Mr. Gay Pride: The Blog

Gender Confusion and Double Minorities. I had an adverse reaction to my post yesterday about gender-confused children, so will share that and my reply. Here's the adverse email:

As a frequent reader of your blogs, I have noticed a pattern of bigotry and animosity toward those with gender identity disorder. Even if you think it unnatural, it would seem your response should be steeped in compassion, not in animosity. However, you, who spew such judgmental and loathesome terms as "monstrosity" and "loons," advocate in your latest Mr. Gay Pride update confining the gender-confused to hospitals meant for those who present a danger to themselves and others and offering them suicide as the only alternative to lifetime confinement if they do not accept their sex of origin. This is nefarious, insensate and totally unnecessary.

I not only find this repugnant but also conspicuously hypocritical given that you consider sex-change operations violent crimes against the "insane." Assisting suicide violates the very "first, do no harm" mantra you use to impugn the case for sex-change operations. In fact, your views are far worse even if your attitudes about sex-change operations are to be taken as valid: You would permit not "mutilation" but DEATH!

I am also curious as to why you are so doctrinaire about gender identity disorder when homosexuality might also be said to be a delusion. How do you know you are not delusional or insane? Why are you not at least open to the idea that you could be wrong about this? After all, it was proud, dogmatic bigots like you who once categorized homosexuality as a mental illness. Let's confine gays to mental institutions, educate them about biology and sexual reproduction, and force them to accept reality or kill themselves.

I do agree with you, however, on allowing minors to alter their bodies. Parents should not permit that but should instead force the child to make those decisions for themselves as adults. Children are simply too young to make life-altering, irreversible decisions about their bodies, and their parents may (justifiably) incur wrath and blame later should the children regret it.

Gender identity aside, there are a number of other areas where I think you're dead-wrong.

You speak for all gay men in deciding they are all drawn to masculinity to the extent that the effeminate are doomed to lives of unhappiness. How then you explain some men's fascination with twinks? I am somewhat effeminate, albeit not ostentatiously (OR ARTIFICIALLY), and men are attracted to me. It happens. Mr. Schoonmaker's experiences and preferences don't define the entire world's.

I also found it reprehensible that you decided to denigrate blacks and Hispanics who voted for Proposition 8 as "niggers" and "spics." It's hypocritical to take the stance that bigotry is wrong and depraved, then quickly descend to it yourself. You were capable of educated, valid criticisms of blacks, Hispanics and OTHERS who voted for Proposition 8 without resorting to hurtful racist terminology. It was almost as if you used it as an excuse to unleash your latent feelings of racial superiority. I happen to be both black and gay and found it sad. I had black bigots alienating me on one side and gay bigots on the other. It is worth noting, though, that early results overestimated minority support for Proposition 8, though you irresponsibly never addressed that.

My reply:

These gender-confused loons ARE a danger to themselves, and to others. They MUTILATE their bodies; and someone who is perfectly willing to harm themselves CANNOT be trusted not to harm others.
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I expressly stated in advocating permitting incurable lunatics to commit suicide: "Here is a supply of pills that can end your misery." Psychology cannot help everyone, and there are dangerous lunatics in and outside of institutions who are consigned to decades of misery before death relieves them of pain. Suicide is wrong when it is a permanent solution to a TEMPORARY problem, not when it is the ONLY solution to a PERMANENT problem. People with a terminal illness may well be right to end their misery. Permanent madness is a terminal illness; suicide is a rational choice in such a circumstance.
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Homosexuality, or any genuine sexual orientation, is not a delusion but an attraction. Homosexuality is found in a very large part of the animal kingdom, if not in every mammalian species. A man who knows he is a man and knows he is attracted to a man and derives pleasure from men is in no way delusional.
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This is the base problem with allowing the gender-confused to vent their madness: it taints everything and everyone around them. Madness is not usually transmissible, but sanity is easily eroded in people of weak identity and weak will. In legitimating the "woman trapped in the body of a man" or the reverse madness, society attacks the whole concept of reality as controlling the universe, and leads some people to indulge and rationalize away insane thoughts rather than understand that they are insane thoughts and either get over them on their own, or seek professional help -- and NOT from someone who will tell them, "Oh, that's not crazy. You are entitled to choose your gender, and we have the knives to help."
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Gay men's sexual identity is under CONSTANT ATTACK from a vast CASTRATION CONSPIRACY, into which you have apparently been recruited. If there were skin-change surgery that could replace black skin with white, and white-controlled media were to promote such surgery as a "cure" to the "problem" of the black race, would you be equally at ease with that "solution"? (Note: I made this comparison before I got to the point in your email that said you are black. Perhaps this comparison is particularly appropriate to make the point for you.)
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You confuse bigotry with certainty. If someone insists that the world is flat and the moon landings never occurred, is society supposed to say, "Fine, you're right, and we are all wrong"? When a person who is obviously a woman is called a "man", but then she has a BABY, there are some stupid, evil people like Oprah Winfrey who will leap to say not, "Well, so much for the pretense that she is a man" but "A MAN just had a baby!"
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The attraction of some gender-insecure men to effeminate men, even men who dress as women, is a desperate attempt to recast their homosexuality as heterosexuality, and thus to deny their own nature and psychosexually castrate their partner. It is NEVER healthy, and it is NEVER genuine but always a willful falsification of reality to preserve a hoped-for "normality" as a "sort-of" heterosexual man who just happens to have sex with (a technical) man.
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My point in saying "niggers and spics" was made very plainly in that passage: "if they can be bigoted against us, we can retaliate in kind"; thus, it is dangerous for one minority to attack and deny the rights of others. The words of the old Negro spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" enjoin "If you get to Heaven, before I do ... just bore a hole and pull me thru." Gay men have, in general, supported civil rights for blacks, Hispanics, etc., partly from simple fairness but also partly in the hope, even expectation, that as they advanced, in part because of our help, they would return the favor. Didn't happen as fully as we had hoped.
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And whereas blacks are easily spotted, gay men may not be, but be in position to harm blacks or Hispanics he comes to regard as enemies, by passing over them in hiring, entering negative notations in personnel records, voting against them, etc.
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I don't understand whatever point you seek to make by "It is worth noting, though, that early results overestimated minority support for Proposition 8, though you irresponsibly never addressed that." Are public-opinion polling errors germane to the issue of human rights?
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As for your being a double minority, black and gay, I long ago learned that double minorities tend to have ENORMOUS, sometimes insuperable difficulty in becoming well-adjusted gay men. One minority status is hard; two is nearly crushing. The same process of self-liberation should work twice, but perhaps it's like a pint of courage trying to fill a quart container.
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This is where backup from the law, or social approbation, comes in, to fill in that other pint. When, instead, social disapproval and legal pariah status evaporate or siphon off some of that pint of courage, a double-minority person is in worse condition than the single-minority whose pint of courage need only fill a pint container.
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I don't know if there are organizations dedicated to double minorities (2- or some such) that address such issues and provide strategies for dealing with the special challenges of double minorities. A general-purpose gay organization might not suffice, just as a heterosexually organized 'gay' organization that by its very structure promotes a message of men-and-women-together-now! cannot really liberate gay men from impositions of heterosexuality.