Today is one of the most epic, intellectually and emotionally stimulating days I’ve had. Where to begin? I won’t be able to cover it all.
First, an activity that’s all about you.
Did you ever play the Sims? Well, in the Sims, the user designs computer characters in an incubated world. The user picks different traits – body type, skin color, gender (female or male), hair, clothing, astrological sign, and then even personality – niceness versus grumpiness, cleanliness versus messiness, and on and on. The character spins in cyberspace there. He or she picks up a teddy bear and caresses it when the user adds nice characteristic points, and sports a toupee when designated to do so.
That’s you. And all of those characteristics, they’re (arguably) your genetics. In the Sims world, the user determines what you look and act like, and it doesn’t matter what your virtual parents do. For the sake of this activity, let’s make things a little more real. Let’s say your biological mother’s parents are from Western Europe and your biological father’s parents are from Mexico.
There you are, spinning around and trying on outfits in your world, and all of these different aspects of you are forming. There’s a gender that the user checks on a box – you don’t have any say in it, but you’ll have a completely different experience based on the one that’s chosen. That user selects your skin color. That user selects whether you stand on two feet or sit in a wheelchair, whether you have diabetes or whether you’ll get depression one day, whether you’re skinny or curvy. That user decides whether or not to use a couple of game cheats to get you ahead and into the nicest house in the neighborhood – that user enters a password and you don’t have to get that entry level job anymore. You can spend time improving your essential self, reading and playing music. You can learn how to cook.
The user did a good job. You’re a pretty neat character, and pretty to the eye, too, with shoulder-length brown hair and a blue sweater. A Pisces. Your body isn’t skinny or fat, and while you aren’t the funniest person in the room, you’ve got a lot of points going for your intellectual side. Besides that, let’s see. The user really wanted that long brown hair, so you’re female – you can’t have long hair otherwise, it’s not programmed that way. And I mentioned where your parents came from geographically, but forgot to tell you that your skin tone leads people on the street to think you’re white. You can walk, you are healthy, and you will likely be able to remain that way – your parents have health insurance and money to buy you healthy food. They live in what people on the street call a “good area.”
Luckily for you, you’re okay with most of this. You feel like your body has done you well, and that the way you are treated because of your gender fits well with your personality and the box that user checked. Your parents eat organic. Another thing that you might like to know is that you are incredibly attracted to people whose users also checked “female” boxes, and sometimes (but less so) attracted to those in the “male” boxes. It makes sleepovers in the 7th grade awkward. You deal.
Wow, this is getting long. You’re a complicated person, you see, because there are all these things about you, and they form this code. The code is going to be really important in a minute, so pay attention. You like to think that your body is like everyone else’s body. It has a heartbeat, and you have flesh, and you like it when people like you. You feel connected to the world, even though you haven’t yet left your isolated creation-room.
The thing is, though, this code I mentioned. We’re leaving the Sims now; this is real life. Someone has handed you a card. It looks somewhat like a credit card, or those cards they give you in college to swipe into dorms and dining halls. But it’s not. Attached to this card are most of those things I just told you, in the categories you see on anti-discrimination clauses: race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, you know the drill. The person who makes this card for you has never had a conversation with you. They may not have even met you. But this card they give you becomes very important. Like a college ID, it unlocks doors and gives you permission to enter. Some doors you won’t need your card to open, like a public park. Most things, though, you will. If you wanted to have a place to sleep, for instance, your ID would need to say that you’re in a high enough income class to do that. If you didn’t have that (don’t worry, you do), you still might be able to find shelter – that is, if you have some other markers on your ID, like the one that says you feel the gender your user chose matches the one you express each day. If not, you might be out of luck. Let’s look at it this way – in the olden days, that card of yours would have been a key melted from metal. Race and gender and sexual orientation would have been the mountains and valleys on that key, and to fit, it would have to be the perfect combination. To fit in while drunk at a high school party and not worry about being sexually harassed, you’ll need… to be male and like women. Sorry, doesn’t fit. To enjoy the benefits of gay marriage you have to have the codes for a solid income, and pick a gender. You’re set there; say No to Prop. 8. You see? You have a good attitude, and that’s great. But the places you can go, and opportunities you have, are largely based on your card. You can jump over the barriers, sure, but it takes effort and some places are guarded more than others.
There you have it. It’s an over-worn idea, but a good one to revisit. We have different aspects of ourselves that we can’t control, and they alter our experiences whether we like it or not. I see homelessness, which wasn’t my pet issue before QEJ, in a completely new light now that I’ve listened to all of the people who talk about it. The way everything is structured, you need metro cards to go to job interviews and if you can’t afford metro cards, you can’t get a job. And identities and the way people react to them complicate transcending those boundaries. Both of my bosses took the time to explain today how this works, as applied to a couple of relevant situations:
1. Issue: Welfare
Identities Involved: Gender, Gender Expression, Income
What Happens: Those people who are transgender and low-income (whether they’ve always been that way, or whether they’ve been kicked out of their home/job due to discrimination) need welfare. They go to the welfare office. If this person was just low-income and didn’t have to worry about a gender identity/expression outside the norm, the person would qualify for some aid and have a lesser chance of homelessness and starvation. But identities don’t stand alone, they intersect. Oftentimes when low-income transgender people go in to get welfare, government employees call them by the wrong pronouns, or by their birth name. Reina told me about a case she knew about. Someone assessing welfare needs said to a transwoman, “you don’t need welfare, you need social security, because any man who dresses like a woman is crazy in my book.”
Impact: Transgender people are often humiliated by these exchanges, and then they don’t go back to receive welfare, or other government-run assistance like shelter, Medicaid, Medicare, and HIV benefits. Especially now, with the recession, unemployed transgender people who abandon the welfare system just don’t eat, or end up in the sex trade industry.
2. Issue: Gay Marriage (I haven’t fully understood this until now, so hopefully this explanation helps. And it’s not all there is to marriage politics at all, just a simple version.)
Identities involved: Sexual orientation, gender, income, race
What happens: I’d love for marriage to be legal for everyone. What strikes me as odd is the nation-wide obsession. Yes, it’s an issue many people can relate to, and any time the general public spends talking and gaining awareness about LGBTQ issues is worthwhile. But why marriage? Why not acceptance in schools, or job protection? The simplified answer according to Michelle is this: where there is inclusion, there is exclusion. Besides the title and official recognition of the government, one of the important benefits of marriage is health insurance. In our country, though, not everyone has health insurance – only people of a certain income, generally employed, do. Then, we need to ask ourselves: who gains from gay marriage and who is excluded from it? Low-income LGB people who don’t have health insurance would gain little financially by marrying another low-income LGB person without health insurance. Yes, the title is nice, but is that all marriage should be?
Impact: Low-income LGBT people are left out of the nation’s largest queer rights initiative. Thus, they’re less likely to be engaged politically, and their issues are invisible, only to be written about in blogs by Oberlin students (and, of course, by QEJ and similar orgs).
These issues seem obvious to me now, but weren’t so until today. Asking questions and learning about them was so thrilling that I am almost convinced that I have to be a Gender and Sexuality Studies major (along with CRWR, if I can get my way on that). I realized that since the moment I abandoned my straight identity, I fell in love with queer theory. My GBF (Gay Best Friend) Alex and I went through discourse after discourse without even noticing. We tackled the Kinsey scale junior year of high school, the LGBT studies and activism class we designed and took senior year, among other projects. It makes sense that he’s doing Women’s Studies and I’m resigning myself to the fact that identity is fascinating.
The funny thing about my identity-filled day is that it started out completely free of identity. I woke up at 8:15 am, the third day in a row without adequate sleep, in a terrible mood. I was eating cereal in Sophia’s kitchen when her mom, Karin, came in. I love cereal, and it generally makes me happy, but it didn’t do the trick until Karin and I started talking about the nature of life and death, and the meaning of life. She’s a holistic health counselor, and she brought up the idea of spirituality that I have fought against for most of my life. “Underneath it all,” she told me, “we’re all connected.” If the government is all for artificial identities, then Karin is all about the body attached to them. There was much more intricate conversation involved, and I’m interested in learning about her profession’s policies. I still don't know how I feel about it all. But what I really gleaned from the talk is that we’re all the same deep down, which I really had forgotten, and that compassion is essential to survival. I tried it on the subway, and looked at all of the white men I usually feel subconscious bitterness towards, and tried to look underneath their privilege. I thought about every person I passed, and interacted with. It felt exhilarating. On the way home after nine hours of work, a girl on the subway across from me looked like she was crying. I stopped her on the way out and told her to have a good night, and it wasn’t hard, and it did make me look strange but I didn’t quite care.
A song to listen to if you have a day like today.
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