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Tag Archives: sexual identity

#comingoutday: the thread

12 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

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sexual identity, sexuality

Yesterday (October 11) was #ComingOutDay and I shared some thoughts on Twitter. Here is that thread in blog post form, lightly edited to address a few typos. 

Twitter wants to make EXTRA ‘SPECIALLY SURE that I know it’s #ComingOutDay so I thought I would say a few words about what my coming out experience(s) have been like. I have spent a lot of time in the past couple of years reassuring newly-out queer adults  (💗🙌🌈💗) that our process of “coming out” can be both like and unlike the mainstream cultural narrative of coming out.

First I want to say: Coming out is sometimes unsafe. If it’s unsafe for you, I hope you care for yourself as you can in the moment. You still count, and you still matter. I hope in future it will become safer and more possible to come out to at least some people who love you.

Also: here’s a thread I wrote earlier in the year about how coming out can still be hard and scary for many of us. That doesn’t make you any less queer. That’s structual cisheterosexism still making our lives difficult.

So in this thread I thought I’d describe my coming out experience as a Midwestern queer kid during the 1980s-1990s. Keep in mind that I didn’t have an email address until I was seventeen. I had the public library and my parents’ bookshelves. The avenues for finding queer thought, queer options, queer community as a young person have changed radically since that era.

Some queer folks can look back into their childhood and find strong evidence for having been “born this way.” That’s a favored narrative for many reasons. But it isn’t a narrative that has been particularly useful to me. Sure, I was born “this way” in the sense that I was born me, and likely always had the capacity for same-sex as well as other-sex desires. But I also didn’t experience the gender policing many queer adults remember from childhood. I wasn’t made to feel non-normative in that way.

As a queer adult, looking back, I would say that my experience of passionate same-gender friendships might fit into a pre-history of queerness. I remember since early childhood imagining an adult life that involved establishing a home and family with another girl. Sometimes a boy. (And, you know, sometimes both.) But I didn’t have the language for same-sex desire/romance/relationship until I was about eleven and some girls at a sleepover were giggling about using the word “gay” in a Scrabble game. So I asked my mother for a definition — which she provided in very straightforward, not anti-gay, terms. It would be a few years later, in my early teens, when I began to observe that — unlike some of my friends — I didn’t feel romantic interest exclusively towards boys. Although the way I interpreted my feelings, at that point, was that I struggled to tell the difference between friendship and dating.

What does “coming out” look like for someone who hasn’t ever really been deliberately in the closet, but also hasn’t had the language to talk about who they are that resists presumptive (cis)heterosexuality? It’s a slow and halting process. As a teenager, I gathered more language. I read my mother’s edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves that had a whole chapter on lesbians! Our library had a copy of Annie On My Mind in the teen paperback rack (thank you librarians!). ElfQuest comics had gay and poly elves. 🤔

A piece of this story I often reflect on is that while I personally knew very, very few (out) queer people in our community, I knew a lot of single people — and single women specifically — who had created lives for themselves without following the dictates of the marriage plot (and/or parenting). One aspect of queer adulthood that I think we don’t talk often enough about is that our milestones and families often look and feel very different from the heteronormative imaginary. Sometimes they’re the same, or similar. And that’s okay too. But often they’re not! And for a child or young adult looking to grown-ups for possibilities … it felt in the early 90s (and I suspect often still feels today) like none of the life paths out there quite fit.

From 1997-2005, I was a commuter college student, living off-campus and working plus attending school part time. My campus was a hostile environment for queer people and feminists (I was vocally the latter, quietly the former). This is the period I think of as my “over-invested ally” period. I had no problem identifying as a lefty feminist, but I skirted the edges of campus queerdom because I lacked enough coherent evidence to identify as lesbian or bisexual (the options that felt available). I had no partnered sexual or romantic experience to point toward as evidence of my desires. It was all nebulous internal knowledge (knowledge I would tell any person today, who asked, is absolutely valid evidence … and anyway you don’t need a case file to identify as queer!). But at the time, it felt to me like you needed to prove the negative of being “not straight” (and I imagine many people feel a similar need to assemble their casefile for being “not cis”).

Me circa 1997-2007: It would be super awkward to go through the process of telling everyone you were queer and then have that be WRONG.

(Yes, 2019 me agrees with you that’s … not how this works.)

How does the concept of “coming out” (of hiding) fit into a story like this? The language and act of “coming out” can be found in the gay liberation moment of the early 1970s. It was originally a bold and brave call to political assembly. If you were a queer adult in the early 1970s you had lived through an era of intense persecution that had the goal of placing you outside the body politic. Claiming the public square was raucous street theater demanding that we be seen. This is also why Pride was, and continues to be, so important. Taking up space in public, being loud, being visible, is a political act:

We’re here. ✊

We’re queer. 🌈

I think a lot, though, about how those Big Coming Out acts we engage in as members of a queer body politic work in tandem with all the Little Comings Out we engage in as individual queer people. And how “coming out” is, maybe, in those quieter moments, more of a coming in — or settling in — to the self.

In order for me to make the shift (circa 2007-2009) from being an over-invested ally who understood herself to be “mostly straight” to being a queer bisexual I had to engage in so many small acts of letting that case file mentality go. I had to reject the straight-until-proven-queer framework that is cisheterosexist normativity at is most pernicious. I had to let go of the fear that unless I tried and failed at being straight I couldn’t properly prove I wasn’t.

I know this experience isn’t unique to bisexual folks. But I do think, perhaps, that understanding yourself to be queer involves less self-gaslighting doubt when you very obviously are not interested in people with whom you would appear to be in a heterosexual relationship. In a cisheteronormative world that prioritizes hetero desire, if you have some desires that seem to match up with that script, those desires can drown out the queer ones through cultural amplification. If my passionate friendships with men are read by the world around me as romantic, but my passionate friendships with women are read as platonic, it can be very hard to overrule social expectations and say: NO I LIKE THE LADIES IN A SEXY WAY TOO.

In the end, my Little Comings Out happened through so many moments like this:

*The day I referred to “my girlfriend” in front of a colleague.

*The day I said “we” meaning queer people.

*The day I said to my mother, “I’m falling in love.”

To me, being queer is both about the Big moments and the Little ones. It’s about finding your way through the cacophony of straightness to the right queer harmony that resonates with you. And it’s about acting in solidarity (whether visibly or not; visibility isn’t always safe) with others under the queer umbrella.

Coming out — in big ways, and little ways, helps us find one another, fight for one another, find language that helps us illuminate our souls.

Welcome home. 💗

Happy pride. 🌈

presentation @ boston college

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in my historian hat

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history, professional gigs, religion, sexual identity, sexuality

On March 29th I attended the Biennial Boston College Conference on History of Religion and presented a paper that tried, for the first time, to offer up some analysis regarding my current project. A big thanks to the conference coordinators for a great experience!

This project is, broadly, exploring the ways in which the Christian left negotiated sex, sexuality, and gender during the thirty year period between 1960 and 1980. Narrowly, for this paper, I looked at a ten-year period of the Methodist publication motive for clues regarding mainline Protestant conceptions of gender and sexuality. As I’ve mentioned before in this space, I’m particularly interested in what the magazine had to say about sexuality because after breaking with the church, the publication’s final two issues focused on the topics of gay liberation and lesbian/feminism (their terminology). Rather than seeing this break as a natural, inevitable conflict between a traditionalist anti-gay church and more radical youth activists, I am asking why Christian left theology ultimately failed to provide a hospitable atmosphere for meaningful, nuanced discussion about queer sexual morality.

At least, that’s what I’m fumbling my way toward asking. I’m not sure how close this one conference paper gets to that goal — but it is a start. So for those who’ve been following my research this past year, I offer this work-in-progress as a reward.

Access the PDF online via Google Drive.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to my two excellent and inspiring co-panelists, Trevor Burrows (Purdue University) and Casey Bohlen (Harvard University), both of whom are working on aspects of Christian faith and political action during what we might term the “long Sixties” — looking back into the 1950s and forward toward the 1980s.  I look forward to watching their progress as scholars and writers in the field.

booknotes: pray the gay away

28 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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gender and sexuality, in our words, politics, religion, sexual identity, sociology

Between the winter of 1987 and the summer of 1988, Boston-based journalist Neil Miller traveled across the United States “in search of gay America.” Though he spoke to women and men in the “well-trodden … urban gay ghettos” of Washington, D.C., New York City (the “gay metropolis”), and San Francisco, his primary purpose was to document the experience of queer folks living in what coasters refer to as “flyover” states, the “red state” regions of the American South, Great Lakes, Midwest, and Plains states. As Miller writes:

Acceptance and self-acceptance amidst the anonymity of cities like New York and Los Angeles and even Boston meant little, I was convinced. One had to travel beyond the large metropolitan areas on the two coasts to places where diversity was less acceptable, where it was harder to melt into the crowd … that was where the majority of gay people lived anyway, even if you didn’t read about them in the gay press or see them on the evening news (In Search of Gay America, 11).

What Miller found in his travels was that queer people in the heartland were often less visible than their East and West coast counterparts; they kept their heads down and their mouths shut, maybe living in a community where everyone knew they were gay but no one openly acknowledged it. Many of Miller’s interviewees talked about the social isolation, particularly if they were un-partnered; in the pre-internet era single lesbians and gay men often had to travel regularly to urban centers to meet and socialize with others like themselves.

In the two decades since Miller’s travels, much has changed in the world of LGBT visibility, culture, and activism — yet our collective understanding of queer culture remains focused on urban, coastal areas as gay-friendly, while the rest of the country is dismissed (especially by those who don’t live there) as a place where “diversity is less acceptable” and life is harder for queer men and women trying to make their way in the world.  Bernadette Barton’s new study, Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (New York University Press, October 2012) both confirms and complicates this narrative.

A Massachusetts-born academic who moved with her partner to Kentucky, Barton was taken aback when a neighbor denounced homosexuality as a sin after Barton came out to him. Curious to understand how “Bible Belt gays” experienced this climate of casual anti-gay sentiment, she began interviewing gays and lesbians who grew up in what she terms the “Bible Belt panopticon,” the southern mid section of the nation in which tight-knit communities and strong evangelical, fundamentalist Christian culture come together to create and police conservative norms. When the normative culture is implicitly anti-gay, open bigotry is not needed to encourage self-policing. For example, Barton quotes an interviewee reacting to a church billboard proclaiming, “Get Right or Get Left”:

Get right means to be saved and get left means to be left behind at the Resurrection, but this also conveys the dual message of the church’s political affiliation as well. It’s very polarizing, and when I read it, it sounds like a threat.

Barton observes:

This is an example of how antigay rhetoric, especially to a Bible Belt gay, doesn’t have to say anything at all about homosexuality. It’s the associations. A Bible Belt gay knows homosexuality isn’t included in the right column.

Pray the Gay Away explores different ways in which this Bible Belt panopticon manifests, from family expectations to ex-gay ministries, gay-unfriendly workplaces and legislation to ban same-sex marriage. Throughout, the voices of Barton’s interviewees are powerful evidence in support of her thesis. One graduate student, for example, tells Barton about how his parents tried exorcism when they found out he was in a same-sex relationship. When he remained unrepentant they not only disowned him and cut all financial support, but also removed all of his belongings from his dorm room before they returned home. Through the support of his campus community, the student was able to remain in school — but the resilience of the child does nothing to redeem the horrific behavior of his parents.

I grew up in West Michigan, an area that is — though technically outside the Bible Belt proper — incredibly religiously and politically conservative. Reading Barton’s work, I found much to identify with in its descriptions of life in a community that resists difference and where anti-gay feeling is commonplace. I was particularly struck by her observation that in such communities, “gay” and “straight” are the only two categories a person can belong to. Anyone who is something other than straight is “gay.” You’re either “right,” after all, or “left.” That observation made me wonder whether it took me so long to recognize my own sexual fluidity in part because I literally had no language with which to describe myself.

Though I no longer have to live in a culture that makes it difficult (if not dangerous) to speak of my existence, I am mindful that what Barton terms the “toxic closet” effects everyone whom anti-gay bigotry touches, not just queer folk. My parents, for example, felt profoundly alienated when the city council rejected an anti-discrimination ordinance last year. And my grandmother is uncertain with whom she can safely share the joyful news of my marriage. The “Bible Belt panopticon” constrains us all.

At times, Pray the Gay Away seems to paint the Bible Belt as a monolithic culture of hate. I was pleased to see how careful Barton is to point out that she “deliberately sought out individuals who grew up in homophobic families and churches to best explore their consequences,” and that her narrative describes the normative culture of the Bible Belt, rather than attempting to describe all people therein. (For a broader examination of queer folks’ relationships with their families of origin, see the excellent Not in This Family by Heather Murray.) Barton’s conversations with gay Christians and gay-friendly church leaders, as well as her nuanced exploration of ex-gay ministries help show that even situations which appear toxic at first glance often contain more complex realities.

Yet ultimately, Barton argues that in the Bible Belt region “rampant expressions of institutional and generalized homophobic hate speech in the region bolster individually held homophobic attitudes and encourage those who have dissenting opinions to remain silent.” One lesbian student whom she interviews theorizes that it might even be accurate to identify these anti-gay attitudes and actions as “gay cultural genocide.”

I highly recommend Pray the Gay Away to anyone with an interest in contemporary queer experience, in Bible Belt Christianity, and the intersection of the two. I’d go so far as to say it’s required reading for anyone who cares about what it means to be gay in America today. Whether or not you’ve ever lived in the “toxic closet” yourself, too many of our fellow citizens still wake up there every morning. We owe it to them to listen to the stories they have so generously shared.

Cross-posted at In Our Words.

"genitals as signifiers": when birth is a "social emergency"

07 Thursday Oct 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

books, children, human rights, sexual identity, sexuality

Yesterday I started reading Katrina Karkazis’ book Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience (2008).  Based on ethnographic research and review of the existing literature, Fixing Sex traces the twentieth-century medical treatment of individuals whom the medical profession identifies as “intersex.” Part one of the book discusses the understanding of, and treatment for, intersex conditions in the past — with a focus on the late twentieth century — and Part Two explores the decision-making process for children who are born with what doctors feel are sex and/or gender atypical bodies. Since Karkazis draws heavily on interviews she conducted with the parents of diagnosed children and adults who had been treated for various conditions, I’m excited about getting into this second half of her study, which I have just started this afternoon.

What I really wanted to share with you in this post, though, is several paragraphs from the first chapter of Part Two in which Karkazis describes the way myriad ways in which children born with no immediately apparent sex identity are experienced as a matter of “social urgency” by their parents and the medical community. I realize it’s kinda academic and somewhat heavy on the specialized terminology. But I think she’s packing some pretty important stuff into these paragraphs (pp. 95-97). Reading this narrative, I just felt an overwhelming sadness in my chest for these tiny persons whose very being is somehow construed as problematic — who cannot be incorporated into the human community, it seems — because they lack a clear “girl” or “boy” box in which to be situated.

No sooner than a baby is born its sex is announced by the attending clinician, based on an inspection and understanding of the external genitalia as either male or female. The process of sex identification at birth is one in which genitals are granted the power of synecdochic representation. Genitals, and the sex designation to which they give rise, create gender expectations for almost every aspect of an individual’s life. Not only are they usually the sole factor of sex determination but they are also assumed to correspond with fully and uniformly differentiated internal sex organs and are further charged with the task of signifying and predicting gender (whether identity, role, or behavior) and even sexuality. Put another way, if a baby is labeled “female” at birth, it is assumed that that person will grow up to understand herself as a woman, to dress and act like a woman, and to desire and have sex with men. Because this is the usual course of events, it is assumed natural. At birth genitals are thus viewed as symbolically and literally revealing the truth of gender.

At no time are the connections between genitals and gender more evident than when the genitalia of an infant either do not signal or else missignal sex. In these instances, atypical or, in clinical terms, ambiguous genitals are seen not as the representation of sex, but as the signal of a misinterpretation of sex. Without legible genitals, and thus without an evident or stable sex, an infant with “ambiguous” genitals flutters not simply between sexes but between genders and sexualities: such infants are neither readily male nor female, neither masculine nor feminine, and consequently neither readily homosexual nor heterosexual. So-called ambiguity is posited as the ground of sexual and gendered difference: a prediscursive, precultural dimension of bodiliness rather than an effect of a social system that requires a binary and incommensurate set of two sexes.

In other words, the body is seen as problematic and wrong because it fails to match our expected (and culturally-created) binary categories, rather than such a situation causing us to reconsider our categories that fail to take into account the existence of bodies that do not readily fit into them.

Bodies with atypical or conflicting biological markers are troublesome because they disturb the social body; they also disrupt the process of determining an infant’s place in the world. Gender-atypical genitals (and bodies) create anxieties about the borders of properly gendered subjects and a desire to reaffirm those borders. In a culture that requires clear gender division — a culture in which, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, we truly need a true sex — gender-atypical bodies threaten an entire system of laws, rights, responsibilities, and privileges built on the notions of discrete and binary gender.

As a result, clinicians often rush to stabilize the sex of infants with intersex diagnoses. The urgency of this undertaking, to which parents no doubt contribute, all too often overrides the joy of the birth, as an infant may be whisked away for medical tests before the parents have had any chance to bond with their baby. Parents may be discouraged from naming their baby before a gender assignment is made. To avoid using gendered pronouns, clinical caregivers may refer to the newborn as “the baby.” Because the announcement of sex is usually considered a prerequisite to naming a child, which is in turn a prerequisite to filing a legal notice of the birth, there is a sense in which biology determines — or confuses — a newborn’s entire social and legal identity. Physically alive but denied a sex and a name, the infant has no social existence. Personhood depends on gender assignment.

This might seem like a somewhat silly comparison, but for some reason scenario — in addition to making me almost physically ill at the thought of newborns being kept from their parents and made to undergo invasive tests — reminds me of our new kitty, whom we adopted last weekend from a foster home. We know the cat is female from the rescue organization, but we have not yet settled on a name. This hasn’t stopped us from lavishing love and attention upon our kitty, showering her with endearments and otherwise trying to let her know in no uncertain terms that she is now part of our family.  While I understand that, in our culture, most names are imbued with gender, terms of endearment (“sweetheart,” “love,” “darling”) are pretty universal — and with a preverbal infant it’s the tone not the words that matter anyway. It’s the sound of a familiar voice and the warmth it conveys that matter. The fact that the adults in this scenario seem to have lost sight of this due to being wrapped up in their own cultural anxieties makes me sick to my stomach.

Monica Cole, whose daughter has CAH, describes living with this uncertainty after the birth of her baby: “The doctor said we needed an ultrasound to determine our baby’s internal sex organs, and a genetic test, which could take a week. Well, how could we not know the gender of our baby for a week? I had a hard time not being able to say ‘he’ or ‘she’ and ‘baby’ was so distant. The hospital had only blue-striped or pink-striped baby hats, and the nurse asked which we would like to use. I picked a blue hat and decided to use a male pronoun. The nurses followed our lead of what pronoun to use, but they also placed both an ‘I’m a boy’ and ‘I’m a girl’ cards on the baby tub.

“How could we not know the gender of our baby for a week?” Cole’s question is posed as if the answer is self-evident: it was impossible for her, and the hospital staff that surrounded their family, to allow the child to exist without categorizing it. The trappings of the hospital stay (the birth announcements, the labeling of the baby “tub,” the hats — all of these were predicated on a gender binary; there was no third — let alone forth, fifth, sixth — option).

The birth of a baby with an intersex diagnosis is thus considered a social emergency in which medical experts are called on to intervene. The entire process could be understood as what the anthropologist Victor Turner has called a “social drama” with four stages: breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. The breach or schism in the social order caused by the birth of a baby with atypical genitals (and this no obvious gender assignment) produces a crisis that must be addressed because it threatens social norms. The redressive action is the culturally defined process through which gender is assigned. Although not all parties may agree about the correct gender assignment for a particular infant all agree that the resolution of indeterminate sex is necessary [emphasis mine], and thus some accept a particular decision as final simply to bring about closure. Reintegration eliminates the original breach that precipitated the crisis. Treatment decisions remove biological or phenotypic atypicality, recreated a particular gendered world.

As this chapter and the next will reveal, clinicians and parents typically share the same goal, though their opinions on how to attain it may be diametrically opposed: to use the best medical technologies available to adapt the infant to life within the binary gender model; living as much as possible as a “normal” male or female.

It’s not that I didn’t understand that gender anxiety exists, or that the desire to sort individuals into a binary gender system is extremely compelling in our culture. I am not particularly surprised by this description of events. This does not mean that it fails to distress me. What appalled me about this passage was the degree to which none of the adults in this situation seem capable to stepping back and letting the situation be a non-emergency. In most of these instances, a healthy child has been born. This child is not in pain; this child is not suffering from something that could threaten their existence. There is no need for immediate medical intervention in order for this infant human being to survive. So can’t we all celebrate this new life? Can’t we welcome this tiny new person into the human family? Does a person really require a gender identity in order to be welcomed and cherished and loved for who they are?

As evidenced by Karkazis’ account, it appears that they do. And that, in turn, seems like a pretty sick commentary on the relative importance of human beings vs. categories in our culture.

What I can’t help thinking as I read Fixing Sex is what sort of birth experience these children would have if, instead of a general consensus that they must be made to conform these children were simply welcomed? What if, instead of confirming the parents’ likely anxieties about the sex atypical nature of their child, clinicians were able to calm parents down and encourage them to get to know their child as an individual rather than as a “he” or a “she”? I can’t help thinking that this would be a phenomenal place of strength out of which a child would have the best possible opportunity to thrive and become themselves in the world, rather than being taught — physically, emotionally, and socially — from the first moments of birth that conformity is a priority, regardless of the cost.

in words and pictures: asking trans folks questions

23 Friday Apr 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

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feminism, sexual identity

This new poster has been making the rounds on the blogs I read the last couple of weeks, and I actually think the title is somewhat misleading: it’s not so much about what specific words are verboten (for a glossary of terms surrounding transsexuality, check out the guide put together by the Gender Identity Project) but about why certain questions or turns of phrase are hurtful to trans people.


I appreciate that they include explanations along with each phrase, rather than just announcing “these words are transphobic!” When folks find themselves explaining over and over again that certain language is hurtful, the “why” often — understandably — gets lost in the shuffle. The “why” is often so obvious to those who are inside a given community that it can seem redundant to explain to those outside the loop why a question is hurtful. It can often be even more difficult to explain why it’s hurtful without making the person on the recieving end of the explanation feel defensive.

Obviously, it’s not the responsibility of those in the know to educate 24/7 about the things they’re knowledgeable about . . . which is why it’s handy to have infographics that do it for us!

via sexgenderbody and others.

"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue

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