Passing Lies

While trans theorists such as Jack Halberstam, Sandy Stone and Kate Bornstein argue that the notion of passing is singularly unhelpful, idealising gender ambiguity assumes one has the luxury to take on the gender order. The ability to exist in an ambiguously gendered state in a tenuous one at best, more often it is simply an impossibility. ‘Choosing to pass,’ then, needs to be considered in the context that trans ontologies elicit homicidal rage. Desires for invisibility need to be disentangled from affirmations of gendered power asymmetry; that is, transexual desires for the ordinary should not be misconstrued as reinforcing normativity.

Ftm bodies overwhelmingly present either bodily ‘incongruity’ or ambiguity, or bare physical marks of (re)construction, (unlike mtf transexed bodies on which reconstructions are able to be rendered invisible, ftm transexed bodies remain visibly scarred). We are punished or rewarded according to our adhesion to social expectations, especially of gender, and the social penalties for ambiguous, androgynous or ‘incoherent’ gender presentation and performativity tend to be rude or insidious at best, torturous or homicidal at worst. It remains apparent that those of us who are most visibly different encounter discrimination, hostility and violence. Cultural pressures to conform to gendered expectations become internalised and naturalised, creating anxieties about gender ambiguity from ‘everywhere and nowhere’. This occurs through socially organised gender policing in science, law, religion, education systems, art, pornography and economics.

To ftms especially, misrecognition remains powerfully affective in choices about ‘passing’. For the most part ftm ontologies remain unrecognisable to others and this misrecognition presents a(nother) form of oppression. In order to be recognised as men we rely on body modifications via hormone use and/or sex reassignment surgery, and/or enacting socially legible ‘masculine’ behaviour. The ability to relax ‘hypermasculine behaviour’ and still be read as male corresponds to male appearance (‘passing’): what it means to be a man really hinges on just one thing: being (read as) bodily male. In this way, ftm body modifications can allow for breaking hegemonic gender ideals; we can be effeminate men. 

As social theorist Michael Warner suggests in his book The Trouble With Normal, ‘nearly everyone, it seems, wants to be normal. And who can blame them, if the alternative is being abnormal, or deviant, or not being one of the rest of us? Put in those terms, there doesn’t seem to be a choice at all.’ Passing isn’t a lie. Suggesting that it is erases us from being, as though we must be identifiable from nontrans people. Passing is a survival technique. And as I’ve said before: we need to survive.

Is Everything Cool As Long As I’m Getting Thinner?

Skinny Homos, Queer Anxiety and Dominant Culture

A certain queer ontology has been gaining a concerning amount of trendiness of late: the skinny homo. While I am acutely aware that the everyday stresses of being in a marginalised group take their toll on the body in one way or another, the glamourisation of an anxiety-producing, appetite-suppressing, ‘busy’ lifestyle is just not that subversive.

The skinny homo as cultural phenomenon seems to rely on an appreciation of anxiety and its dramatic (and drastic) effects on the body (/ life): fight or flight mechanisms direct blood away from the digestive system in stressful situations causing a loss of appetite or inability to eat. Certainly, queer sexual and social lives can induce this reaction for extended periods of time (half-days, days, weeks). However, even if the skinny homo aesthetic eventuates out of something other than not eating to actively ‘diet,’ it nevertheless results in a culture and celebration of skinniness highly conveniently aligned with current mainstream ideas about desirable embodiment.

Along with the behaviour itself, the way in which it is talked about reinforces this reverence of skinniness. Not eating becomes ‘culturally-legible’ as it is reiterated: “look how skinny I am…you’re so skinny…things are so fucked up.” Here, the tendency to directly relate ‘how bad things are’ to a level of skinniness results in a physically manifested hierarchy of oppression, named and duly noted as unhelpful by queer theorist Jack Halberstam as “transgressive exceptionalism.” Having a healthy body is no longer read as strength but rather that things ’simply can’t be that bad.’

Our bodies are the ultimate metaphor for power and control within our grasp. And we do suffer. Embracing such a ‘lifestyle of starvation’ comes to metonymically represent our being in the world: as damaged. Furthermore, the discourse of ‘the skinny homo’ affirms a self-harming sado-masochistic pleasure in watching one’s body disintegrate. Albeit in a different context, this nevertheless reinforces culturally dominant ideas about skinniness, idolizing a state of fucked-upness as desirable; that is, “I can’t eat, oh, well, being skinny is not only so cool, but also shows I’m the most oppressed.” The citation of the skinny homo encourages continued failure to eat because it is considered somehow a part of queer culture, and not a particularly problematic one. But it clearly is.

Negotiating our way in an oppressive and violent world can be devastatingly hard and painful. But we are strong and endure. We need (our bodies) to be healthy; our lives sustainable.

Eat up.

Max xx

Pride 09

THE INSTABILITY OF GENDER AMBIGUITY

 

I was shocked when I first realised my identity and existence as a woman wasn’t stable. I felt like I’d been hit in the face. It happened in a moment. I didn’t grow up ‘always’ thinking I was, or wanting to be, a boy, a guy, male. I was a rough tomboy kid, a loudmouth bitchy teenager and then a radical feminist dyke. While I’d never felt particularly comfortable in that genre, I thought ‘dyke’ was one which allowed for the shifting materialisations of my gender ambiguity: that I could still be a tomboy.

Gender is a frame through which we see each other and the world. Everything about me and my life was now in question. I couldn’t keep track of my things or myself. I was one of those people who never lost anything, but I just lost it. What can you cling onto if not even your own gender is stable? Suddenly, nothing was solid. I started losing things. I drank a lot. I smoked a lot. I was pretty much intoxicated in one way or another consistently for really quite a long time. I wore a lot of fancy clothes, hand made suits and shirts with cufflinks and flashy shoes, and sat in gutters drinking red wine, inevitably spilling it down the front of my pants and the sleeves of my shirts. And it was a contradiction I appreciated: a symbolic tension which manifested my internal one – Who the fuck was I? 

In the autobiography of his transition (What Took You So Long?) Raymond Thompson tells of how he smashed apart his house and lived in the rubble for weeks: “The walls of protection that I had carefully built about myself, I was now breaking down.” The home harnesses the semiotics of boundary maintenance; as anxious people often obsess over cleanliness in order to feel some kind of control in their lives, Thompson’s desire to live in chaos displayed his bodily feelings of damage, inadequacy and fragmentation. And it’s just not a sustainable existence.

I realised that being a dyke, being a feminist, and being politically active about sexist bullshit had made me recognisable as ‘a woman,’ and I wasn’t very happy about that. Feminism is for Everybody and feminist discourse needs to take into account the complex position of transmen within the nexus of sexual difference: women aren’t the only gender-oppressed group. As Barbara Johnson points out: “Any discourse that is based on the questioning of boundary lines must never stop questioning its own.”

 Have Pride. Take it Easy.

Jealousy / Compersion

Community at Stake

When Sexy Galexy told me about all the fights she used to see in Sydney, and how important it was to instil in young people the realities of lesbian (and queer) community (“Of course you’re going to have fucked every fifth person in the room, but we need to give each other a break”), I didn’t realise just how right she was. But, sitting in the gutter one Friday night considering the merits of going home or back into a club that contained a girl I liked making out with my best friend, I remembered. 

The ensuing drama, angst and bitching ripped apart not only the three of us, but our friends and community as well. The need to be prepared for the collision of our friends and lovers is urgent: we’re artists and writers and community organisers and educators. This world needs us: strong and capable, and causing trouble to other people, not each other. 

Strategies polyamorous communities have developed for negotiating multiple relationships, especially in regard to jealousy, provide useful learning tools for lesbian/queer social groups.  Regardless of the mono/poly status of participants, our communities inevitably involve the overlapping of relationships, (often aptly named ‘the web‘). 

While it’s easy to acknowledge that feelings of anger and hatred are not helpful, emotions are rarely rationalised away. But our ability to describe and experience emotions can be enabled or constrained by our cultural vocabulary; the language of partnerships, ‘infidelity’ and ‘jealousy’ makes it difficult to talk and think about building and maintaining relationships outside of the dominant paradigm. ‘Jealousy‘ is a particularly salient example of the mononormativity of language, as it is constructed as a negative emotion as well as the ‘natural’ response to any perceived threat to a relationship. In resistance, polyamorous communities have spent time creating new languages to describe the positive experiences and emotions of engaging in multiple partnerships and relationships. ‘Compersion‘ is one such neologism: the opposite to jealousy, particularly sexual; the feeling of pleasure at the idea or sight of one’s lover/s involved with other people, especially each other. Here, the invention of the word ‘compersion’ helps enable the experience of positive emotions in situations which otherwise could provoke only negative terms/feelings. But the word is only the beginning. The cultural tendency towards jealousy and rivalry, rather than compersion and appreciation, is yet another obstacle in queer sexual lives (one just as valuable and rewarding to overcome as compulsory heterosexuality).

Discourses of ethical polyamory, which focus on openness, honesty, and mutual caring, are useful for broader queer communities: we all need to listen to and respect each other, be honest, and take responsibility for our own feelings and their impact on other people. The intertwining of our relationships should provide platforms for community building, not disintegration. In the end, as Sexy Galexy put so clearly: “we’re all banging on the same fucking door”; we need each other.

With Love and Respect, 

Max xx

Bitch Boi?

Can you still be a bitch if you’re a guy? I don’t know. It’s (a) female power. I was a hard-arse bitchfeminist butch who sometimes played at being feminine when I was a dyke. But now? Well, my femininity’s been re-named effeminacy, and the rest is just fucking obnoxious. Many things change, not just the body (if the body), when one is sex changed. When I’m read as a guy I shut up a lot more. I don’t talk over women the way I would talk over people before. The first time I painted facial hair on my face it was to stop myself getting into a fight with another chick, because I knew with the gender of that face I would never enact violence on another woman.

The thing is: sex matters. The way sex is perceived is a lens through which behaviour is interpreted. If you pass as male because of your body (facial hair being particularly salient in this respect as I’ve noted before), behavioural clues to gender are less important; there is less need for hypermasculine behaviour in order to be recognised as a guy. This is unfortunately complicated by the way in which masculinity is so often defined by misogyny, thus it is harder to pass if one holds and stands up forfeminist values. This is often the justification transguys hold for being as sexist as other guys, but male privilege and power fucks everyone over – trannys shouldn’t be too quick to forget.

As Kate Bornstein notes, “The correct target for any successful transsexual rebellion would be the gender system itself. But transsexuals won’t attack that system until they themselves are free of the need to participate in it… Without the structure of the bi-polar gender system, the power dynamic between men and women shatters.” That said, it is not incidental that when we don’t embrace a gender normative corporealitywe are at the highest risk of violence; liveability is severely affected in such a context, and we need to survive.

Aggression (and even violence) can be subversive for women, undermining the stereotype of women as docile and passive victims. But if male privilege is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission, what really happens when the bitch reappropriates this power? Is to be a bitch, to take mastery in hostility and force, just reinforcing male power and its dominance?

We need more guys to get their feminist shit together, stand up (against other guys), shut up (and listen when women talk), and (thus) start to define a non-misogynistic masculinity. We need power to be conceived of and employed in other ways.

The Fucking Phallus

When I fucked chicks as a dyke, I wasn’t into foreign phallic objects. But when I started stuffing one in my pants and feeling not disconnected from it, I started wanting to fuck in different ways. The chronology here is dubious. Which came first I can’t tell you. But things change. And it’s not often easy (or possibly helpful) to know why. But things change fast. 

The fact is, the ftm surgeries currently available aren’t that great. Top surgery invariably leaves visible scars and the craftsmanship involved in phalloplasty – construction of a penis – is desperately inadequate. (And biological reasoning just doesn’t cut it. Hearts and hands are transplanted: the penis is not such a complex organ.) These are hard (and expensive) body modifications. And the results don’t pass. Whether or not this is a desirable outcome is up to each guy, but the fact is, we don’t have the choice: there isn’t the opportunity for transmen to pass in all the ways it is for transwomen. This is only the beginning. All too often ftm and mtf experiences are conflated as ‘transsexuality’. There is a gender difference here (which crosses over as we do).

My (lesbian) feminist upbringing taught me to loathe the penis and its bearers. And I did. It also taught me to love the body I have. Which I also did. But is wanting to change that body in some way anti-feminist? 

The impossibility of female phallic power has been challenged explicitly by photographer Catherine Opie in her series Being and Having: a collection of brightly coloured portraits of female-bodied masculine folk who gaze (back) at the viewer with an intensity of strength and integrity that refuses to be objectified. The subversive potential of such a work and its implications is explicated by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter: “the simultaneous acts of deprivileging the phallus and removing it from the normative heterosexual form of exchange, and recirculating and reprivileging it between women [sic – female bodies] deploys the phallus to break the signifying chain in which it conventionally operates”. That is, the enactment of the female phallus rips down the structure it is supposed to represent (patriarchy and male power). 

There is a long history of hostility and animosity between those who change their bodies and those who think such action reinforces (sexist) notions of gender conformity. Woman-identified and transboi feminists are too often quick to defend their respective positions without considering the broader political ramifications. This makes sense: our bodies are on the line and the personal is (still) political. But we can (and need to) coalesce in finding the subversive potential of transformation. We desperately need Transboi feminist ontologies and politics of the body to be theorised. 

Butler continues: “Consider that “having” the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things.” I think many other tranny bois and transmen do. We don’t have much of a choice but to re-contextualise and re-configure what we have into what we want it to be/mean.

Keep dreaming, 

Max xx

(Avoiding) Mardi Gras

“Faggot bisexual cunt!” was how I was saluted when I exited the train in Sydney’s CBD for the 31^st New Mardi Gras. I was gobsmacked. Not because I was being insulted on the one day of the year it’s supposed to be ok to be flamboyantly gay, (clearly not), but because never had such a whirlwind of terms I adore been used against me with such aggressive force. I laughed. He wasn’t wrong.

I was in for a long night.

I’ve never been in the parade. For a long time I’ve been disconcerted and troubled by spectacle. I am highly aware of its political uses (as mass distraction, especially fascist), which disables me from ever ‘enjoying the moment’ in a crowd. However, I realised that my discomfort has more to do with the fact that I’m a spectacle every day everywhere I go. My friends and I joke about being a gay pride parade. But we are. Every day. And I feel like if I enact that spectacle in a parade, then I legitimate all the things I think are illegitimate every other day.

Mardi Gras is important, absolutely. We have cause to celebrate, and reason to remember to keep fighting: a lot hasn’t changed on the other side of the fence.

Here are some of the other encounters I had at this year’s Mardi Gras in Sydney:

l        >while sitting by myself at the end of the parade, tears running the make-up down the sides of my face, a lovely gentleman gave me a plastic rose.

 

l        3 guys in a taxi stop at the lights while we’re waiting for the bus and scream at my friend and I: it blurs in my memory -  ‘fucking transsexuals’ was there ‘what are ya?’ There’s one empty lane between us and the cars aren’t moving. We stand there as they abuse us for almost 2 minutes. I march over to the car and the guy in the front quickly pulls up his window. The guy in the back doesn’t bother and as I reach into the cab, he grabs me and the guy on the other side gets out ‘Are we ok?’ are the words he uses but what he says is ‘Are you going to fuck off now?’ I walk back to the bus shelter and he gets back in the cab. They don’t stop shouting as the cab moves away. My friend yells at me for my violence. ‘It’s fine that it makes you uncomfortable,’ I say, ‘And I’m sorry. But being yelled at and not responding I can’t abide right now. And I had no words.’

Best of luck out there,

 

Max xx

Fight or Flight?

Bird La Bird & Bird Club

Wearing frilly knickers should not be dependent on what’s in them. When I hear the word “real” before any category of person whether it’s woman, lesbian or femme I head for the hills. If you’ve ever been told you’re not “real” you’ll probably like Bird Club. – Bird La Bird (on friction.org.uk)

‘Armageddon Fem’ Bird La Bird screeched onto the stage as a part of the Femme Programme at London’s 21st Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, performing at the screening of Campbell X (Inge Blackman)’s ‘Fem’, in which she also appears. At the following London Pride Bird organised a Femme Pride Bird float with the maxim ‘Femme Invisibility: So Last Year!‘ In 2008 Bird graced the cover of Ulrika Dahl and Del LaGrace Volcano’s ‘Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities’ and I met her for the first time at the book’s launch in London. When, there, Bird sang her song ‘Do you know what kind of club this is?’ (about gay clubs who can’t/don’t recognise a queer bird), I fell a little bit in love. And I was not the only one. So many cheers and thanks and acclaim and joy was bestowed upon her that she determined to turn the mythology of Bird Club into a reality – a real club, if only once a month – where Anyone Can Be A Bird.

I’m interested in post Butch/Femme and what happens when players themselves question and rewrite the roles. I find the hostile reaction many non-players have towards butch/femme enthusiasts fascinating. I can’t think of another consensual sexual activity that has so much scorn and derision poured on it. I’m fascinated why many people find it so threatening and I’d like to see if that anxiety can be played with. – Bird La Bird

When I started feeling good about the word ‘tranny‘ and dressing ‘as a boy‘ and ‘as a drag king‘ I never felt like one (a boy that is). I was stable (if slightly uncomfortable) as a dyke and (therefore) as a woman. But then I found a place that did to me what I do to so many people; made no assumptions about me. And it had a huge impact on me. Clearly. Because it happened. I started having moments where I didn’t feel so much like a lesbian anymore, like a dyke, like a woman.

I was lost. And it was sublime.

That is where Bird Club lies. When Bird La Bird says Anyone Can Be A Bird, that’s how it is. Everyone can be anyone they want, and maybe even someone they didn’t quite know they were.

Dear Bird, Thanks for opening my eyes and my wings, Love Max xx

The next Bird Club in London is March 12. Go to www.birdclub.org.uk for details.

Photograph by Sam Nightingale.

Whose history?

Gay and lesbian historicism has all too often used gender transgressive individuals to create gay history, yet argued that gender transgression is not in and of itself important, instead assuming that gender transgressive behaviour and cross-gender positioning were taken up for the specific purpose of engaging in a homosexual partnership or ‘lifestyle’, excluding the possibility that gender transgression was engaged in for more complex reasons.

This is political work. To show that homosexuality has existed in all times and places and, in certain times and places, has been socially accepted, even revered, gay historians argue for social tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality (fair enough). However the way such histories have been written is to privilege homosexuality at the expense of transgenderism.

Pat Califia explains: It does not further our understanding of human sexuality to press for recognition of homosexuality throughout history at the expense of recognizing other sexual minorities. The history of their oppression is as valid as our own, and if gay male and lesbian scholars deny that history, we are as guilty of censorship and prejudice as any straight anthropologist who chooses not to report homosexual activity.

Such gay historicism was (and is) a part of the gay liberationist project, which sought to separate sex, gender and sexuality, in defiance of the early sexologists’ assertion that gender inversion was a manifestations of same sex desire. Here, the contradictory tensions of gay historicism are revealed: on the one hand it seeks to escape the equation of homosexuality with gender inversion, and on the other it needs to use stories of heroes from the past who had just such an embodiment. Perhaps gay historians hope by locating homosexual gender inverts in the past, they can keep them there. However, in arguing that sexuality is not necessarily linked to gender inversion, gay historians have gone too far by removing the importance of gender transgression all together, thereby dislocating historical links between gender and sexuality, the effect of which is to render impossible a transgender history.

Writing a transgender history that does not exclude homosexuality, such as that of Leslie Feinberg in Transgender Warriors, is crucial work that still needs to be done. Historical figures cannot simply be ‘taken back’ and named ‘transgender’. Histories need to be constructed that acknowledge that these people were, and are, important because they were different: different because they had same sex desire and engaged in same sex relationships and different because they transgressed the expectations of their sex.

To T or not to T?

Facial Hair: Fantasy and Reality

What makes a man?

Sex is (most unfortunately) all too often heralded in popular culture as one’s initiation into manhood, but facial hair is a much more striking sign. A beard or moustache is such a strong signifier of maleness that little else can contradict it. I enjoy the parody and glamour of drag king make up, or eyelash glue  does do the trick (so to speak), but a lack of facial hair combined with a moderate height of 5”5′ means my gender is read as that of a boy, not a man.

I grew up from a generally accepted tomboy into a much less accepted tranny boi, but will I want to be a boy forever?

T is often regaled as the journey into manhood for the transguy, for precisely these reasons. Sometimes I long for the relief of passing. Although, of course, it comes with its own pains.

Physically it is not yet possible to trans ftm in the way it is mtf. And it is prohibitively expensive. This reflects the still misogynistic nature of trans surgery, which privileges the male body and creates it as ‘unimitatable’, while it treats the female body as easily (re)constructed, yet for the most part ‘untreatable’.

When someone ‘misreads’ me, I usually turn away in the hope they won’t reconsider as it is in the so-called ‘realisation’ that violence manifests. Or mockery. Or cruelty. The liveability of a genderqueer life is always in question. It can be straining, stressful, frustrating, and sometimes, well, terrifying. As well as daring, fun, fabulous, subversive and socially treacherous.

Hard muscles. A flat chest. Bulging pants. These are things I dream of. But what would it mean for my maleness, my manhood, to be sculptured by surgeons? Kate Bornstein argues that to move from F to M or M to F doesn’t reinforce a binary concept of gender, but rather creates transformation itself as the meaning of gender. Here she carries the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, that one is not born a woman but becomes one: gender is the act of becoming. And I agree. But the fact remains that the maleness of my body would be crafted and re-created according to standards of gendered beauty that I, theoretically, disapprove of and have for so long openly rejected. This is troubling.

As I have said often to my fellows on the subject of embracing male privileges: one always has the choice about what kind of man one becomes.

Right now my masculinity doesn’t necessitate surgical intervention. But when I gaze at the flat, hard pecs of a guy at the gym, when I watch beads of sweat gather on his chest hair, his grimaced jaw shadowed with stubble – I wonder if I will hold out forever.

Drag

I don’t have the balls to be a drag king. I wish I did. But I’m something else. Jack Halberstam says he’s an off-stage king and he’s my hero. So maybe I’m one of those too.

Glamour Bois, Brighton

For a long time I thought drag relied upon the body: ‘sex’, ‘opposition’. But now I think that’s not it at all. That’s precisely what it’s not about. Drag says ‘who cares what’s under the clothes, I look fucking fantastic and you know it!’

Drag works by highlighting the performativity of gender; drawing attention to its ‘unnaturalness’. But whether there’s a female, male, intersexed or trans body underneath, well that’s just not the point.

That a male infant will become a masculine (heterosexual) man is the only trajectory offered by dominant Western ideas on gender. But drag works to break down this assumption, showing us that gender is what we do (and how we look). 

Drag can both subvert gender stereotypes and reinforce them: it inherently calls into question what makes a man and a woman, but in practice provides only the opportunity to destabilise these ideas. Whether or not gender conventions are in fact disrupted is dependent upon the performer, and indeed the audience. It is judgements by individuals that uphold cultural norms; whether a person is transcending (or reinforcing) expectations of gender depends on the interpretation of the audience. Thus, it makes sense to look at individual drag artists and performers to see if (and how) they subvert or reinforce gender stereotypes.

Gender theorist Kate Bornstein suggests ‘It doesn’t really matter what a person decides to do, or how radically a person plays with gender. What matters, I think, is how aware a person is of the options. How sad for a person to be missing out on some expression of identity, just for not knowing there are options.’ 

Heterosexist culture dictates that we must be simply and exclusively either a masculine male man or a feminine female woman. Drag kings and queens, as well as intersexed people, transsexuals, cross dressers, gender benders and other transgendered people, subvert this expectation that gender is (and can ever be) singular or stable. And drag is not limited to a ‘cross-gender’ presentation: queer femmes and male drag kings can say as much about society’s uptight gender philosophies as any male bodied drag queen.

In The Drag King Book, J. Jack Halberstam asks ‘To what degree is the Drag King, like the drag queen, both a revered image of queerness and an image associated with shame?’ And that, really, is still the question. What does it say about ‘us’, about our internalised queerphobia, perhaps, that so many of ‘us’ despise the character in drag?

Most of all drag is about pride. Drag artists scream out a kind of queer pride no once-a-year festival could compete with. And we, the introverted voyeurs, can take vicarious pride in their performance when we lack the balls ourselves to be on stage.

Gay Blood Ban

Positive change required

As a guy who likes sucking cock, I found it not only offensive but pretty difficult to answer the National Blood Service’s question: “Are you a man who has had oral or anal sex with another man (even if you used a condom)?”

Answering yes to this question results in a lifetime ban from donating blood

For me, mostly it’s the kind of cock that one isn’t born with. Secondly, I know I’m not the kind of man ‘that counts’ to them anyway. Thirdly, I do always use a condom and I really think that should count for something. (A dear friend of mine got herpes as a teenager and that shit lasts forever. No thanks. Really, it’s worth it). Also, women can have cocks too you know.

The NHS, supported by leading AIDS charity Terrance Higgins Trust, says that men who have sex with men (MSM) present a high statistical risk of having HIV and this therefore justifies the lifelong ban on MSM donating blood. They claim that this is not discrimination: “The reason for this exclusion rests on specific sexual behaviour (such as anal and oral sex between men), rather than the sexuality of the person wishing to donate. There is, therefore, no exclusion of gay men who have never had sex with a man nor of women who have sex with women.”

So their justification of why gay men are excluded is not because we’re gay but because we have sex? Nice one.

The truth is: anal sex is a high-risk activity for transmitting HIV, and unprotected oral sex is high-risk for other STIs, such as syphilis or herpes. But it is also true that not all gay men have anal sex, and lots of heterosexual people do. While it may be the case that more men who have sex with men are at risk of contracting HIV, it is not because they have sex with men, but because they have unsafe (or less safe) sex.

So, a question that (actually) doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sexuality, but on risky sexual behaviours, would be: do you practice anal sex or unprotected oral sex (regardless of the sex or gender of those involved)?

In their lengthy justification for supporting the ban, THT state: “The Blood Service policy does not imply, nor is it based on the assumption, that all gay men are promiscuous.”

And continues: “not all assumptions are wrong… It is unfortunate that generalisations have to be made and that people have to be categorised and grouped, but we accept that in this instance it was not done in a judgemental or discriminatory fashion.” ah-hem.

By assigning people to social categories, rather than dealing with them as individuals, the THT and NBS reinforce negative stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous, dishonest and ‘unclean’. This is institutionalised homophobia, regardless of their claims that it’s not.

To sign a petition to lift the blanket ban on MSM donating blood, go to www.bloodban.co.uk.

For the full explanations given by the NHS and THT, go to:

www.blood.co.uk/pdfdocs/position_statement_exclusion.pdf

www.tht.org.uk/binarylibrary/blloddonationsbypeopleathigherriskofhiv.pdf

Family?

When you’re the only queer in the family, trekking back to the place where you grew up can get tougher every year. No matter how much you might’ve changed, it always seems like no one else has, and you’re forced back into those same relational dynamics you tried to escape from. I’m lucky my parents don’t expect me to put a dress on or anything, but then, they never did. So I guess I’ve been lucky a long time.

The role of the family in socialisation is obviously integral, but it is always expected that parents will automatically fear the gender dysphoric child – the  homosexual child – vehemently. But what if, like me, your parents were totally fine with whatever?

One of my earliest memories is running around outside in the sun when I was 4 years  old and taking my shirt off (which I did often). My (older) sister said to my mother, ‘You can’t let her go out in public like that’ and my mum replied ‘She can do whatever she likes,’ to which I then exclaimed: ‘If boys can do it I can do it!’ And well, not much has changed there.

The point is, family matters. Most of the year, perhaps most of our (adult?) lives, we spend with a chosen family, our childhood family popping in here and there, or not. The queer tendency to conflate community with family harks to the shared intimacy, and often loyalty, of understanding queer sexual lives (whatever that might mean). </spanThe thing is, legal rights, responsibilities and rewards are reserved for biological or legally-bound relatives. Although in the UK, these privileges are offered to pairs of adults in monogamous sexual relationships (and their children), in Australia same sex couples do not have access to legal entitlements and are unable to adopt children.

Here, one may be inclined to question the validity of a (hetero)sexual relationship as the only parameter to acquiring such benefits. Surely consenting adults should be able to decide who they desire/require as legal and financial partners, and that be it. As Judith Butler questions: “how does one oppose the homophobia [of heterosexual marriage entitlements] without embracing the marriage norm as the exclusive or most highly valued social arrangement for queer sexual lives?”

What we need is to disassociate the rights and responsibilities currently the privilege of marriage (and, for the most part, civil partnerships), so that ceremonies can still remain a symbolic exercise for those who choose it, but allow the rights and responsibilities of kinship to take any number of other forms.

Happy queer holidaying.

Hey Hetero! is a public art series by Deborah Kelly and Tina Fiveash, Australia, 2001.