http://www.artsandopinion.com/2011_v10_n3/farrow.htm ----------------------------------snip The word sex in our codes specifies the natural division of the species into male and female, with a view to protecting the latter especially. The addition of sexual orientation, however, has effected a transformation in our thinking about human sexuality. Male and female have begun to give way to heterosexual and homosexual in the basic binary logic of sex. Hence the idea of same-sex marriage, with its air of legal inevitability.
The proposed addition of gender identity and expression carries that transformation even further by suppressing the binary logic itself. Backers of these bills often make no attempt to disguise this. “One of the great myths of our culture,” insists the Canadian Labor Congress, “is that at birth each infant can be identified as distinctly ‘male’ or ‘female’ (biological sex), will grow up to have correspondingly ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ behaviour (public gender), live as a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ (social gender role), and marry a woman or a man (heterosexual affective orientation). This is not so.” The standard notion of sex, then, must be replaced by the more malleable concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity. And I do mean must. Here in Quebec (Canada) a recent government white paper promises to wipe society clean of both homophobia and heterosexism -- that is, of any “affirmation of heterosexuality as a social norm or the highest form of sexual orientation [and of any] social practice that conceals the diversity of sexual orientations and identities.” What this will mean in the long run for the legal protection of women remains to be seen, of course, but we can’t have it both ways. Sex cannot serve as an effective legal marker for discrimination if its binary nature dissolves into fluid sexual subjectivities. In that sense, these bills constitute unfriendly amendments to the civil and criminal codes they purport to refine or perfect. Observe, as well, that these bills thinly veil another very telling contradiction. Trans people, we are told -- the people the bills are supposed to protect -- are those who are uncomfortable with and to some extent reject the gender identities assigned to them at birth. Some are transsexual -- namely, those who have a strong sense that they are living in the wrong sex -- and some are transgender, identifying with neither sex but placing themselves here or there on a gender spectrum. The former seek a transition between the two sexes; the latter deny that there ‘are’ merely two sexes. The former may regard their problem as a “medical concern, pure and simple,” to quote Corporal Natalie Murray of the Canadian Air Force, who made the transition. The latter often regard their problem as purely social, that is, as someone else’s problem, the problem of bigotry. Here again we cannot easily have it both ways. Corporal Murray’s “hard-won identity as a woman” seems to make her a good poster girl for the Canadian bill, if one ignores the male chromosomes; but neither of these bills is about medical concerns, pure and simple. Medical concerns are covered by the term disability, which is already in the list of prohibited grounds. In the final analysis, these bills are about the alleged bigotry. Which is to say, they are more interested in taking the transgressive out of transgender than in guaranteeing the right to therapy for the transsexual. Both goals are problematic, of course. Some years, Dr. Paul McHugh (“Surgical Sex,” November 2004) described the process by which his psychiatric team at Johns Hopkins eventually put a stop to sex-reassignment therapy, having come to the conclusion that SRT was based on a faulty premise and did more harm than good; indeed, that it was “to collaborate with a mental disorder rather than to treat it.” Proponents of the present bills, setting aside the medical evidence, choke and fume at such a claim. Ironically, however, they would agree with McHugh that “without any fixed position on what is given in human nature, any manipulation of it can be defended as legitimate.” And that is exactly what they want to achieve with this legislation. Gender fluidity is what they are after -- meaning no fixed borders for sexual identity and no fixed rules for sexual self-expression. Naturally this means all sorts of new rules for the general public, for businesses and schools, and for government. That is why interpretive institutions are springing up everywhere, like the GenderKompetenzCentrum at the University of Berlin. But when all is said and done, the proponents of these bills are not interested in the difficulties of implementation. Nor are they troubled by the logical or juridical or social contradictions the bills generate. For these bills are Trojan horses, which on closer inspection are designed not to protect a threatened minority but to entrench in law the notion that gender is essentially a social construct, based not in the natural order but in more or less arbitrary acts of human self-interpretation. To endorse such bills one must think as the neo-gnostic Hegelians taught us to think -- that nature is there only to be sublated or overcome -- and to go, boldly or obediently, where the Gender Mainstreaming (GM) strategists want us to go. “To adopt a gender perspective,” says one obedient United Nations publication, “is to distinguish between what is natural and biological and what is socially and culturally constructed, and in the process to renegotiate the boundaries between the natural -- and hence relatively inflexible -- and the social -- and hence relatively transformable.” The fate of these ambitious bills will tell us quite a lot about how these negotiations are going, and reveal just how transformable our society actually is. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
