NOTE: This post was originally made in a fandom livejournal in 2005, and I'm reposting it here to give some background for the transgender posts that follow. My identity at the time was sort of a tomboy bisexual, after a brief period of 'lesbian', later to be altered to genderqueer pansexual, and finally to its current -- as of 2009 -- state of queer tranguy. This post is here for teh histories, and because it was what inspired me in 2007 to start posting about gender in the first place. Further historical gender posts from me will follow.
The notion of "coming out" has never sat well with me, because I feel that it forces the queer person to say "look at me, I'm different from you." In no way does it undermine the basic societal assumption of heteronormativity or generate acceptance of homosexual relations as acceptable; insead, it places them even more starkly in contrast to what is "normal". It bases everything on that ever-present liberal relativism in today's Western culture: yes, I'm a completely different kind of person than you; it is backwards of you to do anything other than accept me for - not in spite of - those differences.
My saying this may seem in contrast to the fact that I have accepted the term "queer" for myself; the point is that I do that with the full understanding that in all walks of my life and for as long as I can remember I have taken perverse pleasure in being other, weird, different - queer. One of my favorite before-I-had-a-memory stories is that a fantasy author who was friends with my parents when I was an infant and toddler used to refer to me as "elf child". I'm also a self-identified geek - something that in these hipster urban circles I run in is far more stigmatized than being queer.
To widen it a little more, I really understand the desire of GLBTs to identify themselves as other, because it turns us into a community of oppressed, a created family when many of us (myself NOT included, thankfully) are alienated from or actively disowned by our biological families. We turn to society and say "I don't need you, I've got them." Is it any wonder that the conservative elements of society are threatened by us? Is it surprising they imagine a fearful and illusory "gay agenda" in our social activism, in our choices to stand up and be heard, damnit!? This is all well and good, and I get the standard surge of pride whenever the suffocated bursts free and breathes the fresh air. Fresh air is yummy.
On individual terms, I can see how the great "coming out" is a necessary declaration of liberty. In broader terms, though, it's time for us to change - or maybe just widen - our approach. If the ultimate goal is societal acceptance of alternative sexualities, we can't afford to continue alienating ourselves from the breeding elite. And actually I think American queers are already moving in this direction: why is there such an emphasis on gay marriage these days? What is gay marriage but an assertion that we aren't so different from you breeder-types after all? That we now have the desire to absorb the heterosexual model for our own lives. This is, I think, tied in with the gradual 20th-century reimagining of male-female marriage that feminism strove for. If "traditional" marriage is gaining acceptance as a declared commitment between two individuals in mutual love and not one man's ownership of another man's daughter, it's not so far a step to embrace the declared commitment between two individuals (of the same gender) in mutual love. I suppose this liberated ideal of male-female marriage is under attack right alongside gay marriage, but I'm not so pessimistic as to think we're in an irreversible downward spiral. Politics are three dimensional and curvy, not one-dimensional and straight. (ha)
That paragraph ended up in a different place than it started. This post actually started with an article I was reading on attitudes towards alternative sexualities in non-Western modern cultures, particularly Japan. Kind of makes me question the whole approach we have and how healthy it might or might not be. "Coming out" (yes, I do mean those quotation marks) is all well and good if the alternative is sexual repression, but integrating our ideas into society so we don't have to come out will be even better. See? I'm all subversive.
Clearly, I'm an instigator in the great Gay Agenda. Fear my wrath.
It's also time to remind certain people in this country that they have brains of their very own, and they don't have to follow a Texas Idiot just because he said not doing so means you're gay. Or evil. Or whatever.
[/Family Guy]
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