[image description: an extreme close-up of light blue forget-me-not flowers against a blurry blue background. white art deco letters in all caps say “monosexuality is a heterosexist idea used to oppress gay people and erase bisexuality from history and society”]
like what if they were right? what if the concept of monosexism rests on the insistence that there ARE two and only two genders, two and only two sexes, two and only two gender roles, to pair up in the first place? that makes sense, doesn’t it?
what if that means that it doesn’t just loathe bisexuals, because our very existence breaks that binary, but also intersex people, aces/aros, and trans people of all types?
what if that means that it does tolerate both straight and gay people, on the surface, but it’s demanding a rigid adherence to gender norms that the majority of gay people don’t fit into in the first place?
remember how Senator Barney Frank, and the HRC, fought for years to keep “gender identity and expression” out of the united states’s Employment Non-Discrimination Act? and even the Advocate magazine said, if it had passed that way, “many LGB individuals would have still been vulnerable to job loss as it would remain perfectly legal to fire a masculine-presenting woman or a feminine-presenting man. Those viewed as somehow outside of what society expects from us in terms of gender would remain a target.”
what if that’s heterosexism versus monosexism?
One part of our community sees things as being centered around “gay versus straight”, and thinks that we are only oppressed if people think we’re gay. Some of those folks acknowledge that cissexism exists alongside it, so people are oppressed for being gay or trans. In this worldview, people who “look straight” - intersex people, aces/aros, “het-partnered” bisexuals, nonbinary people, straight and passing trans people - are privileged. Gay men, lesbians, and anybody who will be read as gay or non-passing, are oppressed.
The other part of our community sees things as being centered around “violating the gender binary”, and thinks that we are oppressed when we are seen as bending or breaking that binary. This includes gay men, lesbians, and/or non-passing trans people, but it also includes everyone who is nonbinary, passing trans people, intersex, ace, aro, bi, et cetera.
Because the rule of the gender binary is that there have to be two and only two genders, which have to correspond correctly with the two and only two sexes that are acknowledged, and the two and only two gender roles, and they have to be with each other, and only each other. That is how the gender binary works. That’s what it is.
I think that one perspective is what we label as “heterosexism,” and the other is what we label as “monosexism”. I think this is the big divide that has always, always been present in the community. And I think that lately we’re being told over and over, by the first group, that believing monosexism exists is anti-gay, and it’s keeping everyone from seeing that actually, monosexism itself is anti-gay.
Okay, Gen Z, younger millennials, please tell me, are you aware of what the title Ms. means? And how to pronounce it?
Because I just listened to several young 20-somethings pronounce it Miss and talk about how it means you’re not married. And…I’m feeling weird about it, considering that’s the title I use.
(It means my marital status is none of your business. I use it because I’m married but I kept my maiden name so I’m not Mrs. anyone.)
These comments really are fascinating and it seems especially people whose first language isn’t English aren’t sure about this, which is fair. But as I suspected some young folks aren’t clear either?
It seems like Ms. has been conflated with Miss and Miss has fallen out of favor, which is fair, but the meanings have been confused.
So here:
Ms.has some antique origins similar to Mrs. and Miss (all short for Mistress) but was revived in the 20th century (mostly in the 60s and 70s) by feminists as an all-purpose female title.
The problem with Miss and Mrs. is that they are tied specifically to marital status. (Miss is SPECIFICALLY an unmarried woman and Mrs. is a woman who is married or has been married. Yes, even older women can be Miss and a widow is still Mrs. (of course if they so choose).
While Mr. isn’t tied to marital status for men, of course. So Ms. is the female equivalent to Mr., intended to be used both as a default term when you don’t know someone’s marital status and ALSO as a term of choice when you don’t wish to be defined by your relationship to a man.
This was very much a political thing, part of second-wave feminism (which of course has it’s flaws). (Ms. magazine was a feminist women’s magazine which popularized the term.)
It’s pronounced something like Miz or Mzz.
So for me, I’ve used Ms. basically since I got out of college anytime I’m asked for a title. First because I didn’t want my marital status to be a thing of concern in professional settings. And when I was living with my now-husband but we weren’t married. And then after we were married and I kept my own last name because IMO neither of the other options was relevant.
(The keeping your own name thing is a different discussion probably, but I did it partly out of desire to stay the same “person” and partly out of apathy. Also my husband’s last name isn’t even the same as his parents (because remarriage) so there was no pressure there to change it and he gave no fucks about it. In fact, he’s almost seriously thought about changing his name to mine because he likes my family better, lol.)
But anyway, I feel like it’s important to keep the intention of Ms. alive because it’s so very useful and needed to have an equal partner to Mr. And more useful than ever with so many situations where you may be married/committed but not using your partner’s name (ie. gay married, poly relationships, not legally married for reasons of disability, idk whatever).
But Ms. does NOT mean unmarried. It means someone could be of ANY marital status: never married, currently married, divorced, widowed, etc. It means “it’s not your business because you don’t ask a man his marital status the first second you meet him so buzz off.”
[image description: two Facebook screencaps. The first is “We Removed Something You Posted. We removed the post below because it doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards: Sassafras Lowrey posted “at least 2017 has brought us the return of Dykes To Watch Out For (which I didn’t used to read, because I was firmly on the Hothead side of the lesbian comic binary… but now I do?)"” The second screencap is “You’re Temporarily Blocked From Posting: This temporary block will last 24 hours, and you won’t be able to post on Facebook until it’s finished. / Please keep in mind that people who repeatedly post things that aren’t allowed on Facebook may have their accounts permanently disabled.”]
Author Sassafras Lowrey was blocked from posting on Facebook for mentioning Dykes To Watch Out For–or more specifically, for using the word “dyke” at all.
It’s no secret I love social media – and defying all logic, my favorite of the social media platforms has always been facebook. I had been seeing friends post about new policies where Facebook was blocking people or pulling content that used the word “dyke” as reclaimed and empowering identity language. I continued posting on my facebook like normal, and woke up this morning to discover that not only had a post I’d made yesterday sharing the newest Dykes To Watch Out For classic lesbian comic had been pulled for “violating community standards” but my profile had also been put on a 24 hour hold, and I’ve been reminded/threatened that repeat “offenses” could get my profile deleted.
Because there has been doubt that this is happening, I took screenshots
Over at Twitter Owen Jones reflects on the way the history of bigotry is repeating. The new British TV series It’s a Sin reminds him of how the tactics once used against gay and lesbian people is now used against trans and nonbinary folks.
Owen Peter Jones is a British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist and political activist.
It’s a Sin is a British television drama serial written and created by Russell T Davies. It is about the queer community in the 1980′s London.
Owen writes:
One of the most important themes in ‘It’s A Sin’ was about gay/bi people and shame - caused by growing up in a society that saw gay/bi people as would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.
While HIV rates remain significantly higher among gay and bisexual men, treatments now allow those with HIV to live healthy lives. Alcohol and drug abuse as a response to shame and trauma caused by homophobia is today a bigger problem in Western nations.
It’s important to make this point because the evidence suggests that mental distress is even more acute amongst trans people, who are today the most marginalised and oppressed part of the LGBTQ+ world.
Anti-trans activists use the same arguments as the homophobes
Today, anti-trans activists play the exact same songs about trans people: that they are would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.
Some of those anti-trans activists responded viscerally to being called out for enjoying It’s A Sin. They are furious at being compared to the monsters who victimised gay people, even as they obsessively target trans people in the same papers that obsessively targeted gay people.
Some of them point to their past association with pro-gay struggles, or in some cases simply that they have been to gay bars before, as though any of this gives them a lifetime freedom pass to say whatever they like about other minorities.
But as It’s A Sin shows, a society which made gay people feel unwelcome - as burdens at best and as menaces at worst - inflicts terrible damage on gay people. The same is being done to trans people.
However those who, in some cases, spend a genuinely huge amount of their lives talking about trans people as would-be predators or threats to children justify it to themselves, they are inflicting the same injuries on trans people as It’s A Sin underlined is done to gay people.
The quadrupling of transphobic hate crimes, the 48% of trans people who fear using public toilets, the trans people discriminated against at work, the quarter who’ve suffered homelessness, all of this is erased from the “conversation”, such as it is.
Even the focus on contexts which don’t affect 99.9% of trans people - but which are used to attack all of them - namely prisons and sports deliberately excludes questions like ‘Why are there no trans Olympic medallists?’ or 'How do we stop trans prisoners being assaulted?’
Inflicting the same damage
The hounders of trans people may hate It’s A Sin being used to hand them a mirror. But the anti-trans faction, who operate strikingly like a cult, are not only singing the same tunes - they are inflicting the exact same damage on trans people as gay people have long suffered.
oh and I’ve set this so only people who follow me can reply because, although anti-trans activists have made a conscious decision to relentlessly and obsessively target me, and I can live with that, I don’t want trans people to have to sift through their bile.
“Gender critical” parents who are harming their kids
Some other thoughts.
One of the most powerful themes towards the end of It’s A Sin is Ritchie’s mother being confronted by Jill for the damage she inflicted on her gay son, suggesting that the shame she instilled in him helped drive behaviour that led to his infection with HIV.
“Actually it is your fault, Mrs Tozer,” says Jill. “All of this is your fault.“ Jill adds: "The wards are full of men who think they deserve it.”
She was right. So many of the gay and bisexual men who died often lonely deaths in hospital wards were traumatised by their parents.
Today, most gay people have gay friends who have mental trauma which often leads to alcohol and drug abuse with absolutely catastrophic consequences. Many, all too many, have had friends who’ve died from suicide. The culprits? Society in general but often parents in particular.
It’s A Sin showcased the LGBTQ family, of other LGBTQ friends filling a vacuum left by the absence of a loving family. A big role of that 'family’ is to pick up the pieces because of the damage inflicted by parents on their children.
When parents refuse to properly accept their LGBTQ children for who they are, they insert ticking time bombs in many of them. That bomb may detonate in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, who knows, maybe in their 50s or 60s. But in many of them, it will detonate.
This is why there is a genuine horror watching self-described “gender critical” parents ranting about trans people on the internet. Because I can’t help but think, oh god, what if they have trans children. What damage will be inflicted upon them.
But in other cases, transphobic parents will stick determinedly to their guns and inflict the same damage on their trans children as homophobic parents have always inflicted on their gay children. We should be clear: homophobia and transphobia are forms of child abuse.
Hiding behind the argument of protecting their children
Both traditional homophobes and contemporary transphobes claimed they were protecting the welfare of children. As anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant declared: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children”.
Today’s anti-trans activists use the language of 'safeguarding’ and often suggest that parents know what’s best for their children. This is clearly not always the case. Lots of children need to be protected from their parents. That includes many LGBTQ children.
So when this Times journalist attacked Mermaids, a charity supporting young trans people, for including an 'exit button’, suggesting it was 'a major safeguarding breach’. Many LGBTQ children don’t have supportive parents and need to hide their identity away from them.
Anti-trans rhetoric echoes anti-gay arguments
Anti-gay rights campaigners long focused on the danger posed by predatory gay men to vulnerable children, and pointed to scandals in, for example, the Scouts and the Catholic Church as evidence. Today, anti-trans activists similarly extrapolate extreme cases to make their case.
That’s why so many gay people stand up for trans people. Trans people, of course, are in our shared LGBTQ spaces, and their experiences do differ in important ways - but we see them going through the exact same things we’ve gone through.
It is, frankly, grotesque that gay people who for very obvious reasons stand with their trans siblings are then vilified as misogynists, or have obvious homophobic tropes about wanting to endanger children’s safety thrown at them.
It’s also perverse that many of the same people publicly cooing over It’s A Sin are the same people trying to hound the LGBTQ allies of trans people out of the media (they can’t really do this to trans people because there are very few trans people in the media).
LGB people attacking trans people
As for the LGB people who participate in the hounding of trans people. There have long been examples of oppressed groups who participate in oppression, often against themselves: women against the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism, right-wing black Republicans, and so on.
These anti-trans LGB activists are not only completely unrepresentative of LGBTQ people: many queer bars and spaces bar people who express their bigoted opinions for very obvious reasons: to ensure they’re safe spaces for the whole LGBTQ rainbow.
Watching straight people try and foment a civil war within the LGBTQ world by platforming these completely marginal bigoted zealots is actually completely and utterly grotesque.
Finally (!) in the 1980s, almost the whole media was anti-gay, and public opinion was overwhelmingly anti-gay. Today, almost the whole media is anti-trans, but while transphobia is rampant, anti-trans sentiment is not as widespread as anti-gay sentiment back then. There’s hope!
But it takes huge courage to speak out in support of trans people in Britain in 2021. One day, there will be TV programmes about the onslaught against trans people. Those who victimised trans people today will be portrayed in them. They’ll go down in history as hate figures.
Sadly, it’s too late to save all too many LGBTQ people who had ticking time bombs inserted into them both by society and by their homophobic and transphobic parents. They detonated. But we can save others from that fate. So speak up.
My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.
And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.
I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.
“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”
“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”
thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy
Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?
Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.
And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad). Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.
Here’sone history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS,one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.
I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.
They died of AIDS because
Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.
Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.
Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.
Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.
Picture from 1993:
We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.
As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.
Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.
I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.
Please read it and reblog people have to hear about what happened today. There are videos of nationalists beating people (teenagers) just because they were walking nearby or throwing firecrackers. These are the people that our president was willing to go side by side during the independence day. We can’t rely on the government doing something so please don’t sleep on it, let prople know about things happening in Poland right now.
this needs to end.
70% of the lgbt people in Poland experienced some sort of harassment and abuse. me included.
in Poland there are nearly no anti-discrimination regulations.
homophobia doesn’t exist in Polish law.
all of the anti-pride march protests were fully legal.
there were only 1000 people taking part in pride march. against 4000. four t o u s a n d.
lots of people got hurt. it is said that some of them died because of the damage from the things nationalists were throwing at them. it isn’t confirmed yet, though.
the media is silent, no one talks about what happened today. I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT.
please spread the word, spread the information, the world needs to see this. the world needs to know what’s happening.
please help polish lgbt people.
i don’t want to be scared when i go outside. i don’t want to feel like i can’t hold my loved one’s hand. i don’t want to feel like i can be killed because of my looks. i don’t know what to do.
