Frustrated at NPR's imprecise language in "Pakistan's Transgenders In A Category of Their Own"

Hello All Things Considered, I was troubled to hear the imprecise use of language in your segment from Monday's show about Pakistani hijras. Throughout the segment you use the word "transvestite" interchangeably with "transgender," even though the individuals interviewed clearly describe their gender identity as neither male not female. The word "transvestite" is widely used to describe people (usually men) with intact male gender identities who dress in women's clothing, as opposed to transgender people who usually identify as a gender different from the one assigned them at birth. While I appreciate that NPR is interested in covering stories from beyond the gender binary, I really wish you would have done your homework a little bit better. It is no small distinction to those of us who live with non-normative gender identities, and we deserve the respect of a few hours of research. Many thanks, R. E. H. Gordon Brooklyn, NY

Dan Savage Stereotypes Gay People

Dear Dan Savage,

I just heard your piece on “Fresh Air” and I hope you will give me an opportunity to voice my disappointment with a few of your comments. As an LGBT person, I am, of course, very grateful for the work you do and the ways that it helps LBGT youth who are in need of hope about their futures. However, I am very frustrated with the stereotyping of gay people that you engage in. In your segment on “Fresh Air”, and in other places throughout your work, you regularly equate youthful gender non-conformity with gayness. You talk about the “gay” behaviors you engaged in as a child—liking musical theater, being friends with girls, being in to typically girly interests—as indicators of your adult sexual orientation. While it may have been the case in your experience that these typically gay behaviors and interests were bellwethers of your homosexuality, you have a tendency to generalize this viewpoint, equating gender non-conformity with gayness. This widely held belief that gender inverted behavior is linked to homosexuality—girly boys must be gay men, boyish girls must be lesbians—is damaging and counterproductive for a number of reasons:

First, it promotes gay stereotypes in a way that hurts gay people. It hurts them because it sends strong messages to gay youth about what gayness looks like, how to be gay properly, and what their interests and behaviors should be. In those fragile years of trying to find themselves, many young gay men engage in performances of gayness based on extremely limited ideas about what gay men are like. What if you are a gay man who likes football, hates to talk, has no female friends, thinks Glee is stupid? There is no place for these people in your worldview, and they end up not fitting into the world twice over, once as gay and again as not being able to be gay “properly.” I see this all the time in young gay men—exaggerated performances of “faggyness” that stem, I believe, less from their true personalities and more from a desire to be recognized as gay in the eyes of the world according to extremely limited acceptable personalities for gay people. While there are many gay men for whom this behavior is completely honest, there are others who are in need of other models. We need to create a culture in which there are as many ways to be gay as there are gay people. Let’s not recreate the limited behavior norms that plague straight people.

Second, it promotes gay stereotypes in a way that hurts gender non-conforming straight people. How many sweet sensitive aesthetically inclined little boys have been labeled as gay based on their behaviors and had to struggle against endless assumptions about their sexuality based on the “gayness” of their personalities? The world needs more straight people who embody their heterosexuality in all sorts of different ways, and your stereotyping sends a message to these people that they must be confused, or in denial of their true orientations, making them the object of gossip and ridicule. There need to be more feminine straight men, not less, and your views make it even harder for these gender non-conforming people to be themselves.

Third, it injures transgender people by equating gender non-conformity with gayness, as opposed to with being transgender or gender queer. While there are of course links between gender and sexuality, they play out very differently for each unique individual, and your comments leave out the possibility that childhood gender inverted behavior might be primarily about gender identity and not about sexuality. Let gender non-conformity mean all the different things it can mean when it is not tethered to serving as a sign of impending homosexuality.

Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts on these issues, and I hope you will take them into consideration.

Sincerely,

R. E. H. Gordon
Chicago, IL

Letter to the NYTIMES Editor about Peggy Orenstein "What Makes a Woman a Woman?" published September 11, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13FOB-WWLN-t.html?scp=1&sq=orenstein&st=cse


Dear Editor,

I would like to express my disappointment with Peggy Orenstein's piece "What Makes a Woman a Woman?" While I respect that the author's personal struggle with breast cancer has led her to feel that her feminine gender is rooted in some primal way in the physiology of her female sex, I wish she would have expressed this as her own individual experience. Instead, she generalizes her personal feelings onto everyone, using it as a way to claim that the experience of one's gender identity to be in accordance with one's birth-sex is innate, natural, profound, and extra-cultural. While it may have been "gospel" in the early eighties to understand gender as socially constructed, a view that has since, apparently, gone out of style, I was born in the mid-eighties and I am surrounded by a vibrant community of people of all genders who do not feel that "biology is destiny" in the least. Rather, we understand that there exists a wide variety of gender identities that correspond in every imaginable way with birth sex, body parts, reproductive capacities, and sexual preferences. It is, frankly, insulting how many people's lives Orenstien undermines with her ridiculous second wave feminist claims about the innateness and naturalness of gender identity. We would agree that gender identity is, indeed, a profound part of personal identity, but this by no means implies that is rooted in some predetermined way in our anatomies, chromosomes, and hormones. Her close-minded view-point is further evidenced by her repeated use of the term "disorder" to refer to the bodies of intersex people, a condition which is not as rare as people would like to believe and is completely medically harmless in the vast majority of cases. If intersex people tend to identify as either male or female, as stated by Professor Berenbaum, maybe it is because they live in a world that defines personhood largely on the grounds of "healthy" gender identity that corresponds in the expected ways to one's anatomy, and are medically, socially, and emotionally coerced into conforming to a gender norm in order to save them from the "unpleasant freakishness" of indeterminate gender. For someone who claims to be a feminist, Orenstein should be ashamed for this oversight, and about expanding her personal feelings about her gender into categorical claims. For us, feminism means granting everyone the right to embody and express our own unique genders, while respecting the validity of each other's experiences, even when they might contradict with our own conclusions. I shudder to think about all those people, teens especially, whose gender identity does not seem to innately relate to their birth sex and for whom Orenstein's essay might reiterate the societal imperative to have a correct and healthy gender, like she does, influencing them to continue to be ashamed of and hide their true gendered selves.

Thank you.

Rebecca Gordon
Chicago, IL.

NEEDING TO BASK IN THE QUEERNESS OF THE LYRICS TO THE HUMPTY DANCE

My name is Humpty, pronounced with a Umpty.
Yo ladies, oh how I like to hump thee.
And all the rappers in the top ten--please allow me to bump thee.
I'm steppin' tall, y'all,
and just like Humpty Dumpty
you're gonna fall when the stereos pump me.
I like to rhyme,
I like my beats funky,
I'm spunky. I like my oatmeal lumpy.
I'm sick wit dis, straight gangsta mack
but sometimes I get ridiculous
I'll eat up all your crackers and your licorice
hey yo fat girl, c'mere--are ya ticklish?
Yeah, I called ya fat.
Look at me, I'm skinny
It never stopped me from gettin' busy
I'm a freak
I like the girls with the boom
I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom
I'm crazy.
Allow me to amaze thee.
They say I'm ugly but it just don't faze me.
I'm still gettin' in the girls' pants
and I even got my own dance

People say "Yo, Humpty, you're really funny lookin'"
that's all right 'cause I get things cookin'
Ya stare, ya glare, ya constantly try to compare me
but ya can't get near me
I give 'em more, see, and on the floor, B,
all the girls they adore me
Oh yes, ladies, I'm really bein' sincere
'cause in a 69 my humpty nose will tickle ya rear.
My nose is big, uh-uh I'm not ashamed
Big like a pickle, I'm still gettin' paid
I get laid by the ladies, ya know I'm in charge,
both how I'm livin' and my nose is large
I get stoopid, I shoot an arrow like Cupid,
I use a word that don't mean nothin', like looptid
I sang on Doowhutchalike, and if ya missed it,
I'm the one who said just grab 'em in the biscuits
Also told ya that I like to bite
Well, yeah, I guess it's obvious, I also like to write.
All ya had to do was give Humpty a chance
and now I'm gonna do my dance.

Adult Contemporary, Cory Arcangel, Team Gallery

LISTEN TO FUTURE MUSIC

http://www.myspace.com/pointnever