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| https://ruminating.org/news/creating-an-inclusive-society-tolerance-vs-acceptance/ |
Okay, it's Sunday, and I am caught up on the blog.
Last night, when I returned home from seeing Michael Pollan, I had to write out notes for all the ideas in my head for things that I want to share in my presentation, which is Thursday.
So, here's some of those thoughts.
The visual up top has to do with comments I want to make on tolerance and acceptance. After some Internet searching, I find that I am not the only one with these same feelings. My feelings came from an incident at WMU in which the president sent a message to the university either following the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri and University of Missouri unrest or the travel ban enacted shortly after Trump took office. Either way, he advocated that we all -- we as in the campus community -- practice tolerance. I cornered him at a university event shortly after and told him that tolerance is not the right word. We want to practice acceptance and model it for our students and our colleagues.
I often use this story to introduce any subject for which I want to advocate acceptance over mere tolerance. Gender is one such subject.
I have always said to students as I teach gender that there should be as many genders as there are people.
And though I am not sure of everything that statement can mean, I often have some ideas
By this comment I mean to suggest that gender, the expression of our gender, is intimately and inextricably linked to our self-expression and how we present to the world our version of masculinity or femininity as an extension of our own sense of identity.
Hence the term "identifies" as is so crucial. I love this term. "She identifies as female though she was born male." Or "he identifies as a gay man." Or even, "I identify as a comic book geek." Our language has shifted admirably to accommodate these new ideas, expanding the definition of the verb "identify" to include how the word means "To believe or assert that one belongs to a certain group or class" as opposed to just a word for how we classify, affiliate, and/or associate things.
Our expression of gender is part of our expression of self and thus part of what Jung referred to as the process of individuation. But in Jung's view, he started with polarities, in addition to the binary poles of his personality characteristics (extravert-introvert, thinker-feeler), he characterized human beings as dualities of sex/gender soul images, both masculine and feminine, arguing that those who identify as male have an inner, unconscious soul image, a feminine side, and likewise for those who outwardly identify as female, their inner soul face is masculine.
These were easy definitions for Jung who wanted to link clearly his psychological ideology to medicine and biological sex as well as spirituality and religion and even Eastern mysticism and philosophy with a concept much the same as yin and yang. These were easy an natural choices for Jung because gender definitions were not yet overly complicated, and so his ideas are very hetero-normative. And though he did address the idea of what his ideology means for non-heterosexuals, it was an after-thought and not the main focus of his concepts.
Also, the battle for psychology's acceptance in the world of science, especially after Fraud and strong resistance born as much from anti-Semitism as from skepticism of whether of not psychology could meet the rigors of the scientific method, scientific epistemology.
But if Jung was alive today his theories of personality and thus of gender would be more complicated.
Our psychology is … a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.
- Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958), p. 476, as cited in Psychotherapy East and West (1961), p. 14
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Jung
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/under-the-influence/201308/the-psychology-the-psychology-isnt-science-argument
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201601/the-is-psychology-science-debate
AND A BREAK IN THE ACTION
I am not sure why I am sharing a bunch of Calvin and Hobbes comics on this page. I found them on one site that I looked at while writing, downloaded them for future reference, and then decided to include them.
Gender is complicated.
Our identity is more than just an expression of qualities of our biological sex, but certainly, factors of our biology, our chemistry, our genetics, our inherited and hereditary traits, instincts, and deeply-encoded modes of being --- all of which are commonly what we call the nature part of the nature-nurture debate -- matter to contributing data to who we are and how we share with the world who we are.
Mind and body form a foundation on which cultural concepts grow fruit all infused with the power of the spirit and the soul.
Here's some of my ideas on why a gender identity matters, why we care to understand the identities of others, and why either consciously or unconsciously we make one for ourselves.
- CONFORMITY
- EXPECTATIONS
- MARKETING
CONFORMITY: Especially as children, we need survival skills to navigate our first social interactions even in the most progressive and inclusive schools. We conform to pre-ordained ideas of gender to fit in and avoid ridicule, bullying, or even repeated assault. The social world may be easier on the outliers, those who conform less, in 2019, but it's not improved enough that the ever present pressure to conform has ceased to exist. In this world, forcing everyone into two genders eases the pain of growing up and/or working with those who are growing up.
EXPECTATIONS: In a two-gender world, it's easier to interact with others if we know what to expect from them. Similar to conformity, as we grow older, we make pacts with those people in our lives with whom we form relationships. When we meet someone, we show them who we are in a kind of gender performance. We show them our mask, and they show us their mask, and we make an agreement, sometimes spoken, often unspoken to be these people for each other.
This idea of personas and masks presents a deeply complex and multi-faceted crystalline entity that I am not going to delve into too deeply here, but there are some disclaimers to make. Some people will say that they skip this step and they do not wear masks. Some of them are right. Some of them are just unaware that the way they perform their identity is a mask. For many, it's very difficult to take off the mask and show the reality beneath. Also, we all wear many masks, take on many roles and labels, adapt to different situations all the time, and so our sense of persona and ultimately identity may be completely or at least to some extent a fluid thing. My good son mask is different than my good husband mask.
MARKETING: How much easier is it to sell things to people in a binary-gender world. Blue for boys; pink for girls. Science educations or vocational trades for boys; more "feeling" or maternal roles for girls in teaching, nursing, or office work. But those supposed natural definitions of gender-based sales pitches are nonsense. less than a hundred years ago, pink along with red were the colors for men as they were associated with action, vibrancy, potency, and power whereas blue was for women as it was quiet, more neutral, and demure.
If we will soon come to live in a world of as many genders as people, and we already are starting to live in this world, marketing becomes much more complicated. AI will help with that problem when we get there.
BEYOND THE THREE
Despite the imperative driving fitting ourselves into tiny boxes, conforming to pre-established ideas of gender identity and to swallow as reality delusional nonsense on biologically-driven gender qualities and roles, we know that advertisers have broadened the marketing concept in the last twenty years, making show of apparent efforts to be more inclusive while still pushing the same agenda of narrow definition.
The term heteronormative alone tells us a great deal about the cultural imperative to normalize and homogenize all outliers, to appropriate and co-opt difference into a new world normal that's simple a re-mix of old world normal.
But if we're living our lives outside of the capitalist and consumerism bubble of spectacular shock, jolts, hype, clutter, and noise, we know that difference exists and shows its face in our daily lives. In heteronormative land, we know that there's many ways to express masculinity for those who identify as cys males who believe themselves to be white despite what broadcasts of sports and about sports often try to tell us about ourselves. ("Believe themselves to be white" is a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates' book Between the World and Me.) Just like if The L-Word taught us anything, and some argue that it did not teach us the right things or things in the right way, beyond even our own personal experiences, things like that show (also Queer as Folk) revealed that there's more than one way to identify as a gay woman and that there should be (duh) because of INDIVIDUALITY.
And so, on that, and this is last thing so I can post this and put more of this content into the power point as my writing here is really working out what I want to say in Thursday's community conversation.
reprint from
https://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/10/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-91-gender.html
I spoke about the inadequacy of terms like "sexual orientation" (sounds like a special camp/workshop that orients a person, IE. points him/her in a direction) or "sexual preference" (sometimes I prefer toast for breakfast; sometimes cereal; this is not right either). And so, I told my students about my preferred term (and the term preferred by many): sexual identity. Because after all, who we are in regards to our gender and our self is all about identity.
And so, then a week or two later, I followed up with a recommendation of Sallie Tisdale's Talk Dirty to Me, as it's a book I taught in the gender course. And so I read the following, written by Sallie Tisdale.
"'We all pretend to be more of a man or a woman than we secretly suspect we are,' writes my friend Laura Miller. Thus, emblems: the tidy little acts of straightening a skirt and freshening makeup, shooting shirt cuffs, ruffling hair. Tiny details, unconscious habits, little trills of pretense and belonging. See me, they say, I am-- whatever I hope I am. We cultivate those things which set us aside from the other, the opposite gender, squarely among our own.
Over the last year, and with considerable surprise, I've come to realize I can't define woman. I can't tell you why I'm sure I am a woman, why others think I am, why my personal and internal experience seems to fit what culture tells me a woman's experience should be. I am a woman because I look and act like the social convention called "woman." But not wholly, or always. What I once thought a permanent and objective state seems to me more and more like vapor, a fantasia, a wisp" (Tisdale, 41-42).
From Tisdale, Sallie. Talk Dirty to Me. Anchor Books: New York. 1994.
And so if I am right about my central thesis -- there should be as many genders as there are people -- then we individuate into unique entities, separate and distinct gender identities either with the mask we wear to express our main identity or our mask beneath the mask, our attempt to strip off the persona and be the integrated self that Jung tells us is our nucleus, our solar nexus, the core of our whole being, our unified self, the seed of our tree, the self that we were, are, and always will be that we fully realize and express at the end of our process of individuation.
And yet, we self-categorize. We take on labels that feel right to us that help us to conform, fulfill expectations, and help the sellers to market to us. But we can and should consciously choose our labels rather than having them given to us by parents, assigned by surgery, or pressured into place by peers.
I am a cys male and my pronouns are he and him. I believe myself to be white. I am a feminist (though humanist is a better term). I am a writer, teacher, software engineer, ultimate player, sushi-lover, comic book nerd. In Enneagrams, I am the helper, the artist, and the thinker. I am some things I would only share privately with someone I trust.
I also like pie.
https://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-sense-of-doubt-blog-post-1479-jungian.html
https://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2015/10/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-91-gender.html
SOME MORE RESOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity
https://medium.com/th-ink/understanding-heteronormativity-98f562a050b8
https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/07/what-is-heteronormativity/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity
https://www.genderspectrum.org/quick-links/understanding-gender/
https://www.aglp.org/gap/1_history/
Some APA members, primarily psychoanalysts who continued to espouse pathologizing views of homosexuality, challenged the leadership of the APA by calling for a referendum of the entire APA membership. The decision to remove homosexuality was upheld by a 58% majority of voting APA members.
When the diagnosis of homosexuality was deleted in 1973, the APA did not initially embrace a normal variant model of homosexuality (Drescher 1998, Bayer 1987, Krajeski 1996). In recognition of the opposition, it made a compromise. The DSM-II diagnosis of Sexual Orientation Disturbance (SOD) replaced Homosexuality. Accordingly, individuals comfortable with their homosexuality were no longer considered mentally ill. Only those who were "in conflict with" their sexual orientation had a mental disorder (SOD).
The APA Committee agreed with the opponents and the diagnosis of ego-dystonic homosexuality was removed from DSM-III-R (1987).
Many of those opposed to the diagnosis of EDH had viewed it as a diagnostic relic that had indirectly, if not directly, perpetuated the mental illness model of homosexuality. Removing it was a crucial step in a paradigm shift that would help psychiatry focus on more relevant models and concepts in understanding gay men and lesbians.
https://www.aglp.org/gap/7_intersex/
More sources and resources
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ferguson-riot-and-ferguson-unrest-2014-2015/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_University_of_Missouri_protests
DISCLAIMER - Yes, I know, I teach MLA format of source use, but I am not bothering with such strict forms here as this is an informal posting for my own benefit -- my study not my practice -- mostly read by me and so not intended as a formal or even deeply researched document.
Please stop and read this. It might be old news to you, but in case it's not, please make sure you grasp this. https://t.co/ex5DS3Jznj— Andrew Fallows (@kaldrenon) May 20, 2019
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1905.19 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1415 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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