Out and About
Lately I’ve been editing a guide to colleges for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, and allied individuals.
Whew! That’s a mouthful.
I’ve learned a few interesting things from it. Apparently “intersex” is the correct term for “hermaphrodite,” which some consider an insult. I don’t know why it’s an insult—Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who apparently merged with a nymph at some point and thus had two sexes—but that’s what I read. I don’t know much about the history of that term as applied to people who have something other than one simple set of genitalia, or gonads, or chromosomes. You know, the people who get “fixed” at birth so they can fit into one side of the dichotomy or the other? Not that having a mixed set would be simple in this world…
“Transgender,” on the other hand, refers to people who don’t accept the male-female dichotomy. Yesterday I read this quote from a student: “My current math professor is comfortable using masculine pronouns with me (I use both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe myself).” I’d like to sit down and have a good long talk with such a person, especially about the intersection of genitalia and gender.
I don’t believe that certain things—like war—are masculine and certain things—like flower arranging—are feminine. It depends on who’s doing them. If a woman does something, anything, it’s feminine. If a man does something, it’s masculine. If a man and a woman are doing the same thing—say, murdering an enemy—at the same time, then it’s both masculine and feminine at the same time.
That’s pretty simple to get your mind around, I think. But it’s still a dichotomy.
But what I find it hard to get my mind around is what it feels like to describe yourself with both male and female pronouns. I want to know: how does your body lead you to describe yourself that way? Or is there some kind of disconnect, and what caused it? What does “genderqueer” really mean?
Does this massive edifice we call “gender” really have much to do with our bodies, anyway? Maybe our bodies are just the excuse.
Pertinent or impertinent?
I copyedit a lot of books for Lynne Rienner Publishers in Boulder, Colorado. My most recent project, about how the Internet will probably NOT solve all the economic problems in the developing world, included this quote from a speech by Karl Marx on the anniversary of the Peoples’ Paper (see Berman 1988, 20):
“The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. … At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. … All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into material force.”
Spring forward into health
I’m always glad when daylight savings time returns. I much prefer days light until after 7 pm. It’s at this time of year that my spirits really begin to lift, and I think, “Summer is just around the corner!”
I also have reason to rejoice because my sister is at home convalescing. I’ve spoken to her twice—once in the hospital and once at home. When I talked to her in the hospital, it nearly broke my heart because she sounded so feeble. When she called me from home on Tuesday, she sounded almost normal.
She’s taking a month off from work and will have to do some cardiac rehab. I asked her what she was going to do with all that time, and she mentioned some of those projects we’ve all got on the back burner, like reorganizing photographs, and said she wanted to spend a lot of time enjoying spring.
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Last night Todd and I went to a screening of Group 101 short films. Group 101 comprises directors who commit to making one short film a month for 6 months. Every month they choose a new theme: this month it was teeth. I made my acting debut in one of the films, “Seven Cups of Joe.” Watching myself onscreen was a lot less scary than I imagined. The director and his wife gave me a lot of compliments, which was nice. Compared to the actor who was playing my boyfriend, who performs in an improv group every week, my facial expressions were fairly static, and I didn’t really know how to interact with the camera. I thought I did OK for never having acted before (unless you count playing the hospital visitor in Good Morning, Miss Dove in high school).
I had a great time doing the scenes, though. It was fun to work with Troy because he’s so good at pulling lines out of thin air, and I learned a little bit about how you want to position people for the camera.
