On June 26,2015 the United States Supreme Court ruled that same sex couples have the right to marry in all 50 states. One month later, on July 26, 2015 Caitlyn Jenner (aka Bruce Jenner, a renowned Olympic athlete) hit the cover of Vanity Fair displaying her new gender identity.
This is the year of tolerance and euphoria for the LGBTQ movement. Ten years ago, who’d have thought it? We have passed the precipice – both gay marriages and transgender identity, have hit the main stream. Even though many businesses still refuse to hire transgendered people and right-wing fundamentalists are mounting a counter-campaign to protect the civil rights of bigots on a skewed interpretation of religious freedom, with the exception of laws limiting abortion, both Federal and State courts have sent the signal that gender and sexuality concerns will be protected under the concept of individual civil liberties.
But it all happened so quickly, so very quickly. In the end, I can’t help but wonder why. Was this just that all our hard work in the LGBTQ community has paid off so we should just ride the wave of success without question? I honestly wish it was that simple. But as a long-time Social Justice Activist, Marxist and Lesbian Feminist I have to take the long view and try to analyze the underlying causes for this fairly rapid change in attitude. (I can just hear the groans and boos of readers begging me not to rain on our parade or worse – thinking that any questioning of our wins is really a form of self-hating homophobia.)
For many of us who have come out of both the Gay and Women’s Movement we see the more recent advances in the LGBTQ movement inextricably tied to the question of gender’s relationship to sexuality and reproduction. In the 1970’s radical feminists challenged the fixed and essentialist nature of gender roles as a critical aspect of women’s oppression in a male dominated patriarchy. The fact is that the rapidly changing technology in the last century, particularly in the domains of sexuality and gender has taken even the most creative visionaries and forward looking young people by surprise.
The introduction of everything from birth control and artificial insemination, to hormone therapy and plastic surgery, to test tube babies, robotic wombs, incubators, and in vitro fertilization challenges the concept that biology is destiny. Technology has severed the fusion of sexual reproduction/gender identity which has been the basis of the patriarchal family and male dominated institutions for the past two thousand years. It raises the question “What is a Woman or Man?” What is biologically determined and what is environmentally and culturally determined in defining Woman and Men? And why are categories of gender identity limited to two? What is the purpose of the institution of marriage and why is it defined in terms of sexual copulation though reproduction is no longer considered the primary purpose of marriage. If marriage is failing as the primary locus of reproduction, how do we reproduce the next generation in the current society?
Leaving aside, those reactionary folks who always want to preserve the status quo, there is much confusion and lack of clarity among progressives as to what strategies we need to use to end oppressive sexual/gender structures and systems.The absurdities and contradictions in the current understanding of sexual and gender relations are legion and range from the ridiculous to the sublime.
A couple of questions that I am going to try to deal with in this blog (I’m sure you can think of your own):
1)Should the basic personal economic unit in society, whether it be marriage or civil unions or some other form, be based on monogamous sexual copulation as the primary requirement?
2)Is the formation of a binary male-female gender identity determined by biology or environmental/cultural factors?
The fact is that if we want to successfully answer these questions and come up with strategies that will actually lead toward progressive values of equality and democracy we cannot gloss over these contradictions with wishful thinking. If we are going to develop a good analysis, we have to consider all historical and current patterns.
Background: (If you feel that you have a thorough grasp of all the millions of debates on Capitalism’s relationship to Patriarchy, Marxist vs. Post Modern Structural Analysis and Reform vs. Revolution, you can skip this rather simplistic attempt to summarize history and move straight to the analysis of the sex vs. gender and role of marriage discussion which appears below the fold.)