Tag: Friday Philosophy

It seems to happen periodically, but with unfixed period.  Sometimes my thoughts are in too much of a jumble to make much sense out of them.  I took a look through the past year’s columns and discovered at least three occasions in which this happened in 2008.  Each time I still managed to cobble something together anyway:

March 28:  Thought Salad

May 2:  Mixed Veggies

Sep 5:  Stone Soup

Hence, I guess, the name of this edition.  Hopefully there is some of the meat required as part of that hobo dish.

The ingredients:  identity, privilege, memories, creativity, pain.  Not necessarily in that order…and sometimes in combination.

The pope has spoken.

Who am I to disagree?

Being one of those who are determined to be as dangerous as global warming, who the hell am I to disagree?

By the end of the night we are expecting 5 to 7 inches of snow with a quarter of an inch of ice on top.  And my sinus is roaring in protest.  So the best I can do here is hope for something resembling coherence.

This morning there was a request by jlms qkw that we share A Few of our Favorite Things:

My favorite things are freedom from tyranny, especially the tyranny of the majority, the freedom to be Other, the liberty to be happy and at peace with myself.

But my most favorite thing is the ability to speak up for others who have not been as fortunate as I.

There are a lot of people who are less fortunate than I.  I cannot stand idly by while they don’t have the freedoms I have.

So I use the only weapon to fight for them that I have, which are my words.

Come on in and sit by the fireplace awhile.

So many things I could be writing about…but the entire week has seemed to conspire to draw me back into discussions I’d rather walk away from.  But I don’t, I guess because I hope that maybe one or two people out there might learn something.  I largely come away with a feeling of disappointment, but that disappointment would be directed at myself if I didn’t at least make the effort.

So I guess I’ll spill it all here and try to knit together a point out of the whole.

In Feminisms the other night, there was a discussion about women choosing to have labioplasties.  The column lambasted the women who would make such a choice as being tools of the patriarchy, I guess, or victims of it, and went on to deplore the procedure as abetting the practice of female genital mutilation.

I was astounded.  I mean, what kind of hypocrite would I have to be to speak against women choosing to have a procedure performed which I have undergone myself?

The semester stumbles toward a conclusion and I with it.  So creativity for today was severely inhibited.  But what is a person who has the onus of a weekly column to do?

My particular solution was to use whatever talent I have at arrangement to assemble some parables from various sources.

If there is a spiritual component to this, so be it.

An effort to reform society which is not coupled with an equal effort to develop one’s spiritual self cannot bring about lasting results. It is like trying to cool a pot of boiling soup by merely stirring it, while ignoring the blazing fuel underneath.

—Parable 14, Thus Have I Heard:  Buddhist parables and stories

The collective consciousness of the WeaveMothers sensed the impending change of gears of the Celestial Steam Locomotive.

The train approached a long uphill grade of the current happentrack.  The Engineer engaged the lever of night.  The passenger continued sleeping.  The listener fell into a trance.  And the storyteller dreamed for them all.

It was a tale of life on the borderland, of the place which was on neither this side nor the other side of the rainbow.

The WeaveMothers have appeared before.  In what passes for chronological order, they are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Having ready Michael Greatrex Coney’s, Song of Earth is also helpful.  Or you could just relax and accept the possibility of the Celestial Steam Locomotive passing through the Greataway.

I started out hoping to write about scarcity.  Specifically I was hoping to write about the scarcity of fairness and equality that to many people think exists, as if we can’t be fair to everyone and that it is necessary that some people have to have inferior rights in order for others to feel superior.

I wanted to write about just why that must be so…because I don’t think it does.

But I can’t get this exchange out of my head:

I’m a transwoman.

I have a rather large adams apple.  Am I not a woman in your opinion?

nope.

That was from a woman who thinks she’s more deserving of respect than I am, simply because she was born female.

And this came from a gay guy:

I got it

Code Pink has trannie members too so it’s not all women.

And people recced that comment.  I can only assume that’s because they agreed.

So I’m stuck writing something probably only for myself and a very small audience:  those who I believe could benefit from reading it will not.  Or maybe I should put that this way:  those whose reading it would benefit transfolk are unlikely to read it.  That is pretty much the nature of intentional ignorance.

It’s an old argument.  Old as the hills.  Older than some kinds of dirt.  But then, so am I.

The thinking goes like this:

Nobody could disagree with that.  Surely I don’t.  But as someone who taught logic for a quarter century, I am all too aware of human frailty in this matter.  Some people read that as having the implication that it would not be wrong to discriminate against someone because of what they did choose.

There’s the culprit:  thinking that it is okay to discriminate against people.

In four states there were referenda about whether we GLBT people deserved to be treated equally with other humans…and the answer we received is that we did not.

We should be planning a way forward instead of casting the endless supply of recriminations, searching who to blame.  But people expect to see blame, so they usually miss the opportunities to look for that path forward.

ENDA, fairness in housing and public accommodations, and hate crimes protection are much more important, if only because they would benefit all GLBT people, not just the ones in relationships.  In my two decades of working on these issues, we have not made substantial progress.  It’s too easy to write these issues off as GLBT issues and tell us to wait until there is a better time.

And so we wait.  And we wait.  Just like we waited last year and the year before that and the year before that and every year I can remember since I came out.  And even before that.

Maybe while we are waiting, something could be done.

Coming down to the last few days before the election, we have seen the hatred and ignorance from the right with respect to marriage equality and equal rights in general…and California’s Proposition 8, Florida’s Proposition 2 and Arizona’s Proposition 102 in particular.  And we have heard from the supporters or equal rights, even though there may seem to have been few of them amongst our political leaders.

One group hasn’t been heard from so much:  the children.

I’m not talking about GLBT kids, though some of them may be.  The right wing…and even some people supposedly on the left…like to talk about the purpose of marriage being the protection of the family…and by their definition that generally means having children.

Are we hearing the voices of those children?  Do we even acknowledge that they are there.  Maybe we should listen to their voices, or at least see their words.

In the interest of full disclosure:

I was married for twenty-four years, from March of 1969 until some time in 1993.  We got married because there was a pregnancy and there was going to be Hell to pay with the in-laws.  So I agreed to run off to Miami, OK, to get a quicky marriage…and to spend at least the next 18 years of my life raising our daughter, who was born in August of that year.

In 1992 I began my transition from male to female.  Lawyers were contacted.  Papers were filed.

I quote myself from Sexual Disorientation (poor form, I know):

Me:  Personally, I was married to a woman for 24 years.  Then I had a sex-change.  Now I cannot marry a woman.  Go figure.  Aren’t I still me?

Me, again:  Follow-up thought:  Then again, in many states, I can’t marry a man either, but such is life for transsexual people.

Perhaps as penance for something I did in a past life, I am prone to perusing the back pages of Daily Kos.  Like Diogenes looking for a human being among his fellow Greeks, I search for those who might learn that hatred starts small and begins with the words we use.

I seek to teach.  Mostly I discover people who are unwilling to learn.  I find people who are so invested in their juvenile attempt at humor that they can’t stop to learn why it is juvenile, why it is demeaning, not to its supposed targets, but to those whom it actually hits, and as the conversation progresses (I refuse to give up the hope that everyone can learn not to hate), I get to learn how deep and varied their hatred actually is.

I find pseudo-intellectual  analysis of why only the so-called normal people deserve equality in this society.  Upon challenging their reasoning, I often find the same people have a very low opinion of education.  I ask questions that don’t get answered.  Apparently, those questions do have an effect, however.  You’d be amazed at the number of times people assume that the questions I ask must be asked in anger and respond in kind…and never answer the question.

And I find hatred, both the small and the large of it.