Last night, I was asked to speak at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, my synagogue in New York City. I go there when I'm in need of solace or succor or someplace with peaceful family. Well, it's an LGBTQetc inclusive congregation, and each year they have a Pride Sabbath, and they invite a cool person who speaks to them about pride. This year they chose me.
Every week, on the Sabbath, a different part of the Jews' journey to freedom is read. I asked Rabbie Sharon Klenibaum (upon whom I am secretly crushed out) what portion of the Torah would be read that evening. She told me that every Pride Month Sabbath at CBST, the congregation hears the story of how Noah finally sets foot on dry land, right after a HUGE MOTHER-FUCKING FLOOD has wiped out humanity. But God promises never to drown humanity again. He didn't preclude other methods, but we are definitely NOT going to drown. God makes this covenant with Noah, and to seal the bargain, He gives Noah a rainbow.
My queer Jew people in New York City hear that story every year, and it always gives us goose-bumps, the rainbow part—God's presence as we step out of the closet and onto dry land. So, I was supposed to talk from the bimah for 10-15 minutes—about anything I wanted. I thought it best to stick to the scripture, so I told a midrash—that's a Jew version of a parable, and sometimes even a koan. A midrash is a person's re-telling of some part of the Torah. I wanted to stay on point, so I told a story that I think makes the rainbow an even more important synbol LGBTQetc Pride. Download KB CBST Pride Shabat 2012 I closed the evening with a prayer, and a lot of people have asked me to post it. So, here's my Pride Sabbath Prayer for you. Enjoy being proud. kiss kiss, Auntie Kate
I’m thrilled to write that I’ve been asked by Routledge Publishing to update my fifteen year old book, My Gender Workbook. We struck a deal, I’ve got the green light, and I’ve begun writing My New Gender Workbook. I’m so excited!
WHY AN UPDATE?
I’ve been in touch via Twitter, my blog, and YouTube with a lot of people who regularly read and use My Gender Workbook both in class and daily in their lives. It turns out that people really like the principles of the book—but that many of the cultural references and contexts—even the way some quiz questions are phrased—are out of date, and this sometimes gets in the way of grasping the important stuff. So, an update would involve a page by page combing out of outdated references. For example…
There’s much more awareness of intersections of oppression and marginalization.
There’s a much more sophisticated understanding of & experience with the Internet.
The geopolitical world has grown vastly more polarized since the book came out.
In a few places in the world, reat strides have been made in sex-and-gender freedoms.
At the same time, many ghastly practices of policing sex and gender have been uncovered.
Sex-and-gender activism has become globalized, and shuffled into the deck of social activism.
Young Female-to-Male has replaced Middle-Aged Male-to-Female as the face of transgender in the world.
Sex and Gender activism & awareness has become increasingly polarized along lines of class, race, and age.
WHERE DO YOU COME IN?
As in the original book, I’ll be looking for a great many voices other than my own. In the original, there were hundreds of voices other than mine, appearing in lists, text boxes and call-outs. In the new version, I’m aiming to include even more voices. My idea is to maintain a running commentary of multiple voices all through the book.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All submissions for the workbook should be in the form of tweets, or at most double tweets—that is to say, all submission should be no longer than 140 to 280 characters, including the mandatory hashtag: #MNGW (My New Gender Workbook). Why so short? The very best voices in the original workbook were short, articulate, and right to the point.
SO—WHAT DO YOU WRITE ABOUT?
Any gender-related topic you damned please.
However, over the course of the next 4-6 weeks, I’ll be asking specific questions on this blog and on Twitter. There’s going to be a new question every couple of days. But you don't have to wait for the questions. If you’ve got anything to say in 140-280 characters, I WANT TO READ IT, and I promise I will.
HOW DO YOU SEND IN YOUR SUBMISSION?
The best way is to use Twitter. Remember, two tweets maximum. All submission tweets must include the hashtag #MNGW or they very likely will slip through the cracks and we most certainly do not want that!
You can also post your answer on this blog. If you do, make sure you give us a way to reach you if we need to.
Or, you can email your submission to: mynewgenderworkbook at gmail dot com.
Please note that we will use no one’s words without their express permission.
Finally, there's no promise that your name will appear next to your words, or that your words will be used. Everyone whose words are used will be credited with the name of your choosing in the acknowledgements.
There’s only one more rule for submissions: don’t be mean.
ENOUGH ALREADY—HERE’S THE FIRST QUESTION
What’s your gender?
____
I cannot WAIT to see your kickass smart answers to this simple li'l question.
Please do retweet and repost and link to this blog to as many places as you can—even the surprising places.
Thank you in advance for all your help and support.
I was invited to Toronto this year to speak at Trans Pride. I don't often get invited to speak at Pride events, so not too many people have heard or read what I think about LGBTetc Pride, and more specifically Trans Pride.
A lot of what I said at Toronto Trans Pride is part of a book I'm working on for Seven Stories Press, called No Votes For Bullies: Democracy For The Rest of Us. If all goes according to plan, the book should be out in September, 2012—a couple of months after my memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, comes out from Beacon Press in June, 2012.
So, here are the talking points I used for my talk on Trans Pride, delivered to some hundreds of lovely gender anarchists and sex positive, sex inclusive outlaws at the post-march Gender Revolution stage in Toronto on July 1st, 2011.
Too many people kill themselves for no other reason than their religion says they're better off dead than queer. I'm so sorry if someone is telling you that. It's just not true.
You probably already know this already, but I don't hear it said nearly often enough: It's not "the Christians" who go after gays, lesbians, transgender folk or bisexuals. It's not the Christians who walk calmly into church and assassinate abortion-providing doctors. It's not the Christians who wanna re-build the Berlin Wall across the southern border of Texas.
It's not the Jews. It's not the Muslims. It's not any of the wondrous sects and denominations that evolved from these world-class religions, becoming world-class religions in their own right. Those are not the folks who are keeping us in our sex and gender closets.
Sure, as sex-and-gender freaks, we might make some Christians, Jews and Muslims uncomfortable. They may not wanna hang out with us. But it's not them who threaten, harass, rape or kill us. It's the people who follow the fundamentalist canon of any religion, sect, or cult.
Fundamentalist canon is easy to spot, because it's all written with the linguistic trick of either/or. That's how it gets its strength. Fundamentalist canon says this is good, that is evil; this is right, that is wrong; this gets you into Heaven, and for that you'll go straight to Hell. Fundamentalist canon is unquestionable, unswerving, and unashamed of the violence committed in it's name. Fundamentalist canon says My way or the highway. We are damned if we don't go along with them.
If you're some sort of sex-and-gender outlaw and you're living in that kind of a world, get out of there as fast as you can! Find yourself another denomination of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, or any number of other faiths that have more wiggle room than an either/or morality. Google around… you'll easily find yourself a congregation of people who know that God loves you just the way you are.
About.com has a whole page of alternative denominations who welcome LGBTQetc outlaws. That's good news, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to welcome you as a sex worker, pornographer, adult entertainer, sadomasochist or polyamorist. Some modern denominations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam may indeed welcome you as a more radical sex and gender outlaw—but you might have to become the person who opens them up to the idea. For the latter sort of sex and gender outlaw, you might find more solace and support in Goddess-based religions.
Religion is fine and dandy. Religion saves lives. What the LGBTQetc movements need is more religion. What no one needs more of is bully fundamentalism.
To the leaders, membership, and supporters of The Human Rights Campaign, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and state-wide groups supporting marriage equality as your primary goal,
Hello. I'm Kate Bornstein, and I've got a great deal to say to you, so you deserve to know more about me: I write books about postmodern gender theory and alternatives to suicide for teens, freaks and other outlaws. I'm a feminist, a Taoist, a sadomasochist, a femme, a nerd, a transperson, a Jew, and a tattooed lady. I'm a certified Post Traumatic Stress Disorder survivor. I'm a chronic over-eater who's been diagnosed with anorexia. I'm sober, but I'm not always clean. I've got piercings in body parts I wasn't born with. I'm also an elder in the community you claim to represent, and it is with great sorrow that I must write: you have not been representing us.
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Let's talk about a love that unites more people than have ever before been united by love. Let's defend some real equality.
The other day, New York State's lesbian and gay bid for marriage equality went down in flames, enough flames to make people cry. Thousands of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people and their allies spent a lot of money and heart-filled hours of work to legalize marriage equality, with little to show for it. That sucks, and I think the reason it didn't work is it's because marriage equality is an incorrect priority for the LGBTQetc communities.
Marriage equality—as it's being pushed for now—is wasting resources that would be better deployed to save some lives. There are several major flaws with marriage equality as a priority for our people:
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Marriage as it's practiced in the USA is unconstitutional… if you listen to Thomas Jerfferson's interpretation of separation of church and state. The way it stands now, if you're an ordained leader in a recognized religion, the US government gives you a package of 1500-1700 civil rights that only you can hand out to people. And you get to bestow or withhold these civil rights from any American citizen you choose, regardless of that citizen's constitutionally-granted rights. The government has no constitutional right to hand that judgment call over to a religious body.
Marriage equality—as it's being fought for now by lesbian and gay leaders who claim they're speaking for some majority of LGBTQetc people—will wind up being more marriage inequality. Single parents, many of whom are women of color, will not get the 1500-1700 rights they need to better and more easily raise their children. Nor will many other households made up of any combination of people who love each other and their children.
When lesbian and gay community leaders whip up the community to fight for the right to marry, it's a further expression of America's institutionalized greed in that it benefits only its demographic constituency. There's no reaching out beyond sexuality and gender expression to benefit people who aren't just like us, and honestly… that is so 20th Century identity politics.
Marriage is a privileging institution. It has privileged, and continues to privilege people along lines of not only religion, sexuality and gender, but also along the oppressive vectors of race, class, age, looks, ability, citizenship, family status, and language. Seeking to grab oneself a piece of the marriage-rights pie does little if anything at all for the oppression caused by the institution of marriage itself to many more people than sex and gender outlaws.
The fight for "marriage equality" is simply not the highest priority for a movement based in sexuality and gender. By simple triage, the most widespread criminality against people whose identities are based in sex and gender is violence against women. Women still make up the single-most oppressed identity in the world, followed closely by kids who are determined to be freaky for any reason whatsoever.
Lesbian and gay leaders must cease being self-obssessed and take into account the very real damage that's perpetrated on people who are more than simply lesbian women and/or gay men, more than bisexual or transgender even. Assuming a good-hearted but misplaced motivation for all the work done on behalf of fighting for marriage equality, it's time to stop fighting on that front as a first priority of the LGBTQetc movement. It's time to do some triage and base our priorities on a) who needs the most help and b) what battlefront will bring us the most allies.
I'm asking that you to fight on behalf of change for someone besides yourself. Please. I promise the rewards of doing that will revisit you threefold. Who needs the most help is easy: women. To lesbian and gay leaders, I ask you to ally yourselves with the centuries-old feminist movements and their current incarnations. You want to get a bill passed through Congress? Take another run at the Equal Rights Amendment. Unlike gay marriage, the ERA stands a better chance of making it into law, given the Obama Administration and our loosely Democratic majority in congress.
Stopping the violence against women and freaky children, and backing another run at the ERA have got the good chance of creating national front, lots of allies. On the home front of sex and gender, there's plenty of room for change that doesn't require millions of dollars and thousands of hours.
Looking into the community of people who base their lives on sexuality and gender, there's a lot of door-opening to do. Beyond L, G, B and T, there's also Q for queer and Q for questioning. There's an S for sadomasochists, an I for intersex, an F for feminists, and another F for furries. Our community is additionally composed of sex educators, sex workers, adult entertainers, pornographers, men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and asexuals who have sex in whatever manner they define their asexuality. You want to create some real change? Make room for genderqueers, polyamorists, radical faeries, butches, femmes, drag queens, drag king, and other dragfuck royalty too fabulous to describe in this short letter.
There are more and more people to add to this ever-growing list of communities whom you must own as family and represent in your activism. You cannot afford—politically, economically, or morally—to leave out a single person who bases a large part of their identity on being sex positive or in any way a proponent of gender anarchy.
That's what I have to say to you. That and thank you for the good hearts you've clearly demonstrated in your activism. I'm asking you to open your hearts further is all.
You're welcome to leave comments on this blog, but the best way to engage me in a conversation or recruit me to help is to contact me through Twitter. I look forward to talking with you, and I hope we can work together on the terms I've outlined above.
I'm going to keep this short and sweet, to keep myself from wandering off intoMobius stripsof postmodern theory. I've been paying attention to some trans activists who are using the word cisgender.According to its very own Wikipedia page:
"The word has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning "on the same side" as in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry. In this case, "cis" refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned gender."
Who knew? Not me. I'd only begun to hear the word about a year ago but according to its own Wikipedia page, cisgenderhas been in use on the internet since 1994. So this is me trying to play catch up.
Here's what I've got worked out so far.
1) Cisgender/Transgender is a valid gender binary. I don't like the prefix cis, but that'smyproblem. A global binary exists that is worthy of examination for its impact on the quality of our lives.
2) Identifying people with fixed gender identities as sex partners is key to both the identities and desires of cisgender lesbians and gay men, as well as to heterosexual men and women. Bisex,Polyamory,Asexuality,et albreak cisgender rules of fixed desire.Trans,Genderqueer,Drag et albreak cisgender rules of fixed identity.
3) To hold on to any power gained thru classimilation, middle class cisgender lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual men and womenmustdefend their desires/identities as both correct & natural.
4) Cisgender people who are sex positive & gender embracing are more than allies, they're family. That's where the idea of any othering of trans by some monolithic cisgender identity ultimately falls apart.
5) Sex positivists and gender anarchists are simply too sexy for inclusion in any middle class arena, including the current "LGBT" movement whose agendas are set by mostly middle class cisgender lesbian women and gay men.
OK. That's as far as I've gotten. Ithas not been my intention to offend anyone. This is a theory in progress.I believe thatno valid theory of identity, desire, or power can other a single sentient being. If you feel offendedI was wrong.I'll do my best to right the wrong.I'm talking about this on Twitterso if you've got a comment please tweet me. I've got faster and more frequent access to Twitter than I have to this blog.
