Eight Genders: Why Can't We All Get Along?

My friends include several people who are queer in one way or another and my friends' friends page has even more folks with non-straight and otherwise unusual opinions about sexual arousal and human desirability. Coming to terms with your own gender and sexuality can prove challenging. Sometimes what your brain and body are saying isn't said by the people around you. Without good role models and sometimes without even good words, enacting gender and sexuality in a well-adjusted manner is an amazing feat. In an attempt to turn the kaleidoscope a bit for a new view, I'll share the following teaching.

In the summer of 1994, my mom and I attended a week-long workshop at Naropa with American Indian storyteller and medicine man Johnny Moses. One of the many fascinating tidbits he shared was about gender in Nootka society on (I think) Vancouver Island. In Nootka language and culture, there are eight genders.

• There are the straight men, and they're BOOORING.
• There are the straight women, and they're boring too, so the two of them get together.
• There are gay men
• And gay women.
• Then there's what we'd call bisexuals, but they're comfortable with people of all genders. So I suppose they'd be octosexuals.
• Then there are men trapped in womens' bodies
• And women trapped in mens' bodies.
• Then there are people who feel like their spirit is not human, they're from somewhere else in the universe and were made to inhabit a human body so they could learn a lesson.
• There are also people who are comfortable with all the genders, but aren't sexual at all. Perhaps they're octoasexual.

Other cultures in the area had different ideas about gender. Some had more, some had less, and others didn't really think about genders -- you just know what you feel like and you relate to people as they are. One group in the area have the concept of a gender whose members can't be sexual unless they pretend to be someone else.


Something bugs me about what passes for political debate and social dialog in America these days. The participants don't spend nearly enough effort in an attempt to understand and properly characterize what the other side actually thinks and why they think that. In our formal way, philosophers usually attribute the best interpretation of a work to its author. If his words can be interpreted in two ways, only one of which is totally absurd, the other should be assumed the intended meaning. Unfortunately, in common political and social thought, people often don't even rise to the level of willful misinterpretation. They start and end with making up positions held by their adversaries and then deriding those. For instance, some people voted for Nixon in 1960 because they didn't want the U.S. president to take orders from the Pope. Kennedy was elected, but the Pope's power in America didn't change.

This seems to be the current state of most of the gay marriage "debate" currently transpiring. It strikes me that a lot of constituents believe that proponents of gay marriage are following an agenda of goals that they do not, in fact, desire. I read somewhere that some anti-gay marriage leaders are intentionally ignoring the distinction between legal marriage and religious marriage. Thus, there may be lots of people who oppose gay marriage because their religion forbids homosexual unions and they don't want the government forcing their church to recognize and perform gay marriages. I don't think anyone on the pro-gay marriage side is claiming anything of the sort, but the misconception is out there. People therefore defend a ban on gay marriage in the name of religious freedom, of all things.

In the hopes of increasing the general level of understanding in the universe, I therefore hope I can make this clear. Religious matrimony and legal matrimony should be two separate (though usually co-occurrent) concepts. Religions should be able to confer the "sanctity of marriage" on relationships at their discretion. If a church's elders or members decide that unions are only holy if both members are of the same religion, race, sexual orientation, or age bracket, so be it. No person should be forced to perform a religious marriage they don't bless, and if a church disapproves of people living together who don't have a sanctified relationship, they may so decree. To the degree that the church's doctrine influences its followers actions, the faithful should follow these guidelines.

Alongside the concept of religiously blessed union should lie the legally blessed union. It could be called almost anything for all I care -- marriage, civil union, 602(d), or whatever. But it should be called the same thing for everyone to which it applies. To qualify for an LBU, the participants must meet certain criteria. They must be of the age of consent, they must agree to the union without duress, and perhaps they should swear an oath indicating some of their duties. The benefits provided by LBUs should be entirely legal in nature -- tax breaks, prevention of housing discrimination, inheritance, partner benefits, and so forth. There should not be a box on the form to describe which party has what sexual organs, because that has absolutely nothing to do with the provided benefits. It should be possible to have a legally blessed union without that union being religiously blessed and vice versa. It should be possible to have a legally blessed union with more than one person at a time, though providing for this would require some careful thought about legal repercussions. It seems questionable to force an employer's partner benefits plan to cover all seventeen of a person's spice, since that could lead to loophole unions where people without a relationship get married purely for free health care. But this sort of thing is a minor issue which can be worked out in legislative committee after sufficient testimony.

Laws restricting marriage to certain gender combinations based on religious tradition is a bit like laws restricting the purchase of meat to certain days based on religious tradition. If your religion says you shouldn't marry another person, don't. (Alternatively, make the switch to a religion that will let you marry the person you love.) If your religion says you shouldn't eat meat on Fridays, or even that you shouldn't eat meat at all, then don't. But don't make a law preventing the sale of meat on Friday.

Finally, the anti-gay agenda is largely doomed. No matter how much people try, they won't stop people from doing any of the following with people with similar sex organs:

• stimulating sex organs to the point of orgasm
• living together and sleeping in the same bed
• creating and raising children
• sharing finances and possessions
• holding hands, kissing, or cuddling
• arguing, fighting, lying, breaking up, harassing, taking revenge, or any of the other not-so-fun things that happen in a relationship.

All that outlawing same-sex unions prevents is tax breaks, access to health care, sensible custody, and reasonable inheritance. And that seems like a really strange set of things to selectively deny to people.

Well, tax breaks, access to health care, child custody, and inheritance are frequently granted to the wealthy while they're harder for poor to obtain, but that's a problem for another time.

In the abortion debate, people who are pro-life want to increase the number of lives and people who are pro-choice want to increase the number of choices. In the gay marriage debate, people who claim to defend marriage and pro-family actually oppose measures which would increase the number of marriages and provide more legal stability to families. To quote Dr. Strangelove, "You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

It's Not Just For Prostitutes!

Working in bed, that is.

Yesterday I got out of hammock earlier than usual, so I elected to take the bus to work. Despite standing around for about twenty minutes at the bus station, it was a nice experience. I was able to read all the way down and didn't feel at all stresed, despite the growing snow. It took about 1.75 hours to go from my house to work, but that could be cut to 1.5 by taking a later 204 from my house. Unfortunately, the G only runs during "peak hours," which means the last run home from work is at 6:21. I thought it was 6:24, so I must have missed it by a few minutes. So after half an hour standing around in the snow, I caught the 16L to downtown denver and then caught the B to Boulder Station -- over two hours after I left work.

I then hung out at the ex-Kitt West RA party, learning that plaidjacket and maplesstrip both have journals. Welcome to my friends page! Attendance at the shin dig was disappointing, in part due to the weather, I think, but the gathering was fun nonetheless.

This morning, I got up after the last G left Boulder. I ate a quick breakfast and trudged to the driveway in six inches of snow. I turned the key, the car started, I turned on the defroster, grabbed the ice scraper, and then realized the car wasn't running. After several more attempts to start, I brushed off the snow and called it quits. Fortunately, I have my work laptop, so rather than bussing two hours to work in the snow, I'm working from my hammock. And unlike many days I spent trying to do homework, I've been fairly productive. Perhaps my weakness of will is subsiding. Or, to avoid the double negative, my will is strengthening. And on the plus side, I'll be home before 8 for the first time since I started working last Monday.

To be fair, not all of my late-night arrivals are caused by long work days. I've spent a couple evenings tooling around looking at neighborhoods. Everyone who knows me has said I'd prefer Golden to Lakewood. Golden, being smaller, more self-contained, and home to an engineering school has funk and soul. Golden is distinguished by more than just the logo on the street signs, unlike the distinction between Arvada, Wheat Ridge, and Golden. Plus, Golden is up close and personal with hiking and mountain bike trails. In my semi-aimless driving the other night I also discovered a forest of appartment buildings around Red Rocks CC. That spot is also fairly close to Green Mountain, is roughly the same (biking) distance from work, and is adjacent to a Carmel Community, which I believe is housing for the mentally handicapped. And it's hard to think of much in suburbia that's funkier than several acres of mentally handicapped individuals. When I get a chance, I need to gather some information on these places. This weekend's a bit shot, as I'll be playing in the Society in Shadow LARP at Genghis Con.

The RA party was hosted by Chris, who last semester was put on probation for what sounds like a pretty silly reason. She was then fired a few weeks ago for some even sillier reasons. Denise, the Kitt West hall director, seems to believe in assigning Probation to every violation of RA expectations, no matter how slight. I don't know how prevalent probation and termination are this year, but in my first year and a half of being an RA I didn't hear about any RA getting fired, and I know that quite a few didn't meet expectations. One reason I liked working with Kevin in the Quad was that if I did something wrong or didn't perform one of my duties, the first response was an open conversation. If the failure was due to reasonable circumstances -- academic pressures, unawareness of a rule, or serious mental slip-ups, no employment action would be taken. Most RAs genuinely want to do their jobs well, so punitive measures rarely help matters. But Dinese seems like a description of John Ashcroft I read in U.S. News -- she believes in enforcing all of the rules. Including this odd requirement that RAs remove all bulletin boards and other postings from their hallway before winter break. Now, my walls were COVERED with stuff. Much of which was generally informative, and went back up afterwords. But most annoyingly, my wals also held a U.S. map that Eugene had cut out, state by state with amazing precision, and taped up with about 400 pieces of masking tape. So I spent an hour last December pulling down states, sticking them on the back of my door, and then another hour in January putting them back up. Because of this annoyance, I decided to rotate the map 180 degrees on reposting to avoid insanity. However, the best illustration of Denise's non-consequentialist rule enforcement policy is Eugene and Drew's case. The two of them had a shot of liquor before RA training started in the fall as a "Summer's over, we're RAs now, time to be responsible" act. There would be no residents in the building for two full weeks, so their action had no chance of "sending the wrong message" to residents or anything. However, since they broke the letter of their employment contracts, they were fired. They received the exact same punishment as an RA who later in the year was caught with a lit joint in her room and beer in her fridge. I was on probation through December of last year, even though I was done in May, because I arrived for duty 20 minutes late. I was late because I ate at Sewell in a non-hurried state after watching Floating Weeds. I then went to the Engineering computer lab to print some schoolwork. Oh yeah. That was on top of being 10 minutes late to an earlier staff meeting because ending a dentist appointement an hour before the meeting turned out not to be enough time to bus back to campus. The only negative repercussion of being on probation was that I couldn't skip a staff meeting later that week to attend the CWA. But had I continued through the fall in Kitt West, I probably would've gotten fired (Probation + Probational Offense = Termination) inadvertantly. And moving in the middle of last semester wouldn't have helped anything.

Well, that was a ramble without much of a point. So I suppose the moral is that Housing is a place where great things happen despite the misdirected good intentions of the beaurocracy.

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Valentines Notes

Salon.com is offering a "Renew and give a free gift subscription" offer through this weekend. Would anyone like a free subscription? Subscribers don't have to view the ads. Salon's got lots of interesting articles on a wide range of topics. Their election reporting this year has been quite good; they critically examine canidates, behind-the-scenes folks, and movements, without the major media bias towards the candidates who can cough up lots of dough. Their media bias is left-wing, but they're open about that and they let it guide their editorial policy, not the factual claims that they make. This, I think, is proper journalism -- don't try to avoid bias, but leave that bias at the editorial level. Distinguish between reporting and opinion.

Yet again I'll pimp my favorite Valentine's Day link: how to say "I Love You" in scores of languages.

If you're not in a relationship and would like to spend Saturday crawling through Orkut, Google's "friendster done right" service. It's got more features, seems faster, and is geekier and slightly more elitist. I do find it ironic that the Terms of Service forbid spidering Orkut. I mean, you'd think it wasn't run by a search company. Anyway, if you want an invite, let me know. If you're already on, you can add me as a friend: orkut (a) trevorstone.org