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.