Childhood Sexuality

The single most profound moment in the formation of my sexuality during my childhood was seeing Madonna’s Open Your Heart video.  One of the first images is of a peep show booth window going up to reveal two sailors in white uniforms watching the show, faces touching, hands touching.  Madonna is dancing in the peep show, and she is arguably at her hottest, with fishnets, corset, bleached hair and all kinds of sexiness.  Later, even briefer than the image of the sailors, is the image of a woman in a fancy suit jacket and tie watching intently with her hand near her mouth.  Blink and you miss her.  I was very young and much like Sarah Palin staring down Putin across the Bering Strait, I did not blink. Other peep show spectators include a perv with thick glasses and a cowboy who cannot stand to look away as the booth window closes.  The woman appears again as the last image of the peep show spectators, she is smoking a cigarette after the conclusion of Madonna’s stage performance.  How delightfully suggestive!  Or have all of us non-smokers forgotten what some women like to do after cumming? And of course there is the young boy who is barred from entering the peep show but sneaks in, and Madonna gives him a kiss and dances off into the sunset with him at the end of the video, in a spectacle of exuberance and pleasure.  From the sailors alone, I knew I was queer, I knew I was like them.  In fact, the whole cast of characters played out in my emerging sexual landscape. I knew without a doubt that I wanted into that world, the world of peep shows, strippers, sailors, cowboys, women in ties, perverts and other assorted degenerates.  As a child watching a music video, I recognized the world I belonged in!  Some may call Madonna’s forays into queer worlds cultural appropriation.  But in my suburban prison, Madonna was a breath of fresh air, the promise that another world of sexuality existed, one that was not based on the dominant heterosexual mythology of getting to various bases and painful first times. 

School

The first thing I learned in elementary school was that I was different, and not in a good way. Adults and other children regularly attempted to correct my gender. The way I looked, dressed, talked and even walked were constantly being subject to scrutiny and comment.  Every day I was given direct feedback about the specific ways that I was failing to be a girl.  A steady stream of negativity came in the form of verbal correction, looking at me too much or not looking at me at all.  I was struck by the barely concealed disgust that my body, my clothes, my mannerisms, my interests and my whole self evoked in adults and children alike.  I got the message that I was distasteful, and I understood that I should be ashamed of myself.  And I was ashamed.

But at the same time I simply could not live with the idea of becoming more feminine.  My efforts were lackluster at best.  I would not have even known where to start.  What they wanted me to become was entirely alien to me.  I could try to be a normal girl and fail, or I could try to have some kind of integrity and be true to the self I felt I was.  So I made a commitment to gender nonconformity as a very young child, long before I had any concept of sexuality or desire.  No one called me a Lesbian until I reached middle school but every day I heard about how I was not a Real Girl.  My mother had put me in a dress for school pictures, and I heard about it a year later when one of my classmates recounted the only time she had ever seen me in a dress.  She detailed the color and material and everything about the dress I had worn the previous school year, while I was somewhat stunned because I could not recall what she had worn the previous day.  Even in a case where I was not being corrected, the scrutiny made me want to disappear.

Deep down I didn’t really want to be a girl, at least not in the way I saw all around me. I decided just to be smart instead.  Smart was an identity I could live with, although it certainly did not win any points with other kids.  With each new shitty experience, I became more determined to find my own way.  Being smart was a clear decision for me, rather than some innate quality.  I just had to concentrate and be willing to work hard, so I set my mind to do it. I pushed myself more than any teacher ever did.  Being smart was a way for me to get positive feedback from adults and a way to live with myself being different.  But mostly it provided a reason for me to continue to show up at school.

I rejected what others girls did and wanted, from dolls to dresses, from marriage to children.  Long before I had any concept of sexuality, I swore that I would never get married and never have children.  I knew this years and years before I knew I was queer.  I also started to formulate ideas about how if all the adults in my world were wrong about gender, they very well could be wrong about a whole host of other things too.  Even as a little kid, I could tell that a lot of the adult world was forced, in the same way gender was being forced on me.  I started to become suspicious about institutions like God, racism, sports, the mall, the giant TVs and the fenced-in homes, and every other suburban idea and aspiration.  My earliest desires included a desire to escape, get out of there and get away.

But there was more to my childhood masculinity than just failing to be a girl, more to it than wanting to be my own self.  There was also misogyny. Misogyny complicates this story by tainting my freewheeling nonconformity with a real aversion to all things related to being a woman.  It spoils the fun of this tomboy liberation narrative with a sexist distaste for the feminine. Sexism and boyish freedom mixed together in my young mind, and in the culture I saw how being smart was associated with being masculine.  It would be a long time before I could sort them out, but as a kid, I knew with certainty which side of the equation I wanted to be on.  I was ashamed that I had been born female but determined to never be a typical, normal woman.  This typical woman did not exist of course, but was the product of hateful statements my father made about helpless, ditzy women and admiring statements my mother made about men and what ever they said or did.  Well, my parents were simply acting in accordance with the sexism that was polluting the air, floating in the drinking water and blaring from the TV.  Within my childhood self existed a complicated mess of shamefully wishing I could be more of a girl, defying suburban girl conformity, and a creeping belief that women were inferior and irrelevant anyway. 

So this is only partially a story about me against the school, or the suburbs, or the world.  The truth is that I still do not fully understand how I made it through school.  I do not remember any moments of respite where I really believed that one day it would be OK for me to not be a regular girl.  Mostly I remember not being able to stand the expectations of me to be a girl, not being about to stand the disapproval of me not being a girl, and generally not being able to stand the scrutiny.  Instead of a story about how I courageously defied expectations and triumphed over the evil forces of suburban conformity, the truth is a much less flattering story about how regular old sexism cannot be extracted from my earliest rebellion against gender.  I was a nerdy tomboy who thought all girlish things were stupid, and that was the best I could do.

Catholics

Why is it that whenever I talk to straight people about my opposition to marriage, I always find myself reassuring them that I am not judging their marriage or their choices?  They never feel the need to reassure me that they are not judging me when they talk about marriage or discuss who is engaged or any of the other choices they know very well I have consciously and deliberately ruled out of my life.  Straight privilege means never noticing that these conversations silence queerness by drowning it out with repetitive straight clichés.  

When a straight person tells me “I am a catholic,” it never occurs to them to reassure me that they disagree with their church’s views about sexuality or contraception or abortion or any of the other things I feel strongly about.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the pope’s views about homosexuality.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the church’s destruction of ancient and irretrievable books, its inquisitions, its crusades, its complicity with the holocaust and ongoing complicity with the AIDS crisis.  We are talking about the people who created the witch hunt, after all, why not at least pay lip service to this two thousand year abuse of power?  How much does an indulgence run these days, anyway? 

Yet when I say that I am opposed to marriage, I always find myself offering some comforting words to them so they know I am not opposed to their marriage.  I care about their feelings and our relationship.  I guess I am prioritizing the relationship over my ideas, which has its pro’s and con’s, but clearly the caring is not reciprocated.  Part of straight privilege is being comfortably certain that you will rarely be called upon to explain your relationship choices, or consider how your words, actions, beliefs, values and omissions might be painful for others. 

So the catholics now have a pope who has been a fanatical opponent of queer people since he was in the seminary.  We are Ratzinger’s favorite topic going way back in his hate-fueled career. This is the same guy who was protested by Queer Nation in NYC back in the late 80s.  He said in his 2008 year-end remarks that humanity needs protecting from the threats of homosexuality, transexuality and gender theory as much as the environment needs protection from destruction. It made me wonder who he is referring to with the word “humanity.”  In more than 20 years, this man has not moved an inch in his hatred and condemnation of queers.  Is the pope’s humanity the same humanity that led the Vatican to refuse to sign on to a UN proposal for nations around the world to decriminalize homosexuality?  Ratzinger extends open arms to a holocaust denier but looks the other way at state sponsored murder of homosexuals.  In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Nigeria and Mauritania, homosexuality is punishable by death.  The catholic church has made it very clear that for the Vatican, condoning the actions of states that put homosexuals to death is preferable to signing on to legislation that would suggest condoning homosexuality. People are being punished and even put to death, but they won’t sign on to a resolution to stop the killing because that would also marginally condone homosexuality.  How dense do you need to be to continue to be a part of a church that calls itself pro-life yet holds this untenable position? 

Humanity looks quite different to me than it does to this pope.  Clearly, my personal humanity and the humanity of my kind is not in need of protection in the eyes of Ratzinger.   It sucks to realize you have a more expansive view of humanity than this little old turd who gets to be a world leader.  The humanity of four trans women who were murdered in Memphis, Tennessee over the course of 2008 is the kind of humanity I find deserving of protection.  The pope missed this fact in his year-end reflection.  One of the women, Duanna Johnson, was beaten by police officers in June, was planning a lawsuit against the city, and was mysteriously found dead in November. So where exactly does the threat of transgenderism show up?  What threat did these women pose to humanity?  The question I continue to ask myself is:  When do I start holding the catholics in my life accountable for the position of their pope and church?  When will I start to ask the catholics I know to have some integrity?  Identifying oneself with catholicism is not a neutral position any more than identifying with a political party, and a very mean-spirited and vicious one at that. Either stand up to this fuck or leave his church.  Whose humanity really needs protecting here?

The Pregnant Man

I recently finished reading Labor of Love by Thomas Beatie and I highly recommend it.  Thomas tells a moving and important story of his childhood, coming out, falling in love, transitioning, getting married and having a baby.  Occasional sappiness aside, I enjoyed the book and found it surprisingly compelling.  The reason it surprised me is that I spend much of my life questioning and resisting the very ideas he supports in the book: marriage, family and normality.  Bringing marriage and normality into the queer world is alienating and horrifying to anyone who identifies with being Queer-- different, strange, unique, extraordinary.  Yet I respect Thomas, I respect what he has done and I respect his book.  My affection for him grew as I kept reading, even as I found more and more things that he and I see differently.  I intended to write here about loving this book and articulating these disagreements.

But before I started, I did a little research to find other reviews of the book.  What I found was disappointingly predictable.  Everywhere Thomas and Nancy’s life is discussed, words like “claim” and “apparently” are used.  This ties in directly to the transphobic idea that transgender people are deceitful, that they are eternally one gender and transitioning is just an effort to pull one over on straight people.  In very few places are any of the ideas or content of the book addressed.  People cannot get past Thomas and his life to actually look at his book.  A man got pregnant and had a baby, he is expecting again.  But the pregnancy is only part of the story. I want to discuss his full life story, the way he tells it, and the values and ambitions he expresses in the book.  I want to discuss the struggles he had finding support from the straight, queer and transgender people.  I struggle with finding support for my choices and share his disappointment!  Above all, I want to talk about his absolute insistence on being normal, on pursuing the american dream of home ownership, entrepreneurship and offspring.  But there are hardly any decent responses to the book to be found.  The book disappears in all the reactions to his gender and his pregnancy.

The internet is full of terrified cisgendered people insisting Thomas is not a man or stating he is really a “mutilated woman.”  This is from people who are confronted with a set of simple facts that contradict their ideas about gender, but instead of reexamining their ideas about gender, they refute the facts.  They also seem to rely heavily on typing in all caps.  Gender ideas are precious, so people stick their heads in the sand in order to not see Thomas as a man and not have to do the hard work of recognizing everything they believe about gender is wrong.  It is much less work to deny that Thomas is a man then to apprehend what his being a man suggests about the location of manhood.  The prospect of revising their beliefs about gender is so terrifying because of some really simple logic: If gender is not what we think it is, then we do not have to behave the way we do as regular men and women.... so how would we behave?  Who would we become?

In the queer press, there is mostly silence and some shit saying he is just looking for fame.  This is so embarrassing.  Is our homo world so narrow that we don’t have room for this man?  Does he make us feel self-conscious?  Is it because the HRC donors want to be accepted as regular men and women and consequently cannot allow people to think they are sympathetic?  If the queer community includes somebody like Thomas, does that mess up assimilationist gay and lesbian ideas about same-gender attraction? Or does including and supporting Thomas make so-called radical queers feel less cool, because we are so heavily identified with being outsiders and he is talking so earnestly about being a husband?  Or do we just feel too exposed by all the attention he got?  Or are we all simply mirroring the same oppression we experience?

I read Labor of Love and I found things I disagreed with and want to discuss.  One thing that stands out to me is the fact that I was able to finish a book that described marriage, pregnancy and childbirth, three topics I firmly believe are discussed to death in every last venue of our popular culture.  Maybe the reason I could read about these subjects, even when presented in such an earnest and sentimental way, is because for once, somebody quite similar to me is having the baby.  Thomas and I are in this together.  We are cut from the same cloth.  Can the queer community be big enough to contain us both? And would Thomas want it to be? 

Normality has been a driving force in Thomas’s life and in mine.  We are the same age.  Thomas’s insistence that he is normal, in a normal relationship, is a normal man having a normal life is what I found both frustrating and fascinating about the book.  We both experienced alienation from the expectations of female children and openly defied those expectations.  I had a remarkably similar experience to one of the stories he tells where a girl at school got a crush on him and then was infuriated upon learning that she had just experienced “same sex” attraction.  We both felt better when we moved the fuck away from home and cut our hair.  Yet at some point, there was a fork in the road around this idea of normality.  I had tried unsuccessfully to be a normal girl so when I reached that fork, I rejected normality forever.  My family was a site of pain, and I took a huge leap forward when I decided to follow a path of rejecting traditional family values, calling myself queer and starting to envision what I wanted my adult life to look like with a household of my own people. I imagined that my people would reject monogamy, materialism and gender roles; we would love justice, generosity and inclusion.

When Thomas reached that fork in the road, he chose normality, grabbed a hold of it and never let go.  His family was a site of pain so he decided to create a better one.  No matter what anyone told him about his identity, his life, his relationships, his transition, he insisted and continues to identify with normality.  He named his business “Define Normal.”  He referred to himself as not only a pregnant man, but a pregnant husband and a legal male.  Before transitioning he was a highly visible dyke activist for marriage rights, again relying on the idea that LGBT people are normal and deserve the same legal rights as other normal people.  He set his mind on creating a normal life and marriage and pursued it ferociously.  I set my mind on creating a healthy life and a tribe of unconventional friends and lovers.  How did our paths diverge so widely, perhaps even at same age?  Normal became his passion and mine too.  In the same year that Thomas was laying claim to marriage, across the country I was a founding member of a collective house of queer lovers and comrades.  When he was taking steps to become legally male, I was taking steps to improve the faltering health of my committed open relationship with two other women.  But the one thing Thomas and I were each doing in our own way was trying to create a relationship system for our selves, one that would be life and identity affirming both for us and for those who we care about. We have both made a life long pursuit of these works in progress.

But that’s where a major difference comes in: These are not two neutral positions.  Thomas wants to expand Husband to include him, and expand Family to include his family.  He takes pains to explain over and over how he is just living a regular life.  My ambition is to dismantle all the old roles like Husband because they are too limited by history, ownership and lovelessness.  My ambition is to form new, healthy ways for humans to relate to each other that do not have thousands of years of patriarchy and oppression built in, that do not alienate us from each other like the often trod husband and wife death march.  His ambition is to have a happy family for himself, his own wife and his own children.  This variety of self interest is entirely too normal. 

In this situation I might feel compelled to defend Thomas in public and argue with him in private.  Only we don’t actually know each other, and disagreements within the community have already been effectively silenced by the current obsession with marriage rights.  This is not a simple, one-issue movement but queers with more money, more access and more of a voice make it feel like one.   More than anything we need to have our full community visible, present and acknowledged.  I prefer not to have normalcy be a measure of my humanity or anyone else’s.  And this is not just a preference, this is a position that is more inclusive, healthy and life affirming for more members of our community.  Thomas Beatie is the first pregnant husband in the public eye because as he states, other pregnant trans men were not legally male and were not legally married.  But trans men without legal ID are no less men.  And Thomas only very minimally acknowledges the enormous advantage his wealth has been in his struggles with fertility doctors and clinics or even in having the ability to move to a new state and start over.

The point of the book is to tell his personal story, and to raise consciousness in the telling.  The book succeeds in this respect.  My fear is that by holding on to normality, it perpetuates the existing hostile environment for the majority of queers who exist even further away from that privileged center, whose stories are not about starting a nuclear family but about blowing up that model and starting over from scratch.  Or about being on their own, or about single parenthood or any multitude of other stories. We have had it with Normal and the pain, exclusion and hostility we have experienced around it.  Yet I am delighted that Thomas and Nancy’s story has been all over the media, reaching Oprah’s audience and the readers of People Magazine.  I am happy that this pregnant man confronted multitudes who had previously avoided thinking about gender.  And I am over the so-called radical queers who would turn their noses up at the Beaties and their story.  I am looking for more opportunities to engage in important conversations about how we can challenge oppressive gender norms... but when it comes down to it, I want to be part of a queer community that is large enough to include Thomas, Nancy, me and all the others who are far, far, far from normal. I am so proud of Thomas Beatie and his family!