Once dreams come true, they’re no longer dreams. Keep on dreaming!

SO all this bill does is guarantee employers docile and low paid workers, with all of the hoops and fines and rigamarole for Latino immigrants, nothing for LGBT and more H1-B visas to undercut domestic wages. If you like the amount of women and non-Asian people of color in the STEM (Science, Tech, Engr and Math) fields, then by all means, let’s undercut any attraction these fields would offer by importing a captive, vulnerable workforce fleeing poverty.

These terrorists in Washington hate Americans for our freedoms.

One instance of this failure to respect boundaries on the part of trans fetishists is the treatment of Bradley Manning. Unwilling to accept Manning’s own wishes as expressed on his support group’s website:

http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/feminist-trans-advocates-should-support-bradley-manning

“Everything we know from Bradley Manning’s friends, family, and legal defense team, is that he wishes to be referred to as Brad or Bradley until he’s able to get to the next stage of his life. Bradley has indicated that he’s not interested in publicly addressing this issue.” -Bradley Manning Support Network. July 24, 2012

Many trans folks and their supporters insist upon prioritizing their need for self affirmation over the stated desire of another individual to express his own identity.

Hating to go all binary on you (how DO you ever deal with the Marxist dialectic or the subject/object dichotomy?) but for most all gay men, being gay centers around the penis, the biological aspects of being male. The notion that this widely held perspective can, similar to Manning’s stated desires, be blown through by third parties to be recrafted in terms favorable to their view of gender is simply a political non starter.

While there are social aspects to the construction of gender, the penis, having, having had and knowing what that is like, is central and for most men and gay men it is essential in defining what maleness is. This does not mean that people don’t get to define themselves as male for their own terms, but one had better be prepared if one represents as male to a gay man but is not packing a rod.

I am sure that is very frustrating to trans men, but frustration is no license to reconceptualize others in ways that don’t reflect others’ reality.

But the main point of identity politics is not to shed light on reality to help us understand and change our environment, rather it offers proponents a cudgel to wield in order to bolster their previously held positions.

To wit, another play party this past winter, I’m feeding it to porn talent half my age who is providing expert oral talent, and a group comes to play next to us. One participant has a pussy and titties, nice ones. They play, we play, and this individual’s moaning is several registers above anything else in the room. As one with a sordid bisexual history, that’s no biggie to me.

After everyone wraps up, I tell this individual that it is nice to see some diversity in the space. He asks me what I mean, I say gender diversity, and he affords himself a gotcha moment where he goes on a lecture about what gender is and what it is not. “I am male, this is a male space, there is no diversity.” Uh, huh, yeah, right.

The only way that “it’s all good” works is if boundaries and self determination are respected across the board and totalizing theories are not imposed by a minority upon a majority, especially when those theories don’t describe reality to anyone but their ardent proponents.

Perhaps the aversion to binary thinking blurs the barrier between subject and object and proponents of gender as be-all and end-all really don’t give a shit about anyone else?

I went into Contact wanting to be thrilled, I came out of it underwhelmed. Star Trek has been far more useful to me over the decades.

If you’re designing theory to be debated within the academy, then burn yourself out in the echo chamber.

But once it ends up on the real world as actionable, then it becomes relevant to my reality and has to heft its own freight.

You’re suggesting a theory as complex, with as many sharp moving parts as the Contact device that will produce as improbable and indeterminate outcomes.

An elegant queer theory would not have to so many special cases and would not need to shoehorn so much of other peoples’ realities into itself in order to square the circle.

We are told that LGBT struggles are united because we are all hated for the same reasons. True as that might be, that view offers no coherent theory on why there are gay men, why there are lesbians, why people are bisexual and why people are transgender. Similar to Marxism, it fails as an emancipatory basis because it defines people in terms of the “oppressor,” terms unfavorable to emancipation.

In previous successful liberation struggles, India, South Africa, a consciousness raising movement was critical. In those cases, the majority was raising its consciousness to resist colonization. But what I think we’re seeing with the emergence of the cult of gender theory is a similar coming of age, consciousness raising. But instead of a majority raising consciousness, a minority of a minority is coming of age. The only difference here is that the minority-minority is attempting to redefine the consciousness of the majority-minority in its own terms in order to strengthen its hand as it raises its own consciousness.

To my mind, the attempted dominance of gender theory in queer theory represents a small minority of folks for whom gender is very important attempting to enforce a gender-centric view on the majority who fall at the top of the gender bell curve.

I mean, the twisted interpretations of what maleness and masculinity is that I’ve heard from some trans folks and gender theorists, not to mention the looks in their eyes when they’re at play parties and they see the real equipment throbbing and squirting betrays a disconnect from native males.

Whatever works for them is fine with me for them, but outside of their sphere, there will be resistance unless there is respect and cooperation demonstrated as allies should.

This is part of a larger phenomenon that I call activist goggles or maybe in this case theoretician goggles, where people very close to and invested in a narrow issue presume that everyone sees the world in their terms and rages against them for having not and ignores the needs of other legitimate stakeholders in moving their narrow agenda and rages when called on that too.

But isn’t the whole point of identity politics so that nobody ever has to go outside of their comfort zone to buy people into their politics?

Are you suggesting that it is worth the cost to a theory to incorporating the exception to the general case at the expense of the accuracy of the theory describing the accurate case?

The point of the hopelessly muddled Contact, aside from the absurdity of a backup trillion dollar machine being constructed and hid behind the curtain, was that perception was hopelessly subjective and personal, the only evidence was that there was time for perception, no common ground on what was perceived.

There is no possibility for one grand unified theory of queer. The problem space is too complex, too contradicted.

If a theory cannot be grasped by the people it is supposed to describe, if the theory cannot be used by them to describe the reality they face, and if the theory manages to meet those tests if it cannot be used to change the world, then that theory needs work. I suggest that most lesbians and gays cannot use gender theory to grasp our reality.

Academic parlour games such as these are what they are and nothing more, insider baseball. The idea that non-binary gender has anything to do theoretically with lesbians and gays other than defining us all in negative terms relative to the the phobes truly strains credibility.

This is a theoretical quibble, not a civil rights quibble. Everyone is entitled to full civil rights to live their lives as they would. Nobody is entitled to recast theory onto other people and insist that a theory that does not speak to their experience is relevant to their reality.

The only way that trans folks can expect for folks to honor their autonomy to chart their own course, to define their own existence on their terms is for that tolerance to be reciprocated and for the areas of contradiction to be negotiated cooperatively and collaborative as allies should.

ce·leb·ri·ty
/səˈlebrətē/
Noun

A famous person.
The state of being well known: “his prestige and celebrity grew”.

Synonyms
fame – renown – reputation – repute – notability – glory

Of course there are multiple genders but they are rare and don’t go far to describe reality. Their rareness likewise complicates their elegant integration into other theories.

There is no grand unified theory of queer, just multiple disjoint sets, some of which overlap, some of which don’t.

The fact that the ‘phobes hate us for the same reason is their error, no basis for anything but the most reactionary and broad/shallow points of unity, nothing aspirational and affirmative.

Deviants deviate.

We are deviants.

We deviants deviate from the norm.

Most folks, gay and straight fall, into the standard deviations around the top of the bell curve on gender expression.

Deviating from the norm is great, but that does not change everyone else’s reality for everyone else.

Yes, we deviate from the norm and that is okay.

Our liberation will not force us to look like the norm.

I don’t claim to represent anyone.

I am sorry if your self-perception is so fragile that suggestions of alternative views demolishes it.

Too many structured play dates where you never had to play with kids you don’t like, eh?

How again is demanding full representation of the full diversity of the queer communities applying a litmus test?

I’m all for contradictions in theories so long as the theories are actually deployed only to the extent to which the ambiguities have been resolved and which the theories comport with reality and the outcomes are actionable.

If a theory helps people explain their reality all the better for them. But when a theory’s explanations of others clash with the autonomous self conceptions of others, then those boundary conditions need to be negotiated not asserted, not commanded with appeals to guilt.

Just as I’m cool with militarists getting their Choi grand marshal while demanding parity in respect for Manning, I’m cool with anyone defining themselves in whatever terms work for them using whatever theories work for them so long as the courtesy is extended as reciprocal.

I’m not seeing how any of these theories explain that binary gender and heterosexuality are near universal norms across all sorts of cultures and economic systems.

Yet we’re seeing gender injected into almost every political matter as if it has become a latter day Palestine, as if transgender matters are somehow new to society, as if Rocky Horror never happened, as if we never Richard O’Brien’s 1975 directive to “Don’t dream it, be it seriously an came out, lived our lives and cornered homophobia.

Many progressive gay men of a certain age in my circle who are all for transgender inclusion and full civil rights have been rolling our eyes at the way that gender has metastasized the queer discourse over the past few years in a way that does not reflect what we see in the queer communities in which we live.

I’m cool with being a minority, being different from the norm and having people in the norm not be comfortable with that. I’ve got no need to re-conceptualize heterosexuality for heterosexuals in order to accommodate me.

Just as we 10% lesbians and gays don’t try to redefine heterosexuality in our terms for the 90%, gender theorists at .5% don’t get to redefine the 10% on their terms, just for themselves.

We are sex deviants, not gender deviants, homoSEXuals, not homoGENDERals.

Dan Choi disobeyed lawful orders as well yet he was honored.

Bradley Manning disobeyed unlawful orders–to withhold evidence of war crimes–and he is banned.

Makes perfect sense.

We need look no further than the initial missive from Williams that was ill-thought-out from a PR perspective because it reveals her true motiviations–political ass covering.

Everything else is rationalizing backfill.

Many of us were horrified that Dan Choi was a grand marshal because we are morally horrified that he had voluntarily joined an institution that commits war crimes and crimes against humanity on an industrial scale.

Not only did he join an organization that commits serial unspeakable atrocities, but his campaign was to make it so that other young gay men would be subject to a draft should one blow again.

So not only was a former grand marshal apparently a sociopathic individual who joined a criminal organization but he had to make his choice for everyone else, to make it so that others, future young gay men who did not want to participate in crimes would be inducted into that organization should the government revert to that policy.

And yet none of us complained, none of us tried to silence a significant chunk of our community. I guess that tolerance is only expected to work in one direction.

But that excuse was not cooked up until after the fact. Had Manning not been controversial, the issue would not have arose. Williams’ curiously authoritarian missive confirms as much.

The willingness to critically analyze all which is to be taken as the givens, to interrogate the dominant ideology, is what I think this is getting at. Smart people question all assumptions because nobody with more than half a brain wants to operate under untested, possibly faulty assumptions.

Would that the gender theory fetishists critically interrogate the effectiveness of their own unsettled and contradiction-strewn theories at first accurately describing and then formulating effective strategies to change reality prior to attempting to assert these theories on the rest of queerdom. Don’t want to operate under faulty assumptions.

It is ex-post-facto in that Joey should not have been allowed to nominate Manning in the first instance. Further, there is no legal basis in Pride’s bylaws for a board president to unilaterally nix a nominee by the electoral college. This is one big CYA operation for the Democrats and the military industrial corporations that fund them and the professional homosexuals.

Pride was created to commemorate the Stonewall Riots and should reflect that first and foremost, not to celebrate the party culture, although there is plenty of partying.

“nontheless well-known in LGBTQ circles, is that having a complex-gendered brain often gives rise to sophistication in tackling and weighing the complex moral issues of our time.”

LGBT run the spectrum of brilliant to dumb as soup, clearly contrary to Aunt Ida’s assertion, there is no correlation between queerness and smarts or stupidity.

But the point is that Manning IS gay and that he took tremendous personal risk to Do the Right Thing.