Footnotes

Two of the main characters in my current novel project are transgendered, and the narrative moves through various genderqueer scenes with ease. That's all part of the world I've created, and as such it's normative: not a freak show, not a deliberately quirky trick. It's just how things are. For my part, I think it's a terrible thing to let mere chromosomes or the vagaries of society dictate how you shape and present your body. Our binary system of gender and sexual identity represents an oppressive failure of the sensual imagination, and I haven't got much patience with it. Even in the LGBT scene, there's still a certain uneasiness with the "T" portion of the letter salad, even more so than with the "B" ingredient. For example, read this story right here:

A judge in Malawi has imposed a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison with hard labour on a gay couple convicted of gross indecency and unnatural acts.

The judge said he wanted to protect the public from "people like you".

Steven Monjeza, 26, and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, have been in jail since they were arrested in December after holding an engagement ceremony.

The case has sparked international condemnation and a debate about homosexuality in the country.

The British government, Malawi's largest donor, expressed its "dismay" at the sentences, but has not withdrawn aid.

But there's more going on here. According to the Guardian:

There has rightly been an international outcry in response to the couple's barbaric treatment, but the protest has been against the perceived homophobia of Malawi's law courts. The problem is, however, that one half of this couple does not primarily identify as gay. Tiwonge is most probably transgender but possibly intersex (in many parts of Africa people do not actually have clear vocabulary to express this), and considers herself a woman. Indeed she has lived "as a woman" all her life.

Whoops.

Autumn Sandeen has gathered many other commentaries on the situation, in addition to her own:

The Malawian couple has been charged and sentenced in relationship to having a homosexual relationship. The LGBT legacy and new media has picked up on the 14-year sentence based on the couple's relationship being declared homosexual by the judge who sentenced the couple. And let's be honest with ourselves -- I believe we can safely say that from past coverage by the LGBT press and LGBT blogosphere that this story would not have gained as much traction in LGBT media if this were considered a transgender or intersex story.

And, that's sad. Transphobia and homophobia both arise from the same root -- that root has to do a lot with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people not conforming with societal sex and gender norms...

Supposedly there's an argument to be made for a necessary distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity, but that only works if you accept the concept of "orientation," the notion that there's some sort of sexual compass that one follows. To me that's an untenable fragmentation of human identity, resultant from our Puritanical cloistering of sexuality as something apart from who we are, a horny little daemon that pokes and prods us this way and that. I'm with Gore Vidal on this, who said, “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."

In "The End of Gay Culture," Andrew Sullivan wrote:

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist--or that they won't create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that "gayness" alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

Humans like to categorize things, to arrange people and behaviors just so, and place them in little Aristotelian boxes. Socially, it is necessary to give authority to such distinctions in order to draw attention to injustice, because injustice is itself based on those very distinctions. In the case of Tiwonge Chimbalanga, we see that the end result of such categorization can in fact be further, incremental injustice: refusal of an individual's identity in favor of an accepted categorization.

Try this, just to see how it feels: two people who love each other were sentenced to fourteen years in prison because they did not hide that love. That's where the true injustice lies.

There are young generations now who know nothing of the Stonewall riots. They've grown up with Ellen, and Will and Grace, and legalized same sex marriage in some states. Still fewer know of the Mattachine Society, homophile pioneers of the 1950s. Today's queer teens will walk down roads in life that were smoothed by the struggles of those who came before them. The historian in me finds that a little sad, but the details of all history eventually hide from everyone except the intellectually driven. I look forward to the day when the politically-driven necessity of the LGBT letter salad itself fades away and becomes a curious footnote to a storied past.