LGBTIQ+

Gender Markers Underpin The Fabric Of The Universe, Or Crazy Shit Religious Nuts Actually Believe

Gender whispers on the queer wind reached my ear this week. A lamentation on how a dastardly sabotage was unraveled, cast to all the people’s hearts through the airwaves. A clip below of the revelation.

How! The Culture Warriors had learned of the Post Modern Neo Marxist plot to tear apart the fabric of the universe. Worse, that incorrigible knight, Andrew Hastie MP, has identified exactly how the deed was to be done – through the Tasmanian State Parliament.

And the mechanism of that forbidden power over the natural forces that keep space-time from unravelling into itself, a thread intertwining through space-time as the exact sequence of all the M’s and F’s printed on old growth forest paper. Deja vu is just when a Tasmanian birth certificate accidentally gets destroyed.

That Hastie considers the Tasmanian administration so supreme in its command of the universe has to be some sort of heresy.

But my absolute favourite line of all has to be this.

“No one ever considers the rights of the child in this. The child has the right to know what gender they are when they’re born, biologically, that is.”

Yeah, because no child would ever be able to tell which gender they were assigned born into, biologically, that is. I remember how I rushed to check my birth certificate, the sole arbiter of truth in this unknowable world, to see if there was a mistake. *sarcasm*

It’s hard to know if Sky News is attracted to the utter density of its presenters and guests, or if they’re attracted to the sheer weight of their viewership. Given their published ratings, I’d bet on the former.

Not satisfied with, or perhaps confused by, other people’s ability to consider two ideas at once, our esteemed leader angrily micro-blogged his displeasure. I guess he wants us to know that, like all Australians stuck in an office all day, that he too spends too much time on Twitter, and reading news websites.

It’s unsurprising that this merry band of buffoons think like this, these fools who need the flag pinned to their fucking chest just to remember what they’re doing.

I leave you with an observation.

Here is the proposed legislation. It updates state law for marriage equality, ends forced divorce for transgender people, and some other tidbits. It is okay.

Here is the official transcript of Cassy O’Connor MP, leader of the Tasmania Greens, in the second reading of the legislation, detailing some proposed amendments. It is very good.

Shame, Pride, Queer Fear

It seems not a day passes that doesn’t take us further back. An eternal violent night of fascism is extending over the world, its shadow cast further and further. Dark days indeed.

I often reflect on how shame, and fear, affect queer lives, or at least mine. It locks us in the closet, hiding nature from the harsh judgement of an artificial construct. It poisons all minds; it enables and reinforces the cruel, self serving bigotries of the selfish and predatory.

Coming out symbolises a conquering of that fear and shame. The imagery could not be more apt – a pure rejection of constraint, expressed outwards into the world. But it’s a common misconception that you only come out once. And just as you constantly come out to the world, the pressure of the world constantly falls back onto you.

The cishetereonormative construct of society damages everyone who exists within it. Those who perform its bizarre rituals are as affected as those who don’t. But to those who exist outside its parameters, the damage inflicted upon them can be horrifying. Murder, suicide, isolation from a complete life. Dehumanisation – transgressors must be terminated.

For me, born into relative peace and privilege at the cusp of history, shame kept me from expressing feminine as a child and teenager. Shame had me denying an attraction to men for over twenty years. A deeply subconscious shame has kept me from Pride. Despite truly living the best three years past.

And I can’t actually explain why I felt such intense shame in a way that satisfies me. Aside from the perpetual message from all of society to conform or perish.

Our society is structured such that every human must perform a precisely designated role, in the service of capital. Our culture is hyper-gendered and fatally cisheteronormative; religious justifications of the essential masculine and feminine have given way to a self-fulfilling cultural construct. And yet, its construction still reinforces the old world.

And I wonder if the only reason why queer shame is beaten so deep into every person because the deconstruction of that system dismantles the supposed legitimacy of extreme power. If queer humans did not stand beneath “straight” humans, but rather we stood together, undivided by artificial boundaries, the force of pure humanity would silence those who exploit prejudice for the rest of time.

The terror of fascism is quickly returning, and no decent person is safe from its march. The only way to win is to purge from your mind the remnants of hopeless tradition, and to see and join a single humanity, united.

The Precipice

When I was in high school, the Catholic school in the area, I heard a rumour that a gay student was receiving “counselling”. I never found out who they were. But that mere thought was just one of the many overwhelming things that successfully pushed a naive, scared trans child further into the closet, not to emerge for almost a decade.

So, you could imagine that I have strong feelings about efforts to create safer environments for queer children and teens to be themselves. I wonder how radically different, and how much happier, my youth would have been had I been free to be me, instead of being forced to present a masculine facade. I remember how conflicted and wrong and ashamed I felt, and I want no one to ever have to suffer that. No one should lose their childhood years like that.

This caretaker government has made clear just how hostile the powerful religious forces in this country are to the very existence of queer people. Skin-curling bisexuals. Gender-whispering educators. Promulgating the right to jeopardise the education of vulnerable children. They barely conceal their hatred with weasel words, squeezing harder and harder as their grip on power slips away.

To call these people Christians is a sick joke. There is no love in what they preach.

But despite the overwhelming public defence from the majority of our society, the fact that our livelihoods and happiness remain the punching bag of desperate reactionaries makes me ill. It’s just a battle in the war. Well funded Christian zealotry is mobilising all around the western world.

It’s a fact that transgender people are their targets, now that their attempt to vilify gay people has completely failed. The United Kingdom is infamous for the moral panic in the media. In the United States, dozens of states are aggressively legislating to constrain trans people. And what happens there is inevitably imported here…

At times like these, like during the toxic survey last year, I despair, I feel overwhelmed, turning numb. But I’m thankful for my newfound security, and the friends I can rely on. I worry about those who aren’t so lucky.

I want to fight this nightmare forming around us. Where bigoted division sets us apart and into hierarchies of dominance. Where the marginalised suffer at the hands of the selfish. Where those who dream of a better world are powerless, condemned to the nightmare of the past.

The precipice we approach becomes starker by the day. We need radical change now. Let’s wake up the world.