Boy Scouts is considering lifting the ban on gay members! The nationwide ban will be removed, allowing individual units to choose their own policy. I'm so excited for my BSA friends!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/us/boy-scouts-consider-lifting-ban-on-gay-leaders.html?pagewanted=1&tntemail1=y&_r=0&emc=tnt
This is even more exciting because Boy Scouts has to make this decision on their own--the Supreme Court ruled that they had the right to ban gay members. It's the same law that makes it possible for private schools to be all-male or all-female--and considering how many women felt empowered by attending an all-female college, I feel duty-bound to uphold the law allowing private organizations to make discriminative calls. That means the only thing to do is persuade leaders to change their minds in cases like this one, where the discrimination does more harm than good. After all, I've never met a boy (there may be some) who really, really wanted to attend a college that happened to be all-female.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
LGBTQIA
Today I read a New York Times article that explores the term LGBT and whether it accurately reflects how teens are identifying today. There are so many words now, when it used to be just LG and later B and still later T. As the article says, "We have our lesbians, our gays...bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual...[p]ansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender.
Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual.
Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous...Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."
Genderqueer. Panromantic. Aromantic. Crossdresser. A couple I may have made up, since I've never seen them used: homoromantic, biromantic, heteroromantic. Combinations. Asexual and panromantic. Aromantic and pansexual. There are different ways of being asexual--having sex for the sake of one's partner but not taking pleasure in it, being in a romantic relationship without sex, or simply not being in a relationship--"A all the way," as I put it during a conversation on the topic.
All describe a slightly different facet of the quickly becoming vastly complex issue of gender identity/sexual orientation.
A teacher mentioned in the article tells her students not to use LGBTQ and suggests the word queer instead, simply because the acronym is so unwieldy. Her students complain she doesn't know what she is talking about, but I think she has a point, especially considering how many people don't make it into the acronym (so you can hardly complain about it being too narrow), and how hard it would be to make them fit--does A stand for asexual, aromantic, or ally? Does Q stand for queer or questioning? Do the various gender-related words fit under transgender or not? One college I looked at has a listserv called EndlessAcronym, so as to embrace all the letters without becoming unspellable.
Queer has its promise as an umbrella word, and if it's not acceptable to the community, we need a single word. After all, when I wrote a paper on the topic, the umbrella definition I found myself having to use was "any deviation from a heterosexual gender binary". Now that I understand the topic slightly better, I may have to update it to "any deviation from a heterosexual cisgender binary" or something similar. And I don't even like that. Deviation has a negative connotation, even though its definition is simple--something other. If you breed a long line of white cats and get a black one fourteen generations down, you have a deviation. If you're doing a physics experiment and all your results fall on the same line on a graph but one, you have a deviation. Somehow that became a bad thing, but I think it's not past reclamation. There's a website called DeviantArt, for goodness' sake. In a society where we're no longer settling for second-best self-descriptors, I think we're capable of embracing our deviancy. What we're apparently having trouble with is accepting that we're all the same, too.
Genderqueer. Panromantic. Aromantic. Crossdresser. A couple I may have made up, since I've never seen them used: homoromantic, biromantic, heteroromantic. Combinations. Asexual and panromantic. Aromantic and pansexual. There are different ways of being asexual--having sex for the sake of one's partner but not taking pleasure in it, being in a romantic relationship without sex, or simply not being in a relationship--"A all the way," as I put it during a conversation on the topic.
All describe a slightly different facet of the quickly becoming vastly complex issue of gender identity/sexual orientation.
A teacher mentioned in the article tells her students not to use LGBTQ and suggests the word queer instead, simply because the acronym is so unwieldy. Her students complain she doesn't know what she is talking about, but I think she has a point, especially considering how many people don't make it into the acronym (so you can hardly complain about it being too narrow), and how hard it would be to make them fit--does A stand for asexual, aromantic, or ally? Does Q stand for queer or questioning? Do the various gender-related words fit under transgender or not? One college I looked at has a listserv called EndlessAcronym, so as to embrace all the letters without becoming unspellable.
Queer has its promise as an umbrella word, and if it's not acceptable to the community, we need a single word. After all, when I wrote a paper on the topic, the umbrella definition I found myself having to use was "any deviation from a heterosexual gender binary". Now that I understand the topic slightly better, I may have to update it to "any deviation from a heterosexual cisgender binary" or something similar. And I don't even like that. Deviation has a negative connotation, even though its definition is simple--something other. If you breed a long line of white cats and get a black one fourteen generations down, you have a deviation. If you're doing a physics experiment and all your results fall on the same line on a graph but one, you have a deviation. Somehow that became a bad thing, but I think it's not past reclamation. There's a website called DeviantArt, for goodness' sake. In a society where we're no longer settling for second-best self-descriptors, I think we're capable of embracing our deviancy. What we're apparently having trouble with is accepting that we're all the same, too.
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