Hot Pink Heteropessimism

If anyone was primed to love the Barbie movie, it was me. But I didn’t.

Sure, I got a kick out of the dazzling pink re-creation of Barbie’s homes and outfits, and the jokes about obscure and ill-advised real Mattel dolls, like boob-growing Skipper and pregnant Midge. Somebody has to buy me a Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken, right now!

sugar daddy ken doll, mattel, barbie boyfriend

Transition goals!

I would have enjoyed “Barbie” far more if it hadn’t tried to say Something Serious About Feminism, because what it came up with was a very 1990s gender-binary utopia where all women are girlbosses and all men are idiots. That a film about male uselessness also has zero queer pairings, either in Barbie Land or the Real World, feels like both a failure of nerve and a bleaker assessment of gender relations than you’d expect from its relentlessly inspirational vibes.

Gender studies scholar Asa Seresin coined the term “Heteropessimism” in a 2019 article in The New Inquiry. Seresin defines it as a mode of discourse where male-female coupling is both inevitable and unsatisfying, even politically suspect. It masquerades as feminism without actually improving anything.

Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition.

The movie’s Barbie Land is an alternate reality where Barbies have all the prestige, intelligence, and possessions. In the Barbies’ social life, the Kens are either mocked and excluded, or tolerated like endearing but none-too-bright puppies. When Barbie and Ken visit our world, she’s crestfallen that the dolls’ feminist fantasy world didn’t do more to inspire social change. Meanwhile, Ken discovers that real-world governments and corporations are run by men just as stupid as he is. He leads a short-lived patriarchal takeover of Barbie Land that mainly consists of bros drinking beer and explaining “The Godfather” to their girlfriends.

Notably, when the status quo is restored, the Kens’ legitimate grievances are still ridiculed. (Seresin: “A certain strain of heteropessimism assigns 100 percent of the blame for heterosexuality’s malfunction to men, and has thus become one of the myriad ways in which young women—especially white women—have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power.”) With an obvious wink, the female president promises to allot them spaces in the halls of power…exactly to the extent that women have it in real life, i.e. not much. I guess what makes this a fantasy is that the men react with sentimental tears rather than incel violence.

Seresin suggests:

In this sense, heteropessimism is, to borrow Lee Edelman’s phrase, an “anesthetic feeling”: “a feeling that aims to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment.” Heteropessimism’s anesthetic effect is especially seductive because it dissociates women from the very traits—overattachment and “the overintensity of feeling”—for which straight culture is determined to make us ashamed. That much heteropessimist sentiment is delivered in joke form coheres with Henri Bergson’s idea that comedy delivers “a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Unlike traditional comedy, however, heteropessimism is anticathartic. Its structure is anticipatory, designed to preemptively anesthetize the heart against the pervasive awfulness of heterosexual culture as well as the sharp plunge of quotidian romantic pain.

If everything in Barbie Land is supposed to be a feminist role reversal of our flawed world, the Barbies’ indifference to their lovesick Kens seems to offer relief from the pervasive pain of coupling with a man who exercises power by not giving a shit about anyone. But if you ask me, a utopia full of man-babies is too much like the world we’re trying to leave behind.

At our trans men’s support group last weekend, we read aloud some passages from the 1995 memoir-in-essays S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt, the recently deceased lesbian poet and partner of Leslie Feinberg. In one piece, Pratt mused about how it felt patronizing when a man opened a door for her, but exciting when a butch woman did it. One scenario carried the assumption of superior male strength, the other had the potential for playing with gender roles between equals. Coming from a Southern feminine upbringing, in her generation, Pratt must have seen a lot of chivalry-as-patriarchy. But I was like, I’d be thrilled if the average young man today opened a door for anybody. Modern heteropessimism is at least as much a reaction against the kind of men who make up the essay collection The Bastard on the Couch–educated Gen-X and millennial guys who feel infantilized by their wives’ competence, and have decided to lean into the privileges of being useless.

There have been several think pieces about queer-coded elements of “Barbie” but I’m tired of settling for that. See also, “Across the Spider-Verse” and every other superhero movie that appropriates the emotional arc and metaphor of being closeted. Straight storylines with a gay aesthetic are as old as Puccini. It’s hard to beat Madame Butterfly for heteropessimism! The effeminacy of the Ken doll is so well-known that Autostraddle ran a humor piece “75 Lesbian Ken Dolls, Ranked by Lesbianism” when Mattel redesigned the doll in 2017 with a slimmer, more androgynous look. In the Barbie movie, though, this effeminacy is only played for laughs, as proof of the Kens’ immaturity and inferiority. It was hard to enjoy this movie because it would have given me massive dysphoria not too many years ago. Dysphoria that didn’t have a name for itself, other than “there’s no place in the world for the thing that I am.”

I made Stylin’ Stripes Ken my Facebook profile picture the year before I came out as nonbinary.

Beachy Tropical Shirt Ken is the 25-year-old trans guy that all of us dad bods with T-induced hair loss are sooo jealous of.

 

August Links Roundup: We’re Here to Recruit You

It is I, your professional transsexual, here to wish you a Happy National Goat Cheese Month. First up on our appetizer platter of links, historian Hugh Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer) asks “Who’s Afraid of Social Contagion?” in this Boston Review essay about our ever-evolving concepts of sexuality and gender.

“Are there actually more queer people now, or just more out queer people? Or are those the wrong questions to ask?” Ryan notes that while diversity of attraction and gender performance has always existed, the classifications themselves have changed several times over the past 200 years, shifting from a behavior-based to an identity-based paradigm, and conceptualizing more specific flavors of queerness as people’s social circles became more diverse through urbanization and the Internet.

For instance, Ryan says, Victorian society was extremely sex-segregated. Homosociality, even homoromanticism, was normal so long as you otherwise performed your “proper” gender identity. Most deep relationships were between people of the same sex, whether or not they discreetly included erotic intimacy as well. Deviant queerness in the 19th century resided in gender performance (effeminate men, butch women, or what we’d now call genderqueer presentation). This changed during the early 20th century:

City life enabled a radical new form of heterosociality—social interaction between people of different genders. Millions of people were able to leave the communities they came from and explore their desires and ideas in busy, anonymous, transient cities full of other people, some like them and some incredibly different. People who were normally gendered but attracted to people of the same sex—a group that had gone unnamed before—found each other in greater and greater numbers and began to recognize themselves as communities with shared identities. Soon, doctors, politicians, lawyers, and others began to notice them as well, and the category of the “invert” was broken down into people who were normally gendered but desired people of the same sex (homosexuals); people who desired to have bodies that were differently sexed (transsexuals); and people who already had bodies that were differently sexed (intersex people).

The seeds were sown for the current generation of “Fellas, is it gay to…” memes. Once the idea of homosexual identity was out there, same-sex affection of any kind became suspect:

As a result, in order to prove they were not homosexuals, newly defined straight people had to start acting differently: avoiding places were inverts went, avoiding too much time with people of the same sex, avoiding physical affection, and so on. This is one of the origin points of modern homophobia…

Ryan theorizes that the Internet has created a second great reorganization of our ideas of queerness. Like the mass migration to cities, it brings previously isolated members of sexual minorities into conversation with one another for the first time.

The gulf between chromosomal sex, physical sex at birth, physical sex in adulthood, gender identity, and gender presentation has never been wider, and this gulf causes problems for a system of sexuality and gender identity that rests on binary sex and binary sexual object choice—the paradigm of LGBT identity that dominated the twentieth century…

Twentieth-century notions of LGBT identity cannot answer these questions adequately, because they were not developed to understand the experiences of queer people; they were developed to segment straight cis people off from the rest of us.

After decades of change on a smaller scale, we are experiencing an epistemic change, a change in the base meaning of sex, sexuality, and gender. This is why it’s bringing together people who would otherwise seem to have no common alliance. But when you think about trans-negative “feminists” and conservative Christian fascists, what do they have in common? They both see the world through a reductive framework built on binary sex, and they both tend to spend most of their lives following rules determined by genitalia: men with penises here, women with vaginas there. Of course they are clinging to each other. Their ideas of “good” and “bad” are different, but their assumptions about what is “natural” and “real” are the same.

Legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon’s radical feminist credentials are indisputable. That’s why I was so thrilled to see her distance herself from the anti-transgender movement that has appropriated the radical feminist label. In this thorough exposition in Signs Journal, MacKinnon explains how reactionary their position is. The article, “Exploring Transgender Law and Politics,” transcribes a symposium with MacKinnon and Finn Mackay, Mischa Shuman, Sandra Fredman, and Ruth Chang at Oxford University in November 2022. Acknowledging that she’s still learning about trans issues, particularly regarding trans men, MacKinnon shows great comprehension and empathy:

Much of the current debate has centered on (endlessly obsessed over, actually) whether trans women are women. Honestly, seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling. One might think that trans women—assigned male at birth, leaving masculinity behind, drawn to and embracing womanhood for themselves—would be welcomed. Yet a group of philosophers purporting feminism slide sloppily from “female sex” through “feminine gender” straight to “women” as if no move has been made, eventually reverting to the dictionary: a woman is an “adult human female.” Defining women by biology—adult is biological age, human is biological species, female is biological sex—used to be criticized as biological essentialism. Those winging to the Right are thrilled by this putatively feminist reduction of women to female body parts, preferably chromosomes and reproductive apparatus, qualities chosen so that whatever is considered definitive of sex is not only physical but cannot be physically changed into.

Feminism, by contrast, is a political movement. If some imagine a movement for female body parts, the rest of us are part of some other movement, one to end the subordination of women in all our diversity. In other words, what women “are” does not necessarily define the woman question: our inequality, our resulting oppression. Those of us who do not take our politics from the dictionary want to know: Why are women unequal to men? What keeps women second-class citizens? How are women distinctively subordinated? The important question for a political movement for the liberation of women is thus not what a woman is, I think, but what accounts for the oppression of women: who is oppressed as a woman, in the way women are distinctively oppressed?

Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries. It is core male-dominant ideology that attributes the source of women’s inequality to our nature, our biological sex, which for male dominance makes it inevitable, immutable, unchangeable, on us. As if our bodies, rather than male dominant social systems, do it to us…

Inferiority, not difference, is the issue of hierarchy, including gender hierarchy.

The whole piece is worth reading. MacKinnon handily cuts down other myths that sexism and transphobia share, from “deceptive” trans women to the bathroom panic. “I really don’t understand why there is such a feeling of vulnerability around women in bathrooms, which usually have stall doors that lock, compared with homes, where no such protections exist and sexually assaulted women are victimized in high numbers by untransitioned men in their own families.” On the so-called advantages of trans women in sports: “Any advantage that height and weight disparities confer, for instance, exist within sexes as well as across them…Michael Phelps is built like a fish, but no one is looking to take away his swimming medals.” Instead, let’s re-evaluate which sports need to be sex-segregated, at all.

Literary scholar and trans activist Grace Lavery strikes back against TERF nonsense in the L.A. Review of Books. “Gender Criticism Versus Gender Abolition: On Three Recent Books About Gender” reviews new titles by Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, and Kathleen Stock, a trifecta of so-called gender-critical feminists who dominate the debate in the U.K. Like the MacKinnon article cited above, Lavery points out how reactionary it is for feminism to defend the biological binary. Lacking merit in their ideas, these writers have positioned themselves as free speech defenders in order to win mainstream allies.

The success of gender-critical thought has been so remarkable, and the capture of the British public sphere so comprehensive, that even to point, childishly, and inquire whether the beautiful finery in which this new philosophy is arrayed really, um, exists is to invite the charge of having done a cancel culture. Promoting these ideas on the grounds of free speech, rather than on their merits, has proven a stroke of tactical genius. Think of all the iconoclastic jouissance one could access if the simplistic philosophical nostra of yesterday—Cartesian dualism, say; or the Platonist theory of forms—had not been refined, but had actually been censored! Stupidity would become wisdom; ignorance, strength. Freedom would be the freedom to submit “2+2=4” as one’s doctoral thesis in pure mathematics, and to anticipate warm praise for one’s principled refusal to challenge the assumptions of the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus.

Lavery would have us look back to genuine radicals like Simone de Beauvoir or the Victorian advocates for women’s rights, who believed that womanhood was a mutable social category before it was a biological fact. “Demands for women’s suffrage were rooted in the notion that ‘women’ were not a naturally occurring type, distinguishable from men on natural grounds, but simply a group of persons that had been denied legal parity.” Metaphysical debates over the essence of womanhood are a distraction from fighting sex-based inequality.

A holiday we can all agree on.

Introducing Theodore DiMeow!

Please give a warm welcome to my new son, Theodore “Big Pussy” Cavalieri DiMeow!

Theo is a quiet but inquisitive young fellow, somewhere between 1 1/2 to 3 years old. He greets everyone with enthusiastic head-rubs. A stray living with a feral cat colony, he was rescued by the good folks at Animal Friends of Connecticut. I went down there for a different cat I saw on Petfinder, but as soon as I met this little guy, he reached out his paw and patted me on the arm. When I was about to walk away, he grabbed my shirt front with his claws. It was destiny!

“Big Pussy” and the DiMeo crime family are “Sopranos” references, of course. “Cavalieri” means knight in Italian, as my name, Reiter, does in German. Theodore was the name they gave him at the shelter. It suits him. He is a gift of God.

July Links Roundup: Happy Barbenheimer Month

Happy pink apocalypse, readers! Can you believe I have not seen the “Barbie” movie yet? Clearly, I’m working too hard.

Recent signs of the End Times include the ongoing right-wing attack on libraries. BookRiot reported on July 7 that “Hoopla, Overdrive/Libby Now Banned for Those Under 18 in Mississippi”:

Despite the age of consent in Mississippi being 16, no one under the age of 18 will have access to digital materials made available through public and school libraries without explicit parental/guardian permission.

Mississippi has a new law on the books directly impacting access and use of digital resources like Hoopla and Overdrive for those under the age of 18 throughout the state. Even if granted parental permission, minors may not have materials available to them, if vendors do not ensure every item within their offerings meets the new, wide-reaching definition of “obscenity” per the state. Mississippi Code 39-3-25, part of House Bill 1315, went into effect July 1, 2023, and libraries across the state have scrambled for how to be in compliance…

By definition, any vendor is out of compliance by simply having materials available in their system which depict sexual reproduction or queerness in any capacity. Images of nude female breasts–which are often part of sexual education, reproductive education, and/or biology and anatomy books written for those under the age of 18–would be out of compliance with the law.

These gatekeeping requirements further entrench educational inequality. Teens without good libraries in their hometowns now face further limits on what they can learn digitally. Those exploring different beliefs and identities will have to out themselves to their parents or lose access to potentially life-saving information.

In other free speech news, the Texas Tribune reported on July 11 that “Texas A&M recruited a UT professor to revive its journalism program, then backtracked after ‘DEI hysteria'”. Evidently, A&M didn’t notice that UT-Austin journalism school director Kathleen McElroy had covered diversity and inclusion stories for the New York Times for 20 years. No wonder their journalism program needs help. In any event, some of McElroy’s fellow A&M alumni made a stink that she was talking about racial equity–the horror! We can expect more cowardly behavior from other school admins, in light of the state’s crackdown on talking about things that make white people uncomfortable:

Also in Texas, the Supreme Court’s ill-founded decision last month in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is empowering other homophobes to deny services to gay couples. According to the Texas Tribune:

McLennan County Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley filed a lawsuit after a state agency warned her about refusing to marry gay couples. She hopes a recent U.S. Supreme Court case about religious freedom helps her cause.

Her lawsuit alleges that the commission violated her rights under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Her lawsuit was dismissed by a lower appeals tribunal, but last month, the Texas Supreme Court said it will hear arguments on whether to revive the state judge’s lawsuit.

How this will be resolved is anyone’s guess. In her role as a public official, Hensley doesn’t have as much freedom of speech as the private website designer in 303 Creative. At least, that’s how prior case law has treated public employees’ rights to express views contrary to their employer. But given that the Supreme Court shouldn’t even have heard 303 Creative, because the plaintiff lied about having been asked to create a gay wedding website in the first place, one can’t count on precedent to stand in the way of right-wing judges’ desired outcome.

Recent state-level bans on trans health care have repeatedly failed court challenges. The Intercept‘s Natasha Lennard warns that we still can’t be complacent, based on Republicans’ successful long game for overturning reproductive rights.

Democrats failed for decades to vigorously defend reproductive rights by lending all too much credence to the Christian right’s anti-abortion stance. President Bill Clinton’s famous phrase — that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” — treated abortion as an unfortunate necessity rather than an integral part of bodily autonomy and a public good.

There’s a relevant analogy here between the common liberal treatment of trans kids: that they’re an unfortunate rarity, which should be tolerated but not celebrated. Against such a threadbare defense of trans existence, the violently committed anti-trans right will surely win.

Liberals putatively opposed to the GOP’s draconian anti-trans onslaught should take heed of the judges’ rulings on trans youth health care. All too many powerful liberal organs — the New York Times perhaps chief among them — have channeled Republican talking points by treating trans children as a site of peril, and gender-affirming treatment for kids as potentially too experimental.

In point after point, however, federal judges from Florida to Tennessee to Arkansas have agreed that arguments treating gender-affirming treatments for youths as untested and dangerous are, quite simply, not based in fact.

“What is clear is that before all kinds of judges, when these bans are tested by what the states are claiming is their evidence, they categorically fail,” Strangio told me. “What that means is that you have a popular discourse playing far more hostile to trans people, far more open to misinformation, than a federal court is at this stage.” Strangio added that “it would be helpful if the center left media were to then cover the cases, after having sparked fear everywhere.”

While I personally feel abortion raises moral questions of harm, which trans healthcare does not, I’ve come round to understanding why our struggles are linked. I can maintain that abortion is an ethically problematic choice in some circumstances, and also that it’s none of my business, let alone the government’s.

The great lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt passed away on July 2. My mom-of-choice Roberta and I had the privilege of meeting her when she donated the books and papers of her late spouse, Leslie Feinberg, to the Sexual Minorities Archives in Holyoke. Pratt’s poetry collection Crime Against Nature, which had recently been reissued by Sinister Wisdom, described losing custody of her sons when she came out. I often think of her poem “This Is My Life You Are Talking About” when cis-het folks debate the “gay issue” or the “trans issue” as if we’re not in the room.

Need a minute to smile? Enjoy this AI-generated Elvis video from There I Ruined It.

Poetry, Music, and a Queer Doll Wedding by Nhojj

I connected with singer-songwriter and poet Nhojj through my friend John Ollom, the movement artist. Raised in Guyana and Trinidad, Nhojj has recorded 7 studio albums and published 3 books. Winner of 4 Outmusic awards, Nhojj has shared stages with Norah Jones, Regina Belle and Estelle. Nhojj views his art as multidimensional healing spaces where audiences can experience themselves through the eyes of acceptance and love.

He filmed this adorable gay wedding with two Ken dolls, set to his original song “Faithful”:

Nhojj has kindly allowed me to reprint two of his poems below.

Ritual of Dance…

I
Dance at
Night on a basement floor
Music
Pounding
Tribal vibrations
Sounding
Sweet on my taste buds
Soca
Beats provoke my waist
Flood of
Sweat
Drips down
Body strips down towels wait
Behind the door cause
I aim to leave it all on this homemade
Dance floor

This house hypnotizes
This afro symphony baptizes
Me by the silk cotton tree
Spirits arise & walk in
Moonlight… fireflies
Reggae lullabies
Djembe drum sanctifies
Our dun dun purifies

Eyes closed
Chest exposed
Arms flailing…remake me
Voices wailing…remix me
Feet stomping…rewind me
Speakers thumping…replay me
Over & over & over again…
Gods of Jouvet
Voices
Chanting rhythms
Visions speaking in tongues
Lyrical phenomenons
Spirit of Shango
Magic
Lightning & thunder
Beneath my feet

Turn the dial left…
Left for…
Higher bandwidths
Higher frequencies
Higher planes

Villages of ancestral domains
Calling forth the rains
Come forth
Come now
Fall down &
Water this parched earth
With…

P
E
A
C
E

****

Cherish Yourself

She didn’t notice me at first, but then I turned, and the light bounced off my being, getting stuck in her vision like a speck of dust. Her eyes narrowed, recognizing something familiar… something distasteful.

Of course this wasn’t the first time. There had been many before her, mostly boys in men’s clothing, with that look of recognition in their eyes, trying desperately to erase this thing inside me. They’d used every trick in their books, teaching lessons they’d been taught about what was right and who was wrong.

This time it only took me 3 years… 3 years to feel my fingers and toes again… 3 years below ground to feel my heart beating… wildly at first, then more evenly, with each new breath. 3 years for me to remember my light, always recognized, would not always be cherished.

So now, every day as sun rises, bending light and shadow round table and chair, I write in my journal, read books from the shelf, and recite the words “cherish yourself”.

Poetry by Perry Brass: “The Death of the Peonies”

Author, journalist, and activist Perry Brass explores the intersection of gay male sexuality and spirituality. His books include The Manly Art of Seduction and the novel King of Angels. This poem, which he has kindly allowed me to reprint, was staged as a musical performance at Dixon Place in 2000 with support from the NYC Gay Men’s Chorus.

The Death of the Peonies

At first they are nothing.
A stubble on the earth
and then their stems shoot up
and tangle and gossip with one another,
and twist their leaves about each other
rancorously, grabbing towards the light
thrusting their fingers out in fisted buds
and penis heads, tight, furled, foreskinned out,
and you wait,
anxiously, hesitantly
for a soaking rain to please them, but not
beat them down. And you dream
about their flesh, their baby whiteness
and rich Latin reds and extravagant nights of them—
drifting out to the garden to smell—
then they burst, and you’re shell-
shocked from them: their dazzling, belly-
filling, ruthless gaudiness. Your heart triple
beats around them, a bolero entangled in
cockatiel plumage, a bed
washed with petals and you’re diving in them,
dripping; swimming; sinking obscenely,

licking them—with that scent of apple
and mango and citrus breeze
and the clean creases of babies and a ripened banana
and rain pounding your throat.
And at night you can’t sleep from the thought
that this exalted gallop,
hard, rushing, punching the air—
its moments are numbered. You must go
out and kneel in it, as you once made love
to whale sounds on a boat—insane,
but who could control it?
They go off. Your beloved will forget you
and take new partners, while you
can only watch—but this does not stop you
from rolling in the agony—how unseemly, dreamlike,
yet revolting. They have just taken your heart
and popped it and are eating it,
these awkward, hushed flowers turbaned
in the mating call of earth and testicles;
and you blame them. They made you ashamed.
Stripped you. Reached inside and ripped
some vital piece from you, while you
only wanted to lie face down, drenched in their odor,
in the crotch of their enduring artlessness

as that scent, intimate, fleeting
suddenly clears through you
and you draw up to your knees
and roll into yourself to at last
dissolve what figures between you.
And in a burst, it reaches you:
your own waking nightmare has taken you out
as its victim and pushed its jagged knife
into your chest as the sun beat down,
while you screamed with a gag in your mouth—
God-take-me-now, God-take-me-now,
now, now—owwww—till your blood rushed up
and was met by a heaven of simple lips,
as the Holy Child, knowing, floating
on a cloud of petals blessed you
and kissed that place in your heart
that bled.

Then all folded into One
rolled into its own thrilling head,
presented on its stem, perfect
through infinity, where its blossom
holds and tempts you
with an aroma of such intensity
that it made you stay alone
in the garden all night.

And in a week or so,
there before you
is that final retreat
when the air takes their petals and drops them
to your feet. And you watch them, exhausted,
mute, stunned, left . . . left in the waiting room
of a choking, single breath.

June Links Roundup: Books Versus Groomers

Happy Pride Month! Are we excited about the upcoming Barbie movie, or are we straight?

Some friends I brought home from P-Town last summer.

This 2022 article from BookRiot remains relevant amid widespread attempts to censor schools and libraries in conservative states. “Sex Ed Books Don’t ‘Groom’ Kids and Teens. They Protect Them,” writes Danika Ellis, recounting situations where Robie Harris and Michael Emberley’s puberty guide It’s Perfectly Normal had life-changing effects on young people. First released in the 1990s and available in a trans-inclusive updated edition from Candlewick, this book has been repeatedly challenged by right-wingers, who call it “grooming” to give kids information on their sexuality. The facts tell a different story:

[A] 10-year-girl in Delaware…picked up [It’s Perfectly Normal] when at the library with her mother. Her mother let her check the book out, and when they came home, she showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said, “This is me.” She was being abused by her father, and it was the first time she’d spoken about it.

Fashion gets a bad reputation as frivolous (hello, femme-phobia) but here are two stories about how it can make a positive difference. “Turning Debris into Haute Couture” by Harvard Gazette staffer Eileen O’Grady describes a student design festival with an environmental message. In a materials challenge worthy of Project Runway, the participants in the Marine Debris Fashion Show had to craft stylish garments from ocean trash. The attractive and innovative runway show educated people about the role of fast fashion in creating pollution from microplastics.

At New York Fashion Week last September, queer style magazine dapperQ hosted a fashion show at the Brooklyn Museum that spotlighted LGBTQ designers and expressions of queer joy. The organizers also made an effort to include trans, disabled, and plus-sized models, affirming a diversity of beauty standards. Check out the top looks in this NBC News article.

Sophia Giovannitti’s essay “In Defense of Men” in the lit mag Majuscule pushes back against “an accepted truism among left-leaning women online: cis straight manhood is bad, interpersonally and politically; therefore, any other gender or sexual orientation is interpersonally and politically better.” This attitude, dubbed heteropessimism or heterofatalism by various commentators, seems like a familiar feminist complaint from women attracted to men under patriarchy. Giovannitti, however, argues that it’s also a problematic way for cis women to hang onto a moral high ground as “the globally oppressed, the phallus-less, the righteous” at a time when feminism is (or should be) moving on to “a nuanced analysis of gender that accounts for race, class, and transition.”

While the decrying of men by Political Heterosexuals is less overtly bio-essentialist—tending to focus on men’s emotional immaturity, commitment-phobia, poor sexual skills, lack of hygiene, or failure to own a real, off-the-ground bed—it still relies on an implicit or explicit comparison with women, and thus, a binary. What makes these men men is that they are not women; what makes these women, then, women is that they are not men. In my view, professing hatred of men online is not exclusively or even often reflective of individual disappointment or in service of individual absolution; it is in service of the desire to continue to define the political category of “women” by a clean-cut opposite, in a time when it is no longer politically correct to do so…

…The performative online displays of man-hating stem from a longstanding in-person sociality: the age-old tradition of straight women bitching about their boyfriends to one another, which they do precisely to feel a sense of community with other women. It’s a grasping for a pseudo-political solidarity that isn’t as performative as online displays are, but that often feels like the easiest way to make meaning of the confusing, ever-present affective experience of women in straight relationships who feel failed emotionally by their partners. This is not unique to straight women, though. I’d argue it’s the universal experience of romantic love: feeling fundamentally misunderstood or unmet by one’s beloved—a betrayal felt so deeply only because of how known the beloved can otherwise make one feel—and whenever I find myself falling back on a “men are trash” refrain to explain my alienation from male romantic partners away, it’s out of laziness or a desire for connection to those who might feel the same. This is a way to make suffering feel more communal and less punishing—to imagine that failed communication or bad sex are beyond our control, and also, to imagine that something better is out there. In other words, I don’t think heterosexuality is a curse, as is so popular to profess, but desire certainly is.

Finally some good news out of Florida: a federal judge in the Northern District of Florida just blocked the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Erin Reed’s Substack newsletter summarizes Judge Hinkle’s opinion, which said in no uncertain terms that the law was bigoted and unconstitutional. Erin says:

The judge pulled no punches when he resurrected lawmakers own statements to prove their discriminatory intent with passing this bill. Earlier in the year, a Florida GOP lawmaker, Representative Webster Barnaby, referred to transgender people as “demons, mutants, and imps.” Numerous references to transgender people in a derogatory and discriminatory were made in the hearings, as they have been made in statehouses across the country. It turns out that getting the anti-trans Republicans on the record with their statements helped block the bill in court.

Judge Hinkle not only referenced the comments, but called them out openly as an exercise in overt bigotry. He contrasted the statements of lawmakers opposing the care with doctors, who are acting in a professional manner to alleviate the suffering of gender dysphoria…

…One of the most profound statements in the court documents was also one of the simplest: “gender identity is real.” This statement, obvious to anybody who knows a trans person or is trans themselves, has nonetheless been challenged and disputed by anti-trans organizations. Transgender people are often painted as a “fad,” a “choice,” or a “social contagion.” Judge Hinkle firmly establishes on the record that this is not the case, proclaiming and using as the basis for the rest of his decision that gender identity is real.

This is a profound and impactful statement. If gender identity is real and if trans people are indeed telling the truth about this being an integral part of who they are, then discriminating against transgender people is firmly unconstitutional.

Amazon.com: Respect Pronouns Transgender Devil Gift Funny Transgender Satan Devil Goth Throw Pillow, 18x18, Multicolor : Home & Kitchen

I’m the real thing, baby.

Reflections of a Former Keller Girl

Complex feelings about this Christianity Today obituary/profile of Tim Keller, the Presbyterian pastor who defied conventional wisdom by founding a conservative megachurch in Manhattan. Keller died this week of pancreatic cancer at age 72.

In 2004, new to Christianity and Northampton, and looking for community, I became the protégé of an older female writer who started a Bible study group based on Keller’s sermon recordings. She had a sharp sense of humor about everything except the gospel, so my proposal to name ourselves the Kellerettes never caught on. When she wasn’t around, we sometimes spoke of ourselves as the Keller Girls. I thought I was female at the time. In a different life–one where she hadn’t been raised neo-Puritan and clung to it as the only apparent bulwark against emotional chaos–we might have been gender-nonconforming autistic fellow travelers to this day. We valued each other’s frankness and spiritual intensity, up to the very end, when she concluded that “we worship different Gods,” despite using the same language for our faith. I do appreciate someone who can conduct an honest breakup.

Technically, the bloom came off the Keller rose circa 2008 because I was blossoming into some as-yet-unidentified variety of queer. But 2008 was also when I realized I was a child abuse survivor, which suddenly made a lifetime of theological solutions to self-hatred seem terribly beside the point.

CT’s Keller profile begins with a pull quote summarizing his message: “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

I used to take the first statement for granted. In fact I was relieved that the unnameable could be named. So the second half was good news–perhaps the only possible good news, as traditional Christians argued.

However, when I stopped being in daily contact with a mother who blamed me for her unmet childhood needs (while trying to break up my marriage and sabotage my adoption plans), Romans 7:18-25 no longer seemed like an inevitable description of the human condition:

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! (NIV)

Life doesn’t have to be a no-win situation. Just remove one psycho.

Similarly, Keller’s core argument spoke to me and many other anxiously high-achieving New Yorkers, but now I want to deconstruct the pessimism that sets you up for the altar call.

At his church in Manhattan, Keller told the nation’s cultural elites that they worshiped false gods.

“We want to feel beautiful. We want to feel loved. We want to feel significant,” he preached in 2009, “and that’s why we’re working so hard and that’s the source of the evil.”

Keller explained to New York magazine that this was, in a way, an old-fashioned message about sin. But when many people hear “sin,” they only think of things like sex, drugs, and maybe stealing. The modern creative class that he was trying to reach, however, was beset by many more pernicious sins jostling to take the place of God’s love in their lives.

The task of “relevance” was to identify the idols that had a hold of people’s souls. And then tell them that they could be free.

The people of Manhattan “had lived their whole lives with parents, music teachers, coaches, professors, and bosses telling them to do better, be better, try harder,” Keller reflected in 2021. “To hear that He Himself had met those demands for righteousness through the life and death of Jesus, and now there was no condemnation left for anyone who trusted in that righteousness—that was an amazingly freeing message.”

When preachers jump to the conclusion “nothing can be done about this, so you need Jesus” they demonstrate a dangerous incuriosity about the psychological sources of our precarious self-worth. Alice Miller’s Prisoners of Childhood (later reissued as The Drama of the Gifted Child) attributes this syndrome, not to idolatry, but to the pain of growing up with a narcissistic parent. Because the child is not seen and loved for himself, but only insofar as he functions as a projection of his parent’s ego and her needs, he starts trying to earn the attachment that should be his by right.

Once I started trauma therapy and faced this dynamic in my past, I didn’t need to re-enact it with Tim Keller’s God.

I used to believe spreading the gospel was the most important thing I could do, because I defined “the gospel” as freedom from obsessive perfectionism and the shame that drives it. Today, same mission, different gospel. A relationship with Jesus can be a stepping-stone to working on your trauma, as it was for me. But don’t let it be a substitute.

 

May Links Roundup: The Conscience of the King

Starting off with some more Richard III content to make this blog even more niche. Don’t worry, though, you can still count on Reiter’s Block for plenty of trans and autistic links and flat-chested selfies. Someone once said that Yakko from Animaniacs is that guy who’s had top surgery and takes his shirt off whenever possible. Relatable!

My partner has adjusted very well, as you see.

Armchair diagnosis of public figures, living or dead, is more of an entertaining pastime than a science. Still, I found some clues to my adolescent affinity for the last Plantagenet king in “Richard III – A Psychological Portrait” by University of Leicester psychology professors Mark Lansdale and Julian Boon, on the Richard III Society website. Due to his disability (thought to be scoliosis), a childhood disrupted by exile and political instability during the Wars of the Roses, and the death of his beloved wife and son, “A number of reasonably reliable indicators suggest Richard was more than usually intolerant of uncertainty in a way that will have had a marked impact upon his personality and his dealings with others.” The authors go on to describe me as a teenager:

Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) is a common syndrome that varies between individuals in degree and is associated with their general levels of anxiety. It probably has its origins in childhood as a need to seek safety by being able to control one’s environment. Thus, if a child’s perception of their caregivers is as being weak or vulnerable, one (but by no means the only) response to the social anxiety associated with that is to develop a degree of self-reliance. This can take many forms associated with an IU syndrome. Without suggesting pathological degrees of this, those evident in Richard include: the tendency to show excessive trust, attachment and loyalty in his positive attachments; piety and rigid moral values, possibly to the point of priggishness and inflexibility; a strong emphasis upon justice and the law; a high sense of personal responsibility; and a strong sensitivity to potential threats.

Indeed, in V.B. Lamb’s spirited mini-biography, The Betrayal of Richard III, the king comes across as an Al Gore type in contrast to his elder brother Edward IV’s Bill Clinton: dutiful and reliable, to the point of being mocked for his sincerity, and unprepared for the deviousness of his milieu.

Now, you might ask, who gives a toss about the ethics of a guy from 500 years ago, or the monarchy in general? Lamb’s book is distressingly relevant to our “fake news” era, in that she documents how the next king, Henry VII, systematically doctored the historical record to make Richard look like a dictator who deserved to be overthrown. The medieval English populace had too little access to information, whereas we have too much. But either way, the average person can’t do independent research on every subject, so we may be seduced into believing the story with the best production values, whether that’s a hatchet job by Shakespeare or a Russian deepfake on Facebook.

I told you we’d get around to the trans content. Emotionally charged misinformation about our community is one of the biggest problems we face, too, because it peels away potential allies on the center-left when conservatives pass laws against our existence. I highly recommend subscribing to Erin in the Morning, Erin Reed’s Substack newsletter that tracks state-by-state efforts to attack or protect trans civil rights. Fun fact, Erin just got engaged to Montana State Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who was silenced by her own House Speaker after she opposed the bill banning gender-affirming care. Tell me again how conservatives support free speech?

I do not have the time or attention span for podcasts longer than 15 minutes, so I am grateful when there’s a transcript for any lengthy and information-heavy audio presentation. Death Panel, a podcast about the political economy of health, hosted this great discussion in 2022 in the wake of yet another New York Times concern-trolling article on trans healthcare: “Panic! At the Gender Clinic with Jules Gill-Peterson and Charlie Markbreiter”:

Jules Gill-Peterson and Charlie Markbreiter join us to discuss Emily Bazelon’s recent controversial New York Times Magazine cover story “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” its harmful and historically inaccurate portrayal of medical transition, and why liberals are so ready to embrace gatekeeping in trans healthcare. Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the award winning book, Histories of the Transgender Child… Charlie Markbreiter is the managing editor of The New Inquiry.

Gill-Peterson expresses frustration that cis journalists in mainstream papers ignore the politicized history of medicine, no matter how often trans historians educate them about it. The issue gets framed as though neutral well-meaning medical experts are trying to navigate a middle path between angry queer activists and concerned parents. “WPATH” is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which sets the guidelines for our medical care, similar to the DSM-V for mental health. Its original standards were crafted by German endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, of whom Gill-Peterson says:

That’s the model where trans healthcare is a special kind of health care that tries to not make itself available to as many people as possible, right. So the whole purpose of transgender health care is to stop as many trans people as possible from transitioning. And Harry Benjamin created the sort of standards by which we would try to do that, in the 1960s. And so those standards included heterosexuality, they included wanting to disappear into society, they included being a well behaved middle class person, they included trying to pass at all costs, right.

They included basically a kind of extreme respectability politics. And you know, as the 1960s wore into the 70s, and Benjamin was sort of a key player, this Harry Benjamin society, right, sort of was formed and became the kind of rudimentary sort of organization for clinicians. Now, it wasn’t formed in the interests of trans people. It was formed because clinicians who provided hormones and surgery were generally regarded as quacks by other medical professionals. And so they just wanted to band together basically, to help lend prestige to what they were doing and to further their own institutional goals.

Framing themselves as a disinterested higher authority arbitrating between political factions, mainstream outlets like the Times or the Atlantic basically launder Christian Right anti-trans talking points as equivalent to trans people’s accounts of our own lives. Gill-Peterson quips:

This is the sort of emotional attachment to liberalism as process, right, as deliberation, “as I, Emily Bazelon, who is not trans, who is not in the trans struggle, who doesn’t have anything on the line, really went through, you know, an emotionless reflection period, and then bravely wrote this article. So actually, what I have to say is more important than, say, multiple trans people with PhDs who have been doing research for a long time, including decades, at some point,” right.

Markbreiter concurs:

it’s funny because again, this piece thinks of itself as being very neutral and unemotional, but actually, one function of it is an extremely emotional one, which is okay, liberals are increasingly eugenicist, have been increasingly so, you know, since COVID, how do they reconcile the fact that in this case, as in many other cases, they have the same position on childhood transition as literal fascists, right? ‘Cause that might make you think, right, like you’re doing something wrong, like if you’re like, damn, I think like all the same things as like the Nazis, like that’s kind of weird, right? Because I’m not a Nazi. So you’re like, hmm, how do I make sense of that to myself?

And I feel like one function of this piece isn’t to make sense, but just to be a kind of like soothing ASMR, spiritual glow for liberals, to be like, “listen,” like “you’re doing eugenics, but in just like a different way, like the vibes are just different with you. So like, don’t feel bad about it. Like if your kid wants to transition, and you’re going to actively block them from doing that and like make them suicidal, like you’re not a bad person. You’re just a concerned parent, and you are different than those bad Republicans.”

This is where Gill-Peterson’s expertise as a historian of childhood really sets things on fire:

And I actually think it’s a really significant problem that we’re facing in this moment, where I just see this kind of doubling down on sentimental politics, where children are perfect for this, right? This is what children, “child,” the concept was invented for. It was invented for letting your fantasy of how you think the world could work, because you’re a good person, override what is actually happening. And it actually is the way that you ideologically justify violence as humanizing, as caring, as loving kids, right? This article records so much mistreatment, harassment and violence against children, it records and openly discusses the abuse of children by institutionally embedded people who are given responsibility over them, whether it’s parents, educators, politicians, or doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and they celebrate the harm that they have done as properly caring for those young people, right? That is chilly. Right?

But of course that’s not how the article presents it. But we have to really think about this is the ideological function that we come together around in American culture, right? Loving children means harming them. That is just completely normal business as usual. And it really, really disturbs me, again, to just see how intensely trans children are available to reinforce that structure.

Radical lesbian-feminist playwright Carolyn Gage got a fresh perspective on her childhood when she received an autism diagnosis…around age 70. In this blog post about her inner life with her dolls, I see myself re-enacting the English wars of succession with Lettie Lane and the Ginghams. (I went through a lot of Scotch tape with all those beheadings and resurrections.)

Gage writes:

I would play with the dolls for six to eight hours at a stretch. When most little girls played with dolls, they would change up the outfits or hold miniature tea parties. When Barbie came along about five years later, little girls could put her in her car and drive her to the beach. My idea of playing with the dolls was very, very different. My dolls were engaged in complex plots involving abductions, and magic, and murder, and illicit romance… There were always four or five subplots going on, and the lives of the servants were as intensely dramatic as those of the court. In fact, the heroine of the castle was a rescue doll whose hair had been pulled out and whose body had been vandalized with ink.  She was a doll of mystery, greatly favored by Ginny and the Powers that Be. Her name was Pat, and it was only later, as an adult, I realized that the avatar of my youth had been a survivor and a gender-non-conforming lesbian. ,

There was something else I was doing in the dollhouse. I was plotting an escape from reality. My family was not well. My mother was a practicing alcoholic, as was my brother–who, like me, was on the spectrum. My father was a sex/pornography addict with scary and confusing dissociative disorders. I was terrified of him. He was a tyrant, and, from what I experienced as a child, he was never called into account for his malevolence.  None of us could ever mount a successful revolution, and any signs of resistance were met with cruelty and sometimes violence.  BUT… in the dollhouse, amid all the epic dramas, goodness and innocence would eventually prevail. To that point, the females always won, and matriarchy would always carry the day. Unlike my father, the perpetrators in my stories would be killed, banished, or won over by good. My dollhouse kept my belief in justice alive. It was an alternative world, and, quite frankly, one that I preferred to inhabit… which I manage to do, as much as possible. The dolls were my true family and my dearest friends.

the ginghams paper dolls | sydandgoose | Flickr

Lesbian commune edition: Carrie is the therapist, Katie practices witchcraft, Sarah grows organic marijuana, and Becky fixes the farm machinery.

Belonging and Believing, Revisited

This video clip from trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté about authenticity versus attachment took me back to a Reiter’s Block post from 10 years ago. Maté discusses two survival instincts that are put in tension when the family doesn’t accept their child’s true self. On the one hand, with our long maturation period, the human animal needs to stay securely attached to caregivers. On the other hand, trusting your intuition keeps you alive in the wild. A person who learns to suppress his perceptions, in order to preserve relationships, will suffer in other ways.

Is this dilemma avoidable, I wonder? Is the effect significant only in narcissistic or abusive families, or is it the human condition to be torn between loyalties to internal truth and external bonds?

Back when I went to church, I couldn’t find a satisfactory balance. In a consumer society, where free choice and competition rule, a lot of institutions focus on getting you in the door. Have fun, feel welcome, get invested in social relationships, and only later find out what’s expected of you and what the community’s real values are. Or maybe that’s just a description of neurotypical socializing. IDK.

The Temple of Witchcraft is pretty different! The foundational training is all about mind/body self-awareness and discernment of your unique highest goals, what we call True Will. The techniques are highly structured, but your encounter with the divine (theistic or not) is expected to take a form that is personal to you. The ethics resemble Buddhist precepts, not lists of forbidden acts and impure behaviors.

I can only speak to the experience of studying online, which is mainly solitary. I don’t know what it’s like to belong to a coven. Probably some of the same individual-versus-collective tensions arise, because people are people. I’d like to think that our nondualistic and dynamic worldview would make us more flexible in adjusting to these tensions than a church that thinks it has a perfect eternal formula for life.

On the level of spiritual warfare, however, I am taken aback by the short-term effectiveness of authoritarian religious unity. When everyone directs their willpower toward the same image and the same objective, that can create more powerful magic than the scattered journeys of maverick witches. I don’t know what to do about this without changing our core values of freedom and diversity.

Maybe that too is the human condition: “truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne,” as the poet James Russell Lowell said. (For a more concise version, because the Victorians sure could info-dump, the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” is adapted from this poem.) Something they didn’t tell us in church is that this is an anti-slavery poem, urging antebellum Americans not to stay stuck at their ancestors’ level of virtue, but to emulate their countercultural courage by moving beyond their beliefs. Sounds more like us witches than a lot of churches today.