The Integrity of the In-between
Rev. Christina M. Neilson
September 14th, 2008
These are the best of times. These are the worst of times. A time when we are pressured to live by binary definitions and cultural norms. A time when all the greatest medical, social and psychological advances are at our fingertips. It is a time of great resistance to change, and great opportunity for advancement. It is a time of pressure to choose sides, if you don’t, you will take the heat. Are you a Democrat, or Republican? Black or white, male or female, rich or poor, urban or rural, gay or straight? It seems as though we are forced to opposite poles, with one side only being the winner. The tyranny of the majority decides the fate of all. We are pressured to fit into a narrowly defined culturally norm, or suffer the isolation and dislocation from community if we resist. Being forced to an opposite pole, we lose our common ground in the middle. We stand firmly entrenched in our position, in our rightness.
These boundaries are artificial, culturally imposed and defined. Dubois says, “one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a negro, two souls, two thoughts, unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body.” As an American Negro, he is both black and white, both African and American. He carries the legacy of slavery, and the hope for a country that includes him. He carries both.
People who come here voluntarily from other countries may also find themselves dislocated from both. They can’t fully separate from their country of origin, their history and traditions are kept alive by the parents who learned a certain way. And yet the “American Way” is not accepted as well.
I had a Vietnamese friend in California who was getting married. She married a Vietnamese man, but wanted a wedding that reflected both Vietnamese values and American values. But they faced a lot of expectations from both families. He was the youngest son, and was expected to take care of his parents, not get married. She was the oldest daughter, and expected to receive a substantial dowry from the husband’s family for her value: a house, a big ring, and several children. But the father of her fiancé would not talk, because he disowned his son for abandoning his responsibility to care for them.
In the end, she was honored for her value, did have a huge ring, an extravagant engagement party, the most expensive wedding I have ever been to, with a bilingual Catholic/Vietnamese service and a 13 course sit-down meal, they had three children, a huge house, and they both had great respectable careers. They found integrity and happiness in the in-between- bridging the best of both cultures. The father, however, refused to come to the service or even speak to them to this day.
The polarized norms are defined by those who are in power. What is normal? In Vietnam, it is normal for the last born son to care for the family, even if that means that he sacrifices his own desire for family. In America, norms are defined by heteronormativity, rigid sex roles, and the illusion of a nuclear family. (Divorce is rapidly changing that.)
The pressure to fit a rigid category picks at one’s soul. The constant message that you are not enough unless you …(wear the right clothes, go to the right church, marry the right person, etc…) wears away one’s confidences and sense of well-being. People may feel that those outside of the normative categories are fair fodder for comments, jokes and subtle or blatant pressure to conform. If you are poor, then you are to blame for your misfortune. You have access to the American dream as much as anyone. If you are gay, then you have “chosen” to be that way. If you are black, then you are genetically inferior. If you are developmentally delayed, then you are a lesser person, not entitled to the same resources as an able bodied person. There is pressure to promote the American myth of Ozzie and Harriet, June and Ward Cleaver- domestic abuse, alcohol use, poverty, are kept under wraps.
These harms are not owned as part of our history. Some things are not discussed in “polite “ society. We talk about the Nazi’s, and the horrible crimes against humanity that were committed. But we don’t learn our own history. Not long ago, forced labor, unconstitutional imprisonment, euthanasia and lynching were all part of American society. We had an immigration policy that barred naturalized citizenships to all people, except those who looked white. It was not changed until the 1970’s when people commented that our policy looked like the Nazi policy.
Actually, the Nazi’s followed our policy, as did Peru and Japan. We led the world in forced sterilizations for ethnic minorities, (Called Racial Hygiene) the “feeble minded”, moral delinquency, insane, or other defective persons. It was thought that their reproductions represented a menace to society. One particular American case, Carrie Buck vs. Bell, became the model on which Nazi Germany based it’s policy on Eugenics. Eugenics can be anything from euthanasia, forced sterilization or selective breeding.
Carrie’s mom was in an insane asylum, Carrie was pregnant and not married, thought to be a substandard student and prostitute, and the child was tested as substandard as well. Her deficient lineage justified the need for forced sterilization. The decision in the court case read, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their inability, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”[1]
It turned out to be a false diagnosis. The lawyers had conspired with each other. Carrie was an A and B student; she was not a prostitute- she had been raped by relatives of her foster parents. 8300 people were sterilized in Virginia alone. And just in case you think that this is a “Southern” problem, California led the pack with the most forced sterilizations. Indiana was the first state to force sterilization. Eugenics was initiated as a “population control program.” Sometimes it was forced, sometimes people were bribed with food and clothes for “free” sterilization. Criminals were sterilized inconsistently. A chicken thief (someone poor stealing food) resulted in sterilization, but embezzlement (usually wealthy whites) did not. Eugenics was a well-funded initiative from the most prestigious families in America, including the Rockefellers, Carnegie’s and others.
We go to extreme measures to enforce conformity, but it is unhealthy and damaging to our soul to allow ourselves to be boxed in a way that does not suit us. Life is so much more challenging and complex than that. We live in multiple worlds. I am a daughter and a mother, a nurse and a friend, a lesbian and a navy wife. A Unitarian Universalist and a factory worker. I have many identities, no one piece defines me. Each of our lives has multiple intersections with people from a broad spectrum. We hold together all these parts that are necessary to live a meaningful and honest life.
Rita Nakashima Brock calls this mergence of multiple aspects of our lives, “interstitial integrity.” Reality is fluid, transitional, impermanent. We live on many margins, not just one. It can feel like we are torn among several different worlds that refuse to get along. (Like lesbian and Navy wife- not too compatible.) We reject a narrowing of who we are by either/ or definitions.
The film that I am going to show at our conversation café today asks the question, “Are we being forced to medically mutilate our bodies with surgery and chemicals in order to fit into defined cultural norms?” The film called “the Gendercator,” produced by Catherine Crouch, notes: “Things are getting very strange for women these days. More and more often we see young heterosexual women carving their bodies into porno Barbie dolls, and lesbian women altering themselves into transmen. Our distorted cultural norms are making women feel compelled to use medical advances to change themselves, instead of working to change the world. This is one story, showing one possible scary future. I am hopeful that this story will foster discussion about female body modification and medical ethics.”
The film begins in 1973, where a group of hippie women are celebrating Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs. Sally, a “sporty” type dyke (flannel shirt and baseball type), overindulges on drugs and falls asleep under a tree. She wakes up in an emergency room 75 years later to discover that the feminist movement has failed, and the evangelical Christians have taken over the government and legislated their strict family values, “one man and one woman couples.” She is told that sex roles and gender expression are rigidly binary and enforced by law and social custom. The Gendercator, a government official, tells her that butch women and sissy boys are no longer tolerated- she has to choose her gender and follow it’s rigid constraints. She is rescued by the “Butch” squad, but she still wakes up with her gender re-assigned.
In a free society, we should be able to ask whether medical modification is in our best interests. At a time when boys take steroids to give them super-human strength, young girls starve themselves for waif like bodies, is the trend toward transsexual surgery in their best interest, or is it an attempt to fit cultural norms that don’t quite match up?
Asking that question upset a lot of people. This film was banned at the San Francisco Gay film festival as being “anti-trans.” The large transsexual population did a letter writing campaign to the festival sponsors, and had the film pulled from its place in the festival. The inter-sex community, people who are born with biological aspects of both male and female genders, applaud the film because they have always been forced by parents and doctors to “choose” a gender, often undergoing “emergency” sex reassignment surgery as early as two weeks old, and continuing therapy as hormones created physical changes.
I think it’s a good question to ask, a necessary political commentary, and hope that watching the film leads to a good conversation about medical modification of bodies. I’ve had medical modification by gastric bypass surgery and have no regrets. But I don’t harbor any illusions about Barbie doll figures either. I have friends who had some part of sex reassignment surgery and feel like they occupy their bodies for the first time. Are being manipulated by the religious right to choose a gender?
Some of you may feel the San Francisco Film Fest was right to pull the film. (Even though most of the people who opposed it had not even seen it.) Others of you may say that no film should be censored, no matter who it offends. Some of you may not truly understand what I am talking about- what is trans surgery anyway? And some of you may say, “it’s science fiction- get over it!”
We walk a thin line between political correctness, good manners and censorship. But there does come a time when we have to stop and ask the questions that people don’t want to hear. I hope the days will eventually be gone when being gay or transgender is treated by shock therapy, prolonged hospitalizations in psychiatric facilities, and Exodus ministry conversions, all of which create long term harm. But neither do I want to create a whole new way exploiting transgender people by making them complicit in their own oppression. They are whole the way they are.
I don’t want to see a world where dualistic categories determine our acceptance, leading us to eugenic policies that determine who lives, dies and procreates. That should be determined by the person or their guardian. There is not much tolerance in western thinking for fluidity. Even our early Unitarian Transcendentalists saw the fluid nature of gender. If we leave the polar opposites, we enter a place of holy insecurity. The place in the middle, where our commonalities intersect, is holy ground. It is the place where we can live with honesty and wholeness, not conformity to arbitrary norms.
The rampant polarity in our society does not need to dictate our lives. There is some scary stuff going on out there. We have too much hate. Too little tolerance of differences. Is that the world that we want to see? Lets not hesitate to use our god given power to create the change we need. It’s a good time to challenge those binary categories, and see the beauty in the person who is both black and white, American and foreign, male and female, gay and straight. Our lives are a complex, fluid interplay of all the people and circumstances in our world, that come together to create the interesting, creative, and fabulous person each of us was meant to be. When we live true to our whole selves, we are living with interstitial integrity.