Author: Joe Wenke
Publisher: Trans-Über
Rating: WORTHY!
Errata:
"Gchatted" ought really to be rendered "G-chatted" (page 11 Adobe Digital editions page counter - there is no page number on the pages themselves). I had never heard of this and thought it was a simple typo at first. It means to converse using Google chat. A bit of clarification would help to distinguish it from a typo.
Joe Wenke's book is sub-titled "Conversations about Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity" so I tried to keep that in mind - conversations, not interviews, but I couldn't help feeling that I wanted to hear more from those he conversed with! I had one or two issues with this book (but then with which book don't I have issues?!); however, the more I read of it the more I was drawn in and in the end I consider it a worthy and educational read.
He interviews a large variety of people, all of whom have their own unique perspective on the topic. The conversation annoyed me a little to begin with, but the more I read through different conversations with different people, the more interesting they became, and the further I got into the book, the more engrossing it was to me, but let me discuss several issues I had so you get the complete picture of my impressions, and decide fro yourself if this is something which intrigues you as much as it did me.
In his first interview, with Kristin Russo, the author observes, "...you call your project 'Everyone is gay' which is a self evident truth. Everybody knows that it's true... what exactly do you mean when you say that 'Everyone is Gay?" I found that an extraordinary thing to say: on the one hand claiming something is universally true and then asking a person what they mean by it. It was especially curious given the comments he makes in this same interview on the use and abuse words which are employed as minority identifiers, both positively and negatively. Besides, if everyone knows it, why do we need to pursue the matter with his last question?! It just struck me as a strange thing to say.
Russo responds that it's about transparency (and in explaining, she actually delivers this transparency!). She states clearly that the name was just a joke for a website. It was never intended to be true (universally or otherwise!), or to offer any deep insight into anything; it was just a joke, which begs the question, what on Earth did the author mean?! maybe he was just carried away with his enthusiasm, but I think someone with a PhD in English ought to be more on top of his use of the language than he appeared to be in this instance - and especially if he wants to win his readers over! But as I said, things improved.
He titled this book The Human Agenda precisely because there is a farcical claim that there's a "homosexual agenda", which itself is nonsensical, unless you define merely asking for fair treatment to be some sort of an agenda. What the author meant is something which isn't explained, but it might make a reader wonder what other agendas might be in play here. Me, I just read on!
Something which is truly self-evident is that this wasn't his first interview for this project because in this one he mentions someone else he's interviewed. Given that reference, it made me wonder why that interview had not been placed before this one instead of seven places after it. He has done this later where Aiden Key's interview follows Andrew Solomon's, which is referenced in Key's interview, so why not here? It gave me a bit of an impression that this was not very well organized, but neither was it completely disorganized either, so it's fine.
With that in mind, however, I decided to read Ian Harvie's interview first (yes, I'm name-prejudiced!) and that was interesting, too. Harvie was born female to all outward appearances, but changed gender to match how he felt inside. Harvie is in his forties, but claims there is no word for what he was. Yes, there was, so I'm guessing he simply didn't know any words for it at that young of an age. Those words have been known for a long time as it happens! Tomboy has been around for half a millennium. Dyke has been around since at least the 1940s, and perhaps even the twenties. The idea of butch and femme lesbians has been around for a century as a concept if not employing those exact words. Transsexual and transgender have been around for half a century. This is nothing new. The shame is that it has taken society so long to acknowledge and accept these facts as a reality.
For me, one of the problems with this book in the early chapters was that more than one person seemed to be making sweeping statements without actually having a good broom with which to sweep! It bothers me because this is an important topic and making statements such as for example, "...every single person in that audience was struggling, on some level with not being enough in relation to their gender..." which is what Harvie says. It felt like a condescending generalization and I found myself hoping for more solid ground as the book progressed.
Fortunately, I found it, but such an all-encompassing statement is not only inaccurate (there's a big difference between saying, "I guess on occasion everyone has issues" and saying "every single person here has issues"), it doesn't help endear people to what you're saying either; it just makes the speaker sound really insecure, and it's exacerbated when the author comes in right behind that statement and makes yet another sweeping statement, again speaking for all of us!
I think my biggest problem with this book was exactly that: the author says confidently that we're all struggling with our identities, as though there is a specific identity which each of us must assume and to which we must adhere. I disagree. I think people don't try to nail themselves to that monolithic cross so rigidly. I think they understand at some level that they are different things to different people. They know, whether they actively acknowledge it or not, that they're not fulfilling the same role as a mom or a dad at home as they are as a boss or an employee at work, or as a fan at a game, or as a role-player in an on-line game, or as a son or daughter, or a grandparent.
I understand that gender roles fly a little more under the radar than these things I've listed, but this doesn't mean everyone is obsessed with them or in trouble with them. I don't doubt that some do struggle. I don't doubt that others give it some thought from time to time, and I don't doubt that others never pay any mind to it, but to suggest that everyone is struggling with it as a routine thing is to misrepresent the situation and worse, maybe marginalize those who don't share this view - or at least make them feel there's maybe something wrong with them if they're not struggling! You can't be expansive and exclusive at the same time when you're talking about he labels we give to people!
Just one person's opinion given in passing in an interview isn't a big deal. Everyone has, and is entitled to their own opinion. It's when those opinions are forced on others, either practically by literally requiring others to hold a certain view, or as it is in this case, representing everyone as holding an opinion or having an issue (which certainly has not been demonstrated) is equally objectionable and worthy only of politicians.
I also found Russo's conversation about the use and reclamation of the word "queer" to be odd. She mentioned that she has a friend who rides freight trains for fun, and seems to be suggesting, even that he and his wife are both hetero people, that he could be labeled queer because there's something inherently queer about the way he lives his life. She doesn't mean this in a pejorative sense, but to me this was nonsensical. If you make a word mean anything, then it actually means nothing! Words change all the time, but you cannot force a meaning upon them, not if you want to make intelligent use of them. Words take on whatever meaning society endows them with and accommodate a given usage at a given time. Trying to bend and stretch words beyond what they normally will bear at any one time is nothing but a way of breaking them and rendering them useless!
I really didn't get part of the conversation with Aiden Key, either, where the author says:
Sexual orientation and gender identity are distinct but also very closely bound together, and what's interesting is that both of these issues seem to be threatening to people, what one's gender identity is, particularly if it's nonconforming, or what one's sexual orientation is if one is not heterosexual if one is gay or lesbian or queer or bisexual even in my own case. I'm very attracted to transgender women.
I think he might have found a better word than 'non-conforming'! It's like on the one hand we have this book about gender agendas, and on the other we're trying to come up with labels for the very people who have been stigmatized and marginalized through the use of such labels. Indeed labels are imposed upon groups and cultures for the very purpose of sanctioning abuse against them. I don't get why we feel we must label people here. isn't it more important to accept than to label? And it takes a lot less effort!
I don't see that it matters whether a woman started out as female or as male. If they identify now as female what else is there to be said? The same goes for someone who starts a female and now identifies as a male - or anyone in between. Why would we need to even have a word for a person who likes people who are female? it;s not important how they got that way! That struck me as a strange thing to say. Pigeon holes are for pigeons and mail, not people. We need to be focused on integrating, not disintegrating, and seeking to label and categorize people, especially when the topic is gender identity, people seems counter-productive at best, and abusive at worst.
That said, this book did improve. Maybe it was just me getting up to speed with it, or maybe the early interviews were just not my cup of tea, but it's not a big deal because the later ones were a delight to read and I enjoyed nearly all of them. That in mind, I consider this a worthy read. Oops, there I went and labeled it. Sorry!
