Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/gender-and-sexuality/page/5/)
About struggles to be who we are, and to love each other across the categories.
Most people of any faith, or no faith at all, would live up to the nearly universal call to treat every single one of creation’s children with dignity and respect. If you make pizza for a living, make the best darned pizza you can and be thankful that people want to buy it.
For the last 30 years, Christians across this country have worked doggedly to fling the church doors wide open to LGBTQQI people. The unabridged, unapologetic Gospel of the Jewish carpenter, executed because he dared to speak out against injustice and stood up for the poor, rings loudly in thousands of churches across this country. It is a message of love and absolute acceptance, with doors flung wide open proclaiming that all are welcome, and cursed be the one who puts up a stumbling block to the children trying to reach him.
War was men’s business and women were not allowed to horn in, yet male officers could not help but admire “the virile courage of this woman,” Juana Azurduy. After many miles on horseback, when the war had already killed her husband and five of her six children, Juana also lost her life. She died poor even among the poor, but nearly two centuries later the Argentine government, now led by a woman, promoted her to the rank of general, “in homage to her womanly bravery.”
Throughout his presentation, Professor Howard repeated one powerful message: speak up on behalf of those affected by discrimination you do not face.
Force Majeure forces us to face an uncomfortable set of questions. Can desire be reconfigured so that we can have sex and domesticity with equal partners in the home? Can women demand equality and masculinity, which so many self-identified feminists seems to command without recognizing serious tensions? A full feminist agenda must find a way to defuse common libidinal impulses if the vision of sex equality is going to be rendered friendly to marriage and domestic life.
The current bifurcated restroom designation contradicts the realities of peoples’ sexed bodies, gender identities, and gender expressions. Many intersex people define neither as “male” nor as “female.” Which restroom must they choose, or which are they allowed to choose?
Unresolved childhood trauma is commonly found among women who later experience domestic violence as adults, says Aurora Silva, a marriage and family therapist who has been working with victims and offenders in the Coachella Valley for 27 years. “Women in the fields have usually been treated as less than or unworthy since childhood, and have difficulty believing they have rights or that they are worthy,” she says.
Of course “we” are not like “them”. The democratic, secular, it’s all about your choice West is not the woman-hating, veil wearing East. Unlike the endlessly controlled, honor-killed, and uneducated women in Arab countries, in the Grey story the victim gets to sign a contract.
But beyond the hegemonic display, serving a patriarchal culture, a different presentation of events dwells in the text of salvation, one that gives divinity a female body, and characterizes the forces of salvation as female corporeal-spiritual ones.
Trans* visionaries, who are persecuted in their own time, will one day be perceived as the visionary truth tellers they definitely are. Until that day, the harassment, the marginalization, the fear, the violence, and the murders must end.