Category Archives: LGBTQ

Of Children Born: The Journey of an Agender Lesbian Mother

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Simone Kolysh is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. They are also an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College and Lehman College, teaching in Women’s Studies and Sociology. Their work addresses intersections of gender, sexuality and race.  In this post, Simone reflects on being an agender, lesbian mother of three children that parents against dominant narratives of gender and sexuality in their queer household. 

My body is a mother’s body. It is not a young body with smooth lines from the thighs to the small of the back. Mine is a body of valleys, soft and reminiscent of uterine battles and pain. It is a jagged, unshaven landscape full of stretch marks and cowardly veins that collapsed under pregnancy weight. Mine is a body that managed a labor without contractions and the darkness of postpartum depression, as the light of my first child was brought into the world on a hot July day. I rocked this body around the bed unable to loosen it free of panic but kept it close to my child so that no matter what was breaking inside me, I’d keep him whole.

My body is a mother’s body. It is not a dancer’s body with perfect posture and well-shaped legs. Mine is a body that knows what an obsession dance can be but that movement no longer comes first. Though it responds to an inviting embrace of the Argentine Tango, it does so with a reluctant and bothered ankle, broken weeks before the light of my second child was brought into the world on the day I, too, was born just twenty-five years prior. I crumbled under my own pressure, onto a mailbox at the corner of Kings Highway and West 8th street. Cursing, I hopped home thinking that to labor with a broken limb is just what I needed.

My body is a mother’s body. It is not my mother’s body with frail shoulders and cheeks full of Botox. Mine is a body of risks, piercings and tattoo ink. When the light is right and the mirror is bribed, I can see what my lover finds gorgeous. And though I claw at my body because it does not always make sense to me, I remember how bravely it got me through my only labor without pain meds, as the light of my third child was rushed into the world at the Brooklyn Birthing Center. When I now feel my three children collapse onto my breasts that have struggled to breastfeed, I know that my body is a mother’s body and it is well worth the worship.

______ ~ ______

There is nothing like a slurred ‘You’re so sexy, baby’ from some guy on the street to remind me that I am seen as a woman despite holding an agender identity. Even men that aren’t strangers have said that I am ‘so obviously a woman’ because I turn them on. Such experiences of sexism, laced with homophobia and racism when I am with my Black female partner, make it obvious that my struggle around gender takes a backseat to our collective struggle as people of marginalized gender and sexual identities, trying to navigate a world where white, cisgender, and heterosexual men hold a significant amount of power.

Yet white, cisgender and heterosexual men may be the future demographic of my three children, ages eight, six and one. Therein lies the paradox of an agender lesbian mother trying to raise feminist kids in a society that teaches boys to put down women and people that don’t conform to mainstream ideas of gender and sexuality. As a scholar of gender and sexuality, a sociologist and a Women’s Studies professor, I have given my kids a critical eye towards gender, sexual and racial hierarchies. It also happens that my middle child has taken a gender non-conforming path, linking once more our gender journey as mother and child.

Shortly before he was born, I began to struggle with the category of ‘woman’ into which I was born and raised. Once I admitted to myself that I could not finish the sentence, ‘I’m a woman because,’ and explored identities beyond the gender binary, I was able to more fiercely carve out a safe space for my children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first battles took place between me and my biological family that not only rejects and erases my gender and sexual identities but also believes I am causing my children great psychological harm. So before I can think through my gender identity and how it has evolved through my motherhood, I must face how my own mother shaped my ideas of womanhood.

My mother’s main lesson was that one’s power as a woman comes from seducing men and appealing to the heterosexual male gaze, in addition to becoming a mother and a wife. Whether it was because our family is Russian-Armenian or that the prevailing attitude across most cultures is one of patriarchy does not matter now. When I showed interest in taking charge of my pleasure or being with women, she took me to see a psychiatrist. When, at twelve, I came out as bisexual, the closest word I knew at the time to describe being attracted to more than just men, she cried. When I married at twenty, she was glad, hoping it was all a phase.

Rather immediately, I became obsessed with getting pregnant since that meant ‘having it all.’ Three years later, I was a mother of an eight-month-old child, banished from my house for breaking up with my husband. I was in love with another man, someone who was my equal. He helped me come into my motherhood by taking over my child’s care from my mother who tried her hardest to teach my son traditional gender norms. To this day, my first child is more aligned with ‘boy things’ because at the time I did not feel strong enough to stand up to my family.

My new partner supported my being queer, the label I took up during college, and my exploration of gender. When we married, I was pregnant and determined to raise this child differently. As I became more involved in LGBTQ scholarship and activism, I struggled with my gender identity and it took about three years to publicly come out as gender non-conforming, during a panel on transgender identities. It was a fleeting moment of being true to myself in a public setting since, without constant coming out, no one can ‘tell’ I am not a woman.

I have to come out again and again because it never quite sinks in and some people simply forget that I am agender or that my pronouns are ‘they/them.’ Generally, I never correct people if they use ‘she/hers’ because I am glad to align myself with women and do, to a large extent, experience the world as women do. Though I would like to not be perceived as any gender, changing my physical appearance was never essential – I do not want to change my body, just the way others link it to womanhood. Not making a physical transition makes it difficult for people to see me as agender.

Even though mothering, to me, does not mean I’m a woman, it adds to my invisibility as an agender person because of the assumption that if one has been pregnant and birthed three children, that they are even more of a woman. It certainly made my biological family like me more, because I gave them ‘three healthy boys,’ a marker of status within a sexist community. It is as if the assumed gender of my children helped solidify my womanhood. And, as a mother, I was now responsible for raising them properly, to become grown men able to provide for their families through upward mobility.

Which is why I am glad that my oldest child’s first Barbie was the Halloween Barbie, scary not only for its lack of realistic measurements. Growing up in Russia, having a Barbie meant you were better off than other families. When naked ‘pupsiki,’ which happened to be gender-neutral dolls, were all we could afford, Barbie symbolized a ‘better life,’ a life sought in the United States. Now I am raising my own children in Brooklyn, New York, but there is little place for the Russian-Armenian values of my past. After all, it was not in my parent’s dreams to have their grandsons play with dolls.

Instead of being groomed to be ‘real men,’ my kids are raised free of gender norms, which allows them to develop their identities safely as they learn more and more about the world. And, prior to learning about gender, each of them gives me a gift. As an agender person, moments when I am not gendered are essential to my wellbeing and how I see myself but they are rare. When my children are young, they are able to see me as Simone or Mommy without gendering me or seeing me as different from them. Even when they have noticed physical differences between their bodies and mine, I have explained everything from menstruation to genital shape without attaching biology to gender.

So when my kids look at me during those early years, their eyes are a place of freedom. In a way, motherhood has given me a way to find moments of validation for my agender identity, even if they are short-lived. I cannot say enough of these transformative experiences because I know what it feels like when a person with no pre-conceived notions of gender is able to see me. The intrusion that takes place when the outside world teaches them their mother is a woman is always disturbing and requires significant re-education. Long ago, I made a blog called Gender/Detki – Rearing Logical Children. In it, I had hoped to provide concrete examples of how I addressed gender and sexuality with my children.

Looking over the blog now, it is clear that my children knew little of gender until they interacted with their maternal grandparents, who live downstairs, or their Russian preschool environment. Their father and I never called them boys and they were allowed to play with any toy and wear any article of clothing, including dresses, tutus and fairy wings. Their hair was never cut and they never heard a single thing about their behavior not ‘being appropriate for boys.’ Naturally, what they learned from us, their chosen family made up of multiple parents and family friends, clashed with what they learned from others.

It was quite a surprise for my children to learn that boys and girls are often separated in preschool throughout the day, that boys and girls have to go to different bathrooms and that specific recital roles, of gnomes or princesses, are reserved by gender. The length of their hair became an issue, because other kids would say they look like girls and their ‘girly shirts’ got laughs. When I dealt with the administrators, I did not disclose my agender identity or any additional details about my family. I argued that if girls were getting their hair styled on a daily basis, the same can be done with my children’s hair and reminded them of the fact that we paid generously for tuition.

Once my kids got attached to their teachers, they wondered whether gender was good or bad. I taught them that people have different opinions and that nobody has the right to police how their gender is expressed. Sadly, because of their encounters with other adults and children, they have learned to expect harassment based on their choice of clothing, toys or behavior. Some of the time, they would give in to the pressure and, for example, ask me to cut their hair. Because it is their body and their choice, I have done so but with tears in my eyes. The pain and the anger I feel on behalf of my children exacerbates my own trauma.

Now older and in public school, my kids manage a lot more backlash, which is hard for me to watch. As an adult, I have not yet figured how to freely express my agender identity without having to constantly educate uninformed cisgender people. Why should children as young as five have to face a similar struggle? Because knowledge is power, I have taught my kids about the construction of the sex and gender binaries, the link to sexuality and how gender and sexuality are affected by one’s race, class and any number of other social factors. These topics are hard enough for my college students to grasp but the way people react to my kids’ gender ‘deviance’ makes such discussions necessary.

I am proud to say that the more I learn about gender and sexuality and about myself, the more my children are able to benefit and feel supported in their own exploration. They have shown resilience and courage by resisting harassment and trying to live truthfully. Here, I would like to return to my middle child’s gender non-conforming path. Most recently, he has become quite interested in wearing a ‘girl’s bathing suit,’ which is not going to go over well at his swim classes, summer day camp or with my biological family. Part of my motherhood journey is to be an advocate for my child and so I am gearing up to have several conversations so that he may be able to wear his turquoise bathing suit full of ruffles. When I caution him, I am sad to say that he may not be allowed to wear it and that his grandmother and others will continue to make comments. He nods and answers, ‘I will ignore them, Mama, I will just ignore them.’

When I speak to others on his behalf, part of me wants to say that I am also like him, weird and proud of my ‘deviance,’ and that I would love for my kids to be part of the LGBTQ community. But their mother’s deviance makes it hard for others to accept my children. Now that I am firmly at peace with my lesbian identity, there are new definitions to go over since their peers are throwing around casually homophobic remarks. To me it is not difficult to reconcile being agender and a lesbian but trying to explain to my kids why the label ‘lesbian’ still applies even if I am not a woman is a bit of a challenge. What I say is that others perceive me as a woman which means having to face sexism and homophobia.

If I did not have to explain to my kids why much of the world thinks our family is ‘wrong,’ they wouldn’t need an explanation because they have been raised to embrace difference. Regardless of divorce, changes in family structure, new gender and sexual identities, like their mother’s lesbianism or future children, they are surrounded by loving adults who will help them usher in a new world. Along the way, they will offer acceptance in return. Want to see an example? I recently asked my middle child about his feelings on my not wanting a gender, on being agender. Not looking up from his video game, he replied, “I feel fine because it’s your choice and gender doesn’t matter at all.”

On not Writing

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Erika Gisela Abad has a Ph.D. in American Studies, and works at Center for Puerto Rican Studies investigating intersectionality, cultural experience, and oral history among Puerto Rican communities and families.  In this post, Erika reflects on how her research in Puerto Rican Chicago sparks tension and memory in dialogues and debates with her mother.  

I struggle with not writing. Sitting with my mom after a long day’s work watching ridiculous TV shows on streaming media. I do this in the midst of professional uncertainty when my conscious tells me it is important to, well, send out applications. A woman struggling with the invisibility of her work, of her motherhood, closing the computer allows me to make her visible in the mundanity of the everyday to which we’ve arrived.

A mixed class Latina the second to finish college, the first PhD, I got this degree because making a living as a writer a mentor once told me, was going to be difficult. In the place many predicted the MFA would land me, I sit with my mom because of the reasons I write:

To heal, to release anger, to get to truths neither speaking nor working reveal. Drafting and talking through to forgive what moments trauma doesn’t want to let go. As I once wrote a mentor, it’s about getting to the table and trying to write what the other person coming to the table could or would look like. It’s about practicing with characters and metaphors how to listen through the trauma, whether the trauma be colonial, patriarchal or material – whether the trauma be that which has been named or that which must be kept invisible. Sometimes the struggle to survive demands struggles be kept silent. Human suffering, as inevitable as it is, often gets lost in the pursuit of fantasy as well as forgetting. Coming to the table is also about assessing whether the wheel turning revolution can be rebuilt or if the pieces of memory missing – memory missing because of what can’t yet be named – requires so many of us to rebuild it.

And sitting with my mom is about waiting, waiting for memory to reappear. And her memories awaken in the memories of others I record as an oral historian. Memories of parking lots turned into playgrounds, memories of late buses to colleges she never imagined. Memories of drinking Dr. Pepper for the first time, her comfort food, the comfort of being able to know more, taste more than poverty and patriarchy permitted to a young woman growing up where Puerto Ricans were trying to make place. These memories give her life beyond the college she never finished for no other reason than being by herself. Her stories lifting up from computer screens in a voice still weary of helping and reaching, come to life beyond the place of making meaning of leaving that requires returning, overwhelmed by isolation.

And I sit with that, when our skin color differences do not write away the sameness of racism we experience. A paleness that encourages forgetting that my brownness writes on the page, for the stage in ways that have her admit—not to me—that the fight continues. Responses to racism are coded in the traumas we share. Retorts and resistance colored by the adverse childhood experiences that divide us. Sitting is all she wants at the end of the day, at the end of days running, at the end of years climbing to find stable ground in which to root, in which to lift me, among her other children higher. My hands race and wring, legs twitch because work, all the kinds, exige movement.

And I struggle to not write in those moments: moments where the cogs in my head turn too fast for her to keep up; when the questions she asks receive huffs and stomps out looking for roads bigger than the rooms we occupy. In those moments where the grumbles she makes about the car driver who works when she doesn’t, because the car that is freedom to her and is more work to me in ways that put her back on the bus, on the train to move because her fixed time challenges the time that, for me, remains in constant question. The need for work fuels us in speeds and codes the other doesn’t understand.

It takes seconds to remember a woman speaking of a girl ashamed and strained by the laundry she carries on the bus. And I see my mom there, then, aching and taking days off to not have to, again cross the street with bags and baskets. She bought to own to never again walk or rent or borrow. She works to have the luxury, luxuries she couldn’t have back then, then when Puerto Ricans were beginning to make meaning, Puerto Ricans who form the history I collect. Her life fills up in the margins of those stories, of those whose mark on Puerto Rican Chicago get printed in newspapers, shine in their awards, appear on screens to see. Those Puerto Ricans now, in between arguments and questions, spark her to remember her story. Histories she lived differently, differently for reasons the more I learn from others, the more she reveals.

So I stretch and listen and sit still, waiting, waiting till she’s asleep to pull out the books, to open the pc, to take out the pen and paper to write. Because writing is still needed to heal, to move, to forgive, to let go, to uncover, to remember. But not writing—not writing in those moments I steal from reason, from economy—allows me to say thank you, thank you the only way a struggling writer knows how. By counting the wrinkles in her face, the sighs in her stories, knowing that, in between them, remain moments and movements to keep me writing.

Experiencing Gender Variation

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Last week, J. Sumerau discussed the development and ongoing recruitment for the Transgender Religion Survey. In this post, J. discusses zir own gender experience, and the importance of amplifying the voices and experiences of gender variant people.  

It has been over two decades since I first heard the terms crossdresser and transsexual. I still feel a smile creep across my face anytime I hear or see these words today even though I rarely use them anymore because once upon a time they gave voice to something I did not yet know how to talk about or make sense of about myself.

As part of an ongoing effort to amplify and document gender variant experiences and voices in scholarly and public discourse, I will use this post to briefly discuss some ways I experience my own gender variation. In so doing, however, it is important to note that my experience is only one of a vast multitude of diverse ways gender variant people experience themselves, sex, gender, and other aspects of this world (for more examples readers may want to start by checking out a new book called Trans/Portraits or other posts wherein people discuss gender variant experiences and options online). In other words, the voices and experiences of gender variant people are as broad and diverse as any other broadly labeled population I have come across to date, and my own experience is only one possibility within this much broader population. I thus offer my own experience as a compliment to ongoing efforts to more broadly disseminate the variety of gender experience throughout our contemporary social world.

Recognizing the diversity and variation within and between gender variant populations is especially important in my case because my own experience fluctuates regularly between various ways people experience gender. For example, there are people who experience more permanent forms of biological and / or social transition as imperative, necessary, and essential to their health, happiness, and well being. As medical research continues to demonstrate, these people need and deserve access, support, and resources for transition, and should be encouraged and affirmed in their transition endeavors at all levels of society. Across the spectrum of gender possibilities, there are people who experience more permanent forms of biological and / or social transition as unnecessary or optional for their health, happiness, and well being in this world. In such cases, the ability to safely transform their appearance, demeanor, or other facets from day to day or within any other time frame, in given circumstances, or in varied ways across the life course represents the gender experience in need of encouragement and affirmation. There are also many variations and nuances people experience between and beyond these two options. Whether one exists on either end of the spectrum I utilize above or somewhere in between or beyond this spectrum in terms of gender, (to me) the core of these experiences lies in the pursuit of autonomy for all people regardless of how they identify with, experience, and make sense of sex and gender in their own lives.

This vast spectrum of gender possibilities is something I confront every day because I tend to fluctuate back and forth between the two options I elaborated above. On some days, I am certain that I will fully transition biologically and socially at some point, and I will spend time looking over the options, researching doctors and procedures, and drawing inspiration from emerging narratives shared by people who transitioned at various points of the life course. At such times, I am certain that I need to transition to be fully satisfied in myself and my life, and I am incredibly grateful that I am lucky enough to have a life partner and close friends I can talk to about how I am feeling, transition plans, and how we will collectively navigate transition processes. On other days, however, I am equally certain that I will never fully transition biologically or socially, and I feel very happy about my ongoing back and forth between masculine and feminine appearances, dressing or otherwise appearing as various gender when I go out at varied times, and my efforts to blend varied elements of myself on any given day. At such times, I am certain that I should not biologically or socially transition in full because fluidity is the road to my own satisfaction, and I am equally grateful that I am lucky enough to have a life partner and close friends I can talk to about and show my fluidity without any pressure to “be only one thing” at any given time.

While the two aforementioned types of days allow me to recognize and appreciate the experiences of people who experience gender in each of these ways, there is unfortunately a third type of day. On this third type of day, I feel torn apart and lost within competing desires to be fluid and to fully transition at the same time. On such days, someone will call me mam or sir depending on my appearance and how they interpret that appearance, and I will want to scream, cry, or disappear because such moments remind me that I do not exist for many people in our world at present. On most such days, I hide in my home to the extent that I can or only go out at night when there are less people around to misgender and / or cisgender me by trying to fit me into their own assumptions and expectations. When I have to go out on such days, I find myself shaking inside and frightened every moment I encounter another person. At such times, I am certain that I need to transition and I am certain that I should not transition at the same time, and I realize all too clearly that I am only free and safe when I am alone or with my life partner and close friends who do not expect me to be a certain type of thing all the time or at any time, but rather help me to manage this type of day anyway they can.

These three types of days repeat throughout my life, and have for a long time now. In the midst of the first type, I see myself in others who seek to and / or accomplish transition in a world that has set numerous unnecessary barriers in their path, and attempts to erase, negatively mark or define, and punish our existence in this world. In the midst of the second type, I see myself in others in search of the freedom and safety to vary who they are in a world that seeks to box everyone into one static option, and often only offers fear, shame, and other forms of punishment for those who refuse to conform. In the midst of the third type, I just try to remember the few experiences I have had in explicitly gender neutral spaces where static, fluid and everywhere in between are welcomed and affirmed, and imagine what our world might be like if such spaces were much more common while I try to feel better about the ongoing battle inside me. In all such cases, however, I am confronted by just how much gender matters to one’s experiences in every facet of our current social world.

This observation especially hits home every time I notice just how differently I am treated when I appear feminine to someone and / or appear to not quite fit “feminine or masculine only” to someone else. In my case, the latter is a much more common experience whereas the former typically happens in darker environments and / or when people approach me from behind while interpreting my long hair, clothing, and / or body language as indicative of a feminine self. The difference in treatment when one is interpreted as masculine and when one is interpreted as feminine is dramatic and obvious. Further, the ways one is treated when they are identified as “possibly assigned male” while wearing or acting in a fashion typically assigned feminine are often terrifying and dangerous. Especially as someone who often can be interpreted as assigned male (intentionally or not), I see the disparities long outlined and opposed by gender scholars and activists everywhere I go because I regularly experience privilege and marginalization in varied aspects of my interactions with others depending upon the ways others interpret and assign meaning to my body, my appearance, and my selfhood.

In fact, how I decide to dress or walk or talk on a given day, how people interpret these endeavors, and what type of day from those listed above I am having in a given moment all collectively shape what the world looks like to me from day to day, situation to situation, and person to person. As I noted above, I am actually quite lucky in that I have a supportive network of people who embrace and affirm me in the midst of any of these experiences, and I further have symbolic and instrumental resources due to other aspects of my appearance and current circumstances that also provide strategies for mitigating such experiences. For me, a large part of the push to amplify the voices of gender variant people (as well as people in other marginalized social positions whether they are also gender variant or not) lies in doing what small part I can in the ongoing pursuit of such support and affirmation for the many people who do not have access to such networks or other important resources at present. As we have learned in relation to many marginalized communities over time, broader recognition of the existence and experiences of diverse groups often helps facilitate better understanding and acceptance of such populations over time. As someone who remembers learning that neither sciences nor religions appeared to either know I existed or have anything positive to say about my existence not so long ago, I think an important step in moving forward involves documenting and amplifying gender variant existence, and the multitude of ways people identify with, experience, and make sense of sex and gender throughout our world.

In my own case, the above offers a snapshot of my experience. I typically identify as a transgender and / or non-binary genderqueer depending on what type of day I am having at the time. In some ways, the use of both terms to capture the variation in my experience is comforting to me. In fact, I adopt a similar strategy when seeking to explain to others my sexuality (i.e., bisexual and pansexual Queer as a recognition of being on the bi spectrum in ways commonly described as pansexual and Queer) and my religion / spirituality (i.e., agnostic and / or skeptical non-believer as a recognition of my acknowledgement that I don’t know or care if there is a higher power or not in ways commonly described as being skeptical of unverified secular and religious claims). In the same way I exist and experience the world between common assumptions about gay/lesbian and hetero/straight sexualities and between common assumptions about religion and nonreligion, my existence and experience of gender lies somewhere between trans and cis gender with an appreciation for and recognition of people who exist and experience this world in relation to other locations within the broad spectrum of gender possibilities.

As a result, I want to close this post with two invitations for other gender variant people regardless of their sex, sexual, religious, or other social locations. First, as an editor of this blog and on behalf of my co-editors, I want to invite any gender variant person in search of an outlet for sharing their voice and experience to submit – anonymously or named – their stories to Write Where It Hurts. We welcome your experiences and perspectives, and will be happy to provide a space for sharing them for those who wish to do so. Second, as noted in last week’s post, I want to invite any gender variant person who is interested to participate in the Transgender Religion Survey. Recruitment continues on the survey itself, and we welcome your voices and experiences with and / or about religion and nonreligion.

For questions or to submit a post to Write Where It Hurts, readers may contact us at wewritewhereithurts@gmail.com

For more information, official survey documentation, and / or to participate in the Transgender Religion Survey, please visit: http://researchsurveyor.com/surveys/index.php?r=survey%2Findex&sid=568681&lang=en

The Transgender Religion Survey

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In this post, J. Sumerau discusses the motivations, contents, and goals of a survey effort seeking to document and amplify the voices of sex and gender groups typically missing from social scientific surveys about religion and nonreligion in American society.

In the past few years, contemporary religious and nonreligious commentators have begun to issue formal and informal statements concerning sex and gender diversity. As transgender women and men, intersex people, non-binary people, agender people, genderqueer people, and other groups of people who do not fit neatly into “male/female” and / or “woman/man” sex and gender binaries gain more recognition in American society and continue to fight for equal rights and representation in this country, some of the largest religious traditions in the country – including but not limited to the Southern Baptist Convention, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Catholic Church – have started issuing official statements about these groups of people. While some of these statements have been positive (such as the recent changes occurring within Reform Judaism to incorporate greater recognition of sex and gender diversity), many of them have been negative (such as the Southern Baptist Convention denouncing transgender, intersex, and non-binary existence).

At the same time, debates have emerged (especially online) within nonreligious communities about these populations and their place in American society. Like their religious counterparts, some of these examples have included positive depictions of such communities and calls for greater recognition, inclusion, and support of sex and gender diversity in America. However, some other nonreligious leaders and lay people have taken the opposite side while adopting and repeating negative stereotypes and condemnations of these communities. If the historical experiences of various marginalized people and communities offer any clues to these patterns, one may assume that religious and nonreligious statements about sex and gender diversity will only increase, that such statements may have far ranging effects on policy, politics, and the everyday experiences of many people, and that politicians (as presidential candidate Marco Rubio did earlier this week) may seize on these statements to justify opposition to equal rights for all people regardless of sex and gender status, identification, and experience.

As we watched these patterns unfold over the last couple of years while doing research and teaching concerning sex and gender groups and statuses often missing from traditional research agendas, measurement strategies, and protocols, some supportive colleagues and I became interested in what sex and gender groups typically missing from existing surveys might say about these patterns, the statements religious and nonreligious people made about sex and gender diversity, and their own religious and nonreligious experiences. To begin exploring this question, I began explicitly asking transgender, intersex, and non-binary people I encountered at various events for their opinions on these topics, for advice about incorporating these opinions and experiences into scholarship, and for advice concerning the best way to create a questionnaire or survey capable of capturing such opinions for scholarly dissemination and publication. While I initially only went to events and meetings I already attended occasionally or was already acquainted with, I gradually began to find and attend other meetings and events in hopes of gathering the most diverse array of advice, opinions, and suggestions I could. Specifically, I sought out people in each of these groups who experienced life in varied racial, class, regional, community, and political contexts in hopes of developing a study that could be as inclusive as possible of the immense variation contained within any common sex and gender status, group, or community categories.

Overall, the lesson I learned from all these informal inquiries was that if anything characterized the groups experiences of and opinions about religion and nonreligion it was diversity. People in each group agreed about many things, disagreed about many other things, and accomplished both of these options from question to question at times. As a result, I decided to fashion a survey that would allow people to self-identify and self-define their selves, experiences, and attitudes concerning religion, nonreligion, and other elements of American society. With this goal in mind, I turned to a supportive colleague with extensive experience designing surveys, and we further recruited another colleague who did their master’s work on sex and gender diversity and worked with us on other pieces on these issues related to religion. The three of us developed survey questions that allowed for a lot of variation in terms of responses, and then I took these questions back to people I had consulted previously to evaluate our efforts.

Over time, this process of construction and revision led to a survey instrument wherein respondents who choose to participate may define themselves (via multiple options or written in their own words; for example the gender identification question has 17 multiple choice options and an open-ended other response respondents may write in) in varied ways on every single variable, discuss their experiences and attitudes in their own words via open-ended options tied to questions about religion, nonreligion, and other social institutions and categories (for example, rather than assuming an experience with sex status, there is an open-ended question where respondents can share and define such experience in their own words), and wherein respondents may answer questions commonly offered on other religion and nonreligion surveys that generally do not have sex and gender measurements or only allow male/female or man/woman options for sex and / or gender.

Recently, we launched this survey online, and we are currently in the process of recruiting and gathering respondents through social media, conversations with national organizations, and through word of mouth in various communities. With recruitment under way, I wanted to use this space to discuss the details of the survey for anyone who may be considering participation. Simply put, the survey is a combination of multiple choice and open ended questions focused on religion, nonreligion, and other social institutions in contemporary America. Anyone who participates will have the opportunity to self define (either through the selection of one of many options provided in the survey or by writing in their own self identification in their own words) their own gender, sex, sexuality, race, education, income, religious or nonreligious affiliation, year of birth, state or region of residence, employment status, healthcare access, and political views. Respondents will also encounter a series of questions ascertaining religious, nonreligious, and other social experiences, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs (most of these also include open ended options for response and / or elaboration). Rather than assuming anything about the populations eligible for this study, we have specifically designed the survey itself to allow people to identify in their own ways, and discuss their own opinions, experiences, attitudes and beliefs.

Since our goal here is to document and amplify the experiences and opinions of sex and gender populations typically left out of surveys concerning religion, nonreligion, and other social institutions, anyone who identifies or exists in ways that do not fit neatly into “male/female” and / or “man/woman” binaries is eligible for participation in this study. As such, the focus of this survey rests upon comparing and contrasting the variation, diversity and complexity of sex and gender groups typically missing from previous surveys concerning religion, nonreligion, and other aspects of social life.

As part of contemporary institutional research processes, we developed a shorthand  label for describing and explaining the project to audiences and reviewers beyond the target population. After consulting with various members of different sex and / or gender groups, we decided to name the project the Transgender Religion Survey for official purposes because this option received the most support from members of these various social groups.

Especially considering that many sex and gender groups do not necessarily use or identify with the term “transgender” and many spiritual, nonreligious, and even some religious people do not necessarily use or identify with the term “religion,” we recognize that this name is not perfect and understand the perspectives of people who might prefer other names or not use or identify with these terms in daily life. However, for the purposes of this study and following the lead of some other large scale efforts to incorporate sex and gender groups often marginalized and erased in contemporary American society, we use transgender in the official survey documentation as a broad umbrella term for anyone who does not fit neatly into societal assumptions about binary sex and / or gender status, identification, expression, and / or display. Likewise, for the purposes of this study religion is defined as of or having to do with assumptions, beliefs, and practices regarding the supernatural.

While many people who fit within the broad definitions noted above identify in a wide variety of ways, shift and change language and identification terms and definitions over time in varied ways, and have very distinct experiences, beliefs and characteristics, we selected these terms as broad descriptors for the overall effort. Within the survey itself, respondents will define themselves in terms of sex, gender, and religion, and our analyses and use of this data will be built upon the ways people self identify and describe themselves, the variations and distinct experiences shared by the varied populations, and the representations respondents select for their distinct lives, groups, and experiences with religion, nonreligion, and other social phenomena. Rather than attempting to pick a definition for this or that group, we thus allow people to define themselves, and we will utilize their self definitions to compare and contrast variation among sex and gender groups concerning religion, nonreligion, and other elements of contemporary American society.

As a result, this project does not seek to define the characteristics of specific groups (i.e., what is transgender, what is Christian, what is atheist, what is intersex, etc.). There are many talented and capable activists and scholars engaged in such work at present, but in this case we will utilize the definitions and terms selected and discussed by the respondents themselves. Our goal is thus to compliment the work of sex and gender activists and scholars by incorporating the voices of sex and gender groups typically missing from other surveys into other areas of contemporary scholarship.

In closing, I encourage all eligible people (i.e., anyone who identifies or exists in ways that do not fit neatly into “male/female” and / or “man/woman” binaries) to consider participating in this study. While I hope for the day when all sex and gender groups are regularly recognized, included, and represented in scholarly efforts, I am reminded of how far we have to go to reach this goal every year when I encounter students that learn of many sex and gender groups for the first time in my classes. With this survey effort, we seek to continue and compliment ongoing efforts to increase the awareness and recognition of sex and gender diversity in contemporary society by documenting some ways varied sex and gender groups experience and think about religion and nonreligion.

For more information, official survey documentation noted above, and / or to participate in the study, please visit: http://researchsurveyor.com/surveys/index.php?r=survey%2Findex&sid=568681&lang=en

Ripped Pages, Erased words – lessons from the unintended audience

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A writer across genres and disciplines, this anonymous contributor is playing the professional field. She is debating whether to continue tenure track pursuits or focus on a career that lets her write what she chooses while pursuing advocacy work. She is grateful for the conversation/reflection that inspired this essay. 

There were two times in my life – once as a child, another as a young adult – where I was asked to destroy my words. In both situations, men asked me to get rid of my words – a journal and a blog. As a survivor of sexual assault and a feminist scholar aware of gendered language and silence, it was important for my own journey as a writer to fully name and forgive how I had responded to write as a result of those moments. I write this to remind myself why I write, for whom I write and to face the fears that have emerged in what I could/want to write and publish.

First, the journal writing I was doing as a 10-11 year old was framed by divorce, moving, death of a childhood friend and grandparents’ return to Puerto Rico. In that time period, abstract thought developing in my brain along with a great deal of loss in my environment creo un sentido de rencor, angustia y resentimiento. I was angry at everyone before I was a teenager. I had been lost, confused and I felt worthless given how much consistency I had lost. That anger was private until an elder read it. After reading it, he demanded I throw my words away because of how disrespectful and hurtful they were to the people I was framing in a negative manner. My words, my private thoughts were not protected because the journal was neither locked nor stored in a secret place. As a child I internalized the idea that my words did not belong to me. Once I ripped out the pages, I started writing fiction. Fiction as escape, as release, as an optimism I would not allow myself to find in an environment until I grew to live comfortably as a lesbian in a city located in the Western United States.

Ten or eleven years later, I was still acting and writing ‘straight’. I was writing straight fantasies, very PG, I thought, and the object of my affection demanded I take down the blog. Written without ever thinking he’d see it, I grew mortified that someone would share it, especially given the greater social context in which my ‘feelings’ for him were shared with him and how long it took him to tell me that someone told him. The person I was writing about yelled at me for how I felt, for writing it down and for publicizing it the way I had. Again, my words no longer belonged to me and I had to get rid of them. I did. Within months, I stopped associating with all involved. The wounds of being uncovered, of leaving and all that neither of us understand of each other’s life lay as an ever-increasing gap between us. Not just for the manner in which something public-private had been shared, but, more specifically, for what I understood that to represent at the time.

In both of these instances, I took for granted where I was writing. As a child, I needed locks and I needed hiding to keep my words mine. The uninvited and unintended audiences wanted to alter/erase my words because of what those words meant to them. Those words were not direct weapons against them. For me, in either instance, the words attempted to explore hurt, frustration, loneliness. The losses and change were overwhelming with minimal outlets available compared to the extent so many were suffering. I wrote as a means to escape, to let go of feelings. To have that taken from me, literally ripped out, informed fantasy writing that would sustain me until high school gave me access to password protected writing.

As a college student teetering on living in truth/coming out and trying to find smaller ways to be different, blogging was a way to connect with a handful of friends who had online journals and remained as invisible as I intended to be. Like in my childhood, I wanted a way to have a journal go with me wherever I was, operating on the belief that I was insignificant enough not to be distributed. It served as a way to explore curiosities, questions, internalized hetero-romantic idealism and other ideas that are of little significance to me now. In those moments, they were growing pains on paper/on screen. Growing pains that were mine. A question emerged that I will address after explaining how I viewed those two moments.

Those writings were a necessary process in my journey. Tremendous loss shaped how I perceived family because of how little control we had over our lives and over the affects of others’ choices on my ability to have, what I thought, was a normative childhood. No one wants to lose so much so quickly. Divorce and death shake foundations. Those I grew to rely on dispersed, and, in that, the grief of various communities – blood and peer – overwhelmed me. Grief transformed to hate because I could not bring my friend back. I could not go back to the house I had lived in for ten years. I did not have childhood friends I played with living next to me. I had more than my uncle had at my age, but that more was not something I would understand or forgive until others’ affluence taught me the power and resilience I had gained in that year of intense loss and change.

As for the online journal I kept in undergrad, I wanted to rewrite ownership of my sexuality. I didn’t think I owned it because – whether a gender or a community – I had spent a lifetime internalizing that my sexuality was not my own. Women grapple with this as much as those who struggle with being queer. I only allowed myself to understand that I had to hide, negotiate and perform resistance to the factors that informed the lack of ownership regarding my sexuality. Because of how new I had been to that community, because of the struggle I had relating to and working with cismen (of color), I was terrified of sharing the complex emotions I had around my body. When I did, I felt I was giving up too much too quickly. It has taken me years of poetry, therapy, and journaling to forgive myself and those young men for how naive we were about bodies, power, sexuality and desire.

The ownership others take over words based on their age/gender internalized authority remains a struggle in many communities. As writers, we each contend with the implications of ownership and measurement exercised by those who use social media to factor into whether one will be hired, published in the future, or deemed socially appropriate because of how in/visible we hope to be and because there are members of our audience we do not know. Reflecting over reactions remains key because there is a great deal we learn from ourselves in the process. Those lessons can, when we allow them to, spur our creative, intellectual and spiritual growth. Neither silence nor censorship will control the audience that thieves itself into the words to which we do not invite them. Neither silence/self-censorship will adequately erase the effects of our experiences. Writing is a choice, a demand for those of us who have born witness to suffering brought on by silence.

The quality of our writing can improve with awareness of how we control what we choose. As scholars, we control that which we are most informed. I take this out of my journal to share on this blog out of a need to forgive myself for who I couldn’t be for myself in moments I needed to express myself while protecting the integrity of my right to feel. As I grow as a writer, protection remains key, which is why I choose for this to remain anonymous for now. I want to control where my writing goes next. I want it to go to a place where, in the future, attaching my names to these words will not cause me nor any of the people in this narrative harm.

What’s in a Name: On Bi and Pan Sexualities

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A few weeks ago, I posted two pieces on Conditionally Accepted (see here and here) and one here on Write Where It Hurts exploring bisexuality in varied contexts and defined in varied ways. At the same time, Lain Mathers posted a piece here on Write Where It Hurts examining the ways these meanings and conflicts around bisexuality play out in lesbian/gay and heterosexual spaces. In this post, I want to reflect upon a question that regularly emerged in response to these posts – the relationship between bisexuality and pansexuality.

As I noted in the midst of some of the productive conversations that emerged in comment threads, the term pansexuality or pansexual (like bisexual, bisexuality and other fluid identity terms) is often rife with conflict. In my experience, this conflict arises as a result of the use of the term in three distinct ways by varied individuals and groups.

Before discussing these uses and the conflicts they contain, however, a little her-his-our-story may be useful. Initially, pansexuality was not coined as an identity term (i.e., like bi, homo, and hetero sexualities), but rather as a statement (often attributed to Freud and others at the time) on the presumed innate sexual desire of all humans. This elaboration is automatically problematic because it erases asexual existence and experience, but thankfully, this is not how the term is generally used at present. Rather, these days pansexuality is generally used as a form of sexual identification that dates back (at least) 3 or 4 decades. In this elaboration, it was initially established as a type or form of bisexuality wherein the person in question did not factor genital possession in the establishment of sexual desire and practice. In fact, many bisexual people I have known (myself included) use this term interchangeably with bisexual, fluid, and Queer among others to denote experience and identification with this end (i.e., lack of concern for genitals in matters of attraction and / or sexual activity and / or romance) of the bisexual spectrum (i.e., I may say I’m bi, pan, fluid, and Queer within a few breaths of the same conversation since for me (and historically) this is like saying I like guitars, fender guitars, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, and bass guitars = I like guitars and here are certain types of guitars that especially fit my needs).

When this identification practice emerged, bisexuality (even in general use) typically referred to those people attracted to their own body and / or genital type and the bodies and genital types of others who were not the same as their own (i.e., these were people who engaged in both homo and hetero sexualities, therefore bisexual). Within this umbrella definition, some bisexuals were (1) attracted to more than one type of genital set or sex, some bisexuals were (2) attracted to more than one type of physical form (i.e., size, shape, race, sex, gender presentation, etc), some bisexuals (like me) were (3) attracted to all types of bodies (i.e., like mine and not like mine) whether or not they looked like their own body type, and some bisexuals (4) fluctuated along varied points of this spectrum throughout their lives. Within this spectrum of possibilities between self (1) and other (2) body types (i.e., bisexuality) and between homo (1) and hetero (2) sexualities, pansexual referred to the third type noted above (as did ambisexual, polysexual, and other terms).

In fact, this spectrum still finds voice within bisexual communities and umbrella designations, and remains the most common definition of bisexuality I have seen among bisexual identified people. Other terms, such as fluid (noted as number 4 above), have even been established to make sense of bisexual people’s locations within this spectrum / umbrella. However, the last few decades witnessed systematic erasure and marginalization of bisexuality within lesbian/gay and heterosexual communities predicated upon transforming the word “bi” from an expression of two ends of a complex spectrum of human engagement and desire preference into a simplified binary articulation of the male/female genital binary homo and hetero sex norms are built upon. Instead of bisexual referring to both homo and hetero sexualities, people began linking it to sex / gender binaries to essentialize homo and hetero sexuality. To put this into perspective, imagine if we began saying homo and hetero sexual meant one sex only instead of preferences for a type of sexual engagement – you would have the same thing that has been done to bisexuality over the past few decades, and it would likely sound as silly to homo and hetero sexual folks as it does to most bisexual folks aware of this history. In the process of this extermination of bisexual complexity in the hetero-homo imagination, some people (not surprisingly) began to identify as pansexual in order to avoid biphobia and monosexism within lesbian/gay/straight communities.

It is within this context that (at least) three uses of pansexuality have emerged as regular components of normative or mainstream sexual politics. In the first case, people adopt a more traditional interpretation of pansexuality as a type of bisexuality that refers to sexual attraction and / or engagement regardless of genital consideration. In such cases, pansexuals stand along side other bisexual people against monosexism and biphobia (and in many cases hetero and cis sexism), sometimes refer to themselves as bi-pansexuals or pan-bisexuals though just as often simply say they are pansexual and / or bisexual (or any other terms within the bi spectrum) in varied contexts and with varied others, and often find comfort and security in larger bi communities while working to provide the same for other bi people in lesbian/gay/straight communities. In such cases, pansexuality is not problematic at all – it is simply someone exercising their self and bodily autonomy to identity in the way that best fits their experiences and desires. They are harming no one, and often, as members of larger bi communities, helping others. In such cases, their identification efforts are similar to working class people who prefer homosexual or heterosexual when identifying themselves, but do not have issues with or fight against middle class people who prefer to use the terms gay or lesbian or straight to identify themselves – they are merely identifying as they see fit within a larger umbrella of binary sexual (homo and / or hetero) others who they support and embrace.

The second most common way I see pansexuality used, however, is deeply problematic. In this case, people identify as pansexual to distance themselves from bisexual communities and avoid the marginalization of these communities within lesbian/gay/straight (i.e., binary sexual) communities. In such cases, these people will call themselves pansexual in a positive way, but then repeat biphobic notions of binary bisexualities used to marginalize bisexuality (however termed) within gay/lesbian/straight spaces. In so doing, they will generally receive affirmation and better treatment from binary sexual communities (lesbian/gay or straight identified) in exchange for supporting monosexism (i.e., sexual binaries) – a process referred to as trading power for patronage in inequality studies (i.e., the process wherein a subordinate accepts subordination on certain terms to gain a more comfortable location within a given matrix of inequality). In such cases, pansexuality is incredibly problematic because it is used as a form of sexual inequality reproduction that further marginalizes other forms of bisexuality and non-binary existence. In such cases, pansexual identification efforts are similar to some working class people who prefer homosexual or heterosexual to identify themselves, and then say those using the terms like gay or lesbian or straight are misguided or wrong or not “really” authentic and / or middle class and above people who prefer the terms like gay and lesbian and straight, and then say those using homosexual or other terms are misguided or wrong or automatically hurting them or not “really” authentic – they are using their own preferred terminology as a mechanism for demonizing people who prefer other terms for describing similar (in many cases the exact same) sexual desires and identities.

Within the aforementioned uses of pansexuality, there lies another common use that actually demonstrates the importance of the first two patterns. In this case, people grow up in spaces and communities devoid of bisexual our-his-her-story and understanding, and as a result, learn binary sexual (lesbian/gay/straight) perspectives of the world only. In such cases, they are taught horror stories and insults and jokes about bisexuality that reproduce monosexism and biphobia, and then adopt pansexuality as a term for themselves because they don’t look like or want to be like the negative depictions they are taught by those who benefit from monosexism. In such cases, they rarely know that pansexuality emerged as a form of bisexual identification, or the patterns of ongoing bi-erasure, marginalization, and just plain fear embedded within many contemporary binary sexual (lesbian/gay and straight) communities. Without access to this backstory, they simply identify in the way that appears “acceptable” to the people around them and embrace the biphobia promoted in the same circles. In such cases, pansexuality is once again problematic for the same reasons noted above, but it is nuanced because some of these people will change their behaviors and / or identities and / or politics when they meet bisexual communities, learn about bi-pan-Queer-fluid backstories, and / or continue to encounter marginalization (though often in a more polite form) within lesbian/gay/straight circles due to their non-binary sexual desires and practices. Others, however, will have grown accustomed to the comfort achieved by contributing to bi oppression, and thus slide into pattern two noted above over time. Finally, still more may never become acquainted with bi-pan-Queer-fluid backstories, perspectives, and / or communities, and remain ignorant of these dynamics or the ways their own self presentation and politics speak to these long term patterns. In such cases, pansexual identification efforts are similar to people who only grow up hearing heterosexual perspectives on the world, and internalize these depictions of dangerous or scary gay/lesbian/homosexual people and wrestle with these depictions whether or not they ever encounter gay/lesbian/homosexual backstories, perspectives, or communities in their own lives – they adopt terminology (i.e., I do this, but I’m not gay/lesbian/homosexual/bisexual/pansexual/etc) due to the fear, guilt and shame they were taught by others seeking to preserve their own position within binary sexual politics and power structures.

With these patterns in mind, I return to the conflicted positions of contemporary pansexual identification. As suggested in my use of gay/lesbian/homosexual conflicts I’ve observed over the years, the use of pansexuality as an identification term is complicated, nuanced, and not a new issue for sexual minority communities (i.e., one only needs to look back at previous conflicts between homophile and gay identifications or conflicts over lesbian and gay woman to see the exact same patterns play out in binary sexual minority (i.e., lesbian/gay) communities in the past). As a result, I tend to interpret these conflicts in much the same way I do in relation to the gay/lesbian/homosexual conflicts noted above.  As Queer scholars have long suggested, I focus on the actions tied to the label instead of obsessing over whether or not someone identifies in a “specific” way (i.e., I focus on sexual justice instead of identity politics).

As such, if someone identifies as pansexual while embracing and working for other types of bisexual people, then I see no problem, welcome them to the club, and stand beside them in any way I can. This is the same way I approach bisexual, lesbian/gay, heterosexual, or asexual people – if they identify as their chosen term while embracing equality for all beings of varied sexual identifications and working for such equality, I want to support them in all ways I can.

If, on the other hand, someone identifies as pansexual while demonizing and working against (intentionally or otherwise) other types of bisexual people, then I see a problem, oppose them in any way I can, and call them out on their biphobia, monosexism, and / or heterosexism. This is the same way I approach bisexual, lesbian/gay, heterosexual or asexual people – if they identify as their chosen term while demonizing other beings of one or more sexual identifications and working against such people, they are facilitators the pain of many other people, and I oppose them in all the ways I can.

I take a similar approach – no matter someone’s sexual identification – in relation to cissexism, racism, sexism, ablism, classism, colorism, nationalism, religious oppression (maybe religism?), and other forms of inequality. If the person in question is working to oppose these systems that cause so many people so much pain, then I stand with them whether our identities match or not and / or whether or not I agree with their chosen identification terms, but if they (intentionally or otherwise) feed these systems I stand against them, do my best to call them out, monitor myself to make sure I don’t slip into such practice or catch any practices like this in my own activities I’m not aware of yet, and otherwise seek to end (in any way I can with my one life) these systems and their power.

As a result, my ultimate suggestion in regards to differential sexual identification terms is to focus on equality and justice for all beings regardless of sexual identification. Do you identify and act in ways that support the equality of others? Do you identify and act against monosexism, heterosexism, biphobia, homophobia, and other forms of sexual violence and marginalization? Do you identify and act in ways that support the right of other people to exercise autonomy in self identification and activity even when such autonomy leads them to prefer different identifications and practices than your own? Do you identify and act in ways that support consent, bodily autonomy for all, sexual freedom for all, and the dignity and respect of all people who embrace and support these ideals? For me, these are the important questions regardless of the term one prefers to use to describe their own sexual practices and desires.

J. Sumerau

Teaching Where It Hurts

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In this post, Xan Nowakowski and J. Sumerau reflect on their experiences personalizing sociology in the classroom (see their recently published Teaching Sociology article on this topic here) in hopes of facilitating dialogue and debate about the benefits and limitations of incorporating professor biographies into sociological curricula.

As people who write about, teach, study, and engage in advocacy related to chronic health conditions, social inequalities, sexual and gender experiences and identities, and managing trauma, we have become intimately aware of the potential personal experience and stories can have for facilitating learning and motivating concrete action among our students, colleagues, and communities. At the same time, we know all too well that structural factors regularly limit who can say what in classrooms in much the same way they do beyond the academy, and that academic traditions have long privileged rational or remote notions of instruction over emotional and personalized approaches. As we did in our recently published Teaching Sociology article, we would like to encourage our colleagues to consider these options and structural patterns in hopes of spurring dialogue about the potential of using our own experiences within inequitable structures to help students and colleagues see the pain created by social inequalities on a more personal level.

As we did with the establishment of ongoing conference sessions, an upcoming book project, and the creation of this site, our focus here lies in the potential of writing (or researching, teaching and advocating) where it hurts. When Xan shares stories of almost dying or struggles with doctors and other medical professionals unfamiliar with what to do to treat their chronic physical health conditions, for example, students come face to face with the results of our flawed healthcare system in the midst of their own lives and worldviews. Likewise, when J. shares stories of being physically assaulted for daring to go on a date with a cute boy or watching a lover die amidst both caring and supportive and judgmental and hateful medical professionals, students witness the concrete tears, pain, and sorrow that come from experiences within interlocking systems of inequality embedded throughout our society. In these and many other cases, we utilize our own pain to pull social inequality out of the abstract and into the actual lived experiences of the students and colleagues who interact with us.

As we advocate in our recent article and practice in our own classes and on this site, we seek to personalize social inequalities for our students. Rather than things they read or hear about in class that happen somewhere “out there” unseen to them, we use our own experience and narratives shared by other people occupying marginalized positions or experiencing traumatic events to translate “out there” into personal realities with actual faces, personalities, voices, and bodies in the eyes of students and colleagues. In fact, both students and colleagues regularly experience their own organic emotional reactions to social patterns in the process, and tend to very quickly make the link that if it could happen to “their professor” then it could happen to “them” or “their loved ones” as well. Not surprisingly, such realizations very quickly transform societal patterns of inequality into anything but abstract concepts. As a result, our willingness to talk about the pain or teach where it hurts often translates into incredibly passionate and engaged rooms full of students especially willing to discuss and consider concrete steps they can take toward more positive social relations.

As we note in our recent article, we developed these approaches – individually and collectively – over time by building the entirety of our class offerings around discussion, consent, and application of scholarly materials to personal experience. In terms of discussion, for example, our courses are organized – from the first to the last day – around personal or collected emotional narratives that we share with students in relation to each course reading and topic. In so doing, we ritualize personal narratives within the class so students become accustomed to this form of interaction and dialogue throughout the course. Likewise, our courses are built upon an emphasis on consent wherein students are never required to disclose their own personal experiences or use ours in their work, but they are allowed to do both of these things on any assignment or in any class meeting where such things are relevant to the given assignment or class topic or assigned material. We thus remove grading from the equation by giving students ample resources to do just as well in the class no matter their experience and / or interpretation of the personal content we or other students share. Finally, we strategically link every scholarly piece or activity in a given class to specific personalized examples so students are able to always see the real world (or applied) aspects of the materials we cover in their own lives, in our lives, and / or in the lives of other people. Our experiences – as well as some initial negative experiences others have had when first attempting styles like our own without these ingredients – tell us these (and maybe other) efforts to create classrooms where students get used to and feel safe with vulnerability may be essential ingredients in personalizing instruction.

With all this information in mind, we invite dialogue, commentary and discussion on the possibility of personalizing scholarly work through teaching and other methods. Whether one seeks to join this conversation on this site or in relation to our call in Teaching Sociology or in any other space, we invite and appreciate other educator’s perspectives on these matters. To this end, ask yourself what ways you do or could personalize sociology? What might be the benefits or limitations of doing so? What institutional and structural steps might we need to take to serve and protect those who share their pain in the service of education and advocacy by and for their students and other colleagues? While we will not pretend to have some “right” or “absolute” answers to these questions, our experiences to date within and beyond classrooms tell us these questions might be incredibly important and useful in many ways.

What “team”? Some thoughts on navigating monosexism

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In this post, Lain Mathers reflects on zir experiences navigating monosexism in contemporary society.  Lain Mathers is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago and the Assistant Editor here at Write Where It Hurts, this is zir first blog.

Earlier this week, Dr. J Sumerau posted on Conditionally Accepted and this blog about the disjuncture between lived experiences and academic definitions of bisexuality. Specifically, ze wrote about how the definitions generated by academics, often with little or no experience interacting with bisexual people (that they know of) or living bisexual lives, are then used to enforce and regulate what is “really” considered bisexual. In this post, I am going to reflect on what it is like for me to move through the monosexual world (i.e., a world defined by sexual binaries) as a bisexual person and bourgeoning sexualities scholar.

Some of my earliest memories about bisexuality came from high school. I often heard my classmates joking about bisexuality (or “bicuriosity” as it was often reduced to). In the hallways, at the lunch tables, in the parking lot after school, such pejorative comments ended up reducing bisexuality to some “true” gay or lesbian “nature” (often in far less neutral language) and were always followed by hysterical laughter. In addition to these comments, my male heterosexual peers often leered at groups of teenage girls, audibly fantasizing about how “hot” it would be if one of them were bisexual so that she would presumably engage in a threesome with one of them and another “hot chick”.

I observed this trope of the “hot bisexual girl” (never a “hot bisexual woman,” only ever a “hot bisexual girl,” reducing adult bisexual women to an infantilized position) expand into my college years, as many of the teenage and young adult heterosexual men I met mused over the possibilities of finding the “right bisexual girl” that would be “down” for a threesome with him and another woman. At one point, I witnessed one of my female college peers follow up this statement with the question, “Well, why don’t you engage in a threesome with a bisexual guy? Maybe your girlfriend would prefer that!” This particular guy responded with, “Fuck no. I’m not having sex with a homo.” Following his blatantly homophobic, biphobic, and monosexist remark I asked, “Would you ever want to date a bisexual girl that you theoretically would have this threesome with?” He paused for a second, “Nah, I don’t date sluts.”

It was at this point that the messages about bisexuality I heard up to that point (from heterosexual people) congealed into a clear dichotomy – the hot, sexually available bisexual girl that you only have threesomes with, but never date contrasted with the always-already “truly homosexual” male who can never actually be bisexual because of the “one act rule” that is particularly pervasive in dominant heterosexual paranoia around males who sleep with other males. I even remember this theme coming up in interactions with some of my early heterosexually-identified boyfriends when they begged me to watch “bisexual girl porn” with them to “get in the mood”. This always made me uncomfortable, a feeling I attributed at the time solely to my discomfort with the sexist objectification in much of mainstream porn. While this was surely a large component of the equation, the fact that I also experienced bisexual desires (that I had yet to acknowledge) was likely another.

Despite the overwhelmingly derogatory lens through which I learned to view bisexuality from my heterosexual peers, I began to openly identify as bisexual during my last year of college. During this time, I did a great deal of research on the Internet and managed to find more positive messages about bisexuality in the form of online conversations among self-identified bisexuals. Additionally, after the negative experiences I had talking to heterosexual people about bisexuality in the past, I was encouraged by the presence of what I understood to be a fairly radical scene of activists and lesbian, gay, and “queer” individuals in the community where I resided at the time. I eagerly hoped that shifting my peer circle from a predominantly heterosexual and sexist scene to a supposedly “queer” scene would be a refreshing start to fully embracing my bisexuality in a positive and supportive environment.

You can imagine the disappointment, then, when a conversation like the following ensued:

At a coffee shop I frequented, some people that I knew were discussing the Occupy movement (this was in the early days of its existence, and many of the activists and “queers” in the place where I lived were planning a similar demonstration locally). The issue of sexuality came up and the conversation slowly veered away from Occupy and towards a conversation of sexual politics. At one point in the conversation I identified myself as bisexual, still a relatively new phenomenon for me, so much so that speaking it out loud felt disingenuous even though it wasn’t. The conversation lulled, some people’s lips pursed, one person pulled out his phone, another took a deep inhale of their cigarette. Finally, the quiet broke when one of the women sitting near me who I was accustomed to seeing rotating in this circle took a large gulp of coffee and then ardently informed me that:

“It’s actually pretty offensive that you use that language. After all, you’re limiting the existence of everyone to either men or women and there’s a lot more gender identities that exist beyond that. Just, like, politically try to be more aware.”

I was stunned, particularly because (unbeknownst to her) I was also reconciling my own non-binary gender queer existence at the time and did not at all see my bisexuality as an invalidating force in that regard. I was perplexed at how she arrived at the conclusion that the “bi” in “bisexuality” only meant “men and women.” From the hours of research that I did on the Internet, on bisexual community pages and Facebook groups, this was not at all the consensus. In fact, I read through a multitude of conversations of self-identified bisexual people reflecting on the beautifully multifaceted fact that “bisexual” can mean one’s own sex and other sexes, men and women, cisgender and transgender, intersex and non-intersex, or no preference for bodies and/or gender identities whatsoever!

I was beside myself trying to sort out why a college-educated supposedly “radical lesbian queer” individual would assert such a myopic view on the meaning of bisexuality. Yet, this was a circle I was fairly new to, so I did my best to disappear from the rest of the conversation (unsuccessfully based on the condescending looks of disapproval directed at me for the next half hour, what are also referred to as “microaggressions”).

In the midst of all this, I could not shake the questions running through my head: if the implication of bisexual attraction and desire supposedly means that I am saying only “men and women” exist, then why is it that no one interrupted the self identified gay male to my left when he discussed his sexuality? Wasn’t he suggesting that only men existed and that there was some “essential” type of being called “man”? Why was bisexuality the sexual identity and set of (extremely diverse) practices solely responsible for reinforcing the problematic and essentialist gender binary? Also, how did these people, a group of supposedly “radical activists, and members of a lesbian, gay, and queer community” not see that they were engaging in a kind of erasure that was not so dissimilar than what they experienced from heterosexuals? I was crushed and disappointed to learn that not only did I not belong in this space either, but also that my existence was offensive.

Be “hot” or be “offensive.” As a bisexual, what I first learned from heterosexual and lesbian/gay people was that I could not be considered fully human with ideas and desires of my own.

A few months after this interaction, I moved to a large city for school and hoped that I would find a more welcoming space for bisexuals in a big city (unlike where I previously lived). I started going on dates, primarily with self-identified lesbian women, in hopes of getting a chance to meaningfully engage this component of my desire and attractions (and also because I had no clue where to find other bisexuals). After the interaction I had with the woman at the coffee shop, I was apprehensive to disclose my bisexuality to anyone – straight, lesbian, or gay – and attempted to avoid talking about my sexual desires other than the ones that would be immediately relevant in that situation (while, ironically, cultivating an interest in studying sexualities). On these dates, I became acutely aware that not only was I offensive (as the woman at the coffee shop had informed me), but that I was also not to be trusted, since, as one woman put it, “bisexual girls can’t make up their minds,” (here, again, bisexual girls can’t make up their minds, reducing bisexuality to childhood not unlike the heterosexual males at my high school).

Eventually, I began to meet other bisexuals and became entirely frustrated with the notion that I was just not “gay” enough, and I began openly identifying as bisexual again (sometimes). Yet even when I did this, I found myself sitting around tables and making sure that those near me knew the story that I fashioned to shield myself from any potential judgment – that I was “like 85-90% gay, though,” generally followed by a laugh and a sip of whatever I was drinking at the time with the hope of concealing my profound discomfort and disdain for this practice of “quantifying” just how bisexual I really was just to avoid negativity from straight, but predominantly gay and lesbian people. In time this did not prove to be much better of an approach than entirely obscuring my desires altogether.

This dissonance was buttressed by the fact that, despite the multitude of ways I tried to present myself while navigating the changes in/with/to my gender, others most commonly read me as a lesbian woman. This was most clearly relayed to me in an interaction I had with a man one day while purchasing a pack of cigarettes at a corner store in the city.

“Congratulations!” The man behind the counter exclaimed as I walked through the door.

I looked around, unsure of whether he was addressing me, or someone familiar that he knew who happened to enter right behind me. I quickly realized there was no one else in the store and since all I had done that morning was get out of bed and walk to the corner, I inquired about the reason for his congratulations.

“Oh, well now you can get married!”

Setting aside the reality that I did not, in fact, have a partner at this time, I quickly realized that, in this man’s eyes, I was a lesbian woman and the day before our interaction the former governor of our state signed gay marriage into law in the state where we lived. Not only was I apparently a lesbian woman, but one who would, of course, automatically want to marry. His assumptions not only erased the fact that I, actually, could have been married to some of my partners long before this date, but that perhaps marriage was not something I had any intention of engaging in regardless of my partner choice. Alas, this man not only reflected his limited familiarity with only the most “respectable” of “LGbt” issues for many straight people, but also the erasure of bisexuality completely from potential “intelligible” forms of existence.

All of these encounters are just a sampler of my experiences navigating bisexuality in a monosexual/monosexist social world. In my adolescence and college years I primarily confronted the dynamics of heteronormativity (and still do). Yet, heteronormative regulations are only one side of a monosexist coin, the other side of which involves navigating the imperatives of homonormativity. For many bisexuals this is a phenomenon all too familiar. We are either too straight, or not straight enough. We are not gay enough either, or we’re really just gay and waiting to “pick a side already.” We’re hot, offensive, untrustworthy, a specter of danger, and volatile. Yes, we are destabilizing for homo and hetero normative assumptions in the most fluid of ways. This is a reality I continually have to work to embrace while navigating hostility from lesbian, gay, and straight others.

While I have often heard – from straight, gay, and lesbian people alike – that bisexuals have it easier because we can “just choose to be closeted” I want to stop and interrogate this assumption –especially since recent reports reveal that bisexuals suffer from more severe health complications than straight, lesbian, or gay people, and because the same assertion was made against lesbian and gay people not so long ago. Additionally, one of the most cited difficulties that bisexuals report is lack of community support. Monosexism is not just inconvenient for bisexual people, it is a form of violence, and it is quite real in its consequences, particularly for bisexual people who already occupy other marginalized structural positions.

My hope in sharing this information is to continue dialogue concerning how we define “bisexuality” in our own communities compared to the academy. I am hoping that perhaps we might opt to challenge where we see monosexism in our own classrooms, writing and research agendas, and community engagement projects.

Lain Mathers

Writing about Bisexuality

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This week, Conditionally Accepted will post my two-part essay on bisexual marginalization in the academy. In this post, I reflect on the experience composing these essays to offer some other things for people to consider when engaging with sexual fluidity in our world.

When a colleague I admire (Dr. Eric Anthony Grollman) asked me to consider writing about being bisexual in the academy, I began wonder what I would say. On the one hand, talking about my sexuality and sexual experiences is something I have a lot of experience with and generally feel very comfortable doing (in large part thanks to a very supportive network of loved ones of varied sexualities I can turn to for support when I need it).  On the other hand, bisexuality is a such a wide and varied experience that I was uncertain what aspects I should focus on in the post.

As I often do when confronted by such questions, I conducted an informal poll of sorts.  I reached out to a lot of sexually fluid people I know within and beyond the academy (most identify as bisexual, but others self identity as polysexual, pansexual, trysexual, fluid, and / or Queer), and asked them “If you were granted a platform to talk about bisexual experience that might be read by many binary sexual folk (i.e., heterosexual and lesbian/gay people), what would you want to discuss most.”  I was lucky enough to get a lot of responses, and I began to synthesize them along the lines of how we are typically defined by others in the academy and then symbolically assaulted by the same others using the definitions they came up with in the first place.  I then turned my attention to binary allies (i.e., lesbian/gay and heterosexual folk who are supportive of fluid people, communities, and issues), and asked them roughly the same question.  Again, I got many useful responses, and they ultimately spoke to the definitional question and attempts to “make y’all fit into our binaries” as one said.  As a result, I focused the Conditionally Accepted essay on definitions of bisexuality (part one) and strategies for combatting biphobia based on such definitions (part two – coming soon) and I encourage everyone to check out these posts (as well as this one by Dr. Julia Serano) and hope they may be helpful to people regardless of their sexual identities and preferences.

By the end of the experience, however, I realized there were at least two more important components that I should at least raise for further commentary. First, I would like to share some other common issues raised in my informal poll that we might want to consider in relation to sexual fluidity within and beyond the academy. Then, I would like to share some definitional issues I accidentally ran into in relation to talking about binary sexual people in hopes of helping other fluid folks avoid the same pitfalls with binary sexual colleagues and audiences.

In the first case, alongside concerns about how fluid people are defined in the academy, the three most common questions raised in my informal poll included (in no particular order) the following:

  1. Why doesn’t there ever seem to be much conversation about monosexism (i.e., the elevation of beliefs that one is naturally only attracted to one sex) in the academy despite rising recognition of systems (like heterosexism, homonormativity, and cisnormativity) that are often built upon this ideology?
  2. How do binary sexual people (generally lesbian and gay people and seemingly more and more popular recently) reconcile calling themselves Queer (i.e., a label initial conceptualized via the rejection and opposition to binary categories) and also mobilizing “born this way” or “binary lesbian and gay” claims? How do they make sense of this contradiction?
  3. Since studies show bisexuals are viewed less favorably and sometimes experience even more marginalization than binary sexual minorities (i.e., lesbian and gay people), where are the massive calls for action on behalf of bisexual communities that we see so often from and for gay and lesbian communities?

I can’t pretend I have answers to these questions, but I do wonder what binary sexual people would say in response.

In the second case, one thing this experience taught me is that some of the terms I use for binary sexual people (and hear used regularly by other fluid sexual folk) may be problematic when seeking to develop fluid-binary conversations. As a result, I thought I would mention this aspect in hopes of helping such conversational efforts since (best I can tell) we all have more in common (especially binary and fluid sexual minorities) than we are often taught. To this end, I want to share a handful of terms I use to refer to gay/lesbian and heterosexual people regularly in practice that do not seem to raise any issue for fluid sexual folk, but might for binary sexual folk.

I have used these terms (and was taught them – sometimes by gay/lesbian and heterosexual people) interchangeably because from a fluid perspective they all basically mean the same thing (i.e., the same way that in practice bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, trysexual, and fluid tend to all mean the same thing in practice among the vast majority of people I’ve met). While these are all the same from my perspective, I regularly learn that they can mean different things to binary sexual people, and I think it is important to be aware of such variation in order to avoid (likely unintentionally) hurting people who see certain terms in certain ways.

When talking about sexual binary folk, I tend to use the following terms as similes that all convey “this person identifies within homo/hetero sexual binary categories,” but here I’ve noted observations about how binary sexual folks respond in varied ways to these terms and / or how I’ve seen them used:

  1. Binary Sexual – I have only heard bisexual / fluid people, bisexual / fluid allies, gay/lesbian/straight folk who don’t agree with the “born this way” rhetoric, and / or gay/lesbian/straight people who identify as politically Queer and /or somewhat fluid or fluid capable use this terminology to date.  I admit, this is my preference simply because it focuses attention on monosexism and the sexual binary.
  2. Gay / Lesbian / Straight – I have yet to find any negative reactions to these terms in the academy, but some homosexual people without access to college education do not like the terms gay and lesbian and prefer homosexual or same-gender-loving.
  3. Homosexual / Heterosexual – Some gay/lesbian people in the academy don’t like homosexual and some straight people don’t like heterosexual – they offer too many different reasons in my experience for me to effectively summarize them here.
  4. Homophile / Heterophile – I’ve only heard this used by gay/lesbian elders and by elder straight allies to gay/lesbian communities. I don’t actually know what younger gay/lesbian/straight folks think of these terms, but I would like to learn.
  5. Same / Separate Genital Loving – I’ve only heard this term used politically by bisexual, intersex, asexual and transgender people seeking to (a) decouple sex and gender, (b) Queer assumptions of romance tied to genital appearance and use, (c) not erase same-gender (i.e., same gender identity and / or presentation) heterosexual, asexual, bisexual, and other relationships, and / or (d) oppose “born this way” or “genitals determine selfhood” rhetorics.

Once again, I have only learned what some sexual binary people think of these terms by engaging them in conversation. In much the same way I suggest in this weeks essays at Conditionally Accepted, I think the way forward is to have such conversations no matter how difficult in hopes of embracing the possibility of full sexual equality for all.

Finally, I should note that for many wonderful sexual binary people and sexually fluid people I have met, none of what I’ve written here will be new or original, and I appreciate such people everyday since they ease the experience of living in a primarily-binary-defined world. To those who this may be new information, however, I hope it is helpful to you in engaging with sexual fluidity or binaries in your own world, and building healthy and mutually respectful connections between sexually binary and fluid people.

I have been lucky enough to meet people who cannot imagine sexual or romantic attraction and activity with anyone that doesn’t have the same or different genitals.  I have also been lucky enough to meet people (like me) who cannot imagine genitals having anything at all to do with sexual or romantic attraction and activity.  I have also been lucky enough to meet people who exist in a wide variety of areas between these parameters and / or bounce around between these parameters in daily life and / or in relation to certain potential lovers.  In all such cases, I long for the day when members of each of these behavior and desire groups stand together equally recognized, celebrated and affirmed in their consensual sexual and romantic endeavors.

J. Sumerau

Why “Marriage Equality” Is Not Enough

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In this guest post, Dr. Betsy Lucal reflects on the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. Dr. Betsy Lucal teaches sociology and women’s and gender studies at Indiana University South Bend.

 

It was my turn to sleep in on June 26, so I awoke to the news that SCOTUS had decided that same-sex marriage is a right. My initial reaction? I said, “Oh, fuck.” Probably not what most people would have expected to hear from me, since I’m well known as an advocate for equality and fairness.

But my concern is that the freedom to marry–the right to be allowed legally to marry–is quickly going to become a requirement to marry in order to secure other rights. I worry that this ruling has inserted the state into my relationship in ways that I cannot resist unless I’m also willing to forego other rights and protections that will now be completely limited to married partners. I’m afraid that this ruling—which indeed reflects the extension of the rights, privileges, and protections of marriage to same-sex couples—will further strengthen the perception and reality that only relationships that bear the stamp of legal marriage should be recognized and respected. I’m afraid that my partner and I will be required to marry in order to secure her access to health insurance through our employer (she works there part time; I work full time, so only my job includes health-insurance benefits). I’m afraid that this ruling will make marriage the only way for us to take care of each other in all the ways we wish to, the only way to secure the life and family we have built together.

When I filed paperwork with my employer to add my partner, Alison, to my health insurance, I completed a form that included my affirmation that I would marry her legally if I could. In other words, she could become my domestic partner as long as same-sex marriage remained illegal in our state. The university does not extend benefits to unmarried other-sex partners. And the implication was that, should marriage law change, that would still be the case; and only married partners, straight or queer, would be able to access benefits. Honestly, when I completed that form, I had no inkling that, within a year, same-sex marriage would become a reality in my very red state and, just one year after that, in the United States as a whole. We jokingly said that we’d only marry each other if we had to. In fact, we promised not to marry each other unless we had to.

As the marriage equality movement picked up speed, though, we started to talk more seriously about the implications of a potential–soon, likely–national ruling for our relationship. We agreed that we would only get married if we had to. We would only marry, in other words, if the state (and, by extension, the university) forced our hand.

You may wonder why a committed, loving couple would resist marriage. You may wonder why my reaction to this ruling was not to cheer and celebrate but to feel annoyed and irritated.

Here’s why: As of June 26, the only available path to the recognition of the commitment, seriousness, and mutual support involved in our relationship is through marriage. The only way to garner recognition for our partnership and our family now is by marrying each other.

Yet, for the last five years, I have supported her and our children emotionally, socially, financially, and in every other way. I have become a parent and accepted all of the responsibilities that accompany that status without having any of the rights that usually come along with it. All because we are not married. I cannot sign permission slips or grade cards; I cannot seek medical attention for my children and have no legally recognized right to participate in any decision involving their welfare. And this is true despite the fact that I have accepted all of these responsibilities for the past five years. That is, for the last five years, I have shared a home and a life with these three people without any legal protection for the life we’ve made together.

Please understand what I’m saying here. I am not suggesting that marriage rights should not have been extended to same-sex couples. I understand the symbolism, the feeling among many queer people that this, and perhaps only this, right could affirm their humanness. And I am certainly not asking to go back to the dark days of same-sex partners not being able to stand by each other’s side in medical emergencies, of same-sex partners losing the homes they had built together when their partners died because the house was only in the dead partner’s name, of pretending the love of your life was “just a good friend” and “de-gaying” your living space before suspicious relatives visited. I’m not calling for that. For those couples who, after months or years or decades together, long to marry, I will not stand in their way. I understand the desire to affirm your relationship this way, to make it public with this ritual.

What I am calling for is attention to the fact that marriage is an exclusionary, discriminatory institution. And this ruling doesn’t change that. It doesn’t change the history of marriage and it doesn’t change marriage’s present or future. It simply expands the possibility that now the meaningful distinction in our society will be between people who are married and people who aren’t, with the unmarried continuing to experience prejudice and discrimination. Will we now look skeptically at partners who choose not to marry when they legally could? If the history of treatment of unmarried heterosexual partners is any guide, then that’s exactly what we can expect to happen.

In other words, this ruling expands the possibility that partners who choose not to marry, who choose not to accept the legal strictures that marriage brings, will face prejudice and discrimination. This ruling does not, for example, allow individuals in multi-partner relationships to legalize all of their bonds and access the rights and privileges associated with marriage. It does not remove policies that penalize poor people with children for marrying by decreasing or ending their public assistance once a marriage is in place. (After all, the solution to women’s and children’s impoverishment is marriage, right?) If anything, this ruling places more pressure on partners to hew to the requirements associated with legal marriage to have the seriousness and dignity of their relationships recognized.

That is, unless I’m willing to enter into a marriage—which is one, but only one, way to organize a relationship—my family still will not be recognized by the state and others as worthy of protection, rights and privileges. Why is that? Why are we so convinced that only relationships organized this way are legitimate and worthy? Why is it that my partner must marry someone in order to access affordable, quality health care? Why is it that I must be married to their mother to legally parent the children I accepted as my own years ago?

June 26 was, indeed, a historic day for our country. Had you told me even five years ago that same-sex marriage would so quickly become the law of the land, I would have responded with incredulity and skepticism. But my fear is that, in the exuberance of that celebration, we have lost sight of the limitations of marriage.

Marriage, like any other contract, is supposed to be entered into freely, voluntarily. On June 26, SCOTUS took that possibility away from me and everyone else who shares my perspective on this flawed and limiting institution. Unfortunately, the freedom to marry also signals the tyranny of marriage.