There's a post doing the rounds in the feminist blogosphere that I think is universally important. It's by Sady Doyle on Tiger Beatdown: On Blogging, Threats, and Silence. I grew up on the internet - not my baby baby years of course, but from intermediate school onwards, ten or eleven. We were one of the few families that had the internet at home because my dad works in the tech industry (software more than hardware). I have never used my real name online. Now that I've gotten it legally changed is the first time - I generally receive letters and packages addressed to a pseudonym, and I only give my address out to people I trust, people I've known for a decent length of time. If something's addressed to my birth name, it's probably something official.
Of course, in the wake of the earthquakes, a sufficiently dedicated stalker could potentially figure out my neighbourhood by tracking what I tweet while talking to other locals, though the fact that I live in what's barely considered a large town overseas in a country way down the bottom of the ocean does shield me quite well also. The ones I have to worry about are locals - like the time, several years ago (I may even have still been in high school!), that I wrote a letter to the paper, something I did fairly regularly, and received a phone call at home from some guy who'd felt entitled to ring me up and tell me how wrong I was.
The funny thing, to me, is that growing up there was this emphasis on teaching kids not to give out their personal details online. But now we're in the age of Facebook. There are raging debates about pseudonyms on platforms like Google+ and the World of Warcraft forums, with a lot of clueless people slinging around aphorisms like "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" and refusing to understand even when explained that some of us do have something to hide because there is, has been, and will continue to be a subset of the population that thinks simply speaking out is doing something wrong. And the punishment is severe. Of course pseudonyms aren't just an issue of safety, and safety isn't just an issue for women (vis: me), but it is something that's particularly prevalent in feminist and womanist communities... and the fact that I'm not a woman wouldn't particularly help me at any rate, because to the people like this my gender is wrong and my biology defines me.
My biology does not define me. And it certainly doesn't dictate what I can say online.
Showing posts with label lgbt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lgbt. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Why I hate Christians
Before we begin:
1) Yes, the title is deliberately provocative.
2) No, I don't actually hate all Christians. My eldest sister, for example, is fairly devout by NZ standards, and she's awesome. Similarly there are entire ministries that seem to have actually read the Bible and are openly accepting of all people and perfectly willing to not try to convert you in every conversation.
3) It might be more accurate to say I hate hateful people, or bigots, or whatever. But if I say that, it's very easy for people to ignore it. "Well, I'm not hateful," they think, and go on with their day. If someone ties in a group they identify with, they have to actually pay attention, even if they then dismiss it entirely anyway. And the hate is so inextricably tied up with Christian tradition that there is still accuracy in this stance.
4) Before you go further, Google "No True Scotsmen". Here, I'll even do it for you. I will get into this further below, but it will help if you have a basic idea of the concept.
5) I'm aware that other religions hate gays too. Mostly Abrahamic ones. However Christianity holds a hell of a lot more influence over the Western world where most people reading this live, as well as a lot of the rest of the world as well. There are a hell of a lot of Muslims, but on a global level, I believe that Christianity still "outranks" Islam when you look at power and influence, even if both of them have their good and bad parts.
6) I am not a hypocrite for blasting Christians for their hate. Why? Because there's a huge difference between hating a minority group that's minding its own business and hating a dominant group for oppressing you. Don't try to argue this point with me. Anyone who can't see this is either intellectually dishonest or stupid as fuck.
Now that we have that out of the way...
Christianity is the dominant group in Western society. Yes, it is. You may not notice if you're Christian, you may not even notice if you're not, but to someone like me who believes religion is personal and has a completely different belief structure, it is awkward as hell to sit through a Christian funeral service (as far as I can tell this means all of them, unless they're specifically something else), wedding (almost as much so) or prayer in general (every day in Parliament, for starters). The problem is that Christianity is so much a part of Western culture that it's difficult to point to parts of it. It's everywhere. It's our holidays, our calendars, our laws, our social codes, our charities (for a fun time, ask me about the Salvation Army - not specifically the NZ one, it's much worse in eg the US), our media, our stereotypes, our view of history, our discussions, our art, our literature. This isn't always a bad thing, though I'm not sure I'd categorise any of it as good either. It just is. Contrary to what some people think, I'm confident we'd have fair and decent moral codes and laws without Christianity, or even without religion at all, so I don't buy into the argument that Christianity props up the justice system. But it bothers me that everyone is expected to know particular Bible stories, but many New Zealanders only have the vaguest pictures of Maori folklore and oral history.
That's only a minor annoyance though. The real bugbear is [one of] the dark side[s] of Christian morality - its attitude towards LGBT people. I'm queer. I'm not sure I'm specifically trans, but I'm sure as hell not gender-normative. And Christianity hates that. Just this morning I had a Christian guy telling me the names of some books I should read and wishing me good luck on some imaginary quest to somehow become not gay, which is still infinitely better than ex-gay therapy, something that all reputable psychiatrists agree is pretty fucking harmful. It doesn't matter, inherently, whether queerness is nature or nurture, because everything we've learned about it indicates that you can't just choose to stop being gay. (I do think sexuality is in some ways fluid, but that's still not the same thing, which I might get into another time. The tangent would be too long for today.) This guy didn't even think he was doing anything wrong. He thought he was helping me. He probably would have said he was doing it out of neighbourly love - something that couldn't possibly be good for me, would almost certainly devastate the stable mental state I've worked incredibly hard for, and might well kill me.
Many Christians would tell me - and have done - that the bigots are not really Christian. This is where No True Scotsman comes in. Telling me this doesn't help me. It doesn't fix anything. All it does is make you feel better, because it removes your culpability by pushing the villain away from anything you're associated with. Unfortunately for your conscience and peace of mind, they are Christian, and while you're busy disavowing them, they're busy killing people like me, either directly (hate crimes), legally (policy that disadvantages queers and makes us more vulnerable, in much of the Western world, or just straight out outlawing us, in many other places) or indirectly (the atmosphere of hatred and intolerance that fuels homophobic bullying and drives people to suicide). It is Christian groups in the US that are pushing for death penalties in Africa. It's Christian groups that threaten to stop helping the needy if gay marriage passes. I suppose you can argue that Catholicism isn't Christianity, but most of us queers are probably still going to want to stab you in the face if you honestly try to pull a No True Scotsman on the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah, they're regressive and no one cares about them anymore-- oh wait except the fuckton of people who do. Turns out they have massive influence in South America, Africa, much of the Pacific... a lot of countries that have suffered pretty badly through the era of colonialism and in the years since, largely because of the policies put in place by Christian conquerors.
After all, if you do a bit of research it's pretty easy to find information about the prevalence of particularly transgender or third-gender people in cultures literally world-wide, as well as same-sex behaviour that may or may not be equivalent to our current ideas of being gay or lesbian or bisexual. (I hold that those concepts are fairly modern, in their current form, so you can't really make the claim that someone like Alexander of Macedon was gay - it's something that just didn't apply in that time period. It would be like calling a historical figure a beatnik, except obviously also quite different because beatniks are nothing at all like queer folk. Well, unless they're also queer.) It's also pretty easy to find evidence that most or maybe even all of these cultures were a lot more stable and healthy before they were kindly colonised and subjugated and forcibly converted to Christianity, but again, that's edging off towards a tangent, albeit a very related one.
You know, if you actually take a step back and think about it, it's incredibly fucked up that gay and transgender rights should be up for discussion at all. We are a pretty huge number of people. We are normal. We are natural. We have always existed in some form or other. There are hundreds and hundreds of species of animal where same-sex romantic or sexual behaviour is well-documented. Yet it's actually pretty damn normal for people to honestly, genuinely debate over whether or not we deserve to have the same rights as anyone else. Even in New Zealand, which is often regarded as pretty liberal, though depressingly increasingly less so at the moment, gay couples can't adopt. One partner can, by themselves, but the other would have no legal rights as a parent despite participating just as much in the day to day raising of their child. There are plenty of other issues too, that's just one that's come up recently because of the big gay marriage debate (which would grant us adoption rights).
And really that paragraph, right there, is why I hate Christianity. Because it has made me into the subject of a public debate. Because it teaches people to be disgusted by my existence. Because it encourages violence. Because me having equal rights is so abhorrent that it outweighs hundreds of problems that the millions and billions of dollars spent on political campaigns and lobbying could help to solve. And, also, because so many Christians would rather argue with me about this than actually try to change it into something that would better represent the 'tolerance'* they claim to have.
(*I don't want your 'tolerance', btw. You tolerate eating vegetables you hate for dinner. You tolerate bad behaviour out of politeness. I will never settle for tolerance.)
1) Yes, the title is deliberately provocative.
2) No, I don't actually hate all Christians. My eldest sister, for example, is fairly devout by NZ standards, and she's awesome. Similarly there are entire ministries that seem to have actually read the Bible and are openly accepting of all people and perfectly willing to not try to convert you in every conversation.
3) It might be more accurate to say I hate hateful people, or bigots, or whatever. But if I say that, it's very easy for people to ignore it. "Well, I'm not hateful," they think, and go on with their day. If someone ties in a group they identify with, they have to actually pay attention, even if they then dismiss it entirely anyway. And the hate is so inextricably tied up with Christian tradition that there is still accuracy in this stance.
4) Before you go further, Google "No True Scotsmen". Here, I'll even do it for you. I will get into this further below, but it will help if you have a basic idea of the concept.
5) I'm aware that other religions hate gays too. Mostly Abrahamic ones. However Christianity holds a hell of a lot more influence over the Western world where most people reading this live, as well as a lot of the rest of the world as well. There are a hell of a lot of Muslims, but on a global level, I believe that Christianity still "outranks" Islam when you look at power and influence, even if both of them have their good and bad parts.
6) I am not a hypocrite for blasting Christians for their hate. Why? Because there's a huge difference between hating a minority group that's minding its own business and hating a dominant group for oppressing you. Don't try to argue this point with me. Anyone who can't see this is either intellectually dishonest or stupid as fuck.
Now that we have that out of the way...
Christianity is the dominant group in Western society. Yes, it is. You may not notice if you're Christian, you may not even notice if you're not, but to someone like me who believes religion is personal and has a completely different belief structure, it is awkward as hell to sit through a Christian funeral service (as far as I can tell this means all of them, unless they're specifically something else), wedding (almost as much so) or prayer in general (every day in Parliament, for starters). The problem is that Christianity is so much a part of Western culture that it's difficult to point to parts of it. It's everywhere. It's our holidays, our calendars, our laws, our social codes, our charities (for a fun time, ask me about the Salvation Army - not specifically the NZ one, it's much worse in eg the US), our media, our stereotypes, our view of history, our discussions, our art, our literature. This isn't always a bad thing, though I'm not sure I'd categorise any of it as good either. It just is. Contrary to what some people think, I'm confident we'd have fair and decent moral codes and laws without Christianity, or even without religion at all, so I don't buy into the argument that Christianity props up the justice system. But it bothers me that everyone is expected to know particular Bible stories, but many New Zealanders only have the vaguest pictures of Maori folklore and oral history.
That's only a minor annoyance though. The real bugbear is [one of] the dark side[s] of Christian morality - its attitude towards LGBT people. I'm queer. I'm not sure I'm specifically trans, but I'm sure as hell not gender-normative. And Christianity hates that. Just this morning I had a Christian guy telling me the names of some books I should read and wishing me good luck on some imaginary quest to somehow become not gay, which is still infinitely better than ex-gay therapy, something that all reputable psychiatrists agree is pretty fucking harmful. It doesn't matter, inherently, whether queerness is nature or nurture, because everything we've learned about it indicates that you can't just choose to stop being gay. (I do think sexuality is in some ways fluid, but that's still not the same thing, which I might get into another time. The tangent would be too long for today.) This guy didn't even think he was doing anything wrong. He thought he was helping me. He probably would have said he was doing it out of neighbourly love - something that couldn't possibly be good for me, would almost certainly devastate the stable mental state I've worked incredibly hard for, and might well kill me.
Many Christians would tell me - and have done - that the bigots are not really Christian. This is where No True Scotsman comes in. Telling me this doesn't help me. It doesn't fix anything. All it does is make you feel better, because it removes your culpability by pushing the villain away from anything you're associated with. Unfortunately for your conscience and peace of mind, they are Christian, and while you're busy disavowing them, they're busy killing people like me, either directly (hate crimes), legally (policy that disadvantages queers and makes us more vulnerable, in much of the Western world, or just straight out outlawing us, in many other places) or indirectly (the atmosphere of hatred and intolerance that fuels homophobic bullying and drives people to suicide). It is Christian groups in the US that are pushing for death penalties in Africa. It's Christian groups that threaten to stop helping the needy if gay marriage passes. I suppose you can argue that Catholicism isn't Christianity, but most of us queers are probably still going to want to stab you in the face if you honestly try to pull a No True Scotsman on the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah, they're regressive and no one cares about them anymore-- oh wait except the fuckton of people who do. Turns out they have massive influence in South America, Africa, much of the Pacific... a lot of countries that have suffered pretty badly through the era of colonialism and in the years since, largely because of the policies put in place by Christian conquerors.
After all, if you do a bit of research it's pretty easy to find information about the prevalence of particularly transgender or third-gender people in cultures literally world-wide, as well as same-sex behaviour that may or may not be equivalent to our current ideas of being gay or lesbian or bisexual. (I hold that those concepts are fairly modern, in their current form, so you can't really make the claim that someone like Alexander of Macedon was gay - it's something that just didn't apply in that time period. It would be like calling a historical figure a beatnik, except obviously also quite different because beatniks are nothing at all like queer folk. Well, unless they're also queer.) It's also pretty easy to find evidence that most or maybe even all of these cultures were a lot more stable and healthy before they were kindly colonised and subjugated and forcibly converted to Christianity, but again, that's edging off towards a tangent, albeit a very related one.
You know, if you actually take a step back and think about it, it's incredibly fucked up that gay and transgender rights should be up for discussion at all. We are a pretty huge number of people. We are normal. We are natural. We have always existed in some form or other. There are hundreds and hundreds of species of animal where same-sex romantic or sexual behaviour is well-documented. Yet it's actually pretty damn normal for people to honestly, genuinely debate over whether or not we deserve to have the same rights as anyone else. Even in New Zealand, which is often regarded as pretty liberal, though depressingly increasingly less so at the moment, gay couples can't adopt. One partner can, by themselves, but the other would have no legal rights as a parent despite participating just as much in the day to day raising of their child. There are plenty of other issues too, that's just one that's come up recently because of the big gay marriage debate (which would grant us adoption rights).
And really that paragraph, right there, is why I hate Christianity. Because it has made me into the subject of a public debate. Because it teaches people to be disgusted by my existence. Because it encourages violence. Because me having equal rights is so abhorrent that it outweighs hundreds of problems that the millions and billions of dollars spent on political campaigns and lobbying could help to solve. And, also, because so many Christians would rather argue with me about this than actually try to change it into something that would better represent the 'tolerance'* they claim to have.
(*I don't want your 'tolerance', btw. You tolerate eating vegetables you hate for dinner. You tolerate bad behaviour out of politeness. I will never settle for tolerance.)
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Performing gender
When it comes to gender presentation I over-compensate - I have curves and breasts and I'm about 5'3 or 5'4 short, and I hate all of it. In an ideal world I'd probably identify more masculine than feminine anyway, but we're not an ideal world, so I get vehement about women's issues because whether I like it or not, they affect me to a great degree. But it bothers me that it's so damn hard to get people to notice that I'm explicitly trying to present as not-female. An mtf transgender person is recognised more easily (notwithstanding that it's also much more dangerous, since societal misogyny can't deal with the idea that a man would "try" to "look like" a woman, let alone with the idea that she is a woman), but someone who's female-bodied with short hair wearing men's business wear, carrying a completely non-feminine bag from the men's section of the luggage store, is still referred to as a lady and called ma'am.
At any rate, I've been trying to be aware of the unconscious things I do as a result of being socialised female. One example is trying to walk more confidently - head up, brisk pace - because somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that I should try not to draw attention to myself (see: street harassment). Something else, though, was about my messenger bag. I love it, it's very utilitarian, and I can just sling it over my shoulder. I've always had this strong feeling, though, from seeing countless women do the same, that holding onto the strap with my hand to my shoulder was a feminine thing to do - whether that's true or not - though I wasn't really aware of how or why. But today it came to me. I've always held onto my bag strap, whether it's a backpack or a single shoulder strap, because it's on the list of Things Women Should Do To Avoid Being Attacked. It's more geared towards muggings than sexual assault, but it's still tied into the idea that women should always be wary of something happening - even walking through an area full of offices, even at rush hour with witnesses everywhere. Not to mention that if something did happen, hanging onto the strap means you can swing the bag around, build up momentum, and use it to hit an attacker.
At any rate, I've been trying to be aware of the unconscious things I do as a result of being socialised female. One example is trying to walk more confidently - head up, brisk pace - because somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that I should try not to draw attention to myself (see: street harassment). Something else, though, was about my messenger bag. I love it, it's very utilitarian, and I can just sling it over my shoulder. I've always had this strong feeling, though, from seeing countless women do the same, that holding onto the strap with my hand to my shoulder was a feminine thing to do - whether that's true or not - though I wasn't really aware of how or why. But today it came to me. I've always held onto my bag strap, whether it's a backpack or a single shoulder strap, because it's on the list of Things Women Should Do To Avoid Being Attacked. It's more geared towards muggings than sexual assault, but it's still tied into the idea that women should always be wary of something happening - even walking through an area full of offices, even at rush hour with witnesses everywhere. Not to mention that if something did happen, hanging onto the strap means you can swing the bag around, build up momentum, and use it to hit an attacker.
Saturday, 18 June 2011
LGBT rights by country
Yesterday, after being accused of being (along with Dan Choi) a closet GOPer (lol), I was told to name countries that allowed gay marriage, with the note that NZ is not one of them. Thanks, I'm aware of that - I live here, and when I'm ready for a relationship it'll be with someone of the same gender the government thinks I am. Mind you, I had already told this person that their previous statement was so ridiculous that I was going to go and look at pictures of bunnies, so I did not reply. When I had exhausted trademe's bunny section, though, I did go to the fastest information source there is - wikipedia. LGBT rights by country or territory provides tables, subdivided by region, of (as you can imagine) rights that LGBT people have in various countries.
It's not a perfect list, I'll say that first. It focuses largely on recognition of relationships, while other rights such as protection from unfair dismissal or eviction, or the right to visit loved ones in intensive care, or the access to hormone treatments and surgery, tend to be grouped under a single column or two. It's a decent overview, though, and provides a very simple way to rank countries.
Firstly I'm going to list the countries named as allowing gay marriage (not civil unions, as New Zealand has), and then I'm going to give a descending list of the number of ticks countries have until I reach the US, as the original argument was centered on the relatively few rights that queers have there.
Marriage:
South Africa, Canada, Mexico City, Argentina, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain
Pending, partial or under consideration:
Uruguay, Israel (recognised, but not performed within country), India (not outlawed, and some cases reported), Nepal, China, Cambodia (technically prohibited but there has been at least one case), Finland, Ireland, UK, Luxembourg
Number of ticks by country:
South Africa (7), Canada (7), Norway (7), Sweden (7), Netherlands (7), Spain (7);
Israel (6.5);
Uruguay (6), Iceland (6), Isle of Man (6), UK (6), Belgium (6), Croatia (6), Portugal (6);
Australia (5.5);
New Zealand (5), Argentina (5), Brazil (5), Colombia (5), South Georgia (5, one "unknown"), Denmark (5), Poland (5), Slovenia (5), Pitcairn Islands (5);
United States (4.5), Finland (4.5), Greenland (4.5).
Finland and Greenland are good company, I'm sure, but it interests me to see which countries are much higher up in the list - Uruguay is probably not a country that springs to mind when you think gay rights, let alone Croatia. At any rate I think it's safe to say that the US is not the leader in LGBT rights that these guys were trying to paint it as.
It's not a perfect list, I'll say that first. It focuses largely on recognition of relationships, while other rights such as protection from unfair dismissal or eviction, or the right to visit loved ones in intensive care, or the access to hormone treatments and surgery, tend to be grouped under a single column or two. It's a decent overview, though, and provides a very simple way to rank countries.
Firstly I'm going to list the countries named as allowing gay marriage (not civil unions, as New Zealand has), and then I'm going to give a descending list of the number of ticks countries have until I reach the US, as the original argument was centered on the relatively few rights that queers have there.
Marriage:
South Africa, Canada, Mexico City, Argentina, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain
Pending, partial or under consideration:
Uruguay, Israel (recognised, but not performed within country), India (not outlawed, and some cases reported), Nepal, China, Cambodia (technically prohibited but there has been at least one case), Finland, Ireland, UK, Luxembourg
Number of ticks by country:
South Africa (7), Canada (7), Norway (7), Sweden (7), Netherlands (7), Spain (7);
Israel (6.5);
Uruguay (6), Iceland (6), Isle of Man (6), UK (6), Belgium (6), Croatia (6), Portugal (6);
Australia (5.5);
New Zealand (5), Argentina (5), Brazil (5), Colombia (5), South Georgia (5, one "unknown"), Denmark (5), Poland (5), Slovenia (5), Pitcairn Islands (5);
United States (4.5), Finland (4.5), Greenland (4.5).
Finland and Greenland are good company, I'm sure, but it interests me to see which countries are much higher up in the list - Uruguay is probably not a country that springs to mind when you think gay rights, let alone Croatia. At any rate I think it's safe to say that the US is not the leader in LGBT rights that these guys were trying to paint it as.
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