SOCIOPOLITOMETAPHISIQUE-O
The Role of Comedy in (Slowly) Attaining A Non-Dual Society
Power for Everybody: The End of Dominance and Submission
Activist Models of Power
Cultural Appropriation & the Birthplace of Choice
Blasted Youth Looks Good in Digital: the Internet Generation
Transgender and Bi/Pansexuality: A Confederation of Amphorousity
Transsexuals and bisexuals are the inside outsiders of the GBLT movement. Our place in the sphere of gayness is neither contested nor entirely accepted, and through that discomforting influence, we have changed the course that queerness will take as it winds through the landscape of the cultural mainstream.
Just as we are not entirely comfortable within gayness, we are not entirely sexually separate from the greater population. We cannot claim exclusive membership in gayness, bisexuals for obvious reasons, and transsexuals for complex ones. A lack of creativity has branded trans and bi/pansexual people as traitors, double agents, and saboteurs. In fact, the anger that motivate these statements stem from our transcendence of allegiance.
Transgender people are routinely accepted into LGBT organizations, yet rarely is this commitment manifested beyond the allowance of trans people to be in attendence in these organizations. Typically, no one wants to be seen as exclusionist, yet fail to understand exclusion as not a moral issue (by which they do right by simply assuring themselves of their good intentions.) Inclusion is an ongoing state of education, action, and realization. It should not be mistook for a moral or political process; it is a transcendant one with unfathomable implications.
Generally unsubstantiated lip service is also paid to bisexual inclusion. Though successful gay and lesbian battles often painlessly translate into benefits for bisexual people, what is actually spoken within LGBT activist settings, not to mention nearly every other mainstream setting, contributes to bisexual invisibility. Historically, bisexual women have fought to be included in lesbian and feminist organizations and groups; the reasons for their disinclusion has ranged from their "divided alliance" between the sexes to representing a source of sexual insecurity and possible heartbreak for lesbian-identified women.
Despite Kinsey's report that the majority of human beings are, in desire or in action, bisexual, a profound invisibility continues to this day, as gay, lesbian, and trans visibility mounts. Its presence on television is almost completely nil. Karen Walker of Will & Grace and Captain Jack of sci-fi show Torchwood are the only mainstream bisexual television characters I am aware of. An either-or mentality persists senselessly throughout all popular media. There are endless debates about celebrities' sexualities which cannot seem to even approach the possibility of a non-monosexual orientation; gay characters are gender-stereotyped to the point where homosexuality develops a unique characterizational flavor that is unmixable and untranslatable into heterosexual characterization. All of these contribute to bisexual invisibility, and to the type of oppression understood to be the most basic: denial of existence. To deny the existence of a group of existants is to fill the space they ought to occupy with other monoliths, forcing them either out of mainstream society or into a silent submission. In its highest manifestation, denial of existence generates in the denied one a type of transcendent conciousness.
Trans, bisexual, queer and intersex individuals have fought for a long time to be included in gay organizations, a fight which has finally yielded an abundant and politically correct acronymizing of the queer movement. Even when inclusion is finally granted, it is usually on the fringes. When I attend a GBLT activist or social group, I consistantly feel that my place is to be quiet. I know I am basically welcome, but I am not 'in the club.' The forum is for discussion of gay and lesbian issues, for gay and lesbian voices to assert gay and lesbian realities. Bi, queer, trans, and intersex people have fought for inclusion because we have badly needed the community. Fighting isolation figures prevalently into queer movements, and people of smaller minority sexualities and genders are often even more isolated than lesbians and gays.
Although we can construct alternate communities, there is an even bigger reason that smaller minority sexualities feel the need to be included in the gay and lesbian clubs. Their move toward political power has the potential to carry us forward in our movements. Gender identity rights bills pass because they are tacked on to sexual orientation rights bills. Strides for gay people often filter down to trans and queer people. However, just as often, they don't.
My first experience going to a GLBT group was in Bangor, Maine, at 15. It was about twenty gay and bisexual teenagers supervised by a couple of nice adults who themselves were not gay. On the night I attended, the adults suggested we split up into two groups--boys and girls--to do an activity. I sat quietly with the girls and did not participate, because I did not want to publically out myself to these adults and kids. I did not want to quietly tell an adult that I didn't actually identify as either, whispering an embarrassing problem to a grown-up, as if I had just wet my pants and needed to be let to go and get changed. A few years later, I joined a queer youth group three hours from my home that was radical, progressive, and primarily transgender and queer, and made round-trip drives to volunteer with them for three years until they shut down due to a loss of private and federal funding.
There are similarities between bi, pan, and fluidly sexual people and transgender people that go beyond invisibility and disinclusion in both the mainstream and "LGBT" communities, and these things link us in ways that shed light on the purpose for that disinclusion. I'll say first that bisexual and trans people are, of course, not two distinct groups, but have deep, complex, and meaningful overlaps.
Hedwig said "There's not much of a difference/between a bridge and a wall/without me right in the middle/you wouldn't be nowhere at all." There is a phenomenon in human society of both needing and demonizing our bridges and walls. Leslie Feinberg, in Transgender Warriors, states that it took a thousand years for the Catholic church to convince the peasantry that queer people were not holy. This holiness that has historically been conferred upon queer people world over is not a flattering statement on the individual queer person; it is an example of a society acting in its own best interest by establishing special station for individuals who do not fit the common roles of the society. Free from interference from a colossal power structure, humans choose to create ritual ways of comprehending and assimilating all aspects of their world. A society with a heterosexual, binary gender system absolutely requires queerness, and that queerness can act as a bridge or a wall. Whether it manifests as either, it functions to preserve and harmonize the social order.
In our society, gayness has become the third gender, the third wheel to heteronormativity. This is the first step. The next step is likely to be resisted and ignored to nearly the same extent as the first. It is the construction of secondary bridges and walls; a further breakdown of roles. If gayness perpetuates heteronormativity by its position as a maligned and fascinating third option, then bi/pan sexuality and transsexuality have come to further break down that balance. Bi/pansexuality and transsexuality do not allow for the gay/straight dichotomy, the very dichotomy that upholds the man/woman dichotomy. In this way they are powerful cultural disturbances, for they interrupt the ability to form sexual and gender positionalities.
Shifting from heteronormativity (which at this point is not even named as such, it is simply normativity) to a world that encompasses homosexuality is for many people a tremendous and treacherous paradigm shift. Once the first shift is completed, new, more liberal positionalities can be formed. Among these are the gay/straight dichotomy, and the "born that way"/genetic origin argument. With deep respect for the courage that it has taken many people to make that first paradigm shift, we must not compromise or hesistate in implementing the next one, the one that is demanded by our very existence.
A new wave of bisexuals, pansexuals, omni/multi/metasexuals, queers, unapologetic transsexuals, genderqueers, etc. have come, by the natural and gentle truth of their own beings, to disrupt every remaining vestige of politically correct thought and bring humanity into a nowhere-land, a world in which staunch moral positions can no longer be claimed, because on your left and right are two queers who will refute them.
These are queers who do believe they were born gay, who do not know what their sexuality is and are not concerned, who fuck who they please and do as they chose. They are not even neccessarily queer. They are trannies without sob stories and straight people without heteronormativity. I asked my friend, Thomas, who has a very queer sensibility, if his intensive questioning of his sexuality had led him to identify as straight. "I ask myself that every morning," he said. "So far, the answer has always been yes." Tomarrow? None of us know who we'll be, or be with, on that mysterious day.
I think that a mutuality between trans and bisexual people is more appropriate than a shared GBLT community at this point, yet no mutual exclusion is neccessary, or of course, possible. I do not think we should stop trying to enter those spaces, and do so freely and openly and with noise. I do think that bisexual and trans people are linked in from a spiritual standpoint, and this makes us powerful spiritual allies and thus cultural agents.
Interestingly, bi/trans/queer specific groups make sense in terms of socializing and dating. As a trans person, I have always felt distinctly uncomfortable in gay/lesbian dominated spaces, simply because I am around people who are actively creating a culture around their monosexual and often genitally-based sexualities. I am unlikely to come home from a GBLT group with a gay man's number; I am much more likely to be either read as a dyke or assigned to an acceptable but desexualized trans-person catagory. They'll call me by the right pronouns but no shift in understanding will occur.
I feel much better in spaces that are, without even trying, very queer. These are groups of friends whose sexual preferences and genders span reaches that are known to be not always nameable and certainly not able to be pinned down. They are people more interested in each other as persons than in cultural connotations, words, & concepts. They are spaces that are safe for people to be exactly as they are: amorphous, alive, changing.