A Dyke A Broad #36
The beginning of our strange post-Covid lives. Plus the continuation of my Gen X thoughts on identity, labels and the LGBTQ+ movement.
Hello from Paris!
Things here feel strangely normal. Sunday I met a friend at a café I hadn’t been to in yonks. A couple days before the Girl and I went to the Leopard, one of our pre-Covid bars, where we recognized the waitstaff who recognized us, and drank two icy beers on the sidewalk watching bicyclists zoom by and marveling like a couple of bumpkins that there were so many people in Paris. My god, who knew?
The last time we’d been was November or December of 2019. By February 2020 the news showed the dead piling up in Italy. Our first lockdown began in March. Even when it lifted, we barely left our apartment, much less our immediate neighborhood.
There in the sunshine, I got a little weepy about how many were dead and how many survived, and I surprised the waitress with a fat tip because she must have been hit hard even if, by American standards, the French government has been incredibly generous. “We owe you for 18 months.” She was happy and moved.
Wow, 18 months! Shouldn’t the sun refuse to shine? Shouldn’t the buildings all be draped with black for the 100 000+ dead in France? Shouldn’t we still be banging pots and applauding out our windows on the stroke of 8? But no, we just want to get on with it—this business of living. We survived. That’s enough. Carry on.
God, we humans are heartless and weird. I’m no exception of course. Bring me another beer!
But now, back to my regularly scheduled Gen X thoughts about the LGBTQ+ movement(s) which of course have a lot to do with gender, sex, and names. Which I know you want to share.
A Revealing Detour into the Language of Race
This week I’m wondering if we can learn anything about our current proliferation of gender labels from the cornucopia of words referring to skin color and heritage like mulatto and quadroon which persisted long after they were first imposed on enslaved or free people of African descent, especially in the 18th and 19th century.
I turned to google and found, Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past.
It is important to keep in mind that assigning percentages of ancestry was far from an exact science. The designations were often given on the basis of complexion or physical characteristics rather than proof of ancestry.
Negro: In antebellum Louisiana, “negro” or “negress” described a person who did not have any European ancestry, as distinguished from a “person of color.”
Mulatto: Historically this term is meant to describe someone of mixed African and European ancestry. In Louisiana, it is even more specific—describing someone who is believed to be of one-half African ancestry and one-half European ancestry.
Griffe: Refers to a person who is believed to be one-quarter European descent and three-quarters African descent. Alternately, it could refer to someone of African and Native American ancestry.
Quadroon: Refers to a person who is thought to be of one-quarter African descent and three-quarters European descent.
Octoroon: Refers to a person who is of one-eighth African descent and seven-eighths European descent.
Negro, mulatto, griffe, quadroon, octaroon. The words remind me of the identities you can “choose” on Facebook, or see outlined in some college guide explaining to instructors that they must not confuse non-binary with gender nonconforming, or fluid with flux. Yes, I know there’s a difference between having words imposed on you and choosing them, but sometimes, if you’re honest, it’s hard to tell which is which.
In this case, words like octoroon— partly imposed by slavery’s legacy of colorism, persisted long past the end of the Civil War. In fact, were used by choice by some black people which I know because some of the words appear in the 1931 book I keep mentioning, Black No More, by George Schuyler.
Sure, they were used partly because colorism persists. But also because once we learn the name of something, we simultaneously train our eyes to see it. And it sticks in our imagination, and comes out of our mouths. Like maple, like oak, words we use instead of the generic tree once we learn to see their differences.
This makes me wonder about the impact of the new language of gender and sex on the 12 year old kid whose social-media-defined world is swamped with it. Do they use the words by choice? Or is it an obligation in Hashtag Nation?
I don’t think it’s a free choice. The act of seeing gender, like race, is learned in a hierarchy of power in which invisibility and namelessness (like God who identifies themselves merely as “I am”) is either a sign you’ve reached the top. Or the bottom—in the case of lesbians. Most people in the middle have a surfeit of words. Many of them artificial. Including ones about race.
Most enslaved people in the U.S. came from West and West Central Africa and had a variety of ethnicities and languages. At first they probably didn’t see their skin color in the way we see today. Before it was meaningless. After all, what did they have in common with many of the others around them, but the slavery they were forced into? A woman I know from Nigeria once joked she didn’t discover she was black until she moved to the U.S. because skin color wasn’t a marker of difference at home. Which is not to say there wasn’t stigma in Nigeria. There, they just base it on other things. Religion, for instance, is always handy. Sex, too. Sexual orientation. Language. Ethnicity. Nigeria is home to over 250 ethnic groups, with over 500 languages. There’s plenty to choose from.
Then I think of how the children of enslaved people gradually began to identify as black. Not just because of the one-drop rule which essentially said, if you’re black, you’re black, (and less human than white). But also because “black” too, was eventually chosen, claimed, and transformed by a civil rights movement emboldened to declare, Black is Beautiful.
That was essential because social change is, in many ways, a numbers game, and a movement composed of all members of the African diaspora, even if they had just one drop of African blood, was larger and more powerful than just rounding up, say, the negroes or griffes, and letting the others pass into another identity, as they did in most of Latin America where a light-skinned person might not identify as black but mixed-race, or even white. And where white, too, has a broader range.
It’s on forms, now, gender identity with its multiple choices. As well as sexual orientation. I have mixed feelings about that. It can make things easier for some people who are not stereotypically male or female. A colleague recently said their provider asked about it, and they debated whether or not to answer that question on the form, but when they did, they actually had a really good health consult. One of their best ever. I’m really glad.
But… There are so many buts. Especially that gender identity is required. That this thing which is so nebulous is now seen as important as your sex, even though sex has concrete, generalizable attributes and offers medically necessary information about your body far beyond reproductive potential. In fact decades of research show that sex differences affect almost everything from the heart, for instance, to the bowels. Even how we respond to medication.
I think about kids and how all our new language backs them into a corner before they’ve even had a chance to experiment, play around much, either with sex or their relationship to gender stereotypes. Especially since the vocabulary they’re offered about gender didn’t emerge organically from commonly used language, reflecting lived experience, but from academia and gender studies. I mean, nonbinary? Seriously? What does it mean to impose these words, often for ideological reasons, on bodies that in this regard, anyway, had been neutral, nameless? A variation of average, not their own deviating thing?
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Yes, it troubles me that so many kids are starting out with words, with abstraction, with language which both reflects reality and creates it, reinforces it. Sets apart people who will perhaps regret it later. We should consider, too, that it moves in cycles even as it seems set in stone.
I remember just a few years ago reading a story about how some mom went to pick her kid up from school, and her kid was talking about their friend, Bob, and when the mom asked, “Which one is Bob?” the kid told her, “The boy in the blue jacket over by the swings.” And she marveled approvingly at the fact that her own kid did not think it was relevant to identify Bob as the black kid, even if Bob was the only black kid on that side of the playground. And how that was held up as progress. How her kid didn’t see Bob’s darker skin as the most important, most visible thing about him.
That was the ideal, the endgame. For skin color to be a neutral, uninteresting quality.
In 2021, the pendulum has swung back the other way on matters of race, and we are once again condemned if we don’t see it. Because to not see it, means you don’t see racism either.
That’s the Catch 22 about seeing. About identity politics in general. To deal with something like racism, or discrimination against women, including those who refuse gender stereotypes, you have to name them, see them, describe how people with certain qualities are treated differently. The only problem is, that act of naming and seeing, not only calls attention to discriminations, it can reinforce difference, set us further apart, increase fragmentation and mutual suspicion, unless at the same time we keep in mind a broader vision of what we’re aiming for. Equality, liberation, love even. Yeah, I said it. Love.
And in Other News… From Britain, a landmark case
When Maya Forstater lost her job she sued, saying she was discriminated against unlawfully for believing that sex is immutable. Her opponents said that she was a transphobic menace and the first judge that heard the case agreed, saying she had no standing to sue.
That decision has now been reversed—in part because there was no evidence that she actually discriminated against any trans people, though once during a Twitter exchange she mistakenly used “he” for the minor Scottish politician Gregor Murray (photo below) who identifies as “non binary” and prefers “they”. So the main case can now proceed.
Here’s a thorough look at the case’s implications by one of her lawyers.
As the judgment demonstrates…Feminism is not transphobia and the pursuit of transgender rights is not misogynist. Transgender people and women each have statutory rights. Where those rights from time to time conflict – as they do - resolution through discussion and debate requires a desire for good-faith engagement and a rejection of vitriol and vilification. The era of mere sloganeering has ended …
The end of sloganeering? We can hope, anyway.
In the mood for humor?
Check out this week’s OK Karen newsletter which asks, “Women: should they say stuff?”
Congrats if you got this far. You’re probably thirsty. So go have a drink of water, maybe put some gin in it.
Swelteringly yours,