People want to be accepted for who they are, but we live in a world in which we can be easily stereotyped or even put in prison, brutalized, or killed for who we are. In the U.S., we had the vicious cases of a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, beaten to death in Wyoming, and Brandon Teena, who was raped and killed in Nebraska for being transgender (as depicted in the film, Boys Don’t Cry). Young people are bullied in the schools everywhere, which sometimes drives them to suicide—and being gay, lesbian, or a boy who seems girlish are by far the greatest bullying points in schools.
“In a 2005 survey about gay bullying statistics, teens reported that the number two reason they are bullied is because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender expression. The number one reason reported was because of appearance. In fact, about 9 out of 10 LGBT teens have reported being bullied at school within the past year because of their sexual orientation,” according to the website bullyingstatistics.org.
In September of 1996, I helped bring a queer film festival to Tomsk, Siberia. One of the films was by Yugoslav director Zelimir Zilnik, Marble Ass. It takes place in Serbia (part of the former Yugoslavia) during the beginning of the nationalist war there. The main characters in the film are a gun-wielding macho man who has just returned from battle, hungry for more killing, and two transgender (male-to-female) prostitutes for whom killing is the furthest thing from their minds. The film depicts a feminine view of war through the eyes of transgender women who have refused to be men. The prostitutes’ words, their relationship, their gentleness, and their refusal to participate in the violence all around them is touching and profound. Especially significant is the fact that the film came from an extremely misogynistic society in which the the government was promoting war against ethnic groups, and against women as a gender. The transgender women are important symbols.
In the U.S. during the women’s movement and gay liberation movement of the seventies and eighties, much hidden history of LGBTs was revealed. One important finding was the existence of two-spirit, three-spirit, four-spirit identities in different Native American cultures. With various names in the Native languages, acceptance and acknowledgement of gender variance and in some cases the venerating of these two-spirit people, was an affirmation for LGBTs. This cultural fact highlighted the complexities of identity and the senselessness of the old binary male/female dichotomy, as does Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity and queer theory, which has become part of mainstream academic discourse since then. There is a great deal of evidence that gender variance and queer relationships have existed throughout time, and that the concept of two genders was actually unusual in older societies and cultures. Furthermore, humans create these concepts; even biologically there is a great deal of variance.
There is nothing natural about the family album, about sex or gender, about our lives generally. The invention of the sex-gender paradigm serves to oppress, control, and reduce people to two types: male and female. These two types are only supposed to act in two ways: the masculine way or the feminine way. But I contend there are thousands, millions, trillions of genders.
Educator and theorist Marla Morris writes this in an essay in William F. Pinar’s Queer Theory in Education. Yet the masculine/feminine binary has been an established norm for centuries, and the nuclear heterosexual family too.
If we examine the oppression of lesbian, gay, transgender, or any other identity on a queer continuum, we must certainly look at the relationship of gender to sexuality. We are living in a world that we did not create, a world of strictly defined male and female gender roles—in any society, whether North American, European, Latin American, African, or Asian. Although sexual minorities have been present in all cultures throughout time, they have not been accepted and have often been shunned and persecuted. But they have survived. The connection with gender variance or performance of gender is part of that survival.
In 1980 poet Adrienne Rich published an article with the provocative title “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” to challenge a world dominated by heterosexuals with the fact of lesbianism. To contextualize Rich’s article, this was a time when promotion of the family and oppression of women was at its height in the U.S. From a feminist perspective, Rich was questioning male domination and trying to foreground the strong and natural bond that women have with each other. Rich begins by saying, “Biologically men have only one innate orientation—a sexual one that draws them to women—while women have two innate orientations, sexual toward men and reproductive toward their young.” And she ends with the idea that lesbian feminism is an important way to fight the patriarchal oppression that permeates our society with a vengeance. The idea of a lesbian continuum throughout human history, a range of same-sex interest and behavior, as opposed to strict lesbian identification, is unfamiliar to most people because of the power of homophobia to silence any diversion from the norm.
The masculine/feminine binary and the family have been an established norm for centuries. We are so used to it that it is hard to see that anything different could have existed. Nontraditional pairs, individuals who don’t fit the norm, and sexual minorities have been silenced and marginalized throughout written history. There have been brief periods of acceptance, but overall any departure from the family and the gender binary has been unacceptable and even criminalized. Intersex children are assigned one gender with the other suppressed. Sexual variance is thereby hidden, repressed, and of course ignored. This is among many serious and large-scale instances of social exclusion and persecution. People have been harassed for as simple a reason as cross-dressing.
Alfred Kinsey, in his mid-twentieth century interviews and studies, found that there had been countless previously unacknowledged instances of same-sex fantasies and nontraditional sexual activity. These were secrets that people did not dare reveal except in anonymous interviews, and Kinsey uncovered a desire for same-sex relations that had never been documented. The research was done almost exclusively with white people, however. He recorded anonymous instances of sexual union between same-sex partners that had never been mentioned to any friend or family member and the number of males and females who engaged in homosexual sex and fantasies was much larger than anyone expected. It was fear of being shunned or labeled homosexual, or fear of being seen as the opposite gender, that kept people from being open. What Kinsey learned was that homosexuality and gender were natural but socially constructed and could even change in the course of a person’s life.
Why is the worst insult for a boy being called “sissy”? The derogation of gay men is inseparable from the derogation of women. The word sissy means womanish, which in turn means faggot/queer/gay when applied to males. This particular insult is directly connected with a secondary subhuman status and disregard for women. For a man to be called a woman is an insult. In male culture, men often joke by calling each other “girl” as an insult, or they use other epithets that mean womanish. If a nonmasculine man is called a woman and a gay man is called a woman, what then is a lesbian? A man-hater? What is someone who is transgendered? In elementary and especially high school, these questions are manifested in bullying and are barely discussed.
Homophobia and the gender binary are the bedrock of the nuclear family, which in turn is essential to the patriarchal status quo. Gays in the military, same-sex marriage, and the reality of many genders threaten the patriarchal system. Moreover, if women are worth less than men, then gays and transgendered people are worth even less in the hierarchy.