Category Archives: Gender Identity

Bradley Manning, Bayard Rustin, and the perversion of Pride

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Can I join?

Can I join?

That eminent critic and activist Edward Said was given, from time to time, to quoting Hugh of St. Victor, a twelfth-century mystic:

The person who finds his homeland sweet is a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.

Said was, of course, a terrorist, and that is just how terrorists think. “Mystic” is another word for “fundamentalist”; and praising foreigners and rootless people? You’re siding with disloyalists, Luftmenschen, cosmopolitans, Jews! (I mean Muslims, sorry.)  In these confusing days when any displaced or misplaced or misprinted person could be a mad bomber — Saudi nationals, Moroccan high school students, dead Brown University undergrads, or citizens of the Czech Republic — it is imperative to find a refuge from the roiling chaos of mistaken identities, to settle on the facts you know when you don’t know anything about the folks around you, and to REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE. Fortunately the gays are good at this. Decades of practicing identity politics have left them secure in their own labels. The heroism of role models like Michael Lucas and J. Edgar Hoover has taught gays to be grateful to anybody who gives them a promotion. Thank you, Barack, thank you, Hillary, for handing us our rights!  We love you forever!  This is our country, and no one can take it from us, and please bomb all those places that are foreign as much as you damn well like!

Michael Lucas, gay role model and former head of the FBI, prepares to waterboard a suspect

Michael Lucas, gay role model and former head of the FBI, prepares to waterboard a suspect

I was reminded of our queer community’s collective patriotism by fast-moving happenings last night in San Francisco. To summarize: SF Pride held a vote and Bradley Manning — the gay or trans (it’s not entirely clear how Manning identifies) soldier who disseminated the great Wikileaks trove of secret US documents — was elected a Grand Marshal of this year’s shindig, which will happen in late June. There are a bunch of Grand Marshals every year, and each one gets to ride in a car during the long parade, wave at the crowd, and accept adulation. In Manning’s case,the soldier was in no position to do the accepting. Manning is under lock and key at Fort Leavenworth, facing charges including “aiding the enemy,” which under the military code can carry the death penalty.  Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblowing opponent of the Vietnam War, agreed to join the festivities in Manning’s place.

J. Edgar Hoover, porn star and gay icon, gets ready for his cum shot: They hate us for his freedoms

J. Edgar Hoover, porn star and gay icon, gets ready for his cum shot: They hate us for his freedoms

No need; within hours the board of SF Pride stepped in and rescinded the honor. Lisa Williams, the board president, issued a statement. “I am against honoring Bradley Manning,” she said, “as he was a traitor to the good old United States of America. If we all had felt the way he did back in the Forties, Hitler would have ruled the world.”

Soldiering on: Lisa Williams, board president, SF Pride

Soldiering on: Lisa Williams, board president, SF Pride

Oh … I’m sorry again. It’s early in the AM where I am, and I haven’t had coffee, and I keep screwing up. What Lisa Williams actually said was just about the same, but with slightly different wording. From her statement: 

Bradley Manning will not be a grand marshal in this year’s San Francisco Pride celebration. His nomination was a mistake and should never have been allowed to happen. … [E]ven the hint of support for actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform — and countless others, military and civilian alike — will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride. It is, and would be, an insult to every one, gay and straight, who has ever served in the military of this country.

I get confused, you see, because Lisa Williams — in addition to being “president and owner of One Source Consulting, a firm which does political consulting, ” and the former “Northern California deputy political director for the ‘No on 8′” gay-marriage campaign — is also the chair of the political action committee of the Bayard Rustin LGBT Coalition. That’s an estimable group that tries to promote black LGBT political participation in the Bay Area. And the quote above, the one about Hitler and the traitor — well, it was actually about Bayard Rustin; so you can see how I mixed them up. Rustin, if you remember, was one of the great figures of 20th-century America: a pacifist, a war resister, an icon of civil disobedience, and the key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. (Also a gay man). Rustin spent three years in Lewisburg Penitentiary as a conscientious objector during the Second World War.  The quote (slightly tweaked) came from a citizen of West Chester, PA, back in 2002, who objected to naming a school after Bayard Rustin. After all, the traitor broke US law, encouraged others to do likewise, and opposed the military and domestic policies of the United States.

Interesting, then, that Lisa Williams works for the Bayard Rustin LGBT Coalition. Because her story shows that you can honor somebody like Rustin– indeed, even serve an organization named after him! — without caring or sharing what he believed in. Since that’s true, there’s really no reason SF Pride shouldn’t honor Bradley Manning.

But Pride is not a protest march, Mr. Rustin. These days we have nothing to protest.

But Pride is not a protest march, Mr. Rustin. These days we have nothing to protest.

I don’t mean to imply that Bradley Manning is Bayard Rustin redivivus, or in any sense his spiritual or political heir. In fact, we know remarkably little about Manning, and a cloud of speculation, much of it absurd, still surrounds his motives. Even that pronoun “his” is questionable. (Speculation persists, supported by chats Manning apparently had with an inquisitive hacker, that she identifies as a trans woman and that advocates and attorneys are suppressing this fact: perhaps to preserve Manning’s “respectability” for the trial. In an attempt to respect the uncertainty, I alternate pronouns.)  The fact that Manning’s been held incommunicado allows everyone to project whatever politics, priorities, or fantasies they like on the mute figure. For homophobes, Manning is a disgruntled and untrustworthy gay man, a living argument for ask, tell, and expel queers from the armed forces. For military interventionists like Dan Choi and Peter Tatchell, he’s an emblem of the kind of inclusive army they’d like, one where all your government secrets will be safe if the officers just welcome the homos with open, loaded arms.

We do know that brutal treatment has been inflicted on Manning while in US military jails. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture — denied an unmonitored meeting with Manning to investigate his well-being — warned the government that “imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence.”  And the Rapporteur, Juan Mendez, a distinguished human rights activist from Argentina who was himself tortured under the US-supported miitary dictatorship, told the press:

I conclude that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement (regardless of the name given to his regime by the prison authorities) constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.

Of course, that’s the UN for you: a gang of Communists. Good American gays reject it and all its works and pomps. The UN, writes young neocon and would-be gay mercenary Jamie Kirchick in our favorite gay news source The Advocate, is “more often than not an actively pernicious force in world politics.” (Kirchick loyally tweets about Manning as “traitor Bradley Manning,” because, after all, who needs a trial?)

Advertisements for my elf: Young Kirchick promotes his twittery on treason

Advertisements for my elf: Young Kirchick promotes own published typing, misspells “Marshal”

Why exactly was this UN fellow Juan Mendez tortured? you well might ask. There’s no smoke without fire; you don’t pull out people’s fingernails unless there’s something under them you want; you don’t torture people unless they were asking for it. Surely he was a Communist, which explains why the UN hired him. Really, how can you appoint a torture victim to investigate torture? How can he be objective? And these UN bigots always defend those gays in foreign lands who don’t appreciate the United States; they never give the US credit for how well it treats gays here. How dare the sissies diss us!

Juan Mendez, tortureworthy pro-treason opponent of enhanced interrogation methods working for the Communist International: not a gay role model

Juan Mendez, tortureworthy pro-treason opponent of enhanced interrogation methods working for the Communist International: Not a gay role model

Now, in some other, more sensitively disposed polities, evidence that a suspect was tortured would give occasion to drop the charges. Not so in the United States, which has acquired an admirably stoical attitude toward inhuman treatment!  In this, though, one detects what perhaps is the root of Manning’s own difference with his country’s policy. Manning didn’t like torture. Irrationally, he didn’t like it even before he was tortured. He didn’t like his country’s complicity in torture; he didn’t like the abuses and crimes that the US committed and encouraged in its occupation of Iraq. And he saw enough of that first hand.

It was from Iraq that Manning sent materials to WikiLeaks, and in Iraq she was arrested. Kevin Gosztola writes — and it’s worth quoting at length:

In 2010, while stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Baghdad, Pfc. Bradley Manning decided to approach a superior officer in his chain of command to voice his concern about something he had stumbled upon in his capacity as an intelligence analyst. His unit had been helping Iraqi federal police identify suspects for detention and discovered that fifteen men had been arrested for producing “anti-Iraqi literature.” … Manning discovered that the writing was hardly criminal; it was a “scholarly critique” of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But his superior officer did not want to hear about it. Manning knew if he continued to assist the police in identifying political opponents, innocent people would be jailed, likely tortured, and “not seen again for a very long time, if ever,” as he told a military courtroom in Fort Meade, MD … Hoping to expose what was happening ahead of the Iraq parliamentary election, on March 7, 2010, Manning shared the information with WikiLeaks….

Since his arrest, the media has focused on Manning’s mental problems, his poor relationships with family members, his sexual orientation, and the fact that he considered becoming a woman. Such a caricature, of an unstable youth rather than of a soldier with a conscience, has enabled the government and other detractors to maintain that Manning had no clear and legitimate motives when disclosing the information.

Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning

But in fact Manning’s first statement in court offered a clear account of what led her to the leaks. She

included an explanation for why he released the video that would be titled “Collateral Murder” by WikiLeaks, and which revealed an aerial attack on media workers and Iraqi civilians, including children. Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have,” Manning said. “They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote ‘dead bastards’ unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.” …

Of the cache of over 250,000 US State Embassy cables, Manning said: “The more I read, the more I was fascinated by the way that we dealt with other nations and organizations. I also began to think that the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity didn’t seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.”

Here, at least, Manning distinctly does share something with Bayard Rustin.  For Rustin, at his best, fought US rights abuses at home and abroad. He was no less an internationalist than Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. John D’Emilio, his brilliant biographer, describes how his rejection of US warmongering led to repeated confrontations with the law:

At the height of the Cold War, when sirens blared, all Americans were supposed to duck for cover. Rustin and a few other comrades said, “This is insane,” and they sat instead in City Hall Park in New York. Indicted and found guilty, they did it again, and again, until many thousands of Americans followed their lead. Rustin organized protests against nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert, the south Pacific, and the Sahara. Soon, the nuclear powers abandoned atmospheric testing.

You may be right, Mr. Rustin. But we can teach democracy by invading other countries and killing people. Can't we?

You may be right, Mr. Rustin. But we can teach democracy by invading other countries and killing their population. Can’t we?

During the Vietnam War, Rustin protested in terms almost exactly applicable to the US’s current exercises in humanitarian killing. He called it

a useless, destructive, disgusting war …We must be on the side of revolutionary democracy. And, in addition to all the other arguments for a negotiated peace in Vietnam, there is this one: that it is immoral, impractical, un-political, and unrealistic for this nation to identify itself with a regime which does not have the confidence of its people … I say to the President: America cannot be the policeman of this globe!

Well, it can still try.

Rustin urged that those who rejected the US’s domestic and foreign criminality wield a variety of tools and strategies: “Non-violent strike, economic boycott, picketing, non-payment of taxes, mass emigration, noncooperation, and civil disobedience.” Whistleblowing wasn’t on the list, but there was no Internet and no WikiLeaks in his day.

And for all this, of course, Rustin was called a “traitor,” and still is, by the Jamie Kirchicks of his time, and ours. I have no idea how he’d feel about Bradley Manning. But I have a fair idea how, as a civil rights activist, a war resister, an anti-miliitarist, and a gay man, he’d feel  if he read the rants of Manning’s opponents. For instance, ”Stephen Peters, president of American Military Partners Association,”a brand new non-profit of unknown provenance, declared: 

Manning’s blatant disregard for the safety of our service members and the security of our nation should not be praised … No community of such a strong and resilient people should be represented by the treacherous acts that define Bradley Manning.

The “strong and resilient people” are apparently Pride’s attendees, whose resilience has not been tested by torture, but nonetheless is surely there. Meanwhile, Sean Sala, an LGBT Military Activist, wrote (with free, Germanic use of capitalization):

Bradley Manning is currently in Military tribunal for handing over Secret United States information to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. … San Francisco has spit in the face of LGBT Military by using a traitor to our country as a poster child. … Manning makes Gay military, the Armed Forces and cause of equality look like a sham. He deserves no recognition … This is a sensitive time for the LGBT Community, we have spent fifty years trying to garnish equality and Manning cannot and will not represent Gay Military patriots.

They said the same kinds of things about Bayard Rustin.

Kiss me, honey, those big guns turn me on

Kiss me, honey, those big guns turn me on

SF Pride’s decision, of course, shows what gays value in the course of “garnishing equality,” at this self-congratulatory, triumphant, but still above all “sensitive” time.  Equality doesn’t just mean the right to marry, or the right to wear a form-fitting and extremely attractive uniform. It’s not just symbolic. It’s both privilege and responsibility, and don’t you forget it. It means equal and uncomplaining participation in the full panoply of the United States’ domestic injustices and imperial extravagances. It means an equal right to repress, in redress and revenge for all that history of enduring repression.  It means you no longer have to lobby the government for anything; your only job is to lie back and endorse whatever it does. It means that you can rest in the serene knowledge that other people are being tortured, and you won’t object, because torture is a great equalizer, a silent democracy of abasement. It means that you finally get to be one of the killers, instead of the killed.

One weirdness of SF Pride’s swift retraction is that they claim to be defending some kind of superior democratic process, against a dictatorial “systemic failure” related to how we let actual people influence our nonprofits. Board president Williams declares that

what these events have revealed is a system whereby a less-than-handful of people may decide who represents the LGBT community’s highest aspirations as grand marshals for SF Pride. This is a systemic failure that now has become apparent and will be rectified. In point of fact, less than 15 people actually cast votes for Bradley Manning. These 15 people are part of what is called the SF Pride Electoral College, comprised of former SF Pride Grand Marshals. However, as an organization with a responsibility to serve the broader community, SF Pride repudiates this vote. The Board of Directors for SF Pride never voted to support this nomination.

Americans bringing democracy to Iraq

Americans bringing democracy to Baghdad

This is a very bizarre conception of democracy — not, in fact, unlike the one the US imported to Iraq. The system SF Pride has followed so far allows the general public to vote for a slate of Grand Marshal nominees, while an “electoral college” of previous Grand Marshals has the right to choose a few more. It seems that the electoral college chose Manning; but even if he got only 15 votes, that’s rather more than the Board of Directors could provide, since it has only 9 members in total. “Less than a handful” indeed! Moreover, the Board of Directors elects itself. It may feel a “responsibility to serve the broader community,” but it doesn’t let the community choose its members. Meanwhile, that “electoral college” mostly includes ex-Grand-Marshals who were picked in the public vote; it’s more democratic than the Board.  So SF Pride proposes to close itself down still more, retreat into its Green Zone, and become still more a model of corporate governance, insulated from the desires or decisions of the people it asserts it “serves.”  This is a rather perverted vision of community. On the other hand, Paul Bremer would probably feel happy on the Board.

I’m not in the US now; I’m sitting in Egypt, writing early in the morning. I feel I’ve become one of those imperfect people, not yet alien to all places, but alien to my ever-less-comprehensible native land. I certainly feel alien to whatever SF Pride represents these days: a sorting of people into the loyal and disloyal, the us (the US) and them, that stands at odds with the evanescent but putatively redemptive values of which queers and other rebels were once able to be proud. Plenty of immensely “strong and resilient people” in two hemispheres of alienation have memories of US overt or covert interventions:  Cubans and Nicaraguans, Dominicans and Haitians, Guatemalans and Iranians, Afghans and Iraqis. Apparently that resilience isn’t the sort that counts; or it’s eminently forgettable amid the fogs of San Francisco Bay. We remember our own kind, not the sufferings of others.

I’m afraid that the gay movement in my country, if it still moves at all, has aged into the matronly complacency that John Betjeman once described, as he imagined a respectable English lady offering a prayer in Westminster Abbey during the Second World War:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate’er shall be,
Don’t let anyone bomb me.

This is what democracy looks like

This is what democracy looks like

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More on choice: Frots, g0ys, and other options

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One of the side effects of the Cynthia Nixon fracas was a return to some of the old men-Mars-versus-women-Venus themes: specifically that women’s experience of sexuality was different, somehow more deliquescent, than men’s. Andrew Sullivan wrote:

My own view is that female sexuality is inherently more fluid than male sexuality, and that lesbians and bisexual women, because they are less fixated on crude physical signals for arousal, have more of a choice than men, gay or straight, in their choice of loved ones.

I always mistrust this kind of thing a bit. Men, for one thing, have been extraordinarily creative over the centuries in inventing excuses to touch each other in apparently non-sexual, but obviously satisfying, fashion. There’s football; there’s wrestling; there’s Western civilization. All these suggest a fluid component to their own sexualities, where male intimacy and arousal can coexist easily with heterosexual passions. Now an Indian colleague has pointed out some websites — very manly websites — dedicated to exploring exactly the same thesis.   They share an aversion to established identities, a dislike for “gays,” a fear of anal sex (it would be worth exploring more deeply, comme on dit, why that act seems to carve selfhood in stone), and an insistence that large numbers of men want sexual contact with other men, but just don’t want to be defined by it. Or talk about it.

Which doesn’t prevent the websites from talking. My favorite is g0ys.org. That’s a zero in the middle; I don’t sense that anybody at the site speaks Yiddish. They say they’re for men who

are looking for answers to some serious questions about themselves. Most are shocked when they learn that +60% of all guys have similar questions (the majority)! Most (but not all) of these guys have feelings for women, but also deal with internal issues arising from the fact that they also have affections for other guys, too! And, such guys don’t identify as “GAY” at all!

Don’t identify with “GAY”? No! Guys like us actually find the imagery & stereotypes that are promoted from WITHIN the so-called “gay-male community” to be repugnant to our sensibilities of masculinity & respect.

60%! That’s a big figure. “Playing inside another person’s butt” they see as “dirty, degrading, and damn-unmasculine.”  Logically, then, they’re not crazy about trans people, or the “modern gay movement,” which has “shamed M2M affection as it was hijacked by pornographers, perverts, sociopathic-personalities & fascists.”  They also have a thing about Muslims: “We suggest that Old Bomb Head’s brainwashed, flag-burning, bomb-toting followers – join the ranks of Hitler & other similar violent political leaders – in HELL.”  Apparently the common Orientalist stereotype, that the Muslim world is simply teeming with hornily ambivalent men, hasn’t reached them.

Then there is the Man2Man Alliance, which, its website proclaims in large Roman letters,

Is a coalition of
MEN
Who practice
FROT
Phallus-against-phallus sex
who reject anal penetration, promiscuity, and effeminacy among men who have sex with men
and
who put forth the truth that one man should love one another through the celebration of their mutual masculinity and the exaltation of their mutual manhood

Matching genitals: What to do when lost on a cold night in Western Civilization

This also features the fear of what happens Back There, turned into a virtual ideology of sexual positioning:

[A]nal penetration subjugates one of the participants to the other, effectively emasculating him, turning him into a pseudo-woman … unmindful of the basic human need for a shared experience without pain and with dignity.

Whereas Frot, phallus-against-phallus contact, is the acme of sexual activity between Men because it’s focused on that which makes Men Masculine, namely their genitals — their Manhood — rather than their organs of fecal excretion.

To draw a parallel with male-female sex: Men and Women connect to one another genitally. They are made that way, like counterweights or puzzle pieces, complementary of one another. In the same way, during phallus-to-phallus sexual activity, Men are related to one another as they should be, in that part of their body that fits together genitally and sensually.

For someone like me, there’s only so much of this you can read without going out and — well, never mind what I go out and do. I’ll confine myself to noting that M2M Alliance is under the sway of Robert Blyish rhetoric, the Battle in the Sweat Box:  ”Manhood, Manliness, Courage and Valour; Justice, Wisdom, Faith and Fidelity; Self-Control and Self-Sacrifice; and Prowess in battle. Men living under this ethos commonly seek an intense, lifelong, erotic bond with another warrior.” In contrast, G0Ys seems fixed on an idyllic adolescent Eden of blameless fondling, as much as the heroes of Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar or of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

The universal truth & the universal unspoken need of virtually every guy entering puberty is to be able to get close & cuddle with the buddy of choice.  They want the wrestling match to turn tender.  There – male aggression is privately mutated into male tenderness & shared intimacy.  It’s often the very-core of the most extreme friendships.

Plus all those ampersands give their prose a nice touch of Whitmania, as though tender Walt himself were leaning over the wounded soldier’s bed, gnarled hands spidering down toward the fount of manhood.

There’s oodles to dislike here, perhaps more than there is to say. The phenomenon of the straight guy on the down low, or doing it for trade, has been around and classed as such for as long as there were not-straight guys, who identified with the act of homosexual sex and threw their selves into it. So that’s one obvious spectrum through which to see this: yet another excrescence of the economy of sex, particularly the economy of denial. A late friend of mine in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, once listed for me an essentially ethnographic categorization of the different types of straight guys who went for him when they were out on the prowl, released from wife or girlfriend. I still have it in my notes somewhere; it was fascinating. But of course, these classifications were all from the perspective of people who were, as it were, already classed — already pinned to the butterfly board. The point with the manly men was that they didn’t class themselves as anything. They were just men.

What interests me here is the way that this particular brand of strongly masculine-identified,  bisexual behavior is no longer reticent: is speaking its names, analysing itself, and looking for an identity of its own. What’s going to come of it? I’m inclined to urge some untenured anthropologist to start studying these movements, as types of how sexual identities emerge. Maybe, fragile things, they’ll wither and blow away first. But you never know. Iron John is still selling. All it needs is an identity to match.


Thatcher, dead, endorses gay rights

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Baird and baroness in happier days: Meryl Streep will play her in the movie

John Baird, now Canada’s Foreign Minister,last made news a couple of years ago when his cat died.  The cat was named Thatcher, after an object of Baird’s admiration, and he sent friends a text message reading, “Thatcher is dead.”  As word raced through Canada’s Tory government, mourning spread, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepared a message of condolence to the British people. It took some time for Buckingham Palace to confirm that the Iron Lady was still alive, though rusting. Harper’s spokesman concluded, ”If the cat wasn’t dead, I’d have killed it by now.”

Baird made news today as well, in a more congenial way, by an act of homage to another tough woman, Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s  initiative of US support for LGBT people’s human rights, announced last month, has become a model for other politicians striving to make a mark.   In a speech in London, Baird therefore took his shot at the headlines, and outlined two priorities for Canadian foreign policy: LGBT rights and religious freedom.

What’s striking about Baird’s mimicry, though, is how generally appalling his speech is, once you get beyond the gay-specific sections.   He targets the developing world — Uganda is, as is ordinary these days, his preferred negative example.  But his language is that of an increasingly illiberal interventionism, driven by the need to reshape other societies, and economies, in a pliable and useful image.  LGBT rights advocates should not be happy to find their cause mixed in with this repressive agenda.

Let’s see. Seething just beneath the surface of the speech, there’s neoliberalism:

The support for free markets and open societies will be the defining struggle of the coming decades – the United Kingdom and Canada have been partners in this great endeavour before; we are partners now, and we will be partners in the future in our common cause.

There’s state feminism, Tory style, with a nod to his late cat:

We in Canada, and in Britain, know well the Queen’s leadership and both our countries benefit from the full participation of women in all aspects of society. I think of leaders like Baroness Thatcher.

Thatcher (femme, not feline) at least fought for her own rights, but in other countries, passive women force us to go out and bomb things on their behalf:

 I am particularly proud of the role Canada has played – in concert with our NATO allies and Afghan civil society – in advancing women’s rights in Afghanistan.

The women lucky enough to have survived NATO’s help, though, have an exciting time ahead of them: “The young Afghan girls that go to school today in Kandahar and Kabul will grow up and learn about the political tenacity of Margaret Thatcher.” The prospect of a whole generation of Afghan females, unveiled and pompadoured, proclaiming that “There is no such thing as society” must strike terror into Taliban hearts.

And, of course, there’s a blissful amnesia about the past:

Dozens of Commonwealth countries currently have regressive and punitive laws on the books that criminalize homosexuality. In some countries, these laws are unenforced hang-overs from an earlier era; in others, they are actively implemented. The criminalization of homosexuality is incompatible with the fundamental Commonwealth value of human rights.

How you “enforce” a “hangover” is less than clear; but never mind that — you’d think these countries picked up these laws during a drunken binge, instead of during the nightmare of colonialism.   That “c” word is unspeakable for Baird, himself the scion of a settler colony, as it implies a common responsibility for that old oppression’s effects. And such commonality in turn seems incompatible with the Commonwealth.  (Meanwhile, elevating human rights as “the fundamental Commonwealth value” may be rhetorically useful, but ignores where the Commonwealth came from.)

To the contrary.  Colonization, though we can’t actually call it by name, was the source of all the good stuff:

Voluntary associations like the 54-nation Commonwealth can and must be propelled forward as an agent for democracy, rule of law, human rights and development. That reflects the true value of the British democracy that has spanned the continents and shaped the world.

There’s a blithe confusion about all those funny little countries in Africa, which are hard to tell apart:

However, there are slivers of light.  Rwanda and South Africa have been leaders in protecting and promoting the fundamental rights of gays and lesbians. Slivers of light.

Rwanda?  Who told him that?

There’s a vision of human rights that deprives victims of both agency and voice:

As citizens of a global community, we have a solemn duty to defend the vulnerable, to give voice to the voiceless, to challenge the aggressor, and to promote and protect human rights and human dignity, at home and abroad.

Finally, there is his fixed conviction that injustice and oppression happen somewhere other than at home.

[A] priority to me as Foreign Minister… is, promoting and protecting the fundamental rights and liberties of people around the world. It is something we often take for granted in our pluralistic societies, something we often overlook. But the vivid images of suffering and repression beam through our television sets, and are plastered in our newspapers.

I am not sure where that “plastered” comes from.   But you can compare this to Clinton’s comment in her Geneva speech last month:

I speak about this subject knowing that my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. … Many LGBT Americans have endured violence and harassment in their own lives, and for some, including many young people, bullying and exclusion are daily experiences. So we, like all nations, have more work to do to protect human rights at home.

It’s unusual to accuse a Canadian of lacking humility as against an American; but there you are.

Identity crisis

A scandal arose in Canada this week over an amendment to airline security regulations that the government had enacted quietly last July. The new rules read:

An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if
(a) the passenger presents a piece of photo identification and does not resemble the photograph;
(b) the passenger does not appear to be the age indicated by the date of birth on the identification he or she presents;
(c) the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents; or
(d) the passenger presents more than one form of identification and there is a major discrepancy between those forms of identification. [Emphasis added]

Item c) would seem to ban transgender people who haven’t changed their identity papers from flying. Activist Mercedes Allen explains more:

Most Canadian provinces require evidence of genital reconstruction surgery before allowing the change of gender markers on foundational documents.  Standards of care call for a minimum of one year living as one’s identified gender before the required procedure can occur (two years in some provinces, including Ontario).  This is further complicated by the fact that some provinces have removed coverage for this surgery from their health coverage, so some individuals can be trapped indefinitely with incongruent gender markers on their identification.

In fact, there have been no reports of trans people denied air travel because of the ban. The transport Minister’s spokesman claims that “Any passenger whose physical appearance does not correspond to their identification can continue to board a plane by supplying a letter from a health-care professional explaining the discrepancy” — though the regulations are far from clear on this.

The deeper problem is that Canada treats the legal identity of certain people as a medical problem, and demands a medical solution.  Recognizing gender identity should not depend on genital surgery, anymore than it should (as in Sweden) depend on sterilization. Requiring that opens the door not only to discrimination, but to physical abuse.

For a loud defender of religious freedom, John Baird seems deaf to the old verse — it’s Luke 6:42 — that asks, “How can you say to your brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in your eye, when you yourself behold not the beam that is in your own eye?”  And, equally, he appears oblivious to how human rights activists must be aware of history, including history’s curious susceptibility to irony.

P.S. A petition against the travel regulation is here. 

Culture, class, and Newt’s sex life

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In the end, all those marriages didn’t matter. Conservatives have become remarkably kind, forgiving people.  Just under fifty years ago, in 1964 a rabid right-wing crowd at the Republican Convention drowned out Nelson Rockefeller with shouts of “You dirty lover!”—because he had divorced his wife.  But through their devoted love for Ronald Reagan (the first divorced US president), the Republican Party was clearly purged of all desire to pass judgment.  Despite all the evidence of Newt Gingrich’s polyamory, on Saturday he won a landslide in South Carolina anyway.

You’ll remember Dr. Keith Ablow, the Fox News psychologist who warned last year that Chaz Bono’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars would cause the world’s children to doubt their gender identities. This weekend, he reappeared to reassure us that Newt Gingrich’s infidelities would actually make him a stronger president. Although “the media can’t seem to help itself from trying to castrate candidates” (wait: wouldn’t that be an end to all the sellable, sexy stories? and what were they doing to Michelle Bachmann?), he says:

I will tell you what Mr. Gingrich’s personal history actually means for those of us who want to right the economy, see our neighbors and friends go back to work, promote freedom here and abroad and defeat the growing threat posed by Iran and other evil regimes. …

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

4) Two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths …

Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies.

There are, to be sure, some flaws in this argument. For one thing, the brutal verities Newt spoke to his successive wives weren’t on the order of “You’re spending more than you’re investing!  Medicare is doomed!  You need to do something about the trade imbalance with China!”  They were more like, “I’m leaving you for someone prettier.”   By this analogy, Americans may not get the chance to beg him for a third term.   Midway through the first, he’s likely to run off and become president of a younger, blonder country with bigger breasts: Ukraine? or Estonia?

Gingrich, with spouses no. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ...

I also wonder about Dr. A’s comparison of the sinewy, masculine American Republic to a series of easily bamboozleable women.  Isn’t this even more likely to cause gender confusion in children than Chaz Bono?  And what about our heroic men in the Fighting Forces, who by his argument will wake up after the Inauguration to find that not only can they ask and tell, but they are metaphorically married to Newt Gingrich?   The one silver lining for the right wing is that this prospect makes even me want to ban same-sex marriage anywhere and everywhere, lest I rouse myself some morning after a drunken binge to discover I am on a Niagara honeymoon with my Big Newton.

The real reason Newt won in South Carolina, though, was clearly that he took up a weapon little deployed by his party: class struggle. It wasn’t simply that he accused Mitt Romney, accurately enough, of being a corporate equivalent of Sigourney Weaver’s sci-fi foe: moving from company to company, world to world, infecting — or investing — with his virus and then squeezing the place of jobs and life to turn a profit. It was that he made Mitt look for once like what he is. He is a stiff, ambitious, extremely rich man with no fixed beliefs, who for the last ten years has planned to buy the Presidency: the politician as shopper.

Nixon in '68: Whiter, please, whiter

South Carolina’s a strange, strange universe. It’s the birthplace of today’s Republican Party. Old Strom Thurmond, its segregationist eternal Senator, switched from Democrat to Republican in the 60′s, and taught Richard Nixon his “Southern Strategy,” how to lure white racists into the GOP and change the political temper of the whole region. It has a long tradition of elite, autocratic politics. (It was the last state in the Union to permit its population to vote for US President, instead preserving for more than a century the tradition of letting the state legislature choose electors.)  Its establishment, however, is always wary of populist earthquakes: that particularly Southern form of populism in which rich whites watch the poor whites roused to anger, and try desperately — and usually successfully — to channel their rage toward anybody but themselves. Newt, adept at the tradition, got the masses’ mouths foaming at the news media, at black people (the “food stamp president”) … and at Mitt Romney.

The Washington Post points out today that Newt makes a strange populist.

That’s weird: … the candidate who has been in Washington the longest, who has spent the most time on the Sunday shows, who has the deepest rolodex of New York media elites, who has been third-in-line for the presidency, is running as some kind of insurgent.

But that misses the point of his real disaffection, which is intellectual, and rooted in his past. Newt is part of a thoroughly lumpen class, the professorial proletariat.

Gingrich, of course, is sure that he’s one of the great minds of all time. He famously scribbled during a meeting:

Gingrich — primary mission
Advocate of civilization
Definer of civilization
Teacher of the Rules of Civilization
Arouser of those who Fan Civilization
Organizer of the pro-civilization activists
Leader (Possibly) of the civilizing forces

Who else could claim that? Prospero? Kurtz?  And of course, almost everybody makes fun of this. Joan Didion, in a brilliant essay, detected in his maundering “not the future but the past, the drone of the small-town autodidact, the garrulous bore in the courthouse square.”

But you have to consider where that mind of his came from. He got his B.A. from Emory, his Ph.D. from Tulane, both respectable schools. He finished a dissertation on “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945–1960,” and spent some time in Brussels (but not Congo) researching it.  (Belgian education policy in the Congo, of course, was not to educate any Congolese.) One regards the dissertation as a potential source of horror –the horror! — given his subsequent comments about our Mau-Mau in Chief:

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?”

Historian Adam Hochschild read the dissertation, and found it dull rather than appalling. But he does suggest that Gingrich never tried to comprehend resistance to colonialism: “He cites interviews with one American and seven Belgians — but not a single Congolese, though there were hundreds living in Europe and the United States he could have talked to.” There’s a basic lack of intellectual curiosity there.

I am the Definer of Civilization, and your paper is due Friday

Which was punished. On finishing the magnum opus, Newt found himself teaching history and geography at West Georgia College, in Carrollton, the former Fourth District Agricultural and Mechanical School. As a recovered academic, I am sure this is an estimable institution. But for the young Ph.D., it is exile. For the aspiring genius, it is Dickens toiling in the blacking factory. For an ambitious assistant prof, it’s Ovid in Tomis, Dreyfus on Devil’s Island; it’s running seminars in Kafka’s Penal Colony, and writing syllabi on one’s own lacerated flesh. Nor did Newt do well even there, in the Sahara of the geistlichen Wissenschaften. In 1978, they denied him tenure.  If he hadn’t got himself elected to Congress the same year, God knows what would have become of him.

These days, Newt is an real live author, who’s published 23 books, many of them arguably in English. When he talks about rebellion against the “elites,” though, it’s not hard to hear which ones he means most vividly, which enemies are nearest his heart. They’re the PhDs who went on to the good schools, the Dukes and Vanderbilts, the Harvards and Yales: the ones who got the great jobs, the ones whose dissertations made their way into print and praise, the ones for whom tenure waited patiently like a blond, young, buxom-chested Estonian bride. The ones who succeeded!

Hochschild notes that if Newt were elected, he’s be the first President with a Ph.D. since Woodrow Wilson.   Well, yes. But he’d also be one of a small company of modern Presidents who never supped up knowledge at an Ivy League school.  Since Herbert Hoover, only Truman, Nixon, and Carter have failed to attend upon such a holy place; and Nixon went to Duke Law School, which is almost as tony. (He was accepted at Harvard, but had to decline because of family illness, adding another to the pyramid of chips on his shoulder.)   In fact, all the rest except Eisenhower completed part of their education at either Harvard or Yale. (I include Eisenhower, though he was a simple barefoot general from Kansas, because he actually served as President of Columbia University before he took on the leadership of the whole enchilada.)

Before FDR, there was Wilson (President of Princeton), and Teddy Roosevelt (Harvard boy); but before then it’s mostly a long procession of the self- and ill-educated, knowing no history and unknown to it now. The US Presidency was simply not very important before the second Roosevelt. Back then, it was a ceremonial job concerned with overseeing Cabinet meetings,  certifying ambassadors, and cutting ribbons.

All day long the right hon. lord of us all sits listening solemnly to bores and quacks. … Anon there comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech. Alas, it must be made at the annual banquet of some organization that is discovered, at the last minute, to be made up of gentlemen under indictment, or at the tomb of some statesman who escaped impeachment by a hair. Twenty million voters with IQ’s below 60 have their ears glued to the radio; it takes four days’ hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next day a dam must be opened somewhere. Four Senators get drunk and try to neck a lady politician built like an overloaded tramp steamer. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.

The elites who ruled the country cared very little about vetting the office’s occupants. Only the vast extension of state power in the New Deal made the Presidency truly vital. When that happened, suddenly it became crucial that its holders bear an Ivy imprimatur, proof that they were loyal to the System, having passed through its intestinal tests and come out the kind of guys who brown-nosed, worshipped the Institution, and rallied for the Team.

And Newt isn’t. He doesn’t carry the certificate or wear the proof. That’s the measure of his outsiderness: the intellectual resentment of a toiling academic who never won the kudos, never made good.

But he’s enough of an intellectual to know what “culture” is. And that’s his devastating potential at this juncture in the life of the Republican party, and possibly the United States.

Conservative populism is a strange thing (like South Carolina). Its great secret, both strength and weakness,is this: Its exponents cannot talk about class for very long. They have to change the subject to something else.

Statue of Tillman, on the S.C. Capitol grounds

Modern conservatism, after all — the post-1848, bourgeois kind — developed not in order to affirm the aristocracy (the task of the old variety) but to suppress and conquer labor.   Its whole birth and formation was a vast change of the subject, away from the reality of class, production, exploitation, and toward ideals of social stability. For a long time in the United States, right-wing populists had a ready theme to switch to, when the switching time came: Race.   White populists in the South performed the explicit service of keeping the white poor’s anger focused on the black poor, not on their rich white oppressors.  ”Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the longtime Senator from South Carolina at the last century’s sharp turn, got his start in politics by massacring black freedmen in an 1876 riot. He called this ”having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them [guess who] as was justifiable.” The stress was not just on the killing, but the superiority. The whites with their miserable, dirt-poor lives needed to believe in something, and Tillman gave the racial myth to sustain them.

This doesn’t work as openly anymore, though Gingrich can certainly dabble in it when Juan Williams, or some other anti-colonial interlocutor, is at hand. But “culture” is the new distraction from class, the new change of subject.

“New” is perhaps not the right word: the right has invoked “culture” at least since the ’60s, not just in the US but in country after country worldwide, to replace a discourse of injustice and justice with one of invasion versus belonging. ”Distraction” is perhaps not the right word, either. “Culture” is a translation of class division, into a different register where the enemies’ identities can be shifted, and the revolutionary options of reappropriation or redistribution blunted or annealed. Those of us who work in the field of sexuality know this register all too well. It’s the hue and cry that something alien is intruding, that you‘re not part of our culture, that whatever rights you claim to represent don’t belong. It’s been used to change the subject from Ghana to Singapore.

Gingrich is the perfect mouth for this language, the perfect voice for this version of ressentiment. Because, of course, he is an intellectual, in the American sense. He has drunk up the deep desire and tendency of American academia — equally the mark of the old humanism and the new postmodernism — to see history in terms of the cloudy abstractions of culture, and not the material realities of money, conflict, and class.  He knows how to dig a ditch and channel this seething magma out there, all the stuff of lost jobs and foreclosed houses and folks living in mobile homes, into a fiery onslaught on the “cultural elites.”

He did it when he won South Carolina.  ”The American elite media Is trying to force us to quit being Americans.” ”The elites in Washington and New York,” Obama’s “extremist left wing friends in San Francisco,” the “growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites” — it was all there. He’s as good at this as Mugabe going after Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson!

His ability to meld class attack with the language of culture makes him a particularly potent demagogue right now.  The man and the hour have met, and both of them have set out to screw Mitt Romney. I am certainly not predicting that Romney — who has about ten million dollars in his pocket for every book Gingrich ever wrote — is going down to defeat.  If the day comes when money doesn’t matter in the Republican party, it’ll be a strange day indeed. But since the 2008 crash, we’ve been waiting in apprehension, breaths bated, for the true right-wing demagogue inevitably to emerge, in the way one attends on American Idol to cough up the semester’s fated celebrity. It suddenly makes sense that Newt the Definer of Civilization, far more than Sarah Palin, would be the one to play the role.

Rape, abortion, and protection: Something good from the Obama administration

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Constitution, Republican reading

“Republicans believe,” said Barney Frank, “that life begins at conception and ends at birth.”  The US right wing’s obsession with the fertilized ovum, and indifference to human welfare once the human departs the womb, has dominated politics for forty years.  Now, a bit of  Scroogeish, misogynistic, anti-abortion nastiness by the Republican Congress has prompted the Obama administration to do something good for men as well as women, lesbians and gays and trans people alike. Here’s how.

a) Modelling Rape

Where to start talking about US law?  52 criminal codes are in force within its borders, an overall Federal code and one for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.  One launching point might be the Model Penal Code (MPC) — particularly because its most influential iteration, launched in 1962, is 50 years old this year.

The MPC was a reform proposal put forward by progressive attorneys, academics, and judges.  Criminal laws five decades ago were a mess. One study says lawbooks typically offered ”less a code and more a collection of ad hoc statutory enactments, each triggered by a crime or a crime problem that gained public interest for a time.” They were so contradictory that a versatile reprobate who committed a serious offense while straddling an interstate border might have to be cut in half before the disparate definitions and penalties could be applied. The Model Penal Code became a template for reforms in the 60s and 70s, and helped bring unprecedented regularity and predictability to the jungle of statutes. It was one of the most influential documents in modern US history, rivaling the writings of Dr. Seuss, James Patterson, and Ronald Reagan.

when it comes to crime, all states are red states

Yet to understand US law today you also have to look at ways the MPC was ahead of its, and our, time –and some of the ways it fell short. On the former note: in the US today just over 50% of inmates in federal prisons are incarcerated for drug offenses, along with around 20% of those in state prisons; the number imprisoned under drug laws has multiplied twelvefold since 1980; as a result the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It brings heartbreaking reflections on the police state we live in now to read that in the innocence of half a century ago,

the Model Code included no drug offenses. In an appendix to the Code’s special part, the drafters merely remarked that “a State enacting a new Penal Code may insert additional Articles dealing with special topics such as narcotics, alcoholic beverages, gambling and offenses against tax and trade laws.”

Talk about laws “triggered by a crime or a crime problem that gained public interest for a time.” When will the time stop?

One way in which US law has moved forward rather than back, though, is in gender. It’s not just Title VII and protection of women from job discrimination: the law has at least partly discarded notions of men as engorged agency, and women as protected victims. The Model Penal Code defined sexual offenses in patriarchal style, drawn from English common law. While the Code did favor scrapping sodomy statutes — and gave impetus to a movement that culminated in Lawrence v Texas forty years later — it defined rape as a male having forced “sexual intercourse with a female not his wife.”  Use of force was especially important to the Code’s definition.  The commentaries attached to the Code made clear that prosecutions should require “objective manifestations of aggression by the actor” — in effect, proof of injury, and, implicitly, concomitant evidence of the victim’s physical resistance.  It reflected a belief both that women were prone to inventing rape stories, and that refusing consent didn’t just mean saying “no,” but fighting back. (Undoubtedly, though, the 1962 Code’s drafters took into account how black men accused of raping white women — with well-publicized cases staining the early Civil Rights era — faced travesty trials and penalties including death.)

As one scholar says,

relatively soon after the Code’s 1962 publication, the Code’s sexual offense provisions … were already considered outdated. The rapid onslaught of the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s brought an intense momentum to change rape laws that the Code had, in part, either mirrored or inspired.

Over the next decades, most states moved beyond the Model Code, criminalizing marital rape and defining rape and sexual assault in gender-neutral fashion — so that rape of men, or of women by women, could be recognized as such. Bizarre provisions remain (Mississippi has a steeper sentence for “assault with intent to ravish”  if the victim was “chaste” beforehand) but the crazy-quilt is measurably less mad. Congress made the definition of rape in federal law (mainly covering military personnel) gender-neutral in 1996.

b) Damned lies and statistics

When conservatives won the 2010 elections, among their prime targets, predictably, was abortion.  ”Republicans ran in 2010 on job creation and deficit reduction,” one critic says, “but have used many of  their newfound majorities across the country to attack women’s reproductive rights.” In state legislatures, they introduced almost 400 anti-choice bills by April 2011 — nearly twice as many as in the previous year.  At the national level, they went after federal funding for abortions.

The 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibited such funding except in case of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life. Congressional Republicans now tried tightening restrictions with the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” which the new House Speaker deemed a high priority. It proposed to eliminate federal funding except in the event of what it called “forcible rape.”  While the bill didn’t define the term, it clearly looked over its shoulder at the Model Penal Code’s stipulations.  It would have ruled out Federal assistance for statutory rape or date rape, or in situations where the victim was drugged, unconscious or mentally incompetent. In all these cases, Republicans would offer the fetus inflicted by sexual violence new rights, stripping the irrelevant woman of her old ones. “This bill takes us back to a time when just saying ‘no’ wasn’t enough to qualify as rape,” a feminist lawyer explained.  (The act also aimed to ban funding for abortions by incest victims, except for women under the age of 18.)

J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson: I can love him, but I can never rape him

The stealth attempt to sneak a redefinition of rape into Federal law failed — under furious pressure, House Republicans dropped the idea. But the conservatives had one argument in their favor. The “forcible rape” language existed elsewhere in Federal policy, if not in Federal law. Specifically, the FBI had long used the definition in its Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Summary Reporting System (SRS). Yearly, the FBI collects statistics on law enforcement around the country, and with these produces what the Justice Department calls “the national ‘report card’ on serious crime; what gets reported through the UCR is how we, collectively, view crime in this country.” Its information-gathering guidelines still referred to “forcible rape,” identifying it as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.”  The terms hadn’t changed since the salad days of J. Edgar’s FBI: they dated from 1927.

Feminist advocates had pushed to change the language for years, but it was probably the Republican revival of “forcible rape” that focused the Obama administration’s attention.   By mid-2011, an FBI committee endorsed replacing the Uniform Crime Report terminology. On January 6, 2012, Obama’s Justice Department announced, with some fanfare, that Summary Crime Reporting would use new guidelines in defining rape.

The new definition is:

The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

The Justice Department says,

For the first time ever, the new definition includes any gender of victim and perpetrator, not just women being raped by men.  It also recognizes that rape with an object can be as traumatic as penile/vaginal rape.  This definition also includes instances in which the victim is unable to give consent because of temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity.  Furthermore … the new definition recognizes that a victim can be incapacitated and thus unable to consent because of ingestion of drugs or alcohol.  Similarly, a victim may be legally incapable of consent because of age. …  Physical resistance is not required on the part of the victim to demonstrate lack of consent.

This does not change the laws that govern prosecutions — though the move, and the resulting statistics, may pressure jurisdictions that don’t define rape in gender-neutral terms, or persist with a definition based on force, to jumpstart legal reform. But, as the director of the Women’s Law Project says, the new policy means “properly measuring the extent of rape in America.”  The New York Times pointed out,

Many states have long since adopted a more expansive definition of rapes in their criminal laws, and officials said that local police departments had been breaking down their numbers and sending only a fraction of the reported rapes to the F.B.I. to comply with outdated federal standards. For example, the New York Police Department reported 1,369 rapes in 2010, but only 1,036 were entered in the federal figures. However, the police department in Chicago, which had nearly 1,400 reported sexual assaults in 2010, refused to discard cases that did not fit the narrower federal definition when reporting its crime statistics; as a result, the F.B.I.’s uniform crime report — which reported 84,767 forcible rapes that year — did not include any rapes from that city.

Transgender people will especially benefit. “Nobody counts trans people, ever,” activist and legal scholar Dean Spade said to me years ago. Every indicator is that they’re particularly vulnerable to sexual assault, but reporting as well as prosecution suffers from the contradictions around whether their gender identity is recognized, and whether rape is treated as gender-neutral.

Now it will be important to see whether acknowledging diverse victims of rape, including men as well as women, leads to disaggregated reporting of their identities in future Uniform Crime Reports. Who suffers sexual violence in the US? We have a chance to find out.

The state and the knife

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How does the law recognize a body? Maybe this is a strange way of phrasing the question, but it’s important. The law is an anthology of verbal abstractions. But unless it affects people where they literally live, inside their skins, in their physical existences — unless it can dictate or restrain action and movement, unless it can tell them what to do — it might as well be a romance novel you pick up in the airport. This doesn’t mean seeing bodies biologically; it means seeing them as what they are, points of touch and tension between psychology and culture — as ways of experiencing the world. The law’s description of, its recognition of your body, needs to be one you can recognize and experience yourself.

Bodies have to acknowledge the law when it calls them. That’s a predicate of the state’s legitimacy. But the law also has to acknowledge them, to call them by name.  This mutual recognition, intertwined with claims to power on either side, is basic to the way this modern world keeps running.

Sweden is a country where the law doesn’t see certain bodies unless they’ve been modified with a knife.

In Sweden, you cannot change your legal gender unless you are sterilized: unless you prove to the state’s satisfaction that you cannot reproduce.   In 1972, the Parliament passed legislation making Sweden “the first country in the world to institutionalize sex reassignment and sex reassignment surgery by law as the treatment of first choice for transsexualism.” The language there (from a Swedish study) suggests how deeply medical the underlying ideology and the resulting process are.

In Sweden, legal recognition isn’t a right, nor, strictly even the end result; it’s merely the byproduct of a “treatment” where bodily modification is the goal, and the institutions that do the -izing are those of medical power.   (The National Board of Health and Welfare oversees the procedures and decides on the change. )

In following years, other states mimicked this requirement, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Rationales for it have been rare. Trans activist Stephen Whittle writes

at the 1993 XXIIIrd Colloquy on European Law which concerned ‘Transsexualism, Medicine and The Law’, Professor Michael Wills of the University of Berne, who writes extensively on European law and transsexualism … took the view that “sterility [of the transsexual person] must be absolutely certain and permanent” . . . before a full recognition of gender change is afforded in law, but he does not explain his reasoning: it is presented as a natural “common sense” assumption. A common sense assumption that appears to be prevalent in any legal discussion in this area by those who are not actually members of the transsexual community.

This version of unexamined “common sense” scored another victory today. The Swedish government withdrew a proposed change to the 1972 law that would have scrapped the sterilization requirement.

Over my fertile body: Göran Hägglund

The National Board of Health and Welfare had urged the change in a May 2011 report, given to the Minister of Social Affairs, Göran Hägglund.  However, Hägglund’s conservative Christian Democratic party, part of the ruling center-right coalition, rejected the suggestion at a party conference the following month. It groped toward new reasons for its diehard defense of sterilization:

“A sex-change means that you willingly subject yourself to treatment in order to change your gender, and if you do that it is also reasonable that you give up some gender-specific properties of your old sex,” Maria Larsson, minister for children and the elderly, said in a speech at the party conference on Thursday evening.

Larsson also said that Sweden is by no means unique in implementing this rule and added that it is also a question of children having the right to “define who is their mother and who is their father”.

Maria Larsson: I'm every woman

Larsson’s last argument is implicitly homophobic in a way that would probably be unacceptable in Swedish politics in any other context; after all, it’s only a small step and slippage from saying that a child has the “right” to “define” mother and father, to saying she has the right to have both. But it’s a telling sentence.  The Swedish state clearly finds it harder and harder to justify rigid policing of gender in public life, where gender itself has become less and less relevant. So Larsson tries to position government as the defender of gender roles in private life and the family.  In a country with less history of patriarchal state control, that might be absurd; but Sweden, after all, is a nation that carried out a eugenics program involving over 60,000 forced sterilizations, mostly of working-class women, from 1934 to 1975.   You might say that in Sweden, the last refuge and resort of patriarchy isn’t the family or civil society — it’s the protecting state itself.

A period of political jockeying ensued after the party conference, as the Christian Democrats tried to persuade the other coalition members — most supporting the change — to discard or delay it. Today, they won. A Christian Democrat MP explained, “It’s important that we stand by the precautionary principle and don’t rush into legislation. This question needs to be looked at more closely.”

Meanwhile, Barbro Westerholm, an MP from the coalition’s Liberal People’s Party, who had “previously indicated she planned to push the issue in the Riksdag,” added:

“I can live with this. It’s a positive step forward where that had previously been deadlock. Sometimes it takes time to reach the goal, but it’s better than having things stop completely.”

Westerholm had previously served as Director of the National Board of Health and Welfare, and in 1979 oversaw the country’s elimination of homosexuality from the list of mental diseases. But in politics, you have to know when to sell out.

Over the years, both states and medical experts have shown themselves almost obsessive in enforcing the sterility requirement. The doctor Whittle cited above, for instance, found dangers lurking in a German court precedent holding that “a reversible interruption of the fallopian tubes might be sufficient, because a transsexual man would be very unlikely to seek such a reversal.” He contended that because this did not preclude the possibility of the trans man seeking in-vitro fertilization, more complete sterilization was needed.

A dozen years ago, in a report on parenthood, I wrote that

Governments in this area still enforce a relentless, ruthless either/or.  Their anxiety to eradicate any ambiguity indicates that the spectacle of (for instance) a legally recognized woman still able, with her own sperm, to inseminate another woman would not merely be a logical conundrum, but a political one: it would strike in some way at the state’s own conceptual foundations, its predication on patriarchal systems separating “masculinity” unequivocally from “feminity.” The state insists on absolute and binary gender oppositions: to achieve them, it claims extraordinarily invasive control over the body.  Human rights cannot allow that claim.  Forced sterilization is unacceptable. …

Freedom from coercion is an essential goal in the intersection of health and human rights.  When such physical modifications are imposed by the state as a condition for participating in civil life in the gender of one’s choice, they are no longer modifications—they are mutilations.  They are no less clearly so than such widely condemned practices as female genital mutilation (the product of an equally repressive regime of gender policing).  As such they constitute inhuman treatment, prohibited by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights as well as every major human rights covenant and standard.

That’s still true. The either-or excludes certain bodies and certain people from recognition, and civil rights. It’s appalling.

Tragedy on Trans Day of Remembrance in India

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A hijra walks through the debris from the disastrous fire (Kevin Frayer/AP)

It’s appalling that a day dedicated to the memory of victims of prejudice should be marked by more deaths, victims of apparent incompetence. But that seems to be what has happened in Delhi. The Hindu says:

Members of Sangama and the Karnataka Sexual Minorities Forum on Monday condemned the Delhi Government for not putting fire safety systems in place which, they said, led to the charring to death of 15 hijras in a fire at Nand Nagri in north-east Delhi on Sunday.

The fire blazed through a makeshift tent where a large number of hijras had gathered to honour deceased friends.

The incident created panic among community members who had gathered for the ceremony. Several others who tried to escape were also injured.

“We stand together with more than 50 seriously injured hijras, families of deceased hijras and with the hijra community as a whole in this moment of deep sorrow. From media reports it is very clear that fire safety measures and emergency evacuation facilities were not adequate in the Delhi Municipal Corporation’s community hall, where more than 1,000 members of the transgender community had gathered as part of its community congregation,” said a joint statement issued by executive director of Sangama Manohar Elavarthi and State coordinator of the forum Mahesh Patil.

“We strongly condemn the negligence of the Delhi Government for not putting fire safety systems in place, which would have saved precious lives,” the statement said.

The New York Times (just think of that!) gives more details — although falling back on the term “eunuch” to explain to its readership who the victims are. Its story indicates this was more than a commemoration of the Day of Remembrance: “Sunday was to be the first day of a 10-day private festival organized by the community to honor a guru, offer prayers and feast together.” One hijra, Naina, told the Times it was a lengthy, regular gathering where “eunuchs of all age groups from India come together and we share our thoughts and try to solve our problems during these events.”

Attendees were expected from parts of South Asia. … Sanjay Kumar Jain, the Delhi police commissioner for the North East District, estimated that 500 to 700 eunuchs were present during the fire, but some eunuchs said the crowd was a few thousand people. …

Surjeet Kumar, an eyewitness who lives behind the accident site, said that the entrance to the makeshift tent was extremely congested when he saw the blaze. He said he and his neighbors dragged some victims over a gate that was barring the entrance to the tent, and took them to a nearby park before police and the fire officials came after numerous phone calls.

The scene outside the Accident and Emergency wing at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital was grim. More than a hundred eunuchs had gathered, some sitting on the floor holding on to their belongings, with others taking turns going to the morgue and the burns ward and a few hugging.

“More than 5,000 members of our community were supposed to participate in the 10-day long program,” said Shaboo, who like many other eunuchs goes by just one name. …

As the sun set, the crowd begun to disperse somewhat as eunuchs from nearby areas returned home. Others waited at the hospital, some to collect the dead bodies of their friends from the hospital authorities or tend to the injured. Some remained because they had traveled to the meeting from outside Delhi and didn’t have a shelter for the night. …

The chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit on Monday announced compensation of 200,000 rupees, or $3,800, to the next of kin of each eunuch killed.

TV9 has wrenching footage of the fire (in Hindi):

This is a sorrowful day.

November 20, International Transgender Day of Remembrance

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Sunday was the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to mourn the victims of violence based on gender identity and expression.  I was on a New Hampshire mountain remote from any opportunities for commemoration. Up there, though, one has a chance to think, and I thought a bit about the incomprehensions and distances between sexual orientation and gender identity as issues uneasily sharing a movement.

So let me talk about two different lives.

Back in 2000, that innocent time, my friend Brendan Fay approached me with a proposal. Brendan has been a heroic queer activist in and out of New York’s Irish community ever since Roger Casement was a child among the ashes, or maybe since the blight first descended on the tuber. The 100th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s death, in disgrace in a cheap Paris hotel, was impending, and Brendan wanted to commemorate it:  to celebrate the Irish writer as a freedom-lover, a cosmopolitan and Utopian socialist who imagined a world united by unforeseeable and unprecedented solidarities. I was then program director of IGLHRC (the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission); so Brendan came to ask if there were some urgent rights abuse in the world against which we could stage a demonstration on the anniversary, to focus attention both on the violation and on Wilde’s enduring spirit of dissent.

Vanesa Lorena Ledesma: cardiac arrest

We had one situation that we were following closely. Vanesa Ledesma, a trans woman, a sex worker, and an activist with the Asociación Travestis Unidas de Córdoba, was arrested in Córdoba, Argentina, on February 11, 2000, after a fight among patrons of a bar. She was kept incommunicado in detention, and five days later she was dead. Police attributed her death to ”cardiac arrest.” An autopsy showed evidence of beating, with severe contusions on the arms, shoulders,  back and feet. Friends released photographs of her disfigured corpse. Activists demanded a full investigation.

Thus on November 30, a small group, perhaps two dozen of us, assembled in front of the Consulate of Argentina in New York. Some carried pictures of Ledesma, some pictures of Oscar Wilde. There were several trans women and a lot of Irish people in green. I seem to remember a bagpipe player, but memory may be embellishing.

After a while the Consul General, an elegant and diplomatic man, invited us into the building to meet. I said my bit about the urgent need to investigate Ledesma’s death, and Brendan spoke about the importance of Oscar Wilde. The consul listened attentively but seemed confused about the connection. ”And are you also demonstrating at the Irish consulate?”

“No.”

“You realize that in Argentina, we are not responsible for … Irish affairs.”

“Yes.”

“And you do understand that Argentina is not responsible for the death of Mr. Wilde?”

I assured him it was a cold case.

He appeared unconvinced, and kept looking at us with tactful caution, as though we were the vanguard of an Irish plot to seize the sheep-friendly wastes of Patagonia.  As we left he shook my hand with exquisite courtesy. “I will certainly convey your demand for an investigation  to my government. And when I next see the Irish ambassador, I will tell him” – he paused, not at all sure what message could be passed on; but then he finished with a flourish of inspiration, “I will tell him there are matters he should investigate too!”

I remember this as a rather incongruous attempt to link two matters that perhaps should have stayed separate. But I also remember it precisely because of the contrast between the two lives, and deaths, we tried to commemorate. No wonder, in retrospect, that putting them together in front of the consulate was confusing.  It made me consider the fraught and difficult alliances between LGB people and that hanging T they like to attach to their advocacy, but only infrequently try fully to understand. The terms are different, the victories aren’t always congruent, and the suffering may estrange rather than being shared.

Wilde remains famous after his first century in the grave. His plays still play, his words still elicit laughter. No one outside some friends in Córdoba pays much attention to what Vanesa Ladesma said.   Everyone who remembers Wilde endows him with a psychology, with the depth and duality that are the necessary constituents of wit.  Vanesa Ladesma suffers the indignity of remaining a photograph, more vivid to most in her mutilated death than in the life she lived. I combed the Internet as well as my own files for a while, and I realized: I can’t find a picture of her while she was alive.

And this all has something to do with how we imagine sexuality as opposed to gender; the first a wellspring of mystery and power, the second an external and limiting imposition. Wilde’s sexuality was an interior fact, a reality within; he had the choice of keeping it a secret; it was his daring but also deliberate play with revelation and concealment that helped him climb to become the most famous British writer of his time; and it was his willed embrace of his truth beneath the unraveled mystery after his precipitate fall that gave him a conclusive dignity, and commends him to us and our posterity. Vanesa was branded, and hiding herself was never much of an option. She carried on her skin the marks of the contrast between who she said she was and who she was told to be. Her life was a courageous but constrained struggle against defining discourses from without.  Sexuality is something one experiences from the inside first. But gender fits you from the outside like a sanbenito of Spandex, imposed from birth.

This inflected, too, the vast differences in wealth and power between them. Wilde was born into a prosperous family, even if one in Britain’s closest colony. He manipulated the inside-outside game of appearances to amass celebrity and money (even if mostly in the form of debt); his ascent was what made his fall so shocking. Vanesa had no game to play; she was always on the outside, by class, by background, by the way she presented her body and the things she did with it.

I wrote somewhat earlier here that sexuality proliferates meanings. There are always spaces, in the way we imagine sexuality, to insinuate some new complexity or individuation or interpretation. Gender culls meanings, weeds them out. Everything has to boil down to the few available options, the old binaries, the one-two punch.

Because of that, insisting on your own authority over the significance of gender, or demanding to cross the yellow police lines laid across the territory, is one of the most dangerous things you can do. A few nights ago, I watched Woody Allen’s Zelig, for the first time in about 20 years. The hero — the nebbish as chameleon — is the ultimate conformist. He becomes like anybody he’s around, to the point where Allen’s little Jewish schlemiel, plopped down in 30s Germany, turns Nazi. He changes race, color, religion. The one thing he doesn’t alter, though, is gender. With women, he stays resolutely male.  Some shapes shift, but other transgressions remain unimaginable. Obviously there’s some squeamishness on Allen’s part about too much malleability; but then, Allen in a storm trooper’s uniform is, in a sick way, funny. Allen in a dress, in that time and that place, would have gotten killed.

Of course, I’m not trying to draw some absolute contrast between two classes of experience: to the contrary. Stephen Whittle, the grand British trans activist, once remarked that 90% of what we call homophobic violence is in fact transphobic violence.  The attackers and the haters aren’t really acting on some theory they have about what you do in bed. They’re responding to the gut sense you’re not “masculine” or “feminine” enough, that you act funny in a way that corrodes the barbed war supposed to keep the genders separate. I can’t vouch for the numbers, but this speaks to the feeling I’ve drawn from hundreds of interviews I’ve done across the world.  Sexuality is always linked to gender. But that’ s also because it’s always linked to power, and gender is one of the key points from which our understanding of power and powerlessness — that great, uncompromising binary that bisects all our lives — flows.

Self-identified lesbians and gays are also caught up in the struggle against the straitjackets of gender norms and the policing of bodies. But they try to construct their identities to give them ways and leeway to change the terms, escape the front lines, fight on their own territory. Trans people are, by definition, in the middle of the fight.

Vanesa Ledesma, by Tom Block

Part of the trans struggle, too, is clearly to reclaim the autonomy and interiority that the social regulation of the body — the control clamped down on the skin itself — tries to deny. This is a heroic fight, and it’s no detraction from its particularity to say that it’s one in which everybody has a stake: everyone who tries to maintain an identity separate from the state and others, everyone who tries to carve out a sphere of independent will in an increasingly programmed world, and then act it out with their bodies somehow and make it known. That’s why I mourn, among other things and names, the fact that I can’t find a photograph of the living Vanesa Ledesma.  I remember the iconic photographs of Khaled Said, the young Egyptian torture victim, before and after he was beaten to death; these images and the indignation they aroused helped spur a revolution. It seems a final indignity that Vanesa Ledesma has no “before.” She’s reduced to her own mutilation, defined by her death. She’s been commemorated since in paintings (available from Amnesty International for $3000); these too portray her shattered features after the police were finished with her. William Kennedy, in his great novel Ironweed, has one of his down-and-out characters reflect on an alcoholic woman sliding toward death: ”Nobody’s a bum all their life. She hada been somethin’ once.”  Vanesa Ledesma was a lot before she died. The loss lies partly in how that life has been overridden.

The Trans Day of Remembrance website banners a few lines from Shakespeare:

My grief lies all within; And these external manners of lament

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul …

That’s from Richard III, the probably-queer monarch mourning his imprisonment by Bolingbroke. It speaks, though, to the struggle to reclaim the life within from the pressure and oppression beating down on the body. Critics for generations have treated Richard as a flagrant instance of self-absorption, lost in acting out his emotions, the King as drama queen. It’s on a trans web page, though, that I hear in these words their special dignity and the weight of their demand. The inner life against external manners: for Vanesa Ledesma, that meant something.

And yet, again, it’s a fight for all of us.

Occupy sex

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fist the powers that be

Branded deep in Harvard’s institutional psyche is the trauma of the 1969 student strike, when protesters occupied the president’s office and shut the school down. They were calling for an end to the University’s coziness with the US military, a black studies program, and no more expropriations of working-class housing — but beyond that, as the famous poster said, they wanted a different life, demanded “to be more human.”  In the strike’s wake, the University moved the president’s house to a far suburban street to prevent hostage-taking, delved more tunnels between campus buildings to facilitate escape, and formally invited women to join the student body, to keep the radicals distracted. Some distinguished and unnerved professors in the Department of English decided to experiment with thinking the way the demonstrators did. If you wanted to destroy Western civilization, they reasoned, where would you strike next? Naturally, you’d try to burn the card catalog of Widener Library, that comprehensive collection of man’s intellectual accomplishments, to render the lending system impotent and knowledge inaccessible to the race. So they recruited sympathetic colleagues to stand sentinel on our cultural heritage in shifts, and these tweedy, chalk-haired heroes took turns lurking discreetly around the catalogs, on guard lest some filthy longhair slip a Molotov cocktail into a drawer. I often think of this whenever I go to the reading room and see the seamless computerized system doling out books now. Barring a Chinese virus, civilization is safe.

OK, 1% inside, 99% outside. Got it?

This history helps explain the University’s inept, paranoid response to the nascent Occupy Harvard movement, a few hundred protesters demanding an institution more open to the other 99%.  The institution has closed and padlocked the gates of Harvard Yard, stationed police all round as if it were a rather cushy Supermax prison, and barred access to anyone without a Harvard ID. As a public-relations move, this tends to reinforce the demonstrators’ point, that those outside the 1% aren’t welcome there. However, it’s a reminder that the fabled, shared, rich commonality of intellectual life has nothing to do with the University as faux community.  Harvard is private property — it is, in fact, quite literally a corporation, and proudly proclaims it’s the oldest one in the Western Hemisphere.  It can keep anyone off the grass it likes. The only one allowed to occupy Harvard is Harvard itself.

I’ve written here earlier about the “new enclosures,” the increasing privatization of public space: how much of what we might think is open territory in city and suburb is actually owned by somebody. And corporations buying up the commons can then severely circumscribe our ability to speak, protest, and assemble. It’s important to remember, though, that even space that is formally, legally public — streets, sidewalks, squares — usually comes with all manner of restrictions on who is allowed to use it or to appear there. In many cases these limitations are invisible to “respectable” users, whose looks and manners don’t transgress the written or unwritten rules. But for others, they are vivid and brutal. And it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of these boundaries involve sex.

A new report by the Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC,  “Move Along: Policing Sex Work in Washington DC,” shows some of these.  The US capital has passed new laws augmenting “an already stringent system of policing and “zero tolerance” for most forms of commercial sex in the city,” by restricting where sex workers can go.

The most high profile measure allows the Chief of Police to declare “prostitution free zones” (PFZs) in which officers have wide-sweeping power to move along or arrest people who police believe to be congregating for the purpose of prostitution. The PFZ concept was framed as an innovative tool to assist law enforcement in its efforts to rid the District of prostitution. In fact, the law simply legitimized previously existing arbitrary and discriminatory police actions directed at people believed to be engaging in sex work.

no girls allowed

This is fairly astonishing. A “prostitution free zone” in the city one of whose streets (K Street, if you’re from another planet) has become a worldwide symbol of corporate bribery and corruption? Shouldn’t members of Congress and similar hustlers be banned from these moral precincts, as well as the working girls? It takes chutzpah.

The inevitable way these laws work is that police arrest anyone they recognize as a sex worker (usually, anybody with a previous arrest) when they’re spotted outside the “safe zone.” One stop from a cop can be enough to restrict your mobility for life. But this is an everyday and widespread way of regulating sex work and keeping the unwanted out of sight. Taiwan, for instance, claims a brand-new law is a liberal triumph that “legalizes” prostitution in certain areas. But in fact it eliminates sex workers’ freedom of movement — and is likely to increase prosecutions.

Taiwan has legalised the creation of red light districts in a bid to regulate the sex industry, but prostitutes themselves say the new law could actually worsen their plight.

Under the law passed by parliament Friday, local governments are allowed to set up special penalty-free sex trade zones, but outside them prostitutes will still be be fined – as, for the first time, will their clients and pimps.

The constitutional court scrapped the previous law punishing only prostitutes on the grounds it was unfair.

But so far no local authority has yet said it will create a legal prostitution area, leaving streetwalkers fearing they face the worst of both worlds.

The desire to set up a segregated sexual geography runs deep. The Dominican Republic is presently debating a proposed law requiring sex workers to carry government-issued cards certifying their health status, at all times. Their work would be confined to so-called “zones of tolerance” — an old but Orwellian term — and they would be restricted to living “in establishments away from residential centers, main avenues of the city and areas that have historical, artistic or cultural significance for the country.” At  a public hearing, a neighborhood association representative bemoaned the “shame” incurred

as a result of the activity of prostitution in the place.  He also considered as embarrassing and decadent the spectacles and misconduct made by women, homosexuals, and transvestites who sell sex.

A Dominican journalist calls the proposal a “mask of hypocrisy,” a breast-beating substitute for “improving the living conditions of the population.”

Part of the political genius of the Occupy movements is that they give physical, immediate, almost sensuous expression to the sense of exclusion so many economically and politically disenfranchised people feel. They sharpen the contrast between private property and common ground, expropriation and community, the high towers of financial privilege and the cold and open street.

It’s vital, then, to bear in memory the other despised and unwanted people who have been shoved out of the commons into the alleys and the prison cells: the sex workers, drug users, cruisers, vagrants, homeless, and the rest, all those whose bodies expose them to the lash of laws that for the rest of us remain invisible and unfelt. It’s critical (even as the right wing tries to deprecate and demonize the movement as a cover for rutting adolescents to make free love like rabbits) to recall that sex is entwined with money and power as a justification for exclusion. Occupy sex!  Own up to it and own it in all its diversity of forms and pleasures. Our bodies and desires need to be reclaimed for a human future too.

“I believed I had to give up every vestige of being male to complete the process”

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Aleksa Lundberg

This article from Global Post, about a Swedish transgender woman’s experience of being sterilized as a requirement for gender-reassignment surgery, and her later fight against the practice, has given the issue welcome coverage at last.  Amazingly, a right-wing party representative says that “children’s interests” underlie the policy:

The conservative Christian Democrats oppose a repeal, as do the Sweden Democrats. Although their party is a minority in parliament, the Christian Democrats underpin the center-right government coalition. Their spokesperson Annika Eclund, describes the party line as “looking out for children’s interests” in a time when medical advances allow new reproductive techniques.

“There are limits to how much we should experiment with how life is created,” she says. “Every day I meet people who are seeking their identity and their background, asking where they come from,” she says. “Men don’t give birth to babies. A daddy can’t at the same time be a mummy. Just because you can, does that mean that you should?”