Maybe one day we will eventually dismantle the vertical line unencumbered by social taboos and cultural norms of gender.

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I travel around the United States and to other countries giving presentations and workshops on university and high school campuses, and at professional organizations and conferences on topics in the field of social justice. Last month, the Program Coordinator of a Midwestern University contacted me stating that I had made the short list of possible speakers to present on the links connecting the various forms of social oppression at that University later in the Fall. She asked me to forward my resume, to list the topics I could present and facilitate, and my costs for a one-day up to a full week on the campus. She told me that she would get back to me after a decision had been make on their choice of a presenter.

One week later she notified me that although my background, credentials, publications, and speaking experiences, as well as personal recommendations from others who had brought me to their campuses were “extremely impressive” and “glowing,” she was sorry to inform that she could not extend an invitation for me to come to her campus.

Though I was rather disappointed, I realize that competition is tight on the college speaking circuit, and I have had similar disappointments in the past. I was curious, however, to know if she had been privy to the reasons why I had not been chosen as the lead candidate so I might be able to at least anticipate this in the future. Her response to my inquiry, though not particularly surprising, was nonetheless rather hurtful and discouraging.

“I am so sorry,” she began, “but a few members of the campus transgender support group complained that, although we have and continue to bring a number of transgender speakers to our campus, they did not want you to come because, according to one member, ‘I have nothing to learn from a cisgender gay white Jew from the Northeast.’ In private conversations, someone told me “not to bring a 68-year-old dinosaur.”

After catching my breath, I thanked her for her candor. I then asked if I could write a commentary in order to analyze many of the issues this incident raises, issues that echo on a larger scale within our communities. I promised anonymity, and she kindly consented.

Intergenerational Issues

Each generation, as is often the case, raises up eager to distance itself from those who have gone before. This was indeed the case for my generation. What seems like yesterday or even last week when I was in my youth, members like myself of the newly emerging Gay Liberation Movement in the very late 1960s and early 1970s, often viewed people in the earlier Homophile movement, with organizations including the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, as “so yesterday,” and their tactics and strategies as “outdated.” Many in my generation of activists considered them “the dinosaurs.”

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I was able to at least partially escape this impression of my elder pioneers because I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity and privilege of working alongside and befriending people like Franklin Kameny of the Washington, D.C. Mattachine Society and Barbara Gittings of the Philadelphia chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. They probably did not realize this at the time, but they served as my mentors, my role models showing me the possibilities that could result from the liberation struggles of the times and those yet to come. I am richer and a more well-rounded person having known Franklin and Barbara, and meeting Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Harry Hay, John Burnside, Allen Ginsberg, and later Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, and so many others of multiple generations. I learn something new every day from today’s youth within every level in the educational system, and of every station in life.

The Tyranny of Binaries

The human brain, through millennia of its evolutionally process, has developed a capacity to categorize reality into easily digestible morsels in its attempt to absorb and make sense of a complex world. We have seen the perennial theme, for example, of Good versus Evil surface throughout the human condition as far back as over 3000 years in Zoroastrianism as valued by Zarathustra, and the theme has reappeared in literary and religious discourses ever since. In some monotheistic religions, within the overarching theme of dualism, for example, the “right” side is seen as good, while the “left” is considered bad, or more prominently the belief that one’s own religion is good, and all others are bad.

I do not understand or view the world, with its multiple components and structures, in these simplistic binary terms: as two opposing poles. In most cases, I understand reality as comprising a continuum with nuance, shades, and degrees. I also do not see the beginnings and ends of the continua as representing good or bad, just and evil, but rather as representing differences.

Though I can at times view some cases as presenting clearly dualistic categories of right and wrong, good and bad, in most other instances, however, I do not understand or view the world, with its multiple components and structures, in these simplistic binary terms: as two opposing poles. In most cases, I understand reality as comprising a continuum with nuance, shades, and degrees. I also do not see the beginnings and ends of the continua as representing good or bad, just and evil, but rather as representing differences.

I contend that the socially constructed binary and hierarchical views within a U.S. context represent the link connecting the varying forms of oppression. The socially constructed “races” of “white” as seen as good, “people of color” as bad, and “light” as good or adroit (whose root comes from droit, in French meaning “right”) and “dark” as bad and sinister (sinister comes from Latin for “left”); “male” depicted as leader and strong, “female” as subservient and weak; “heterosexual” as good, “homosexual” as bad,” and “heterosexual” perceived as love and “homosexual” as sex; “Christian” considered good, “non-Christian” judged bad; “rich” as good and virtuous, “poor” as bad and lazy; people of, say, 18 to about 50 as good and in their “prime” versus under 18 as irresponsible and untrustworthy and elders as “over the hill” and “no longer sexual”; “able bodied” as good, “people with disabilities” as unfortunate, once also seen as punished by the Devil for past transgressions, possibly in a former life; and I could go on in this vein virtually forever.

We have seen the severe consequence for those holding to these bifurcated views of the world, where compromise has been considered surrender, which in the real world has resulted in a freezing or even reversing of political, economic, and social advancement, where “my way or the highway” has set the stage for war and other human tragedies; where my belief system is right and your belief system is wrong, and, therefore, I have the “right” to impose my system onto you and upon your country in the form of colonialism, slavery, forced religious conversion, territorial expulsion, and murder.

Depending on our multiple identities, society grants us simultaneously a great array of privileges while marginalizing us based solely on these identities. Inspired by Peggy McIntosh’s pioneering investigations of white and male privilege, we can understand dominant group privilege as constituting a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely unacknowledged array of benefits accorded to members of dominant groups, with which they often unconsciously walk through life as if effortlessly carrying a knapsack tossed over their shoulders.

Though we can never fully quantify privilege, by discarding the bifurcated polar perspective while charting privilege along a continuum taking into account context and identity intersectionalities, I believe we will come to a fuller and deeper awareness of issues of power and privilege, marginalization, and oppression as we work toward a more socially just society and world.

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I contend, for example, that “race” then must be seen constructed not as a binary with “white” on one side and “people of color” on the other, but rather as a continuum. I envision a continuum because “race” arises and is maintained as a social construction, one that changes with the variables of time and place, one that positions identity categories within a hierarchy of domination and subordination granting or denying each category upon this hierarchal continuum unearned privileges in various degrees.

As a visual organizer, imagine a long and wide horizontal line dissected by a short flexible vertical line. Below the left side of the horizontal line, write “People of Color,” and below the right side, write “White.” Now imagine how your society constructs or places identity groups upon the top side of the horizontal line, including such groups as, for example, English American Protestants, Italian American Catholics, Greek American Christian Orthodox, Polish American Catholics, Mexican American Catholics, Puerto Rican Catholics, Argentinian American Catholics, Afro-Caribbean Americans, Cuban Americans, African American Protestants, African American Jews, recent African immigrants to the United States, European Heritage Jewish Americans, Jewish Ethiopian Americans, Mixed European and African Heritage Protestants, European Heritage Muslim Americans, Iranian American Muslims, Iranian American Christians, African American Muslims, Honduran American Atheists, European Heritage Atheists, and so on.

Gender Identity and Expression

Members of the transgender community have rightly revealed that trans* identities and expressions represent many positions on a continuum or spectrum. In fact, the asterisk in “trans*” symbolizes that wide and rich spectrum. Within the vast array of trans* identities, individuals define and express their genders integrally in multifaceted ways regardless of their assigned sex at birth. In so doing, trans* people have opened the boxes to ultimately obliterate the gender status quo of binary oppositions.

So the question for me remains: While the “trans*” side of the Cisgender/Transgender binary rightly reflects a spectrum, why then does the “cisgender” side remain constructed, perceived, and maintained as a monolithic, unitary, and singular positionality in terms of gender identity and expression? Why, for example, would someone like myself who was assigned “male” at birth and identifies usually as “gender fluid” find myself lumped into the same category as, say, an individual assigned “male” at birth who defines as “male” and expresses forms of hyper-masculinity?

Why, for example, would someone like myself who was assigned “male” at birth and identifies usually as “gender fluid” find myself lumped into the same category as, say, an individual assigned “male” at birth who defines as “male” and expresses forms of hyper-masculinity?

To pose an analogy and to reinforce my argument for conceptualizing the current racial binary as a continuum, I find it ironic at the very least that as European-heritage Jewish ethnic and “racial” assignment has increasingly moved to the “white” side of the racial divide, according to Peter Langman (1995): “Putting Jews and neo-Nazis in the same racial category is probably offensive to both” (p. 236).

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But to be very clear, I am neither saying nor attempting to imply that I am oppressed by cissexism as are people who identity as trans*. For this is certainly not the case. I am, however, asserting as I have in the past for conceptualizing “race” as constructed in a U.S. context, that gender identity (that internal sense of who we are in terms of our gender) and how we express this needs to be represented within its full spectrum, on all sides of the current divide. In this way, maybe one day we will eventually dismantle the vertical line and experience a future in which anyone and everyone on the gender spectrum everywhere will live freely, unencumbered by social taboos and cultural norms of gender.

I hope, though, that we won’t have to wait until we finally and fully crack and tear down that vertical line for us to realize that we all can learn from one other, regardless of our assigned or achieved social identities.

Reference:

Langman, P.F. (1995). Including Jews in multiculturalism. In Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 23(4), October, 222-236.

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