Gay marriage devalues heterosexual marriage and transgender women devalue the womanhood of cisgender women. Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever started a post on such an inflammatory note! OK, before you get the pitchforks and torches out, I have not gone over to the dark side and still firmly planted on this side of the rainbow. The Oz side, not the dreary black and white Kansas one. We have all heard those types of statement before though, haven’t we? Let’s talk about that for a minute.

The reason I’m writing this is that I just read a CNN article (apparently I spend way too much time there) where someone wrote an opinion piece about the shift of focus on gay marriage opposition. Back in the Victorianesque 1990’s when DOMA and DADT were being championed (oh Bill, how we loved you, but you miserably failed us), the big argument from the right was that homosexuality was a morally and sexually perverse swatch of evil cut from the seat of the devils own britches. It was assumed that the rampant promiscuity and public fornication endemic to the lifestyle chosen by homosexuals would be tarnation and ruination and therefore legal defense was needed for the angelically innocent straights to continue dutifully, but not enjoyably, keeping up the population base.

Cut to now when gay couples simply want to raise two parent families and ensure their spouses have legal right to the Vitamix they bought together, and the story changes. While the notion that homosexuals run around attempting to deviously recruit once stalwart husbands and seduce pubescent boys tends to linger, the right still needs to promote the notion that US law should mirror biblical law, line for line. The new strategy is to claim that gay marriage somehow devalues straight marriage. Seriously. We in the trans community are a little familiar with this. While the vast majority tend to be trans inclusive, or at worst, trans neutral, there remain pockets who feel strongly that the existence of trans women intrinsically devalues the womanhood that is rightfully theirs and theirs alone by birthright. It took me a while to really understand what they were even trying to say because the notion seems so, well, petty.

From strictly my point of view, it seems I have to put several magnitudes greater an effort into achieving even an approximation of what most women have through a good fortune of birth. The idea though that my painful corrective actions in any way diminishes what is really an unquantifiable value for someone else is ludicrous. I think the root of this kind of thinking is pure and simple exclusivity and the level of personal standing people feel they have by attaining this. If Carol has Vitamix and now Nancy down the street also went and got herself a Vitamix, I guess Carol no longer feels like such hot shit because she is the only one who can liquefy an eggplant in 14 seconds. She can still do this, and actually has the professional model which Nancy couldn’t afford, but still, she’d have felt a lot better if there was some kind of law that kept Carol in her place. Yes, by the way, I did actually just buy a Vitamix and excited about it. I assure you though, if every one of you goes and buys a better one tomorrow, I’ll be happy for you and not one bit less satisfied with mine.

That is the real conundrum of this for me. On the marriage side of things, one would think that heterosexual couples would be pretty gratified by the gay push for rights. “Yay! We were doing the most desirable thing all along! How totally validating!” I would think the same of anti-trans RadFems. “Yay! Less men, more super zealous feminists!” They just can’t though, and this goes down in my book of weird counterproductive shit people insist on doing, like hiking 30 feet from the unmarked border of Iran or mixing cement in their beautiful new red Vitamix. Really, go get one; I’d love to share the joy with you.