All I Really Want to Do...

There was a flurry of concern online last week about a San Francisco bookstore that declared it would no longer sell books by J. K. Rowling. The store made the decision after Rowling, a billionaire and anti-trans troll, announced that "she would use her personal wealth to fund the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, which describes itself as a legal fund to support 'individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.'"

There are valid concerns about such a move, but most of the discussion I saw exhibited the usual confusion about freedom of expression, censorship, and gender. People seem to be overlooking the fact that booksellers are also book buyers, and they're no more obligated to buy a given book than their customers are. It would be worrisome if Amazon or Barnes & Noble were to decide not to carry books by a certain author, but that's not likely to happen, and I'm not sure I'd object if they did.  Every case has to be evaluated on its own merits.  In this case, Rowling has made her personal brand inseparable from her politics, rather as Elon Musk has done, or Orson Scott Card before them. Uncomfortable as they are, boycotts are a valid tactic, even when I oppose specific cases.

I wrote about this at length a decade ago, 

when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers."  It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs.  In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business.  If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!...

[Comics artist and blogger Barry Deutsch] drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies.  It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business. It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. [Barry] argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.  Again, [Barry] doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.

It seemed to me that the people who called the bookstore's action a "ban" were the same kind of people who would deny that getting books removed from public libraries or public school libraries is a ban. After all, they say reasonably, if you want your kids to read filth you can always buy it for them on Amazon; it's not censorship to remove books from a library, since no library can stock all books.  They conveniently forget that the pressure groups want laws passed that will force librarians to remove books they dislike.  That's government action, and by their own definition it's censorship.

I've been wondering how younger kids feel about Rowling's stance and actions.  After all, the Harry Potter books are getting long in the tooth now; the first was published in 1997, the last in the series in 2007.  Will a new generation of kids be swayed by the batty opinions of their parents' favorite author, or will they be turned off by them?  One independent bookstore's boycott won't affect Rowling's net worth, but a generation's antipathy might. 

Forward Into the Past!

My Diversity Manager Facebook friend shared this meme the other day.

It annoyed me enormously, because it invokes 1950s sexist stereotypes as gender norms.  I commented to that effect.  My friend said he'd been inclined to agree at first, but then realized that it was about the fact that genitals don't define gender, and said I needed to remember the context.  What?

The more I thought about the meme, the worse it became.  Let's start with the final paragraph.  It assumes that dress, hair, and other visible details define gender, and also tell me whether a person is trans or not.  This fits with the widespread tendency to treat transgender as nonconforming gender presentation rather than subjective gender identity.  That is not only erroneous but harmful, because it favors and promulgates sexist stereotyping.

Consider my Diversity Manager friend himself.  For the three decades I've known him, he has had flowing shoulder-length hair, which in Barbie-and-Ken terms means his gender is female, which tells me that he's trans. He isn't, but that's what his gender presentation says.  In the early 60s when men began wearing their hair longer, they were frequently accused of looking like women, confusing the sexes, and so on, even when that long hair was the only gender-nonconforming trait they had.  And it didn't even have to be that long: when I look at the Beatles' early albums, for example, their hair doesn't seem long at all, yet it drove gender cops mad with anxiety and fury.

Along with their hair, many men in that era began changing their clothing styles, wearing brighter colors that were taboo for males in their parents' generation; some experimented with makeup, many began to pierce their ears and wear earrings.  Before long older men also adopted some of these modes, and soon after those young men became older themselves.  Often these fashions were defended and rationalized as a rejection of restrictive traditional masculinity, though that rejection was only partial.  It frequently coexisted with a very traditional male supremacy, misogyny, and predatory male sexuality.  As Dorothy Dinnerstein recounted in her important book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976):

Men could assume sweetly open, uncertain postures, carry flowers, adorn their bodies in what their society at large regarded as outrageously feminine style, and still be masculine. But women who dominated meetings by sheer lung-power, or demanded that others type their leaflets and make them coffee, would have been unsexing themselves. A roomful of male students of mine during that period, decorative and gentle-looking, charmingly tentative in their style of speech, full of aphorisms of the “Kids are beautiful” and “Where you are is where it’s at” and “Like, you know, like, I had this feeling” genre, laughed explosively at the following riddle: “Why won’t [name some plain-spoken, forthright female head of state, or congressperson, or controversial author] wear a miniskirt? Because she’s afraid her balls will show!”

This clinging to masculine status and privilege helped to fuel second-wave feminism.  Effeminate gay men are often ferociously misogynist, as are many MTF transsexuals.  In his book on sex changes, Patrick Califia documented MTF transsexuals who criticized women for not being feminine enough: womanhood, they complained, was wasted on them, and should be reserved for those who appreciated and knew how to do it properly.  More recently, I've noticed that critics of so-called TERFs (women who refuse to accept the legitimacy of transgender identities) tend to fall back on misogynist abuse that reminds me of Gamergate in its monkeys-throwing-feces abandon.  But of that, more in another post.

During the same period, women appropriated styles that had been considered male property.  Even in the 50s, when I was a kid, there was criticism of women who wore trousers.  That seems to have pretty much faded away, and women can wear skirts or trousers as they find convenient: they can even change their "gender" from day to day. Women have also taken on jobs that men had previously monopolized.  Gender reactionaries who insist on the immutability of sexual difference have to forget that the current state of gender affairs should not, on their assumptions, exist: women and men have changed their behavior and presentation in areas that were claimed to be set in stone.  Better still (in my opinion), what replaced the 1950s gender order was not a new conformity but freedom.  At the university where I worked for four decades, students now wear a variety of hairstyles, costumes, uniforms, and they don't seem to view them as mandatory for all.

Perhaps, as I've suggested before, we'll never have equal proportions of men and women in some fields; no one knows.  But the thing to remember is that in the past, we were assured that there would never be any women scientists or CEOs or rabbis, because women were biologically unsuited to those jobs; and that no men at all would attend childbirth, or do early childcare.  If we're still at, say, a 70/30 ratio of men to women in math or physics, remember that in the Good Old Days, 99/1 was defended as God-ordained and biologically inevitable.  It took considerable thought control to ignore that in fact such unicorns already existed, but the eye of faith is generally blind.  (Remember: faith means knowing what you know isn't so.)

So we can see that gender presentation does not equal gender identity, and that we can't know whether people are trans or cis by the way they dress or carry themselves.  What the Sixties produced was a rejection of that assumption.  Gender stereotypes and norms didn't disappear altogether of course, partly through cultural inertia and partly because of conscious resistance to these changes, but overall, the boundaries have been moved much farther than their defenders said they could be, and there's much more variety and freedom in gender presentation than there was in the 1950s. That's why the equation of 1950s sex stereotypes with "gender" in the meme above annoyed me so much: I think it represents a rejection of the breakdown of gender stereotypes that I and many other people welcomed.  I didn't foresee that the progress we've made would have to be defended not only against religious fascists but against people who promote those stereotypes as an advance, even as liberation.  Well, you live and learn.

More on this soon.

Social Construction Workers

Dan Savage's sex-advice column for February 8 was a compendium of brief answers he gave to questions submitted by live audiences recently.  This one caught my attention.

Why are liberals okay with people self-identifying their gender but not their race? Aren’t both considered social constructs?

“If race and gender are both social constructs,” Evan Urquhart writes at Slate, “and if both have been built around observable biological traits, then what is the crucial difference that makes a felt gender identity a true one, but a felt racial identity fraudulent? The short answer is that most trans people and their allies suspect that transgender people are born that way.” (Read the rest of the essay here.)

The full trifecta: neither the questioner, Savage, nor Evan Urquhart, know what they are talking about, especially with regard to "social construction."  Urquhart gets a point or two for recognizing that social constructs are "built around observable biological traits," and also for not freaking out over comparisons between "racial identity" and "gender identity," but goes wrong from there.  And even "observable biological traits" is wrong, come to think of it.  Social constructs include language, religion, nationality, etc., none of which are built around observable biological traits.  I'm not sure how sexual orientation would fit in there either; probably it doesn't.  (It involves observable external biological sex -- whether one is male or female, and whether one's desired sexual partners are male or female -- and there's a common mythology about homosexuals as physiological sexual variants, to which I'll return.  But you cannot always or even usually tell a person's sexual orientation by looking at them; false positives and false negatives abound.)

As for "most trans people and their allies suspect that transgender people are born that way," well, it may be that this is what most trans people and their allies suspect (!), but there is no evidence that it's true, and Urquhart knows it:

I say that we “suspect” trans people are born that way because the science isn’t in, yet. When Caitlyn Jenner spoke vaguely of female brains in male bodies it was because there isn’t any clearer terminology that can be employed to speak about this hunch, but it persists in the minds of many trans people and their allies anyway. We do have increasing evidence for specific genetic and epigenetic differences between gay men and straight men that result in homosexuality, but so far scientists have yet to investigate the rest of the letters in LGBTQ as thoroughly.   For now, even those who are most familiar with this topic can’t say for sure what being transgender is, and what might cause it. There are, however, circumstantial reasons to believe it may also have a genetic and/or epigenetic basis. For one thing, many trans people report feeling that their assigned gender didn’t match their inner conception of their gender from earliest childhood. We also have evidence of individuals who dressed, acted, or passed as the opposite sex across many cultures and many historical eras. This, paired with the evidence that sexual orientations are innate, not learned, leads us to hypothesize that gender identities function similarly.

Urquhart is wrong about the evidence for a biological basis for homosexuality; he's also evidently ignorant of the history of "female brains in male bodies," which used to be a popular conception for male homosexuality.  (He presumably hasn't noticed either that the scientific "evidence" about inborn homosexuality is about sex/gender, not sexual orientation.)  Despite the ongoing scientific efforts to prove otherwise, however, there aren't "female brains," and a fortiori there aren't female brains in male bodies: the brain in a male body is a male brain.  Whatever differences have been claimed have been differences of degree, not of kind, just as with racial differences.  To assert otherwise is like claiming that a tall woman has a male height in a woman's body.  (Given the amount of hassle that tall women get, though, many people might accept that metaphor.)

Urquhart says that "science continues to be done that supports the idea of gender differences within the human brain, while the possibility of such differences existing between races has been roundly rejected."  This isn't true either.  Scientists continue to try to prove innate racial differences no matter how consistently such work is discredited, and popular media (and the public) are just as fond of the idea as they are of the idea of innate gender differences.  That scientists continue to try to find innate sex/gender differences, even though they consistently fail, says more about scientists' culturally-inculcated prejudices than it does about the validity of the idea, just as with race.

As it happens, the word Jenner used was "soul," not "brain," which is even less helpful for Urquhart's argument.  People do talk casually about the soul as if it were something that is known to exist, independently of the body, but it's not a scientific concept (for what that's worth).  Even if there is such a thing as the soul, we know nothing about it, and can't assign it a sex/gender, a race, a nationality, a political party, or any other trait.  It's not illegitimate to use the word as a metaphor, but it can't be used to prove anything.  As with height, just because there's a word for it, that doesn't prove it's a Thing.

Probably most gay people and our allies do believe that sexual orientation is inborn, but they're wrong too, so the same belief among trans people and their allies isn't evidence for anything.  In general, a conviction that one was born with a certain trait doesn't prove that it was in fact inborn. Nor, contrary to the equally widespread and equally false belief spread by Dan Savage and others, do civil rights depend on whether a given status is inborn, learned, or freely chosen.  (Or a social construct, a term which plays no role in civil rights legislation.)

Dan Savage's questioner probably was just trolling, though the troll was effective because it pinpointed basic incoherences in what trans people and their advocates say about gender.  Urquhart's article addressed chosen "racial" identity, occasioned by the controversy over Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who passed as black for several years.  As far as I can tell, though, Dolezal has not claimed that she was truly, essentially black (a black brain or soul in a white body?), or applied the other rhetoric typical of the transgender community and its allies; Urquhart doesn't, at any rate, report that she did.  (According to Richard Seymour, "Dolezal did not claim to be ‘trans-racial’; she claimed to be black, and still does.")  Trans people aren't claiming to choose their gender identities: as Urquhart says, they see their identities as innate and unchosen, forced on them by their genes or brain structure.  The term "self-identify" is unfortunate, though, since it does imply that some kind of choice is being made.  Yet the verb "identify as" has become normative, even epidemic, in LGBTQ discourse.  It's all very well to "identify as," but what are you really?  Are you Betty Jo Bialowsky, or are you Nancy?

So what about "racial identity"?  I can't see how it could be inborn, any more than any identity could be.  Identities are labels, names, and as such are cultural products.  However, many people do believe in inborn racial identities, and that someone's "felt" racial identity can be considered inauthentic.  There was controversy during Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, over whether he was really African-American because despite his Kenyan father he wasn't descended from slaves or because he was raised in African-American communities.  (He grew up with his white mother and her white parents.)  Leave aside the merits of these claims; I want to point out that they separate biology from racial status and identity as radically as transgender separates biological sex from sex/gender status and identity.  It would follow from these criteria that a white-appearing descendant of Thomas Jefferson's slave Sally Heming who grew up in an African-American community would be African-American, regardless of what she looked like, while a first-generation black Nigerian immigrant would not.  If you add to that a belief in the existence of the soul as a distinct and separate substance, then a person could plausibly claim to have a black soul in a white body.  And what about "mixed-race" people?  Do they have black brains and white brains in their bodies, fighting for supremacy?  Do they have "mixed-race" brains?  Or what?

People who invoke social constructs in these debates overlook something important in "social construction," namely the first word in the term.  "Social construction" doesn't mean that an individual can choose an identity (or whatever) at will.  If anything, it means the opposite.  "Social construct" means that there is more or less a consensus in your society about what it means to be (for example) a man or a woman.  There is a very great range of variation among actual individuals, so the social construct is often at odds with reality, and people learn to overlook the variation in order to maintain their stereotypes and the cultural solidarity those stereotypes support.  But the whole point of social construction theory is not that people "choose" identities, but that much of what feels natural to them is really learned, acquired, accepted -- not by conscious choice but by absorption of what they see around themselves as they grow up.  Which, come to think of it, undermines Urquhart's argument that gay or trans people's conviction that we can't remember having been otherwise, can't remember learning or choosing to be the way they are, constitutes evidence in favor of the conviction.  The whole point of social construction theory is that what feels natural and innate very often is not.

What this means is that recognizing that a trait is a social construct doesn't license individuals to choose another one.  Consider language.  Though the language I speak is a social construct, my inability to understand a language I don't know is not the result of false consciousness or a closed mind.  Though there is a great deal of variation within any given language, an individual speaker can't stray too far from the socially constructed norms of the language without becoming incomprehensible to others.  One can move around within the realm of one's language, passively acquiring or actively adopting variants that signal class, locale, gender, or other difference.  But that is exactly the point: by doing so, one signals the social meanings associated with those variations.  We can, and should, challenge the prejudices that devalue certain linguistic variants, but in doing so we'll come up against powerful essentialist beliefs about the nature of those variants.  If you say "ain't," for example, you are signaling to language bigots that you are an ignorant, uneducated, low-class person.  By nature.

As far as I know, though, no one has so far claimed a 'felt racial identity' at odds with the one assigned them by society.  It doesn't appear that Rachel Dolezal did.  Quite a few people are claiming a 'felt gender identity' at odds with the one they were assigned, but as we've seen, their rationales are not convincing.  There's no reason to believe that any gender identity is inborn.  This doesn't have to be a problem, just as it doesn't matter whether sexual orientation is inborn.  It seems that people react differently to claims about racial identity than they do to claims about gender identity, and that's an interesting problem in itself.

It seems pretty clear to me that people generally invoke biology and culture, social construction and essentialism, as expediency requires.  But that's not unusual when vexed issues are being discussed.  Perhaps it's a mistake to take them literally, since they aren't interested in rationality or evidence: they 'reason' backwards from their conclusions, to put a sheen of reasonability on what they believe for no reason, or for bad reasons.

I'm not sure that social construction theory is compatible with the political needs of trans people, or of gay people.  To assert an identity is essentialist, even when the identity is clearly not genetic or epigenetic: nationality, religion, etc.  This doesn't mean that trans people are wrong, nor that they must prove that gender identity is inborn before they can affirm the identities they have constructed and chosen.  But it is wrong to make claims about nature or cause that have no evidence to back them up; making false statements isn't good on general principles, and it's imprudent to hang political demands on grounds that don't exist and may be disproven, let alone on bad science that has already been discredited.

Theory-Bombing

I've begun reading Transgender China, edited by Howard Chiang, published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan, but I'm not sure I'll finish it.  What I have read, however, crystallized conclusions I've been moving toward for some time now after reading academic queer theory and its relatives.

Editor Chiang begins the introduction to the book with a brisk summary of Euro-American scholarship on gender, beginning with "Magnus Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten (1910)" (page 3), and proceeding to various twenty-first century landmarks.  "These newer studies," he opines, "demonstrate a remarkable measure of analytical sophistication and maturity, whether in terms of critical ethnography, synthetic history, clinically based psychoanalytic theory, materially grounded phenomenology, or social scientific empiricism" (4).

As I read those words, it occurred to me I would never use "analytical sophistication" to describe the works I've read among those he lists.  I've complained before about scholars who do good research in the field, whether ethnographic observation or oral history in the metropole, or in the archives, but do not understand the theoretical frameworks they invoke, so that their analysis never makes contact with, let alone accounts for, their data.  This makes reading their work extremely frustrating for me, as the authors keep intruding on fascinating accounts of their subjects' lives with undigested and often irrelevant theory.  It's an academic version of what's called "photo-bombing," where someone intentionally or accidentally ruins a photograph by walking into the field of view or making rabbit ears from behind the subject.  In theory-bombing, scholars randomly drop chunks of theory into their texts: a reference to Foucault's paragraph about the Modern Homosexual, say, where it contributes nothing to the discussion.  It ruins the picture but they can't resist.

In Chiang's case, one problem is the inflation of the term transgender.  He acknowledges that as

transgender studies came to be consolidated and widely recognized as an independent area of academic inquiry ... debates ensued among activists, popular authors, academics and other writers regarding what transgender means (and the more general question of who fits into what categories has deeper historical ramifications in gay activism, feminism, and the civil rights movement).  But with an expansive (even ambiguous), institutionalized, and collective notion of transgender, the actors shared a commitment to advancing the political and epistemological interest of gender variant people [5].

It would be interesting, if probably not fruitful, to borrow Foucault's approach to the medicalization of sexuality and apply it to Chiang's account.  What seems to be going on here is something very similar to the nineteenth-century turf wars between doctors, the church, and the (more or less) secular law over who would get to define, surveil, and police women, erotic outlaws, the mad, Jews, "natives," and other troublesome groups.  The proliferation of academic fields of study exhibits similar conflict over authority (including the authority to name) and, not least, budget appropriations.  That's why I say such analysis wouldn't be fruitful, in terms of publication, tenure, and promotion: as Rita Felski noted mischievously in The Limits of Critique (Chicago, 2015), the critical tools one applies to one's subject matter must never be turned on one's own institution, department, or self.

I've noticed that numerous scholars, including trans ones, have inflated "transgender" so that it applies to almost every human being.  In The Lives of Transgender People (Columbia, 2011), for example, Ginny Beemyn and Susan Rankin wrote:

To be inclusive of all gender-nonconforming people, we defined “transgender” broadly as “anyone who transgresses or blurs traditional gender categories” [22].

In Transgender China, Pai Kee Eleanor Cheung wrote:

However, as the influence of the transgender movement is becoming stronger in Hong Kong, more people have begun to use the term ‘transgender’ as ‘an umbrella term including many categories of people who are gender variant,’ ranging from cross-dressers to intersexed people to transsexuals [263].

The most obvious objection to this inflationary use of "transgender" is that almost everybody "transgresses or blurs traditional gender categories" in some respect, so almost everybody could be classified as transgender by these criteria.  When I've had the opportunity to point this out, I've been told that "transgender" doesn't really mean that, and that it only refers to a specific, limited population.  Yet the scholars (many of them trans) to whom many trans and trans-supportive people point for intellectual and academic legitimacy disagree.  I suspect that most of the trans advocates I encounter have not read any of the literature, or at best ignored the more inclusive definition these scholars posit; besides, having given their definition, these scholars then mostly ignore it, focusing on the kind of people the term was coined to denote in the first place.  Cheung, for instance, goes on to say, "I adopt this latter definition of transgender throughout this chapter, but the emphasis of my analysis will be on those who were about to, or had already undergone, SRS [sex-reassignment surgery] at the time of the interview" (ibid.).

Another problem is that "transgender" originally referred not to gender expression but to subjectivity:

What it means to be transgender is that your innate gender identity does not match the gender you were assigned at birth. This might be the case even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess. You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another.

Yet in "transgender studies," the term is applied to people who lived in the distant past, about whose subjectivity we know nothing.  Or scholars simply ignore the issue and refer to any behaviors or expressions that "that look 'transgendered' to contemporary Eurocentric observers," as trans historian Susan Stryker puts it in her contribution to Transgender China (292).  Cross-dressing for Carnival, for example, will be adduced as transgender behavior without any evidence about the celebrants' motives or subjectivities -- they must be transgender, I suppose, or they wouldn't do it.  This sort of thing can hardly be lauded for its "analytical sophistication."  It tells me something about the observers' subjectivity, but nothing about the subjectivity of the people they're writing about.

Chiang admits that there could be objections to slathering the very Western concept "transgender" over non-Western cultural phenomena and (to use the trendy word) bodies.  He quotes the trans scholar Susan Stryker, who suggested that "the conflation of many kinds of gender variance into the single shorthand term 'transgender,' particularly when this collapse into a single genre of personhood crosses the boundaries that divide the West from the rest of the world, holds both peril and promise" (7).  Myself, I'm not into these East-West binaries, and I think Stryker should have left out "promise."  What she said could as easily be said (and probably was) about the previous candidate for World Assimilation, "queer."  There too a potentially useful concept was stretched and inflated by people who hadn't thought with any care about it, even though it was their profession to do so, and who violated the principles they invoked in its favor.  For example, it was supposedly an improvement over the supposedly culture-bound "gay" despite the dispersion of "gay" around the world among people who'd adopted it rather than had it imposed on them. "Queer" was imposed on cultures and periods where it wasn't used, and to describe people who would have rejected it as a label for themselves -- who indeed had local labels of their own for themselves. What's going on here, I think, is not analysis but the very Western practice of branding.

Chiang also quotes the scholar David Valentine: "The capacity to stand in for an unspecified group of people is, indeed, one of the seductive things about 'transgender' in trying to describe a wide range of people, both historical and contemporary, Western and non-Western" (6).  "Seductive" is double-edged, and I wonder if Valentine was being as celebratory in context as Chiang wants him to seem.  But you could substitute "queer," or even "gay," for "transgender" in this sentence and get a vague feeling of nostalgia for the terminological nostrums of yesteryear.  I'd love to know how "transgender" is different from "gay" or "queer" in this respect, but that question doesn't seem to be on anyone's agenda.

Having paid lip service to these questions, Chiang breezily ignores them.  Later he writes of "trying to imagine China in a transgender frame," and I wonder how he can justify imposing a culturally imperialist Western category on the helpless people of the Middle Kingdom.  How does this differ from subjugating China as "the sick man of Asia," defenseless before foreign cultural and political domination?  His own contribution to Transgender China is a long piece on Chinese eunuchs, who were seen by Western observers and Chinese advocates of modernity as symptoms of China as "a castrated civilization."  The piece does include a Chinese eunuch's account of his own castration as a child by his father, which doesn't seem to have been the result of the boy's gender identity; rather, it imposed one on him.

I can imagine that throwing around an unspecific term could conceivably be justified by the results of the discussion; but not only don't these discussions shed any light on their subjects, the initial caveats are simply forgotten once they've been uttered.  I have the impression that they are like crossing oneself or kissing one's scapular before beginning a fateful project, to ward off misfortune.

I've also discussed and praised scholars who avoid these pitfalls, who really make sense of their subjects; but these people are outliers in their fields.  I'm glad they exist, though, so that I know it's possible to do meaningful work without making the mistakes I'm criticizing here.  But Sturgeon's Law evidently applies to critical theory as much as it does to science fiction.

The Key to the Prison House of Gender

Richard Seymour wrote recently:

From a certain perspective, notably that of radical feminism, all gender socialisation is child abuse.

When he quoted that line on Twitter, I remarked:

In the same way, though, child gender self-identification is self-abuse.

To which he replied:

you're accusing children of abusing themselves.

I answered:

No, I was playing on an antique term that I thought was no longer in serious use. ("Accusing"!)

That, thankfully, was the end of that exchange.

Maybe I was slightly disingenuous, however.  I can't see any reason not to say that children may (and do) do things that hurt themselves and others, as adults do.  It's not an accusation (a term that in this context still perplexes me), and "abuse" is a problematic word: like much of the terminology of regimes of control, it's ambiguous and so is often used carelessly, as in "drug abuse" and "self-abuse" itself.  So let's toss it aside and try to focus on what is really at stake here.

The sentence I quoted from Seymour was the overture to a discussion of, or around, a recent court case in Britain, in which "a judge took a child out of the care of its mother because it was deemed that the child was being forced to 'live as a girl' while in fact identifying as a boy."

We have the text of the judgment to go on, and we have the reactions of trans activists, who have expressed concern about the value judgments implied in the judgment and the absence of gender specialists consulted in court. There is a petition seeking to reverse the decision. 

And that's about it; privacy concerns, I presume, have limited the amount of information accessible to the public.  Seymour therefore decided simply to "ask: what if everything the judgment says is true? I doubt that it is that straightforward, but supposing it is: what conclusions should we draw? For the sake of argument, then, I will assume the factual accuracy of everything that is claimed by the judge."

The ensuing discussion is murky and confused, which is unusual for Seymour.  He's usually exemplary in the clarity and directness of his writing but gender, like religion, is one of his weak areas.  He begins:

In particular, I will assume that the child identified as a boy, and did not consent to live as a girl. Or, more precisely, that the child would have preferred to identify as a boy, and only consented to live as a girl in order to please his mother.

"Identified as" is intensely problematic.  "Identify" is not an analytic term, despite its popularity as a political one.  If the child considered himself a boy, then he continued to "identify as" one despite his mother's pressure.  "Identify" and "live as" are not the same thing at all.  I "identify as" male and as a man, for example, but what does it mean to say that one "lives as" a man?  A child (or an adult) might very well "identify as" one sex while neglecting or refusing to fit the stereotypes (i.e., "gender") associated with it.  I myself violate numerous expectations of masculinity, some of which require more steadfastness than others.

The confusion that runs through the post, though, is the equation of gender socialization and abuse.  Seymour evidently assumes that "socialization" is explicit and overt and probably punitive, though most of the time it's implicit and covert and enforced by approval and reward.  The mother who praised her young son for announcing that he wanted to be Queen of New York was socializing him into her own assumptions about gender.  (I still wonder if she'd have been as delighted if he wanted to be Butch, King of the Cowboys.)  But parents socialize their children by speaking to them in their native language; by living in a given locale with its language and customs, by feeding them some foods and not others, by singing them songs and telling them stories, by providing examples of what people are and how they live.  Parents also socialize their children by teaching them to resist norms and stereotypes: if you teach your sons to cook and clean, and your daughter carpentry and small-engine repair, that is also socialization, and I don't think Seymour would consider it abuse.

It's impossible to raise children without socializing them.  Children can't survive without intensive interaction with other human beings, socializing themselves and being socialized by them; so socializing them cannot be categorized as abuse if "abuse" has any meaning at all.  If it really was the radical feminist position that all gender socialization is abuse, that's a critical flaw in radical feminism. I presume that Seymour is aware of this, and that he was using "socialization" in a narrow sense, such as punishing a child for failing or refusing to conform to some norm.  By "abuse" he presumably meant something like mistreatment and cruelty; mistreatment and cruelty are unacceptable whether they're meted out to children or adults, and regardless of what sort of norms (or none at all) they are used to enforce.

I suppose that some radical Second Wave feminists did imagine that it would be possible to raise children without socializing them into gender norms.  In 1972 the novelist Lois Gould published a fable, X: A Fabulous Child's Story, about a child who was raised without gender socialization as a part of a $23 billion scientific experiment guided and evaluated by "Xperts."  Because it was ostensibly written for children, it's written in an obnoxious cutesy style (another kind of socialization: because you are a child, I will talk down to you).  The child X has to wear red-and-white checked overalls, and after X overcomes the other children's false consciousness, they all want to wear them too.  And after X is evaluated by Xperts who conclude that X is just about the least mixed-up X evar, the neighborhood parents still aren't satisfied:

"But what is X?" shrieked Peggy and Joe's parents. "We still want to know what it is!" "Ah, yes," said the Xperts, winking again. "Well, don't worry. You'll all know one of these days. And you won't need us to tell you."

"What? What do they mean?" Jim's parents grumbled suspiciously. Susie and Peggy and Joe all answered at once. "They mean that by the time it matters which sex X is, it won't be a secret anymore!"

This makes no sense.  When it "matters which sex X is," will X give up the overalls and walk around naked?  Or in sex-appropriate clothing to signal X's sex?  Will X have to give up the freedom X had as a child, and adopt sex-appropriate pastimes and career?  A person's sex continues to matter a lot to adults; children are often granted a fair amount of gender freedom until they reach adolescence, at which point they're supposed to get serious, knuckle down, and conform.

The best I can say for Gould's fable is that she recognizes that raising a child without gender expectations would be very difficult -- as difficult as raising a child to conform to gender norms.  X's parents are given a manual thousands of pages long (they're up to page 85769 by the time X is in first grade), and are guided throughout the experiment by the scientists.  They must maintain a rigorous balance at all times -- indeed, their scientist-guides are as rigid in their prescriptions for socializing an X's gender as any conservative:

Ms. and Mr. Jones had to be Xtra careful.  If they kept bouncing it up in the air and saying how strong and active it was, they'd be treating it more like a boy than an X. But if all they did was cuddle it and kiss it and tell it how sweet and dainty it was, they'd be treating it more like a girl than an X.  On page 1654 of the Official Instruction Manual, the scientists prescribed: "Plenty of bouncing and plenty of cuddling, both.  X ought to be strong and sweet and active.  Forget about dainty altogether".

I almost think that Gould was satirizing the premise of the experiment there, and the idea some people hold that if we just left children to their own innate wisdom and goodness, racism and sexism and all bad things would disappear.  This belief begs the question of where all those bad things come from.  The usual response is that these attitudes are the result of having been carefully taught by wicked or, at best, misguided people.  But where did those careful teachers come from?  Where did their bad ideas come from ? Why are the ideas they teach so tenacious?  Why are they nevertheless so ineffective much of the time? The usual answer entangles us in an infinite regress that doesn't explain anything, but distracts the questioner long enough for the explainer to change the subject.  In Gould's story, after some initial confusion the children around X follow X's example, to the dismay of their parents, but the good guys win easily.  As we know, in real life it's not that easy.

I'll quote again the woman who told a symposium in 1971: “This short haircut, because it is mine, is a woman’s hairstyle. These so-called men’s boots, because I am wearing them, are women’s boots. This pipe, because I am smoking it, is a woman’s pipe. Whatever women wear is women’s wear. It is a matter of individual choice – and comfort.”*  To "live as a man" is any way a man lives; to "live as a woman" is any way a woman lives.

When Richard Seymour wrote about the boy from the court case living "as a girl," he meant living so as to conform to prevailing gender stereotypes.  By his logic, living either as a boy or a girl, as a man or a woman -- regardless of your body configuration or your sex chromosomes -- must be the product of bad faith at best, of abusive socialization at worst.  (Oddly, though, people who reject their assigned stereotype in favor of the opposite one are seen as heroic, free, non-binary.  And can a child "consent" to either?)  Adopting any gender identity apparently means accepting the stereotype, agreeing that certain modes of dress, certain body language, certain occupations, and so on have a gender.  They do only by the same social agreement and processes of socialization that Seymour characterizes as abusive.  Perhaps they are, but we can't get rid of them.  If we don't teach children sex roles, they'll invent their own.  Children aren't passive objects of socialization.  They resist, they create options, they socialize each other.

Seymour mentions "the absence of gender specialists consulted in court."  I find this curious, since expert testimony on gender is always culture-bound, and the results will be largely predetermined by which gender specialists are allowed to testify.  As a gay liberationist influenced by radical feminism I wouldn't trust a child's (or adult's) fate with them; call me old-fashioned if you like.  The only authority Seymour quotes in the post is the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933), who might or might be right in his opinions, but I wouldn't look to a Freudian or any other mental health professional for guidance on sexism.

Seymour says that the same parents who are "evasive and anxious in answering questions about sex, particularly if they are unhappy about their sex lives"

are usually strangely emphatic, insistent, about who is a boy and who is a girl, and about the strict relationship between birth-assigned sex and one’s future gendered life trajectory. They leave no doubt about the matter, even though many children quietly entertain the gravest doubts. Simply, where children want knowledge and independence, parents often communicate ignorance and obedience.

This seems to me to sentimentalize children.  Of course one might suggest that adults "leave no doubt about the matter" exactly in areas where they have many doubts, and little knowledge.  No one has much knowledge about gender, and it would be better to "communicate ignorance" than certainty (which is not the same as knowledge) where one is ignorant.  Most adults are no better informed about sex and reproduction than they are about gender, and their evasiveness comes partly from uncertainty about how best to answer the questions they're asked, and partly from anxiety about bodies, their own and their children's.  If they are insistent about "who is a boy and who is a girl," it's probably because it's how they were socialized, and I'm not sure that most children are any more interested in complex, indeterminate answers on that matter than adults are.  A lot of research has been done on children and gender in the eighty-plus years since Ferenczi died, and it indicates that even very young children are active participants in their construction of gender and other matters while they are still infants.  Children who vary from the prevailing norms aren't necessarily interested in ambiguity either.  They are often quite sure what is girl stuff and what is boy stuff.  While they should be allowed as much freedom as possible to chart their own course, their gender theories are as likely to be bullshit as their elders' are, and for the same reason.  Children who stray from official norms can be every bit as "emphatic" and "insistent" as the adults who try to confine them to those norms; I think Seymour takes for granted that the children are right and the adults are wrong.  I don't.

Against Seymour's stricture on "the strict relationship between birth-assigned sex and one’s future gendered life trajectory," I've noticed that advocates for gender atypical children, and at least some transgender adults are claiming a biological basis for gender variance.  They equate biological sex with the sex chromosomes or a tiny region of the brain and equate it with gender.  One such person, for example, claimed that "science is increasingly revealing to us that gender identity is more or less inborn"; a transgender friend told someone who asked her why she was trans that it was "a matter of brain structure"; both of these claims are false, just like the claim that homosexuality is more or less inborn and a matter of brain structure.  I don't know what Seymour thinks about this, but the current trend even for gender nonconformists is as hostile to the radical feminist position as any traditionalist, seeking to root gender in the body.  Failing that, they try to reify gender, as a pre-cultural autonomous essence rather than a cultural construction.  Both positions are incoherent and quickly become entangled in their contradictions, as Seymour's does.  A radical feminist position would be to abolish gender, but though I consider that desirable I'm not sure it's possible.  Even the radical Second Wave feminists who argued for the abolition of gender kept falling back on gender stereotypes.  It will be no more possible to abolish the socialization of children; the best we can do is try to make the process more flexible, open and humane.

*Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, Lesbian/Woman (Bantam Books, 1972), page 81.

Only I Get to Decide Which Criticisms of Me Are Valid

To a great extent I agree with this meme; it makes an important point.  But even as I clicked "Like," I heard once again that snarky voice in the back of my mind saying, "Oh, yeah?"

Rather than try to tell other minorities what they should do, I'll start with the one of which I'm a member.  I don't trust gay people to decide what is homophobic, or what is antigay bigotry.  Many gay people are themselves homophobic; if they can't spot it in themselves, they probably won't be able to spot it reliably in heterosexuals.  And they don't.

There are two phases to the question, it seems to me.  First we need to know what we're talking about when we talk about homophobia.  Merriam Webster's definition is revealing:

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

I've already discussed the odd conflation of "aversion" and "discrimination."

But I once had a revealing exchange about all this online.  I wrote that if you are uncomfortable seeing two men kissing, but not a man and a woman kissing, that is homophobia.  It didn't seem like a particularly controversial statement to me -- that discomfort is an irrational aversion, no? -- but other gay people disagreed with me vehemently.  Their argument was that if you aren't throwing rocks at a gay person, you aren't homophobic.  It also seemed that they were hesitant to label someone a homophobe merely for wanting to vomit at the sight of two boys kissing, because homophobes are, like, monsters -- demons, even.  That's odd when you consider how much fuss there has been among my people over language like "That's so gay," which doesn't constitute overt violence either.  But then, many gay people have at least claimed to be disgusted by public displays of affection between people of the same sex.  They would commonly try to mask their own homophobia by claiming to be just as disgusted by heterosexual PDAs.  The only disgust at PDAs I've ever observed among my fellow Homo-Americans, however, is disgust in gay men at lesbian PDAs.

I've known a fair number of people who were initially shocked (irrational aversion) or repulsed (ditto) by the idea of homosexuality, or the sight of same-sex couples kissing (or even holding hands), but who got over it -- without therapy.  Their original reactions were born of ignorance and socialization, and these faded away when they got to know gay people, and their repugnance faded.  Even if one wanted to call this homophobia an illness, like most illnesses it can pass without treatment.  Some people, true, cling to their revulsion; that's a lifestyle choice.  It can be judged morally, though a sensible person will also recognize that clinging can become a reflex that isn't turned off easily.

Many, perhaps most gay people regard as homophobic any criticism of born-gay theories of sexual orientation.  Anyone who doubts that homosexuality is innate will be accused of believing that being gay is a "choice" and of siding with the bigots.  This is problematic given the absence of sound scientific evidence for, or a coherent concept underlying for those theories; but as with the medical model in general, the conclusion comes first and the evidence later, if ever.  And the born-gay faith is compatible with considerable internalized homophobia.  (Would anyone choose a lifestyle that caused them to be hated, despised, persecuted ...?)

Having said that, I notice that "Gentiles don't get to decide what is anti-Semitic" is conspicuously absent from the meme.  I suspect that many if not most American Jews would agree that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, unless the critic is a Jew, in which case he or she is a self-hating Jew. Should this be allowed to stand?  I know that the acquaintance who posted the meme on Facebook is critical of Israel, as am I, and would dismiss the contention and the accusation.  But this can't stand, on the meme's simplistic terms. 

"Non-patriots don't get to decide what is anti-American" is also absent from the list.  So is "Non-Christians don't get to decide what is anti-Christian," along with "Non-Catholics don't get to decide what is anti-Catholic," and even "Non-fundamentalists don't get to decide what violates religious freedom."  What complicates the problem -- and also indicates the way out of it -- is that not all members of any of these groups agree, about much of anything.  There is a wide range of attitudes to homosexuality and antigay bigotry among gay people, for example; many critics of Israel are Jewish; many critics of the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy are Catholic; feminists take a wide range of stances; and so on.  It's easy, and all too common, to dismiss the dissenters as willing victims of false consciousness, but that won't work: who gets to decide who has authentic consciousness?

But too much good work on women's issues has been done by men, good work on gay issues has been done by heterosexuals, good work on race has been done by white people, and so on, to limit discussion to the simplistic level of this meme.   Beyond that level, what matters is the quality of the arguments a person makes.  By that standard, much of the discourse of oppression by the oppressed groups doesn't measure up, and it's not news that majorities in such groups are often hostile to the arguments made by the more thoughtful among them/us.  Which doesn't mean that academics and other intellectuals should automatically have the last word either; nor can an outsider dismiss the complaints of the oppressed by pointing to one or two among them who support the oppressor.  You have to acquaint yourself with the range of opinions in any group, and then think about them.  That's a lot harder, but it's what has to be done if anyone's going to learn anything.

Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

Voters in Houston have overwhelmingly rejected a city law that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity -- along with race, sex, color, religion, and other characteristics already protected by federal civil rights law but not by local ordinance. The law had been passed by the Houston City Council in 2014.  Today in the e-mail I got a press release from the National LBGTQ Task Force Action Fund, which referred to

the city’s ordinance that extends non-discrimination protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people--among 13 other protected classes including race, religion, sex, color, age, ethnicity, disability, national origin, marital status, military status, genetic information, pregnancy, and family status.

There's something off here.  I looked it up, and found that, sure enough, the ordinance prohibits discrimination based on "sexual orientation" and "gender identity," along with 13 other traits.  It doesn't specify lesbians, gay men, or the rest, which would have laid the law open to legal challenge.

I confess that some of the confusion was in my own mind.  I gather that "protected class" does not refer to a group of individuals -- it's legalese for the protected characteristic, but in neutral terms: "race," not "African-Americans"; "sex", not "women."  But the related "protected group" is confusing too.  Wikipedia, in a very brief article, says it "is a group of people qualified for special protection by a law, policy, or similar authority... U.S. federal law protects employees from discrimination or harassment based on sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin or religion."  My point is that "sex, race, age, etc." don't refer to groups, but to all individuals.  A law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation protects heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and bisexuals; a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity will protect cisgender as well as transgender individuals; and so on.  I've said before that I don't know what sort of discrimination cisgender individuals might face, but someone's bound to figure out a way to do it before long.  That's one of the generally-ignored pitfalls (or is it a pitfall?) of civil rights antidiscrimination law: it protects majorities as well as well as minorities.  White men have sought and found relief under existing civil rights legislation, as have heterosexuals and bisexuals who were discriminated against by gay men.  And Christians, despite the whining of some of them, are already (in) a protected class. 

In this respect civil rights law is at odds with the dominant multiculti discourse on (for example) racism, which defines racism solely as structural racism and declares dogmatically that white people cannot suffer from racism.  Perhaps not -- it's evidently a matter of definition -- but they (we) can certainly experience discrimination based on our race.  It's written into the law, though as with many laws the consequences may not have been foreseen.  (Remember the article I discussed a couple of months ago, which treated racism as a consequence of innate human tendencies to stereotype people by their appearance, and declared that all white people are racist.  It also conflicted with the dominant multicultural model in treating racism as a matter of individual prejudice rather than structural factors, but neglected to notice that it also proved that all people of color are racist, since they have the same innate stereotyping tendencies.  When I pointed this out to the diversity manager who'd posted the article on Facebook, he floundered: he hadn't noticed the problem, and still didn't get it, caught as he is in the toils of diversity-management / culture of therapy discourse.  That couldn't be what the article meant, because it couldn't be.  That's the big trouble with diversity management in institutions, whether schools or corporations: people are given authority over others even though they don't really know what they're talking about.  But not to worry, they're just following the orders of their DNA.)

I understand why the Task Force phrased their press release as they did; it's a long-established convention to refer to civil rights laws in terms of the minorities they were enacted to protect, so that many people have come to believe that "Civil Rights" means specifically the rights of black people.  "Gay rights" is shorthand for prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, but many people, gay and straight, take it literally; and so on.  Since most people evidently have forgotten, if they ever knew, what the shorthand is short for, I think it's necessary to abandon the shorthand and spell out the actual meaning for a while.  Maybe it won't do much good.  Opposition to civil rights laws doesn't come from a misunderstanding of what the laws are supposed to do; bigots deliberately misunderstand the laws for their own reasons.  But it can't help that supporters of civil rights law don't undertand the laws either.

Will You, Won't You, Will You Join the Dance?

An interesting article appeared recently on the Atlantic's website by Lori Duron, a writer whose six-year-old son C.J. likes to wear dresses and makeup.  C.J. wanted to dress up as Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland for Halloween.  (The article went up on Halloween, which shows you how far behind I am.)  Her account of how she and her husband educated themselves, stifled their fears for their son, and learned to let him dress up as he likes, is moving.  Their fears aren't just projections of their own uneasiness about having a sissy son: such children are frequently victimized, sometimes lethally, by bullies of all ages, so there's plenty to worry about.  But that just means we (by which I mean all people of good will) need to start bearing down more on bullies and bigots.  No safe space for bullying and bigots!  And that's a lot more difficult than it may sound.

Which reminds me: today at the Doonesbury site, the "Say What?" feature was this quotation:

"Nowadays we're ostracized. [The way people treat us] is no different than the way people used to treat African Americans years ago." — Bradley Jenkins, Grand Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America

Bigots have been borrowing the language of discrimination and injustice to fend off criticism for a long time, but this one was especially cute, I thought.  It's funny how easily absolutists turn into relativists when it suits them.  But I digress; back to Duron's article.

Duron says she has learned that C. J. is "gender dysphoric, which is the medical diagnosis for C.J. being, as he describes himself, 'a boy who only likes girl stuff and wants to be treated like a girl.'"  Later she tosses out a few more labels: "gender nonconforming, gender variant, gender fluid, gender creative or whatever term you prefer."

"Gender nonconforming" is the term I dislike least in this array, followed perhaps by "gender variant."  The others don't work even that well.  The "dys" in "gender dysphoric" is a giveaway that, as you would expect from a medical diagnosis, professionals think boys like C. J. have something wrong with them.  Merriam-Webster's definition of "dysphoria" is "a state of feeling well or unhappy," which doesn't seem to describe C. J. at all: it's other people who don't feel well or happy when they are faced with a sissy boy.   Wikipedia adds, "a feeling of emotional and mental discomfort as a symptom of discontentment, restlessness, dissatisfaction, malaise, depression, anxiety or indifference."  Again, this doesn't sound like C. J. as his mother describes him.

But "gender fluid"?  That doesn't work either.  C. J. is gender rigid if anything: he likes "only girl stuff and wants to be treated like a girl."  Rigidity isn't necessarily a bad thing: when you know what you like and what you want, sometimes you have to stand firm, uncompromising, rigid.   The same goes for "gender creative": on Duron's account, C. J. is pretty conformist and uncreative -- he just wants to conform to a gender stereotype other than the one he was assigned by the society he lives in; in that light, "gender nonconformist" isn't really the right term either.  (Whether other societies are any different, let alone better, is something I'll consider in another post.)  I'm fine with putting a positive spin on the way C.J. does gender, but not at the cost of accuracy.

The comments under the article were revealing.  One person, posting as "Guest," pressed hard against letting C. J. dress and behave as he likes.  For example:

How is it brave to let your kid indulge in any behavior THEY see fit? They're kids, they need guidance.

This is easy enough to answer: the Durons didn't simply let C. J. run wild.  They talked to him, tried to offer him alternatives (which he rejected, insisting over several years on his own choices), studied up on gender-nonconformist children; they thought and agonized over it, worried about the hostility and danger he would face from others, before they decided to go along with his wishes.  When this was pointed out, Guest replied:

Kids need boundaries, without them they can easily lose their way. The inner cities are filled with kids who are doing whatever they please. The results have been tragic.

This parent may have thought long and hard but how do you consider all of the factors unless you talk to your child?

Of course the Durons did talk to their child, and considered as many factors as possible.  They do have boundaries, but theirs are different from Guest's.  Like many bigots, Guest read the article carelessly if at all before attacking the author and her son.  It's also hard to see how wearing an Alice in Wonderland costume for Halloween can be compared to violence in the inner cities.  When challenged further, Guest protested:

I am not judging him, I am questioning the decision by his parents to indulge him. Not every whim a child has should be embraced. We are so worried about offending our children's tender sensibilities we are failing to be parents.

It's debatable whether C. J.'s behavior should be called a "whim."  Whims come and go; C. J. is evidently determined to like girl things and to be treated like a girl, and has maintained his determination for half his life.  When I whimsically tried on my mother's shoes at five and found them too big, that was a whim.  (So was trying on my father's shoes at the same age; they didn't fit either.)  Guest couldn't or wouldn't explain why C. J. shouldn't be indulged, even if his behavior were a whim.  If it's a whim, it will pass, but if it doesn't, who will be hurt?  Comparing a sissy boy to inner-city gang violence betrays a tenuous grasp on reality.  And of course, Guest's claim not to be judging C.J. is as disingenuous as most people's claim not to judge.

When accused of homophobia, Guest moved into familiar whining-bigot country and riposted:

I am not afraid of homosexuals obviously. You might be astonished to learn that most people aren't comfortable with little boys parading around in girl's clothes. This notion that I am the one who is odd is pretty absurd. 

I will give the gay activists credit, they have bullied millions into "accepting" their agenda. The problem is not everyone has accepted it, they just got tired of being called names and have pretended to go along.

And so on.  Speaking of conformity, I could have written Guest's comments, which are culture-war boilerplate.  "Most people" are and have been "uncomfortable" with many things: a half-African President, women ministers and priests, interracial dating and marriage, religious freedom, criticism of government policy, Jewish boys with yarmulkes and sidelocks, foreigners in outlandish clothing speaking languages decent people don't know, you name it.  These people need to learn to mind their own business and back off.  We live in a society with many different kinds of people in it, and that's not going to change. It often creates discomfort when you see something you aren't used to, but that doesn't mean you're right and the other is wrong. More likely it's the other way around.

Guest asserted,

I am not necessarily in support of reprogramming sexual preferences, there is no need for that unless the preference is unwanted and the person wants to change by their own choice.

I just don't see anything wrong with asking a very young child, who is obviously not mature enough to understand gender or sexual matters, why he prefers to cross dress. I am not saying somebody should beat it out of them.

First, "sexual preferences" can't be "reprogrammed." There's ample evidence that attempts to change sexual orientation don't work, including from researchers who tried very hard to come to other conclusions. It's appropriate to challenge claims about the supposed innateness of sexual orientation, but not by trying to put false claims in their place. (Contrary to Guest's assertions, the popularity of innatist claims is not part of the "gay agenda," though a lot of gay people buy into them: the science in those claims is highly reactionary, even traditional in its gender ideology. And gay researchers have been among the most vocal critics of "born this way" pseudo-science.)

Second, it's hard to speak of "their own choice" when gay and gender-nonconformist people are the targets of so much coercion. It's not unreasonable to want to change when everyone around you is picking on you for being different, but can it be said to be your own choice?  And any honest, responsible clinician had better tell someone so hurt by harassment and abuse for being queer that they want to change, that the odds of changing his or her sexual orientation are virtually nil. Promising change is false advertising, to put it mildly.  Anyone who claims otherwise is showing that they really don't know what they're talking about.

Unfortunately most of the commenters who disagreed with Guest bought the born-that-way line, like this one:

It's not unreasonable for people--even children--to deeply crave recognition for their gender identity, and science is increasingly revealing to us that gender identity is more or less inborn. It can't just be rewritten through upbringing. Isn't it odd that conservatives often point out that nurture can't overcome nature with respect to gender differences, but in cases of transgender individuals they are prone to insist that surely the right kind of nurture can rewire these kids brains?

This person is as confused as Guest. His or her point about bigots' inconsistencies is well taken -- but it backfires on the liberal position as well.  It doesn't matter a damn whether "gender identity" is inborn or not.  People are allowed to make choices, such as religious ones, that few if any people would claim are inborn.  Children have less freedom in this regard, but parents should still grant them what freedom they can.  The important question is whether C. J.'s choices hurt anyone else, which they don't.  (Guest asked whether he might not be hurting himself, but had no arguments or evidence to back that up, except the conviction that If I don't like your behavior, it must be bad for you.  I'm only concerned with your welfare.)  But human brains are not "wired," and there isn't as far as I know any more reason to believe that "gender identity is more or less inborn," than that sexual orientation is.  We, including "science," really have no idea what gender identity is.  It's also too early to say whether C. J. is "transgendered."  Should he only be allowed to wear dresses and makeup if he is?

My main personal reaction to C. J. is relief that I'm not a parent.  If anything, as I indicated before, I'm uneasy about his gender conformism.  I've written before about the curious narrowness of the female role models that sissy men seem to prefer: hookers and strippers, mainly, or stage performers in their stage personae.  There's nothing particularly bad about those options compared to others, but it sets off my bullshit detectors when such men claim to want to be women: they seem to want to be certain kinds of women -- as one feminist observed of drag queens in the 70s, they don't want to be women, they want to be men's idea of what women should be.  (I think this is analogous to gay men who are "attracted to men" but by "men" mean only a very narrow stereotypical range of adult human males.)  If I were the father of a little girl, I'd be as unhappy if she wanted to be a Disney Princess as I'd be about a little boy who wanted to be one.

C. J. is too young to deal with these questions, but adults aren't, and I think they're worth thinking about.  He says he wants to be "treated like a girl."  I don't think he really does, but how could he know?  Little girls' lives are less restricted than they used to be, but there is still pressure to limit them.  C. J.'s parents are enlightened liberals who wouldn't forbid a daughter to wear pants, to get dirty during play, or lock her in at night when she reaches puberty so she won't dishonor her family by losing her virginity.  The same gender-normative boys and men who pick on queers also pick on girls, often pretty brutally.  Little girls who want to be boys have the same misunderstanding of what their wish would entail.

One of the best writers on this aspect of gender defiance has been Annick Prieur, in Mema's House, Mexico City (Chicago, 1998).  She tells how Mema, the middle-aged homosexual who maintains a household for young gay men and does AIDS education work in Mexico City, visited a family.

Mema gave a special invitation to the fifteen-year-old twin sons, and told them he found them very handsome. They laughed shyly while their parents laughed loudly. Mema then grabbed the nineteen-year-old son and asked if he could take him with him. Of course he was a bit young, but with proper training, he would become a perfect husband for Mema. Everybody laughed, the boy most of all. When we left, Mema handed some condoms to the twins, and neither the twins nor their parents made any fuss about that. But the fourteen-year-old daughter did not get any [58].

Again, about the vestidas, the young effeminate gay men who live in Mema's house:

Others, like Lupita, told me they liked housework. ... Having lived with some of them, however, I have good reason to doubt that they really like housework that much. Confronted with a stack of dirty dishes their femininity evaporates, and they start to resemble lazy teenagers. Not that this is any proof that their femininity is superficial - I suspect their sisters are not always fond of doing the dishes either. But their sisters can refrain from liking without much ado. (That they lack the same possibilities to escape it is another question) [176].

And finally,

One of the jotas' dilemmas is that they want a man who is man enough to be dominant, and yet they do not want to be dominated. Even Flaca, who sees battering as a sign of love, does not obey the dominant male she is so proud to have found: she takes advantage of every possibility to deceive him [255].

In other words, these boys want to be girls on their own terms.  They have a very specific and sometimes idiosyncratic idea of what it means to be a woman.  They can pick and choose where they'll conform to Mexican standards for women, and where they'll fall back on their maleness.  (Their American counterparts, of whom I've known a fair number, are very similar in this regard.)  Fair enough, but women don't have comparable freedom, though they have a little more in the US.

Children have a limited understanding of what it means to be a boy or girl, a man or a woman.  David Ellis wrote something in his memoir that I've heard from other heterosexual men.  His mother, he says, worked in a factory before she married, and returned to wage work when she could, as much (Ellis believes) for the "conviviality" of the workplace as for the money:

There were others in her position in my immediate environment, yet whatever understanding I drew from those cases was countered by the strong sense I had when growing up of living in a society that was matriarchal. The women who mattered to me may have been economically dependent but, as far as I was concerned, they were the ones with all the authority and who therefore lived richer, more satisfying lives than their husbands. Having abandoned responsibility in the domestic sphere, my own father lost all power within it [38-39].

Some writers have speculated that the widespread myth of a primordial matriarchy might have arisen because most children spend their earliest years in what feels like a matriarchy.  (Not all of them do, of course: for some the power of the father intrudes forcefully.)   As they get older, they learn who really has the power.  Their environment may look matriarchal to them, but it isn't, any more than the sun really moves around the earth.

I'd like to ask C. J., and other boys like him, what he means by being "treated like a girl."  Of course he has little understanding of the downside of that, just as tomboys know little about the downside of being treated like a boy.  But it would be interesting to hear what he believes, not with an eye toward changing him, but to understand him.  In the long run he will change, of course, and he should, just as boys who want to be boys need to broaden their ideas about what a boy can do, but it's impossible to predict in what ways he'll change, and he'll have to choose them himself, just as he now decides what to wear for Halloween.

If I met C.J., I'd oblige him and "treat him like a girl" -- by taking him seriously, listening to him, and respecting him.  But that's how I treat boys too.  I'd also be appropriately skeptical about his conception of what it means to be a girl, or a boy, just as I am with standard-gender children and adults.  I'd challenge his stereotypes, in other words, just as I would with anyone else.  To that extent I agree with Guest, except that I don't think the "whims" of American or other cultures about gender should go unquestioned any more than those of gender rebels.  After all, I'm a gender rebel too: I resisted behaving in certain ways just because boys were supposed to, I grew my hair long in the 1960s and had trouble with school authorities because of it, I didn't like sports -- but not because I wanted to be girly, though I felt free to like girly stuff when I wanted to.  My gender was more characterized by being a bookworm, an intellectual; we're the real 'third sex.'  Later I resisted behaving in certain ways that other gay men expected.  "I mean, you're supposed to like Barbra Streisand if you're gay, aren't you?" a gay kid asked me very seriously in 1972.  As it happened, I did like Streisand, but I never thought that liking her had anything to do with kissing boys.  I still don't.

When Being Gay Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Gay -- Oh, Wait ...

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