Category Archives: LGBTQ+
Nature Creates More Than Two Sexes
Intersexed individuals have genital ambiguity and/or gene combinations other than XY-male and XX-female
By Tami Hamilton
We recognize only two sexes. Nature does not.
My niece, Leah, has two children who were born intersexed. Meaning that doctors could not tell whether they were male or female at birth.
Her physicians told her that surgery was needed, and she trusted her doctors’ advice. Actually, it was not even a question but an expectation that her babies would be surgically altered.
So both of them were made female. Their enlarged clitorises were reduced and their vaginal openings made large enough to be girls. The children were also prescribed hormones to help them fill the female role they’d now been assigned. Leah’s two little ones will continue to endure years of vaginal dilation to stretch to enlarge their vaginas. Read the rest of this entry
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Cross-Dressing Pleasure and Pain
Miss Rose Beauty Pageant
Musing on the enchantments of the cross-dressing “Miss Rose Beauty Pageant,” artist and transvestite, Grayson Perry opines,
That’s when the fantasies take flight… (but also) I thought: ooh, there’s a lot of pain in this room…They were doing their best to meet their own very emotional needs…
I slightly cringe when people say “Oh, it’s just a bit of fun,” because these guys are risking often their marriages, their careers, their relationship with their children and their neighbors — not to mention their bank balance sometimes, with the size of their wardrobes.
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Must I Give Sex To Get Love?
The Pink Lady
By The Pink Lady @ Scratch Paper
Let’s talk about sex.
In all honesty it’s never been a very comfortable subject for me, and it’s taken a long time to figure out why. It wasn’t until my women’s studies class in college that the pieces started coming together, and I really started to figure out why I relate to sexuality the way that I do.
Trigger Warning: May be triggering for victims of sexual assault.
When I was younger (early teens) I was assaulted a number of times on my middle school campus, at my church, on various church events, and even in my own home by people who until these acts were committed I was pretty convinced were interested in me as a person. Read the rest of this entry
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Sasha Baron Cohen Foils Tough Guise
By Hansel Choi
Growing up in a boy’s school I sometimes succumbed to hyper-masculine poses. Yeah, that was me, along with plenty of other guys. Silly, overblown showcasing.
And then I grew up and wondered why. Why do we do it? Why do we do it even for strangers we don’t know or care about? People we’ll never see again?
After taking some gender courses, I’ve got some clues.
Growing up there’s plenty of pressure from dads and moms and friends. But it’s more like the pressure of “how not to be.”
Don’t be fem. Don’t be gay. Read the rest of this entry
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Denying Jesus Service at Arizona Cafes
If Jesus walked into a restaurant would good Christians refuse him service? After all, he said,
Even as ye have done unto the least of these ye have done it unto me.
Surely the Arizona Legislature would rank gays and lesbians among “the least,” given the bill they just passed allowing business owners to discriminate against LGBTQ folk.
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Women Get All The Good Emotions, Says Cross-Dresser
I think it’s quite hard for men today, because there’s an increasingly narrow bandwidth of behaviors which are seen as exclusively masculine. As women have quite rightly encroached on what used to be seen as male territory, all that’s left is the negative things. There’s less scope for a sensitive man to feel at home. What kind of men do we actually want boys to become?
That’s British artist and cross-dresser, Grayson Perry. We met him earlier in a discussion on “Men Who Wear Frocks.” He wears dresses, he says, because they help him get in touch with the feminine side of his humanity, which is blocked by a culture that suppresses male emotion.
Here’s how Perry explains that process of female “encroachment” into (so-called) male territory:
Until the later part of the 19th century, cross-dressing in ordinary life was an overwhelmingly female to male activity. Typically it tended to be a woman just trying to get on in a man’s world. But in the Victorian age, the traffic started to switch direction. Since then transvestism has become an overwhelmingly male to female behavior.
As the Victorians increasingly corralled all the softer emotions, vulnerability, innocence, gentleness, beauty into an exclusively feminine realm, men were cast as stoical, butch, practical providers, and dressed accordingly. Is it any wonder that some men started to want to cross over? For me, what the Victorians wore is the most striking example of how clothes can come to symbolize complex emotions.
So women started out more apt to mimic men in order to grasp greater opportunity and self-expression. Not to mention, gaining the status and privilege of the masculine world.
These days, women commonly express a whole range of so-called masculine traits and activities without being seen as crossing gender boundaries. They’re just doing “people-stuff.”
But men have not taken on feminine traits and activities to the same degree. Not because they can’t, but because they mostly won’t.
Why not?
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Women as Prey, Men as Predator
Women are expected to attract, men are supposed to be attracted. Men want, women want to be wanted. Metaphorically, this is a predator/prey type relationship. Women are subject to the hunt whether they like it or not, so men’s attention can be pleasing, annoying, or frightening. It all depends.
Accordingly, women know what it feels like to be prey.
That’s from Prof. Lisa Wade of Occidental College and the popular blog, Sociological Images (where I got the great cartoon, too.)
Not all men make women feel this way, she says, and probably most don’t, but we’ve all pretty much had this experience, whether it’s,
The leering guy on the street, the heavy hitter in the bar, the frotteurist on the subway, the molesting uncle, the aggressive fraternity brother, etc.
Does homophobia arise partly from being demoted on the food chain and feeling like prey, she wonders? Read the rest of this entry
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Men Who Wear Frocks
Some guys wear dresses. Why?
“Vivienne”
“Vivienne” is what one cross-dressing man calls himself when he’s in drag. Vivienne also blogs on her cross-dressing experience over at BluestockingBlue, where she seeks to understand why she does it.
Before delving into Vivienne’s musings, let’s do a little Transvestite 101.
First, you might be surprised to learn that most cross-dressers, a.k.a. transvestites, are straight men.
Straight men?
While biological males who are transgendered or transsexual don’t see themselves as men, transvestites do. They are men who are trying to express something of the feminine within, which is so often submerged. And, cross-dressing often holds a sexual appeal for them.
That appeal helps explain why they’re usually straight. These guys are turned-on by women, and for them, dressing like one can be arousing.
Now back to Vivienne, who wrote a four-part series on a documentary called “Why Men Wear Frocks.” The film was produced by British artist, and tranny, Grayson Perry. To read more, start with Part 1 on her site.
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Gay Marriage Hurts Patriarchal Marriage
Have you heard that gay marriage hurts marriage and family? Some Supreme Court Justices worried about this in hearings over DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act — which was recently struck down, allowing for gays to marry.
If my gay cousin gets married, will my husband and I start fighting more? Will my brother’s kids feel more stressed out and run away?
When marriage equality was argued before the California Supreme Court the presiding judge asked the attorney “defending marriage” how gay marriage would harm it. After several false starts the lawyer finally admitted he had no idea.
Gay marriage doesn’t hurt families.
But it could hurt patriarchal families.
Patriarchal families have male heads. In a family with two men married to each other, who is the male head? If one man were in charge would the other be submissive? No patriarchy-lover wants to see a submissive man!
And in lesbian marriage there can be no male head.
If families without male heads begin flourishing that could harm the whole notion that men must be in charge. Oh no!
All this reminds me of a post by CanBeBitter which lists relationship phrases we should retire. Like this one: “Wearing the pants,” referring to women who possesses an “inappropriate” amount of power in a relationship. And then there is “whipped”: a man who is at his lover’s beck and call and defers to her.
CanBeBitter goes on to observe that, “This list mostly applies to heterosexual relationships.”
Yes, exactly, I thought.
Of course that’s why so many patriarchy-loving folks rail against gay marriage. Who will “wear the pants”?
Gay marriage doesn’t hurt marriage and family.
But it may hurt patriarchal marriage and families.
And that’s a good thing.
Since invalidating DOMA, the Supreme Court scored one for marriage equality in more than one way.
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Don’t Let Your Daughters Grow Up To Marry Gay Cowboys
Mammas don’t let your daughters grow up to marry gay cowboys. That’s a new take on an old song.
I have friends who have married gay cowboys. Except for the cowboy part.
One of my friends married a man, only to come home early one day to find him in bed with another man.
Another gay Christian friend married a woman in hopes of turning straight and living a devout life.
They’re all now divorced.
And then there’s Brokeback Mountain.
Any surprise I became paranoid that a gay man would marry me, trying to pass, or not be gay, or something. I wished that gays could simply marry who they wanted so I wouldn’t have to deal with that.
And I was sure that gay men would rather marry someone who they were in love with and sexually attracted to, too.
We’d all be happier.
Now it looks like we all have that chance since days ago the Supreme Court ruled against DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which had made gay marriage illegal on the federal level.
While the case was in court Justice Scalia fretted over the unknowns of gay marriage. But we do know that marriage between gays and straits doesn’t work. Gays marrying straights does not help the divorce rate.
Others insist that marriage is for procreation.
In that case, everyone from my birth family, except for my brother, would have to get divorced immediately. My father married a woman in her 40s and they never had children. My mother and her husband married in their 60’s. I’ve suffered from fertility problems, myself. My brother, who has sired three children, is the only one who’s safe from these folks.
Please, protect my marriage from these “marriage protection” types!
And besides, it looks like gay marriage is good for marriage.
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