Tante Frieda

I love the German word Lebensgefährtin.  Leben is life, and the second half of the word contains the word Fahr(en), the word for travel.  It's the German equivalent of life partner, a person you travel through life with.   It's the word my Uncle Otto used to introduce me to Frieda Müller, whom I would come to know as Tante Frieda (Aunt Frieda) over the years. I had close ties to Germany, one intellectual, my friend Achim, and one emotional, my Tante Frieda, back in the sixties, when I began to consider for the first time becoming something other than an American. I had begun to feel the pull of my German roots when I went to school in Munich, in 1960, and the feeling only intensified when I found my way to Berlin as a "cold warrior" a few years later. My fellow American soldiers called the Germans "doobies" (supposedly after the sound of the police, fire and ambulance sirens, which they said sounded like doo-bee-doo-bee). I, on the other hand, had a wonderful personal connection to the city of Berlin in Frieda and Achim and their friends and families.

Frieda and I were not related by blood. She and her husband were close family friends of Otto and his wife. Frieda's husband managed to survive the war only to die when a railroad trellis collapsed on him two weeks into the cleanup. He worked for Berlin's transportation service. Otto, too, had lost his spouse and in time the two of them took up what in German is called an Onkelehe (uncle marriage), a system of hitching up with somebody without marrying them, usually because you get more financial benefit by not doing so. Frieda and Otto had to wait over a decade to be allotted an apartment, and when they finally got one, they were reluctant to give up the luxury, including the pension rights which came along with it.  So every morning Otto got up, took the bus across the city where Frieda made him lunch - the main meal of the day - and the two of them just hung out, went to concerts and plays, and visited with other friends, many of whom were also in Onkelehe arrangements.

Otto wasn't a relative by blood, either. While I was the grandson of my mother's mother's first husband, Otto was the brother of her second. In those days I wasn't all that keen on some of my blood connections, so I saw this relationship in a more positive light than some might, an early instance of "chosen family," a concept which has come to take on powerful significance in my life over the years.

Tante Frieda had an actual honest-to-God twinkle in her eye. She was one of the most cheerful people

I've ever known. She loved to laugh, loved to find pleasure in the most mundane things - when you drip filter your coffee, be sure to stir it in the pot once before serving it to mix the flavors - and provided me with a place to bring my army buddies for Kaffee und Kuchen; they also called her Tante Frieda.

Over the years, through Otto's death and my years in Japan and Saudi Arabia and California, I took every opportunity to return to Berlin, usually at Christmas time. Nobody does Christmas as well as the Germans do, in my experience, with their Christmas markets, their choral music in the churches, their Christmas trees with real lighted candles. Frieda lived into her 90s and outlived everybody who once mattered in her life. I felt a strong obligation to come and hang out with her at least for a week or two at Christmas, despite the dreaded Bohnenkönig torture she put us through. Achim and his wife would invite us over for Christmas dinner and Tante Frieda would arrive with a stack of sweet rolls. We had to amuse her by eating them all until we found the one containing a coffee bean, whereupon the finder would be crowned "bean king." Too much dessert, usually following too much food and drink. More fun in retrospect than it was in the moment, I assure you.

Not long before I left Berlin and the army, in April of 1965, the Germans infuriated the Russians by inviting the German parliament, the Bundestag, to hold a session in West Berlin. The Russians retaliated by flying planes low over the city, virtually at eye level past tall buildings. Tante Frieda and I had gone to a concert and were having coffee in the rooftop cafe of the KaDeWe department store in downtown West Berlin and at one point a plane flew so close I could clearly see the pilot. The racket was ear-splitting and Tante Frieda insisted we leave then and there.

That was the first and only time I found her willing to talk about her war experiences. She had been a chemist and was pressured to join the Nazi party. She refused, and was punished by being given double duty as watch during air raids. During one of those raids, crawling from one damaged air raid shelter to another in the neighboring building, she fell and damaged her spine in a way that affected her hearing. She was now nearly deaf, and if she didn't have her hearing aids in couldn't even hear the door bell. Since she didn't have a telephone, the only way we could get her to answer the door if I ever arrived (I'm talking about later years now) unannounced, was to stick a broom handle through the mail slot and hope she would see it.

All these events, the Russian pilots staring me in the face, the broom handles, the bloated feeling from eating too many sweet rolls, the "einmal rühren" (stir once), the twinkle in the eye - all this comes flooding over me today. I don't recall, if I ever knew, what year she was born - it must have been around 1895, or 130 years ago, give or take. I do remember the date, though. It was August 30th.

Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda!

photos are:

1. Tante Frieda in her late teens

2. friends Ed and Bonnie, me, Tante Frieda, and Onkel Otto, 1964-5

3. Tante Frieda, my guess in her 30s or 40s

Bruce Liu in Warsaw and waltzing in Aruba

I have been extraordinarily lucky when it comes to educational opportunity. As I sit here now and look back, I can tick off one after another crucial moments in my personal history when good people stepped in to help me along. Let me give you a sample.

I grew up in Winsted, a small out-of-the-way town at the end of the Naugatuck branch of the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad line - so out-of-the-way, in fact, that the branch shut down the last few stops up to Winsted in 1958.  If you want to take the train to New York, you still can, but you have to drive thirty miles south to Waterbury, then park and hop on for the three-hour trip to Grand Central. Or you can drive the whole distance from Winsted in two. Years later, Winsted was again an "end of the line" kind of town when the Highway 8 freeway was extended to Winsted - and ended there.

But for all the boonies aspect of the town, it had a wonderful public school system, including a private high school the town's kids all went to. It was established by William S. Gilbert, whose name was on all the Gilbert clocks manufactured in Winsted, and the town paid our tuition for us. Included among the faculty was Katherine Morehardt, my junior and senior year English teacher who got us to read The House of Seven Gables. She used to get lost, at times, in talking about the lead character, Hepzibah Pynchon, and we used to make fun of her, as she appealed to our better natures to appreciate the life fate had tossed Hepzibah's way. Our better natures had yet to develop and our teenage imaginations naturally assumed she was talking about herself. I had no idea how in time I would come to be inspired in part by her teaching to become a teacher myself. And when I started blogging, some years ago, to name my blog after that Hepzibah character she had brought to life. She is at the source of my early interest in literature, and when I see what kids nowadays spend their time on, I can't believe she had us reading Shakespeare and Byron and Shelley and Keats and made us aware of Addison and Steele and publications like The Tatler and The Spectator. Not that I remember much about them, but it was an introduction, important in retrospect, to the notion of public literary commentary on social and political affairs.

Maybe even more important was the presence of a woman named Elizabeth Sonier. "Ma" Sonier made the rounds of all the public schools to introduce us to music, a gift from the gods I first got at age 6 in the first grade. Ma Sonier was still my music teacher twelve years later when I graduated, and in the meantime I got to know her as I accompanied the Gilbert High School Glee Club, which she organized and directed. Another stroke of luck was the fact that she was the church organist at the First Church, which was the center of my social life through high school. Her organ lessons led to a job as church organist at the local Methodist Church at age 16. Ma Sonier was also my introduction to orchestral music when she took me and some classmates to Hartford to hear my very first symphony concert. People sometimes marveled at my ability at the organ and I heard lots of sighs of disappointment when I made it clear I would not be striving for a career in music. What they miss is the fact that Ma Sonier gave me an appreciation for music that has gotten me through some rough times and today is among the best of many good reasons for getting out of bed in the morning. I spent the better part of October 2021 rooting for 刘晓禹 (Bruce Liu, if you prefer) of Montreal to win the top prize at the Chopin competition in Warsaw, remembering Ma Sonier all the while. She died in her 90s in the 1990s and probably never knew the full extent of the impact she had enriching my life.

Also at the First Church was a woman named Ruth Ells. She was the adult supervisor of the Pilgrim Youth Fellowship which was the center of my life. She was also a Middlebury College graduate and she pushed me to apply and coached me through the transition to life outside of Winsted.  While at Middlebury I got a chance to spend my junior in Munich, and that opened to me the life of bright lights and big city - all of which I took for granted at the time, and all of which I now see as connected and fostered by good mentoring.

In graduate school at San Francisco State many years later I got a job working with other students of linguistics on a Peace Corps project, writing text books for teachers in Ivorian languages. And even more years later I got a job as assistant to a linguistics professor at Stanford who published a journal in Pidgins and Creoles. Worked my ass off at this job, but learned a ton, which helped solidify my conviction that I belonged to the world of Applied Linguistics. Again, neither of these projects were my primary activities of those years, and it's only in looking back that I realize how lucky I am to have taken a path which would intersect with these interests.

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Want to see something super cute? Have a look at these kids singing Aruba, dushi tera, their national anthem.

You need to know that dushi means beautiful in Papamiento. That's the Creole language spoken in Aruba. Tera you will recognize as tierra, or land, from Spanish and Portuguese. Papamiento is a Dutch/Portuguese/Spanish creole.

I trust that, like me, you appreciate the fact that not every national anthem in the world is somber or, as in the US of A, an unnecessary challenge for the normal voice range. In Aruba they've chosen a waltz! Not like the Australians' unofficial national anthem, "Waltzin' Mathilda," which is actually a march, but a real waltz that makes you want to get up and one-two-three one-two three around the room.

Here's another version, with words in Papamiento to follow along with - and Korean, if that's helpful to you - sans the sentimentality of singing kids.

And, just to round it out, a third version, which takes itself a little more seriously, with the kids again, but this time backed up by a full orchestra and chorus.

And a melody which is now an earworm it's going to take me days to get out of my head.

Hopefully it will help me pick up my feet, at least.

photo credit: beach in Aruba

Ten questions - the transgender question - Part IV

People of good will and optimism try not to see the world in black and white - binary - terms. They prefer to describe much of it in grey - and, whenever possible, in glorious colors.  We disparage the pre-modern catholic penchant for dividing women into virginal saints and "fallen" women, consider cowboy movies where there are good guys in white hats and villains in black hats unsophisticated. We messed up bigtime with the one-drop definition of race we use in America, where a person is white unless they have even the smallest bit of African ancestry in them, whereupon they become black.  And why we continue to operate under that fiction is beyond me.

Not that there aren't binaries. Life and death, off and on, yes and no, something and nothing are binaries. So is male and female, although people on one side of the transgender debate now getting so much attention are calling that into question.  Either one insists on the traditional approach to science, which defines truth as something empirically verifiable, or one buys into the recent postmodern fad of insisting all is flux, and (at least in the sophomoric versions of postmodernism so many people go with) there is no truth, but only one person's "narrative" set against another's.  One side (where I stand, at least for the moment) insists that since more than 98% of people are born clearly male or female, this is enough to make this a binary category. The other side argues that the fact that 1.7% of kids are born intersex suggests that we should see this as a spectrum instead. That means the distinction between sex and gender (once defined as a subjective social category) is lost, and one can use transsexual and transgender interchangeably. This view is now so widespread that, as I mentioned in my previous blog entry, the publication manual of the APA, the American Psychological Association, the gold standard for such things, "has determined that the term 'transsexual' is largely outdated." Read: use transgender for both transgender and transsexual, since the distinction between them is now blurred.

This blurring disturbs me, since I see acting as if there is no reason to distinguish between male and female runs counter to common sense and opens the door to all kinds of bad outcomes. If there is no distinction, what justification to we have for women's sports, for example. Or for keeping women from being thrown in jail with men. How do we keep useful track of crime statistics? Or speak of sexual and emotional maturity? Or acknowledge sexism and the power dynamic in any meaningful way?

But perhaps the biggest problem associated with the transgender debate is that there are so many unknowns and so much misinformation. I'm tempted to call this the age of misinformation, in fact, but let's stick with the importance of gathering accurate information and avoid jumping too hastily into the unknown.

So far, I've come up with ten questions that come to mind.  I make no effort to prioritize or evaluate their importance), and I suspect if one tries, one can come up with many more. But here are my ten, for starters:

1. If young people are going to take puberty blockers, how safe are they? According to the Mayo Clinic, "Puberty blockers are not recommended for children who have not started puberty." At the same time, the consensus is that puberty blockers are a relatively new medical procedure, and we don't have enough information on its long-term effects. We need to consider puberty blockers experimental medicine.

2. At what age should we allow kids to make decisions that are at odds with their parents' decisions? What responsibility do schools and hospitals and other institutions have to convey information they learn from children and adolescents to their parents, and at what age?

3. There is evidence that a lot of young people suffering gender dysphoria commonly suffer co-morbidities simultaneously. A much higher percentage than normal are autistic, for example. Many have suffered physical and mental abuse. Ideally, we should learn where the line is between the gender dysphoria and these other problems, if at all possible, and make sure we are treating the dysphoria on the basis of this reliable information.

4. How seriously should we consider the possibility of "social contagion," the term used to signify the possibility young people are calling themselves trans because they are caught up in a fad. There appears to be strong evidence of this possibility. One can feel dysphoria because of external disapproval or internal disapproval. Arguably, the solution to dysphoria derived from external disapproval is likely to be found through therapy, while a strong argument can be made that dysphoria stemming from internal anxiety should elicit strong emotional and other support.

5. Until recently, many people calling themselves trans would consider themselves gay or lesbian.  Bisexuals once had to endure the suspicion many gays and lesbians had that they were simply not yet ready to accept their same-sex feelings as legitimate, and took the bi- identity as a way of looking less confrontational to straight people. Nowadays there is less resistance to the claim of bisexuality. Is the same thing going on with trans people? Are they people whose claims will be increasingly accepted in time?

6. When a person goes from gay to trans, they change identities. How many of them also change sexuality? If a gay man becomes trans, does he then become heterosexual in sexual orientation? Or does he also switch sexual orientations and become a lesbian? This is not a question that anybody needs to fuss over, obviously, but it would be interesting, if anybody looking for a PhD dissertation topic in LGBT studies wants to take it on. It would tell us something about sexual orientation that we don't yet understand.

7. Advocates of a postmodern insistence that "transgender women are women" have to contend with the argument that this approach is skewing the statistics on male crime.  There is only one study I'm familiar with showing that transgender women, i.e., MtF trans people continue to commit crimes, including sexual crimes at the same rate as non-transgender males, and far more than cis-gender women, but it is contested. This raises the question, at what point, now or in the future, should we start taking these statistics seriously?

8. Feminist movement around the world is credited with raising the consciousness around the fact that men are socialized to think it is natural to commit violence against women - they "just can't help it." Such consciousness has led to laws to protect women as well as a change in social attitudes toward that violence. If the distinction between cisgender women and transgender women is lost, and if male-pattern violence continues, how will we keep track of violence statistics with any accuracy? Will this ever matter? If so, when?

9. In the UK, there has only been one institution devoted to dealing with transgender kids, if I understand the scene correctly. And that is the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) of North London's Tavistock Clinic. It is still in operation, but its work took a hit and it was closed down in 2021 when a suit was filed against it by a woman treated there who had a double mastectomy at age 20, and now regrets transitioning, arguing that GIDS should have taken into consideration that her gender dysphoria could be attributed to her mother's alcoholism, her social isolation as a lesbian and depression as much as to gender dysphoria. The decision to shut Tavistock down became a national scandal and the decision was reversed a year later. But the case has led to greater awareness of the risks of acting in the absence of sufficient data on treatments that must be considered experimental. [For a full history of the case, see Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.] There is at present no end of questions about whether and when treatment by puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery are indicated, and where the lines are between them, The need for clinical  research is urgent.

And finally, one last question. This one is for me personally, and not one to add to the library of general knowledge:

10. Why have so many lesbians and gays and other lefties of a progressive bent climbed on the postmodern bandwagon and taken on the view that one can blur the distinction between sex and gender? It's a distinction we worked hard to make and get the general public to make. Why have they surrendered it so easily? Is it lockstep solidarity with transgender people because they believe we LGBs have to stick together with the Ts? (The Ts that want to claim "I'm a woman if I choose to claim I'm a woman.") If that's the case, shame on them, I say, for making the same cognitive error as the right-wingers, surrendering scientific rigour for political expediency. And it's all so unnecessary, since a man can live as a woman in every way that doesn't involve threatening the safe spaces I believe women have a right to.  I'm with my friend Bill. Ideally, we should create three kinds of spaces: men only, women only, mixed for when separation is unnecessary. Two questions here: Is this even remotely practical? And how many LGB people does this involve, anyway? OK: three questions: Have I got this all wrong? 

As I've said before, there are many approaches one might take to the transgender issue. It is an inherently divisive issue, probably because there's more we don't know about it than there are things we do know.  Most of the time Bill and I can finish each other's sentences. But we've taken very different perspectives on this issue, which fact, when put together with the fact that gays and lesbians generally are sharply divided on this topic as well, is evidence that we're dealing with one of the hottest topics to come down the pike in a long time.   I've taken a legalistic and policy-making approach; Bill prefers a compassionate one. I've been more head; he's been more heart. What we both agree on is that we need to avoid the extremes, such as the far-right Republican view that there should be no government support at all for transgender people. We both find that not just insincere and politically manipulative, but just plain cruel.

I tried to put this topic of how best to approach the transgender issue aside, declaring it's none of my business, and get on with other things. But it's a public policy issue and people's lives and mental health are riding on it, so I believe leaving it to the politicians is not the way to go. It calls for an informed public.

And if you are tempted to say I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, consider the fact that since 2010 the number of girls referred to the Tavistock Clinic has increased by 5000%.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic. 

A Search in Progress (The transgender question - Part III)

My Japanese husband and I got into an argument at dinner the other night over Tokyo's transport system's decision to provide women commuters with women-only cars on the trains during rush hour.  Not a new thing, but the topic of safe spaces for women came up when I shared the blog topic I'd been working on. My spousal unit insisted we should focus on getting men to stop molesting women. I tried to make the point that that's a long-term solution and I'm talking only about a short-term solution, but my husband is not yet fifty and is handicapped by limited powers of logic common to so many youth of today. When we first met, he was in Women's Studies and you might say we've switched places. More miso soup?

Given that men are, what, 100 times more likely to molest women than women men, I'm fully in support of creating safe spaces for women. I say this to establish my take on the transgender issue I've been trying to update my knowledge on the past few weeks. You may remember the story of Lia Thomas, who made women uncomfortable when she removed her pants and showed her male genitalia in a locker room in Kentucky last February. 

And the story only gets better. Thomas beat out all the women on the team and got to take home a trophy that should have been shared with the woman filing the complaint because, she was told, they needed to get the right photo.

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I remember my mother asking me once, when I was in high school, why I wanted to go to mass with my Catholic friends during lent. Religion was still important in those days, and I remember my father telling me that "we didn't believe all those things" the Catholics believed. "What do we believe, Daddy?" my little sister asked him.

The question was probably the first time I was exposed to the notion that belief was not an individual choice but a tribal one. We believed what our parents taught us to believe. And they believed what they were taught in Sunday School. And we lived in the U.S., a country where people lived side by side with people who believed different things. Some of them wrong. Because it was unacceptable to question the importance of religion, and people were encouraged to proclaim their faith and were looked up to when they did so, the ground was made fertile for the notion of multiple truths. Unfortunately, that freedom, along with the freedom to be stupid, has come back recently to bite a chunk out of our backsides.

It's called postmodernism. Once an academic topic for nerds, like the abstract notions of beauty and justice, we find ourselves engaged in a public debate over the way we define truth. "Show me and I'll believe you" people, grounded in the scientific method, want to limit it to the empirically verifiable; people captured by the postmodern notion du jour insist we have no way of establishing truth in the long run and must make do with the beliefs we have created to make sense of the universe, the "narratives." You know, if you're a Euro-American you're likely to believe that Columbus "discovered" America. If you're a native American, 1492 was the beginning of the end of your civilization. There is no neutral, objective place to stand to judge one of these narratives as superior to the other. You simply have to go along with what Kellyanne Conway, early on in the Trump administration, notoriously called "alternative facts." Wikipedia tells us that within four days of her public definition of truth, the sales of George Orwell's 1984 increased 95-fold.

Where once we looked to religious authority (or daddy) to tell us what to believe we now feel perfectly comfortable, many of us, creating our own truths. What is a woman?  To most people on the political left, the kind of people who got behind the cause of gay liberation and rejected the right-wing rejection of gay people, this means getting behind trans people, as well. And that means adopting the postmodern notion that I get to follow any narrative I choose. I become a woman the moment I declare that I am a woman.

That's why Lia Thomas caused all this ruckus back in February. She got to use that women's changing room in Kentucky back then because Biden, our lefty (progressive) president, got behind the changes to Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination, which changes would allow transgender female athletes equal access to women's spaces.

I have to admit that I was, until this transgender issue became front and center, pretty much OK with the notion of taking my cues from my fellow democrats. I live in Berkeley, California, where you don't normally ask people what their political views are. You assume they are democrats unless they tell you otherwise. And they usually don't. You can assume the place is gay-friendly, and nobody has ever asked us to take down the sign in front of our house which reads black lives matter, etc.

But now I find myself wondering how the hell I seem to have gotten in bed with right-wingers. I've made clear that I want to maintain the distinction between sex and gender, for the reasons I just outlined with the Lia Thomas story. This is, to me, not a trivial distinction. At the same time, I don't want to go on record as believing there is no such thing as trans people or that people should not have the right to change their sex and their gender. I just want them to wait until they have reached the age of maturity.

For years to come, we will be trying to explain why the issue of transgender is different from abortion and gay rights, why the left has been sucked into this postmodern nonsense, why when I go to my favorite blogs I find my friends at loggerheads. Richard Dawkins, for example, one of my favorite atheists, has come out strongly against this postmodern truth nonsense. But two other atheist bloggers, Stephen Woodford and Forrest Valkai, jump all over him for it, Valkai even taking the view that gender (meaning "sex") is an inner feeling that one discovers in time. And Woodford, was once himself bounced out of some organization for being "transphobic" before he was let back in. I won't leave links to these many discussions, because I want to not go off on even more tangents, and you can find them easily. J.K. Rowling, like Dawkins, has made strong statements in favor of old fashioned scientific definitions and against postmodern fuzziness, and she now needs bodyguards for her efforts.

In tracking down who's who on both sides - let's call them the distinction makers like Dawkins and Rowling on one side and the transactivist postmodernists on the other - I find myself over and over again in bed with what to me is definitely the wrong crowd. Matt Walsh, for example, a Tennessee conservative, ardently opposed to gay rights, a man the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a "peddlar of fear and disinformation," has made a film entitled "What is a Woman?" I listen to him and find myself nodding in agreement on the trans issue.  How did this happen?

Where this becomes a really important question is when it comes to the issue of "gender-affirming care." Until I started my recent reading, I would nod in agreement with any trans activist insisting that trans youngsters should get all the support they possibly can. They should not have to face hostile therapists trying to talk them out of their trans identities. But then I read of the Tavistock Center, Britain's only real support center for trans youth, being closed down because they were "too quick" to provide blockers and hormones, according to the National Health Service, and I have to push pause. Obviously, there's more to this story than what is found on the surface.

The radicals among the trans activists are no longer the predictable lefties of yesteryear. They line up with their postmodern "I am what I say I am" stance and label their opposition "TERFs" - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Bad guys, allegedly. But the more I learn about these bad guys, the more I identify with them. I'm talking about people like Posie Parker, aka Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshul, a British anti-transgender rights activist and founder of the organization Standing for Women. Her simple, once obvious, definition of a woman as an "adult human female" got her in trouble with the radical trans activists and secured her a place on Tucker Carlson (and how's that for disgusting bedfellows?)

Others in this group include Lisa Selin Davis, who had a daughter who was a tomboy. Pressured to come out as trans, the daughter had to convince her mother that she simply liked rough housing and was perfectly happy being a girl. That led to Davis' book Tomboy.

Another is Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and the title says it all, as does The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls by Kara Densky.

Another major text in this genre is Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

This is not an exhaustive list. I had no idea at the start of all this that there was so much stuff to ponder, so many publications, so many nuanced views, and that it has been going on not for just the past couple of years, but for decades now. I'm a real johnny-come-lately to this party.

I don't know where the transgender debates are headed, whether progressives on the left will come to believe they've been duped, as I currently believe they are, at present. Whether I'll turn out to have thrown my lot in with the wrong crowd when I insist that kids should not be making decisions that involve medical alterations to healthy bodies.

I am no longer totally in the dark on this topic, but I've by no means reached the place where I have total confidence I've got a handle on it, either. There is much that I haven't taken up here, such as the fact we've been talking more about trans women, previously known as male-to-female people than about trans (female-to-male) men. And the fact that I've approached things more from a legalistic, or policy-making perspective and dwelt on the exceptional cases rather than the more common issues facing trans people. But I trust others will compensate for my lack of authority and adequacy of coverage.

This is, for me, a search for understanding in progress. Not finished by any means, but I've got to get on to other things.

Be kind to trans people. They've got a lot of shit to deal with.

Approaching the transgender question: Part II (still linguistic, mostly)

I stated publicly the other day that I think the distinction between sex and gender is not only a useful one, but a logical linguistic one: sex has to do with the body parts and gender with the roles one plays in society. I believe that while doctors can call the sex wrong at times (an infinitely small number of times, but the number shouldn't matter) one should know one's sex if faced with a cancer of the uterus diagnosis. As for gender, like with any other socially-constructed category, one needs to show flexibility. When things get political, I choose to reflect the view of most progressives who say, "I don't tell you whether you are trans or not; you tell me and I'll go along with you and try my best to support the way you want to live in the world." I can't repeat often enough that I think the goal in any discussion, whether you and others see you as an insider to the topic or whether you're just trying to become more informed on the issue so you can vote sensibly on issues affecting trans people, is how can we first do no harm, and second, make the lives of people suffering from gender dysphoria easier?

Note that I'm using the word "trans" here, and some people find that archaic and insist I should be saying "transgender." But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I'll get to that directly.

I'm trying to tread softly here and acknowledge that I'm approaching this question as an amateur. I claim absolutely no expertise and tell myself I've got far more to learn than I have useful stuff to share. But I also believe it's useful to think out loud and let the world come down on you for your ignorance. It's selfish, but it's the best single way to learn things I know. I insisted when I was still in the classroom that there are no bad questions, and being mistaken is nothing to be ashamed of.  Have at me with criticism for speaking too soon. If that's how you feel, you're quite likely to be right. I should probably have waited till I had more information to come forward with these questions. My only response is, "I don't have a lot of time left. People in my circle are dropping like flies. I have to take this learning route."

In the past few days I've been listening to a number of interviews with people who have been dealing with the transgender movement for many years and learning something about the extent of the literature out there. There is Janice Raymond's book The Transsexual Empire, which came out in 1979 and that's a lifetime ago. John Money and Richard Green's Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, the first medical textbook to be published on gender dysphoria was published a whole decade before that, in 1969. There is Riki Wilchins' Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, 2015, Kara Dansky's The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, 2021. Then there is Lierre Keith and her conviction that "(T)here's no such thing as a "transwoman." They are men. That's it. Men. And they don't belong in our word for ourselves or in our spaces."

And, please note, this is not a list compiled after doing a careful search of the literature; it's a sample I picked up from listening to just one trans person with strong views that differ from mine, somebody who uses "transgender" where I would advocate the use of "transsexual," and rolls her eyes at us pedants who still bang on about the distinction. Her name is Lily Alexandre and I know nothing about her other than that she has a vlog which apparently brings her $1,637/month. As I say, I have no idea how to judge the value of what she has to say other than that she sneers where I would expect her to argue.

And that brings me to my point. How are we to deal with people who find your views offensive? Do we back out of the dialogue? Nobody wants to talk with people who roll their eyes at your ignorance or naivete.  I'm still smarting at the first trans person I engaged with who insisted gay men were their biggest enemy because they were trying to hold trans people back from becoming trans. The linguistic can get political at surprising speed.

I remember the first time I called a heterosexual friend a heterosexual. He rolled his eyes. "What do we need that word for?" he asked. The honest answer is we didn't need it back in the day when the universal social attitude was "We don't have people like that." That was Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, referring to gay people. If you don't have gay people, homosexuals, you have no need of the word heterosexual to contrast them with. Likewise, these days, I've seen more than one friend roll their eyes at the word "cisgender." Didn't need the word before transgenderism became the hot topic it has recently become. Before people started fighting over whether they should be used as a third person singular pronoun or whether people got to tell you what pronouns they wanted you to use when referring to them.

Here's my dilemma. I don't know this Lily Alexandre person and don't expect to meet her (them? - I don't know which pronoun she/they prefer(s).) What do I say to her if she uses transgender where I would prefer transsexual? Or, even worse, if she disparages my use of transsexual. My suggestion is we should both be allowed to continue to work within the framework of our own arguments.

But then that takes us to another question. She/they is/are a transgendered (transsexual?) person. Does that give them more rights? A stronger leg to stand on morally? Do I not get to call her on what I think is a linguistic issue (she's not a linguist.) I grant you that linguists are not a disparaged category, at least as far as I know, and racism and sexism only has meaning when it involves a person from the more privileged class coming down on a person from the less privileged class. Does that apply here?

So much more work to do. I'm not sure we've even gotten this plane off the ground yet. Something tells me we're still working on the checklist before even starting the engines.

Just one thing before I leave. I'm being too cute in pretending I have trouble with the she/they choice. I don't. I've already accepted that they should be used these days for the third person singular. So much smoother than "he or she."  I made that decision back in the day when I first read that little girls, when asked to guess who the doctor was in a photo, almost always pointed to a man. I understand, on a practical level, the reason behind getting rid of the generic masculine - using he, as in Everybody should bring his own pencil to the test.

Everybody should bring his own bra, as well.

Keeping language apart from politics may be a lofty goal, but it's a battle nobody can win, in the end.

Getting a grasp on the transgender question - Part I: Language Usage

 L stands for people who identify as Lesbian, G for gay, B for Bisexual and T for transsexual or transgender people. Most of the time, when I talk to LGBT people, I talk to L and G people.  Many of them have had sex with persons of the opposite sex at some point in their lives and that would no doubt make others think of them as B people. In my experience, most were not. Not really. They were L or G people not yet ready to accept themselves as L or G people and trying to "go straight" at the time. I've met very few mature adults who identify themselves as B.  That's totally out of sync with the Gallup claim that over half of LGBT people identify as bi, and only underlines the fact that my personal sample is anything but a sample of the LGBT community; it's a function of the people I hang out with. I am aware that when I make generalizations about any group of people on the basis of their ethnicity or race or sexual persuasion, I am not describing them so much as I am revealing to the world the limitations of my own experience with it. Short of carefully constructed social science data collection, most of these generalizations are based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence.

But I'm still curious about these B-identified people.  Are they "really" B?  Or are they using the term as a mask?  And given the current state of the way we approach things in this country, can we ever trust the answers we might get?  Also, there is a whole set of more useful questions one might ask, if one is seeking to understand sexuality, such as "Did you always identify as L or G or did you once identify as B? If you are B is does your sex interest depend on the individual? The opportunity? 

We already know this applies to L and G as well. Kinsey generated a scale from Kinsey 1 (no interest in the same sex) to Kinsey 6 (interest only in the same sex). It's hard to be precise when dealing with such things as emotions, the sex drive, and in the way our environment has led us to identify ourselves and others sexually.

I've been trying to get my head around this newfound fascination with the world of T. And with the whole notion of identity and how we evaluate self-report data. I am convinced that in questions of sexuality, as with any other American fascination, getting clarity is likely to be beyond reach. Let me elaborate, using the current fascination with the political football that is transgender as a jumping-off place.

The first time I got into a discussion with a T-identified person it didn't go well. They were furious over the kind of questions I was asking. With good reason, no doubt. Naive questions can be charming, like when my niece - four years old at the time - crawled up in the lap of a black friend of mine and asked him, "How come your skin is brown?" But when one adult asks another, "How do you know you are gay, or trans?" the gay or trans person can be expected to think to themselves, "What rock did you just crawl out from under? Where the hell have you been all these years?"

What really pissed them off, though, was the revelation that I was coming from a starting point on the trans question that many trans people find really hard to take. I spent so many years coming to terms with being gay and have fought all my life trying to convince the world that gay men ought to be embraced regardless of how masculine or feminine they presented themselves as. And ditto for women. Whether homosexuality is inborn or nurtured later in life, we should be able to walk and talk in ways that come naturally to us without being considered some sort of freak. Nelly queens and butch lesbians have as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as anybody else, in my book. That's where I was coming from and I was convinced my convictions were established on a solid amount of life experience and therefore unassailable.

"If you find yourself waving your hands or crossing your legs in a way society associates with feminine behavior - if you are a man - and people look at you funny, recognize that it's society's problem, not yours," I would preach to my juniors in the LGBT world. "Don't go buying into the notion that you are 'a woman born into the wrong body.' That only gives bigots fuel for their fire. Stand your ground. Don't surrender your right to be whatever you are to another person."

I was what my T friend would tell me is a member of a class of T people's worst enemies: gay men. A man insisting that his experience with sexuality was universal. No better than the most arrogant and narrow kind of heterosexual, the kind likely to persuade your parents to lock you up in a mind-fuck Jesus reeducation camp to make you straight.

In Japan, in alternating semesters, I ran seminars on "liberation theory." The goal was to try to see if there was a common goal among the social movements around the world demanding political liberation, women's liberation, and gay liberation. And note, in passing, I'm talking about a time before the latter two got recast as "feminist movement" and "LGBT rights," respectively.  It was an uphill climb, since "feminism," many of my highly privileged students, both men and women, had decided, was a bad word, referring to those loud aggressive women who "called too much attention to themselves." And lesbians and gays were people suffering from gender dysphoria. I found myself seriously challenged, since I held the view that good teaching involved not dictating meaning and punishing people who thought differently from myself, but getting them to come around to my way of thinking through intellectual persuasion.  I don't know how far I got in creating feminists. With the gay liberation module, I cheated. I bypassed the intellectual persuasion bit and used emotion. I showed the documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk." By the end of the screening, they were ready to accept that not all Ls and Gs are suffering from gender dysphoria. Many, they came to see, were "bien dans sa peau" as the French say: they "fit quite comfortably in their own skin," and simply want to be left to live a life free from discrimination and rejection.

Unfortunately, I still had a ways to go myself. While it's very much the case that lot of Ls and Gs need to get out from under the view that social rejection of them is proof that they were born in the wrong bodies - or otherwise need to "go straight," that does not mean gender dysphoria is not a real thing. Some dysphoria stems from bullying by people who simply need to shut up and mind their own business. These people you should ignore and not let them run your life. But there is also dysphoria that stems from a powerful inner conviction that life is expecting you to play from a stacked deck.  And are tortured by that expectation and deserve to be helped to get around it.

The line between inappropriate external pressure to think of yourself as incorrectly labeled by the doctor who birthed you and the legitimate conviction that you were incorrectly labeled is probably never going to be easy to find. We will, at least for the forseeable future, always have to do the best we can. My view is that, unless or until a time comes when we find a better way to proceed, we should simply ask the person involved to tell us what sex they want to identify with, embrace it and let them live life accordingly.

Before LGBT people came to find general acceptance in America, we had to listen to bible-thumpers tell us being gay was nothing more than a bad choice. Forgive me, but this gives me reason to think that here, too, this time with the Ts among us, the only decent response to such horse pucky is, "You don't tell me who I am; I tell you. Now piss off."

Unfortunately,  tragically, this country is now suffering from an outbreak of something on the spectrum between a simple outbreak of occasional authoritarianism and outright fascism. And by fascism, I mean, among other things, the twisting of facts for political gain. Roe v. Wade has been reversed, Republicans are trying to keep black Americans from voting because we all know they are very likely to vote Democratic, kids with same-sex parents are being told they cannot reveal that fact in many states when their teachers ask them to talk about their family lives, and in some places even a single parent complaint can lead to a book being removed from a school library. These are ugly times, politically. And T people are the latest pawns on the right-wing chess board.

OK. Buckle up. The next part is probably going to lose me some friends. Because I identify as a sociolinguist and I understand that to mean that I see word meanings as following the actual use of language in society, and not some idealized Language Academy or Dictionary Authority word definition, here's where I run into trouble: 

The T in LGBT stands simultaneously for "transsexual" and "transgender." I see those as two separate things: transsexual as somebody who moves, or intends to move from one physical sex to another, by means of things like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery; and transgender as somebody who sees themselves as no longer willing to play the social roles their society assigns their sex to play and asks you to stop using one set of pronouns and start using the opposite ones. Transsexual, I understand to be a biological category; transgender, a social category. The former as scientifically, objectively defined, the latter as socially, conventionally, subjectively defined. Or, to put it another way, your gender is what you and the rest of the world decide to call yourself, your sex is defined by things that can be measured by such things as chromosomes, gametocytes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. The distinction in recent times has become blurred by usage, though, and now we read that "According to the APA Style guide, the term "transsexual" is largely outdated...." 

What? Say again?  That means to me only that the APA is buying into the blurring of the two terms.  Pay no attention to what you see, it says. Don't believe your lying eyes. The doctor may have called me a girl because he couldn't see the real me, but I tell you who I am; you don't tell me. It's not only my "gender" that is on a spectrum; so is my "sex."

Remember, I insist that people who identify as "transexual" or "transgendered" deserve to be treated with respect and the same degree of affection one would expect to give those who don't. But I find the political assertion that things can be whatever you say they are makes me uncomfortable because it lines up with those on the far right who speak of alternate facts. 

That, of course, just raises the question, "If that's the case, what do you care? Why are you making such a big deal of this?" The answer is I don't like people who make things unnecessarily muddy. What's called for here is a nuanced appreciation of the distinction between fact and fiction. The postmodern assertion that things are no more than what any person's narrative takes them to be is a big part of the current mess we're in, where we are being led to believe that there is a hidden cabal of people out to run the world. No. Distinctions matter. A proto-fascist president may call himself president and insist Biden stole the election. But that's a fiction. Which, in this case, is a lie.  Confusing transsexual and transgendered may be less consequential, but it's also not an innocent misuse of language.

You see my problem as a sociolinguist. My dilemma. On the one hand I want to use language the way the world actually uses language, and not the way some outside authority thinks it should be used. On the other hand, I want to draw a line when people call a liar a president. And when people are (in my view) too lazy to make meaningful distinctions. I'm a conservative in the sense that I want people to say "fewer people" and not "less people" and use the apostrophe-s for the possessive, and not for making nouns plural.

Am I wrong to see the transsexual/transgendered distinction in this light? Note that I'm hardly alone in this. Have a look at two eggheads I normally give a lot of credence to tearing down Richard Dawkins for saying essentially the same thing I just did - which, given his cred as a world-class biologist - should carry a lot more weight. Shame on these guys and their ad hominem attack on one of the great thinkers of our age.

We need to get this linguistic roadkill out of the road so we can get to the really important stuff of the transgender issue - how to help people transition if they need to and how to stop passing bad laws that get in their way.

But more on that later.

I'll stop here for now.

P.S. No high C in Miserere

I need to add a P.S. to that blog entry from a couple days ago - three days ago, since I'm making an effort at fixing up sloppy facts here. The one about Allegri's Miserere.

Two errors in that piece. I won't try to label them as major or trivial. I'll leave that up to you.

My friend Margaret pointed out to me that my reference to Americans going from good guys to bad guys between the time they/we wrote that beautiful preamble to the Constitution (We the People) and the time they/we established the institution of slavery is all wrong. It's not that we fell off the wagon, as we seem to be doing these days in tossing democracy into the toilet and allowing full-blown idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene - to name just one - to run the government. That's historically inaccurate. We started slavery well before our sacred document, the Constitution, came into being, and there are apologists today still banging on about how lucky those Africans were to be brought from the dark continent into the light where they were able to learn to read and write and become astrophysicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson. The truth is the collective "we" has always been made up of saints and sinners, brilliant astrophysicists and Marjorie-type people. That's the nature of a collective; it's always a mixed bag.

The second misrepresentation of the facts that I spread with that piece was that Pope Urban forbade the singing of the Miserere in any place other than the Sistine Chapel and that Mozart foiled the dictat and made corrections. All made-up, apparently.

At least if this other YouTube video is correct. And my guess is it probably is.

Without half trying, I was able to come up with two inaccuracies in one piece. I take that as a metaphor of the times. In the first case, I need a spanking for not proofing my draft of a blog piece before posting. If I had read it carefully, I could have caught the historical blooper.

In the second case, no spanking please. I was simply repeating an error, like so many urban legends flying around these days, that is so prevalent in the common consciousness as to be almost true.

Christ walked on water. Allegri wrote that high C into his Miserere in 1640.  Factual facts or alternative facts? Does it matter that the high C was written by somebody else and added only in the 19th Century? Does it matter that the boy from Galilee never actually walked on water or raised folk from the dead? In the first case, that high C makes people believe there are such things as angels, and in the second that "death hath no sting."

And that raises the question of how important the difference is between truth and lies. Are lies OK if they are white? And if they make people feel better? Are people who are sticklers for historical and other accuracy nothing more than old bores with no imagination and no ability to enjoy flights of fancy?

I come from a German Lutheran tradition, a tradition of sticklers. You will remember that Frederick the Great, you know that marvelously progressive Prussian monarch, who liked to hang out (and allegedly bed, at times) with the boys in uniform and walk the garden paths at Sans Souci with the deist Voltaire, wanted the Protestants of his kingdom to be a united force when they went into battle against the Catholic Austrians (or at least that's the story I've been told), so he made the Calvinists and the Lutherans merge into a single new church henceforth to be called the German Evangelical Church (which it is still called today = "evangelisch" is German for "protestant" and the English "evangelical" is "evangelikal" in German.)

And - just checked - that "fact," that it was Freddie the Great, it turns out, is wrong. It wasn't Freddie the Great, the man's man (no women at our dining table or in our beds) king that united the churches, but two Freddies after him, Friedrich Wilhelm III. Glad to have that muddle cleared up.

But that's a digression. The point I was going for is that a whole bunch of Lutherans couldn't stand the idea of going to church with people who denied that Christ was "really present" in the communion host, but just "spiritually present" as the Calvinists claimed. And not, as the Catholics insisted, that the wafer and the wine became the "actual" body and blood of their saviour, but that he came in the flesh "in, with and under" the elements.

Anyway, the quarrel with the Calvinists and the forced union of churches led a whole bunch of righteous Lutherans to migrate to America where they ultimately formed the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and to this day refuse to allow Calvinists or other Christians to come to the communion rail. Some of them. Most Lutherans have now put that conviction aside. But don't miss my point. "Truth" and "Accuracy" matters.  And even if you can't agree on what exactly that is, is it a single angel dancing on the head of that pin or an infinite number of them, you can fight to the death over it.

Which is in part why I write P.S. entries to blogs a few days after they go public. It's part of my tradition to bang on over accuracy.

Miserere mei

Somebody asked me the other day how I could identify as a Christian, after all the horror and misery the Christians have inflicted on the world, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the patriarchal abuse and reduction of women to virgins and sluts, the twisting of the healthy human sexual drive into a suicide-provoking homophobia, and on and on.

That should tell you something about the kind of people I hang out with. Lots of LGBT people with a searing laser-beamed loathing of the church, at least the authoritarian wings of it like the traditional Catholic Church, the Mormons, the bible-thumping born-agains and the rest. Lots of professed atheists and agnostics who find Christianity and religion in general somewhere on the spectrum between oppressive and no longer relevant (thank God - pun intended).

I don't defend doctrinal Christianity. I am not a theist and share the view that theology is an eccentric cousin of philosophy, a form of poetry. And like poetry, sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes tacky and off-putting, sometimes inspiring. But I usually try to avoid taking on theological issues these days, preferring to identify myself simply as a non-religious Christian. A "cultural" Christian. Someone who grew up surrounded by Christian people with their Christian narratives and ways of structuring a moral universe, but who ultimately found, as one sometimes does with Japanese ways of presenting gifts, that the container can hold greater interest than what is contained within.

I am intimately familiar with the question (and the people who ask it), "Do you believe in God?" Since  "believe" covers the territory of both "think, suppose, trust to be true" and "have a positive opinion of" it strikes me as the wrong question. The question should be, "Do you believe that there is a God" and should immediately be followed by questions probing exactly what that means. Do you have a single unseen identity in mind? Does it have gender and other human characteristics, like an interest in whether one writes with the left or right hand or thinks that race and gender are consequential?

What people usually mean by the question, though, is "Are you a member of my tribe?"  Do you believe in the God that we Lutherans, Calvinists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses have come up with? Or do you buy into the Roman Catholic or Greek, Russian, Macedonian, Serbian or other of the seventeen autocephalous Eastern Orthodox communities' claims that their pope, patriarch, or other male head has been given the keys to heaven and therefore speaks for this deity?  "Do you believe in God" is not a simple question.

I usually cut through the complexity and answer no. And that tends to put me on the spectrum that runs from hostility to disappointment and sadness among people who are inclined to answer yes.

I wish that were not the case. The Christians of the world are no longer the bad guys they became for a bunch of centuries after climbing onto Constantine's bandwagon and going mainstream. It is a truism that power corrupts.  You know, the way that Americans, similarly, went from good guys to bad guys between the time they wrote that wonderful We The People thing and the time they began the slave trade, blamed the Spanish for the destruction of the Battleship U.S.S. Maine to take Cuba and the Philippines away from Spain and evolved a national morality in which lying and dying for empire became a virtue. And the way the German speaking world went astray after producing Bach and Mozart. And the way Jewish Israelis are systematically trashing the rights of Palestinians who live among them. Humans are so hopelessly corruptible sometimes.  These days, except for those Christians who can't tell the difference between religion and power politics of the authoritarian right, most Christians are lovely people. Kindly. Generous. Charitable. The kind of people you want to find common ground with.

So I enjoy engaging in that pursuit. Tell me you're a Christian and my response will be, "Great." And I will move the conversation, as best I can, to topics like how can we make the world a better place for widows and orphans and the undereducated and the poor. I know somewhere in the Christian heart there is a familiarity with the Sermon on the Mount and Christ's focus on helping the poor. And I know they are proud of the material things of cultural Christianity I too am glad to call part of my cultural heritage. I didn't crow when Notre Dame burned; I cried.

I listen to the debates between Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans over who's reading Luther's Small and Large Catechisms the right way and who needs to be excluded from the communion table, and the assertions by the Sedevacantists that Pope Francis and all the popes since Pius XII are illegitimate popes and I marvel at the fact that the medieval debates over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin continue unabated today. Human folly can be downright entertaining, if you look at it just right. And no one has farther to fall than those with the arrogance to proclaim themselves spokespersons for an unseen Almighty creative force of nature embodied in a historical son of a Galilean carpenter who hung out with his fishermen buddies some twenty centuries back, walked on water (no idea why he needed to) and brought dead people, including himself, back to life.

Christianity has two parents, one Hebrew-speaking, one Greek. But equally important is the fact that it was adopted by European foster parents when the Hebrew parent decided they had gotten too big for their britches and the Greek parent couldn't keep them down on the farm any longer.  Anybody who, like me, sees themselves as a cultural Christian also sees themselves as a lucky inheritor of the cultural spin-offs of this Europeanized Jew - the small mundane stuff like the habit of chopping down fir trees at Christmas and bringing them inside and decorating them with candles and colorful balls, and the loftier stuff like the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, stained glass windows and mighty pipe organs, and the music of Bach and Mozart and Handel.

Have a listen to this lovely boys' choir singing Gregorio Allegri's Miserere Mei from 1630. Tell me you don't believe in angels when you hear that kid hit the high C.

That's cultural Christianity, and it belongs to all of us, whether or not we were raised in the Christian religious faith. It doesn't even belong exclusively to Europeans anymore, since there are Japanese, Brazilians, Africans and, at least theoretically, sopranos from Pago Pago who can make that exquisite pure sound, two Cs above middle C, with a bit of practice.

Here are the words in Latin, and Elizabethan English, if you want to hum along...

Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.

According unto the multitude of Thy tender mercies remove my transgressions.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquities, and cleanse me from my sin.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.

I knowingly confess my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris.

Against Thee only have I sinned, and done evil before Thee: that they may be justified in Thy sayings, and might they overcome when I am judged.

Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.

But behold, I was formed in iniquity: and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi.

Behold, Thou desirest truth in my innermost being: and shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly.
Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, make me whiter than snow.
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliata.

Open my ears and make me hear of joy and gladness: and my bones that have been humbled shall rejoice.
Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis: et omnes iniquitates meas dele.

Turn away Thy face from my sins: and remember not all my misdeeds.
Cor mundum crea in me, Deus: et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.

Create in me a clean heart, O God: and make anew a righteous spirit within my body.
Ne proiicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me.

Do not cast me away from Thy presence: and take not Thy holy spirit from me.
Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me.

Restore unto me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Docebo iniquos vias tuas: et impii ad te convertentur.

I will teach those that are unjust Thy ways: and sinners shall be converted unto Thee.
Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae: et exsultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam.

Deliver me from blood, O God, the God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing of Thy righteousness.
Domine, labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.

O Lord, open my lips: and my mouth shall spring forth Thy praise.
Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique: holocaustis non delectaberis.

For Thou desirest no sacrifice, where others would: with burnt offerings Thou wilt not be delighted.
Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum, et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.

Sacrifices of God are broken spirits: dejected and contrite hearts, O God, Thou wilt not despise.
Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Ierusalem.

Deal favorably, O Lord, in Thy good pleasure unto Zion: build Thou the walls of Jerusalem.
Tunc acceptabis sacrificium justitiae, oblationes, et holocausta: tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos.

Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with small and large burnt offerings: then shall they lay calves upon your altar.

Note, if you will, how civilization has progressed since the time when the pope Urban (as opposed to Pope Rural?) of the Catholics could excommunicate anyone for transcribing those words and music, so enamoured was he at the beauty of the piece. He wanted, in hilarious Christian charitable irony, to keep the piece for himself.

Mozart is said to have followed Pope Urban's dictat upon hearing Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, the only place Urban would allow it to be performed. But only until he got home to Austria, whereupon he reproduced the whole thing from memory. And made corrections.

We have inherited this wonderful heritage. My view is that we should treasure it - Allegri's Miserere Mei and the notion of being sprinkled with hyssop and made whiter than snow,  Mozart's phenomenal recall and musical skill, the Lutheran tight-asses from Wisconsin, the boys they used to make eunuchs out of, the whole shebang.

Cultural Christianity belongs to us all.