What is Pride?

LGBTQ+++ spaces are asking ‘what does Pride mean to you?’ Pride is sorrow for being deprived of a public language in which to express who I am as a lesbian.

Pride is hurt that when I talk about being a lesbian feminist, a lesbian whose destiny is bound up with the fate of all female human beings, I am drowned out by ‘trans lives matter’. I don’t want to have to answer that with sharing the stories of lesbians brutalized for the intersectional oppression of being homosexual and female. Or with those of women forced into compulsory heterosexual arrangements and punished for following their own desire of any kind, raped and disbelieved and punished again by police and family. Any of those could have been me.

Pride is sometimes small and quiet, self-preservation finally shaking off fear. Pride is knowing who I come home to, and in which spaces I am only tolerated or precarious (too many, including LGBTQ+++ and progressive politics generally in the US). Pride is being my full big self, laughing and unafraid. Pride is dignity knowing there are some spaces where my role is as an ally and not centering my needs there, but if a community requires me to leave part of myself at home – this time it’s my femaleness more than being same-sex-attracted – I will be a shadow and will not stick around but will show my support in other ways.

This Pride I’m coming out as a lesbian who stands up for female autonomy and won’t go back into the closet, will make that a core part of my political public identity and not ask anyone’s sufferance. So here’s my coming out for 2020: integrating my women’s human rights work with my larger body of disability rights work, I’ve uploaded my 2016 LLM thesis ‘Female Autonomy vs Gender Identity A critical analysis of gender identity in CEDAW jurisprudence and the Yogyakarta Principles‘ to my Academia page, to join the rest of my papers.

Happy Pride!

Relationality

Thinking about relationality, in many dimensions.  As a lesbian married to my partner, living in a rural area in the woods of northern New York State, there are times when loneliness is very intense.  Online work and activism, combined with periods of travel, connects me to community; my marriage and the home and land we live on connects me to a place in the world where I know I belong.  There’s no other home that is my home, no other woman I am bonded with as with my wife.  These are intimate things and new to me, or unexpected that it could be so powerful.

Nevertheless thinking about getting older (both of us now over 60), and participating in the Open Ended Working Group on Ageing, I started to think about the need for positive and strong relationships with more people beyond my partner in real life, as they say, as we both age.  Desire for community and search for community has always been with me, but I have been confronted with barriers at almost every turn, some of which I have written about in this blog.

At the International Academy for Law and Mental Health 2019 conference, I was most interested in certain philosophical papers and sessions.  A session on ‘The second-person perspective in medicine and bioethics’ especially drew me.  While I had some disagreements with each paper in that session, the power of a second-person perspective in how we understand any issue of law and policy is worth exploring.  That’s something I still need to look at – there’s both the issue of intersubjectivity as an ethical approach to relationships (e.g. in context of respect for legal capacity, and decision-making support) including collective relationships (e.g. policymaking processes subject to contesting structural oppression), and more deeply, as a value to be promoted for human community and our community with the non-human world.  (This is a strong thread in justice practices and ecological practices of indigenous communities that have inspired me, that I’ve written about also on this blog.)

Practicing in my own relationships I have come to understand a difference between background relationality and a more deliberate intersubjective relationality.  I have often talked about intersubjectivity in an abstract sense, perhaps in a more cognitive sense of negotiation.  But in reality intersubjectivity – an I-I relationship – is something deeper, it’s interpenetration and mutual reflection to infinity, seeing the other in oneself and oneself in the other.  It’s an encounter between two beings, giving myself to the other directly in her presence and as presence.  I see this as being related to the fourth chakra, the heart chakra.  When I intentionally lift a response into that place, intentionally act from that energy center, I relate differently.  I see the other’s wellbeing not only abstractly as connected to my own, but experientially and literally inseparable from my own.  This doesn’t mean having no boundaries, it means talking about needs and boundaries through the heart and as part of this space of interconnectedness.

Related on the collective level, on the plane going to the conference, I watched the movie ‘The Best of Enemies‘, about a process in the civil rights movement era for a community to decide about school integration, that brought together Black activist leaders and Klansmen with an unexpected result (spoiler) that the central Klan leader was changed and became friends with the leading activist in the Black community.  I am naturally and politically skeptical of such a thing, but it was based on a true story.  At some level in most of what we do, oppressed people have to risk ourselves in processes that involve those of the oppressor class, and when any of us seek to become allies to oppressed people (e.g. for me as a contingently white (Jewish) person to be anti-racist), we have to risk ourselves in facing truths that require us to reorient our loyalties and our view of the world.

I’m not sure how this is going to relate to my conceptual policy framework to address support and non-discrimination in crisis situations as a positive alternative to the violent practice of forced psychiatry.  The practices that will lead to the right kind of support will have this genuine approach and value of an I-I relationship.  Looking into and through one another to a truth that is found and not made.  The IPS concept of co-creation and also intentionality in relationships fits here.  It’s not a cognitive intentionality I think, but a deliberate shift of consciousness in relation to the encounter and the moment, that can be especially brought into play when any of us feels challenged in a relational context that is nonetheless important to honor and preserve.  But it seems to go further, and I’m not sure where it will lead.

I had the opportunity to talk with Sarah Knutson about the conceptual framework together with what I’m thinking about relationality.  Sarah has worked out a way of thinking about high-stakes situations and the stress response that is an alternative to the psychological and medicalized model of ‘mental illness’ and crisis in particular.  Through that conversation I could refine my understanding of crisis as being composed of an objective situation that I don’t know how to deal with, and a stress response that makes me feel a great deal of physical and emotional discomfort.  Support for decision-making as well as practical support for comfort, safety and well-being from the person’s perspective can address both of these components, e.g. the stress response can be addressed through bodywork, calming or meditative exercises or in the process of talking about things in a heart-focused way or in an intersubjective I-I way that relates to the other person’s pain with deliberate ethical empathy and accompaniment.

It’s hard to talk about this without using the ‘heart’ reference, and I would not have found that at all meaningful or useful without the direct subjective experience.  I don’t know how it can be communicated in policy discussions or human rights language.  Maybe it can only be pointed at, and communicated directly in experiential contexts.  Interested to explore further, and welcome feedback to know if this makes sense to you or not, and why (or why not).

Edited postscript: Another aspect of this has been reading about African conceptions of the person, in writings by African and non-African philosophers and ethnographers, who  address the existence of a social as well as (and distinct from) personal self (see chapters in parts 1 and 2 of African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry).  The social self sounds similar to what one of the authors at the IALMH session talked about, in relation to our being constituted by our relations.  That was meant, as I understood it, in both a wide social-cultural sense relating to the transmission of worldview that determines who we think/feel we are and also in a more direct interpersonal and present-tense sense that I was surprised the author was prepared to take for granted.  I recall a conversation I had with a much younger fellow student in law school (as I was in my early 40s) who said he saw himself as an isolated bubble trying to form relationships with others; I saw myself as a node in a web of interconnections but his view seemed to me more common.  I would now describe that view of myself as amounting to background relationality.  There is more to how I see myself now, but that background relationality is still important.  For me it’s essential to become conscious of those relations and become more deliberate in affirming them, sometimes loosening or strengthening them; it is possible to sever them and one needs the option of distance but in some constitutive way they remain part of me through my past even if I have no need or desire to interact with the person again.  And I can see the value of what’s sometimes called forgiveness as a way to make peace with severed connections.

Also, I’m interested in the relationship between the first-person and second-person perspectives.  One of the papers at the IALMH conference rehabilitated the third person as a technique of observation and talking about an external reality; in the example given, a doctor begins with a second-person interaction expressing concern and listening for the patient’s concerns and troubles and needs, what brought him there.  She is also trained to be aware of the appearance of the body and signs of potential illness, and notices that the whites of his eye are yellowed; this leads her to eventually shift the conversation to a third-person perspective in which doctor and patient jointly look at his body from an externalized standpoint.

Two things – his perspective on his body is still different than the doctor’s; she only observes (and does it through her body), while he both observes and experiences.  And when he is engaging with the doctor he is likely to be primarily focused on his subjective experience, rather than on the interaction itself.  There was no mention of a first-person perspective; I suspect because the doctor’s standpoint was the one ultimately being taken as central.  In another paper, the author invoked second-person perspective as a foundation for supported decision-making, somewhat in contrast to a first-person perspective viewed as isolated and decontextualized.  I continue to think that is problematic because it blurs the actual distinctions between one person and another, the existence of two subjectivities however much they may interpenetrate, they are ontologically and physically distinct.   First-person perspective, one’s own direct experience including but not limited to self-awareness of experience and the faculty of directing one’s consciousness and becoming able to shift it, is crucial to the kind of intersubjective second-person perspective that ensures an ethical relation rather than one that ignores boundaries or that denies the presence of self to other, with the effect of dominance and/or subordination.

And (the second thing related to the doctor-patient scenario described) – instrumentalizing another person as an object is not the same as observation, which can be directed towards oneself or another in search of a dispassionate grounding for knowledge.  Witnessing one’s thoughts and feelings is a common strategy for meditation, as is also observation of breath or minute observation of something in the natural world.   Instrumentalizing another person is related to a third-person perspective (subject-object)  as well as an unethical dominance relation within a second-person perspective.  As feminist theorists have pointed out, e.g. Carole Pateman and Gerda Lerner, dominance relations of patriarchy require women’s participation as subordinated subjects.

Where is conflict situated in all this?  Bitter, painful conflicts can’t always be solved by heart-connection, or can they?  Can we value ourselves enough to say no, ‘learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served‘?  Are we trapped by situations where there’s still just a little love left, begging us to hold on or hold out, to keep it going so long as we can?  Maybe the heart-connection helps us to let go.

Self-authorship, mad pride, lesbians

Gerda Lerner in her second volume on women’s history, ‘The Creation of Feminist Consciousness’ (1993), writes about Hildegard of Bingen’s coming to self-authorship, shown in her final series of mystical art works, in each of which she includes the figure of a nun writing on tablets in the left hand corner.  Women still struggle with self-authorship, putting ourselves forward is taking a risk of hubris anticipating that other women as well as men will tear us down and ignore us, not because they dispute the quality of our work so much as because they dispute our right to claim public stature as authors at all.  I am not talking about the industries and their commodification of art, writing, scholarship, activism, legal practice, any profession, so much as that which, as Lerner wrote at the end of ‘The Creation of Patriarchy’ (1986), puts women at the center (taking any issue from the perspective of how it is experienced by women) and gets outside patriarchal thought (questioning all systems of thought, including one’s own).

Readers of this blog will know that I can claim co-authorship of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and can demonstrate in particular my contributions to its most innovative normative standards.  They may also, from knowing me, or from some of my previous writings, know that I struggled first to minimize the significance of this authorship while retaining enough control within the ongoing work to continue developing the logic of what I had begun, then later to reassert and reclaim an authorship that was unique in relation to the issues that I addressed and in the constituency of survivors and users of psychiatry/ people with psychosocial disabilities that I represented in that process.  It was only when it became apparent to me that others claimed credit for innovations that pre-existed their participation, or had a mistaken view of equal contributions when their memories seem to have not retained key milestones in the process for which I had been uniquely responsible, or simply wished ‘everyone to get along’ and minimized – as I had myself – the aggression directed against me as a woman with a bare minimum of credibility from patriarchal institutions (being at the time a recent law graduate), a gender non-conforming lesbian, a survivor of being locked up as a madperson, upending two millennia’s worth of doctrine with a logical pathway that no one had seen before but that opened clear as day to my naive eyes.

Claiming ‘naivety’ is a trope of humility of mystics of both sexes as well as a way of deflecting frontal assault for the temerity of authorship by a woman.  I did experience my work on the Convention as a somewhat mystical destiny, having had a prefigurative dream soon after being freed from psychiatry in which I saw myself as a lawyer, never having considered law as a profession, and having left law school abruptly the first time I started in the 80s, having completed all but six months, then embarking on a kind of ‘rabbit hole’ journey that focused on self-healing, contemplation, self-knowledge, self-directed study and attention, which led me back to law school undertaken at a higher level of understanding and with some awareness of personal power, and which included my first thoughts putting together disability non-discrimination with international human rights to address psychiatric oppression.  Many kinds of synchronicity – meaningful coincidences and decision-points – affected my law school education, and shortly after I graduated I became aware of, and had and eagerly took the opportunity to become involved with, the inauguration of a process to draft a convention.

I had experienced during my time in law school, and reflected to a professor I spoke to,  that I was being erased or erasing myself, and that this wasn’t uncomfortable.  It wasn’t about becoming ‘a lawyer,’ it was something else that I believe was about becoming an impersonal public self to act within history, while letting personal aspects of identity, or who I believed I was, fade away.  It made space within me to allow me to focus on the ideas that I absolutely knew were the logical pathway, and that I kept checking with my sense of responsibility to the constituency – to not harm anyone or destroy anything that should be preserved, given that this was about destroying systemic practices that harmed us and that needed to be catabolized.  There was accountability to the board of the organization I represented, through formal and informal mechanisms, and I involved many people in our networks and in my personal circles in collaborative thinking and decision-making – and yet it was clear that the drive, the logic in its totality, the authorship resided in me.

There is still a sense of potential shame in saying this, a sense that I am sticking up my head like a nail to be beaten down.  I don’t think I could have done it if I hadn’t been female, a dyke, opening myself to the void and its creation of self and other and definition all at once.  I don’t think I could have done it with the male-paradigm creativity of bringing an issue to an international forum and raising it within the confines of possibility, or speaking out and promoting a new vision and collecting adherents.  I worked within a sense of historical time and creative energy, not expecting or anticipating next steps until they were already there, creating the tightrope I walked one as a spider spins out her thread.  Maybe that is why no one saw what I did as I was doing it.  My wife has always called it the ‘path-o-logic’ pointing to the mad quality of this creativity standing outside conventional norms.  I don’t know another ‘mad’ person who has claimed simultaneously to enter history, to bring the void to the conventionalities, which is what the CRPD has opened a pathway for.

And, maybe we are all doing it.  Gerda Lerner’s vision of authorship and how she sees the obstacles to it is still somewhat class-limited, it doesn’t take account of thinking by women, especially women of lower classes, that might be profound and worthy of engagement that simply was trashed, that wasn’t written down, that was burned, that was ignored, that was ignored, that was ignored.  As Judy Grahn wrote in ‘A Woman is Talking to Death,’ ‘I looked in the mirror and nobody was there to testify; how clear, an unemployed queer woman makes no witness at all, nobody at all was there for those two questions: what does she do, and who is she married to?’  Lerner also gives short shrift to lesbians (so far in my reading), saying only that some women ‘turned to each other for care and affection’ among those who escaped the general subordination not only to men’s control but to the material and sexual servicing of men.  While dykes it seems to me are self-authoring beings out of a void, who interact with each other in unpredictable and permeable ways, different entirely from the paradigm of yin/yang heterosexual relations (see eye-opening Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India, by Giti Thadani), and the paradigm of lesbian self-authorship not only as women alone against patriarchy but as women interacting with other women similarly inventing themselves against patriarchy, because they are drawn together, seeking fulfillment in each other and through their honoring of each other, has been important for feminism, at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships reinventing their own stance and honor between the sexes.

For Jewish women newly entering the emerging working class in Russia, Eastern Europe and then as immigrants to the United States, theory and analysis was thriving in the communist socialist collectives they took part in during their off-work hours (at least until they married); this is documented beautifully along with other dimensions of women’s lives written in Yiddish during the period in which that language flourished.  (We need to talk about Jews in history also; the background/foreground effects of Biblical history/Israel as nationhood narrative contrasted with exile among nations, as a people similarly exercising creativity from a position of non-identity or void.  Lilith is said to be ascendant in exile; as well as being the energy of autonomous female sexuality.)  Revolutionary women were among the prominent theorists; I have mentioned Alexandra Kollontai’s essay and should set myself to read some of Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg, and I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of – to center women and step outside patriarchal thought as Gerda Lerner has challenged us to do.

My point in these last two paragraphs is that democratization of authorship is consistent with women’s claim and necessity of self-authorship.  As entirely predictable, when I recently posted a quote from Lerner on the need for women to assert ‘intellectual arrogance,’ a woman was right there to decry women becoming more like men.  How can we overcome silencing without confronting that which tells us it is ‘arrogant’ to speak?  As with lesbians creating permeable relationships into and out of the void, as mad people creating lives unaccountable to systems of normalization, it is essential to radically re-create all social relationships that have been based on dominance or shaped by ideologies of dominance of any kind (which as Lerner convincingly argues in ‘The Creation of Patriarchy’ is modeled on, reinforces, and always develops in interaction with, patriarchy), to be more like what we create in resistance from these positions of oppression.  Lesbian relationships based on desire of mutually autonomous beings each self-creating in resistance, are unique and cannot be replicated in our relations with men, in work comradeship, in platonic friendship; still as Audre Lorde said in ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,’ we can and do use the same energy throughout the different parts of our lives.

Lesbian relationships require us to pay attention to women’s relations with each other completely outside anything to do with men.  Feminists have also looked at women’s class relations with other women.  Gerda Lerner addresses these differences consistently – the (upper class) ‘wife’ in ancient Near East patriarchy could own property including owning female and male ‘slaves’ but her sexual and reproductive power was owned by her husband, while lower class women would be sold into slavery or concubinage to pay off their family’s debts; in both cases women’s relationship to class is defined by their sexual relationship to men); she acknowledges that class differences have made it difficult for women to come to awareness of themselves as an oppressed sex, but does not deal extensively with the intra-sex cross-class relations, e.g. (as described in Nell  Irvin Painter’s biography) Sojourner Truth’s description of having been sexually abused by a ‘mistress’ as having been especially traumatizing because it was done by another woman.  The lesbian/feminist journal Lesbian Ethics made a point of addressing abuse in the mother/daughter relationship and philosopher Claudia Card takes as one of her starting points the existence of abuse within lesbian relationships.  But it is difficult to not only claim authorship but excavate claims and counterclaims and create the language for them among people who have been denied not only authorship but connection to one another unmediated by their oppressors.  (Alison Bechdel, the ‘Bechdel Test’ for movies – are there more than 2 women, do they talk to each other, about something other than a man?)  (Two lesbians, recently beaten up on a bus in the UK, after refusing to kiss for the titillation of a man.)  Our connections to one another have not only been circumstantially impeded, they have been actively suppressed, repressed, and punished.  Solidarity in response to male violence has paradoxically been more visible in the mainstream and in a sense more acceptable, more cognizable, than women being able to claim public (?) space to talk as women with other women, about pains caused within the community of women.  We don’t want men jumping on this, as lesbians we don’t want straight people using our imperfections to vilify us or, even worse, benevolently offering to fix us up if we would follow their advice.  Women claiming public space, lesbians claiming public space – public in the sense of being open to all women, or to all lesbians – while excluding those who don’t belong (men, non-lesbians, respectively) was marginal for the brief periods we have claimed it and now is being forced into hiding, into the impossibility of being public, once again through accusations of transphobia.

The principle of female autonomy I have proposed starts with a first principle for social/economic/political organization of ‘at least equal’ power of the two sexes (‘at least’ with a preference for women to avoid backsliding to patriarchy or women’s millennia-inculcated habits of deference) including definitional power and control over resources.  Sexual autonomy – autonomy of women as a sex – is claimed in all relations with women and with men – sexual, familial, communal, social, cultural, civil, economic, political, spiritual, meaning the freedom (individually and in collectives) to interact exclusively with other women in any or all of these dimensions/spheres, and (individually and in collectives) to interact with men in any or all of these dimensions/spheres on women’s own terms.  I think that this fits with Gerda Lerner’s call for women to develop new consciousness for liberation and the overthrow of patriarchy.  Lesbians, female-autonomous spirituality, female-only consciousness-raising groups, and much else that is female-only from sports teams to colleges to music festivals, are crucial to developing women’s consciousness of ourselves as oppressed and our resistance – both to patriarchal thought and to patriarchal practices and their extensions in the state, capitalism, colonialism, other dominance relations.  We are now facing a multiple backlash from the left (accusations of transphobia, undercutting and gutting women’s affirmative action, positive measures for advancement, safety and privacy within/against systematic disadvantagement and exclusion from public spaces at all levels and the at-will, continuous violation of our private spaces by men treating us – our sexed bodies, our attention, our capacities and powers – as public/private property), and from the right which seeks unabashedly to drive us back to ‘kinder, kuche, kirche’, even to the extent of blatantly justifying unequal pay for elite women (Heritage Foundation on the US Women’s Soccer team, won’t link to it, a recent article).  Yet women’s powers of self-authorship are stronger than ever before, challenging everything albeit in a cacophony of voices that are watched and algorithmed by corporate social media, maybe irrelevant to late stage capitalist oligarchy destroying the living planet, or maybe not, as women, starting with indigenous women and women of color, defend migrant children against yet another genocide in progress.

Women’s liberation, gender identity and the state

The adoption of gender identity laws* by many states, and the endorsement of such laws by organs of the United Nations, demonstrates a failure to recognize women as a political class and women’s liberation as a fundamental component of the human rights project.

The transgender or gender identity movement in itself is a civil society phenomenon that has claimed the mantle of feminism and the mantle of lesbian and gay liberation as well. But it is states who bear the responsibility for the denial of women as a political class and the ensuring violations of women’s human rights.

The women’s liberation movement fought for abolition of all forms of male dominance and exploitation of women, and recognized gender as a social and cultural elaboration of  identities for men and women that not only limited individuals’ freedoms and opportunities but also kept in place the political and economy hierarchy with men on the top and women on the bottom.  This movement, now known as radical feminism, still fights all forms of male domination and exploitation of women.  It is an international and intersectional movement, keeping in mind that to be intersectional, women have to be recognized as a political class – intersectionality does not mean the obliteration of any political class or denying that there is any common political agenda, but rather pursuing the liberation of all members of that class including where that political agenda intersects with others.

Lesbians are caught in the cross-hairs of gender identity as an attack on women as a political class, most obviously because gender identity is promoted in our name through the ‘LGBTQ’ movement, but so are women of color, disabled women and women with other identities that have to fight intersectional battles, and those who have to defend themselves individually against male violence or who fight for its eradication.  Early in the US feminist movement, lesbians were told we weren’t wanted.  We are often treated as ‘not really women’.  Women of color and disabled women are also treated as ‘not really women’ or as the ‘wrong kind of woman’.  Every woman is exposed to social control and disapproval when she steps over the line of femininity as pleasing men and dedicating one’s own will and actions to maintaining a veneer of pleasantness in the family and in society, serving the interests of all hierarchies and systems of exploitation.  It is exactly trampling these lines of femininity that women need to survive, to defend ourselves against male violence both organized and individual, and to act in the world as responsible individuals and citizens.

The gender identity movement takes part of the feminist agenda, part of the lesbian and gay agenda, and makes it the sole focus to be enforced against the other parts of those movements.  The freedom to express ourselves and cross the lines of femininity and masculinity as individuals is part of both feminism/women’s liberation and lesbian/gay liberation.  It is a beautiful thing to see this freedom of expression win greater acceptance – but it has a conservative side, as the freedom is won by appealing to the construct of gender as a set of social cues in communication, e.g. I wear lipstick and present the appearance of breasts, therefore respond to me as a woman, or I tell you my pronouns are ‘they/them’, therefore respond to me as if you are agnostic about my sex.  It’s conservative because it treats an oppressive system as merely the cumulative product of individual choices, similar to a marketplace, and merely demands that the terms on which the market operates are made more equal in terms of opportunity to choose positions irrespective of sex.  But we don’t start out equal and don’t end up equal; it’s nonsense to treat a political hierarchy and system of economic and sexual exploitation as a marketplace – to do so merely entrenches the system of male domination/exploitation/extraction of resources from women along with all its dependent and intersectional hierarchies and systems of exploitation.  In order to act against oppression we have to act collectively to change the conditions that confront us; political action is not a marketplace.

Democracy has sometimes functioned as a marketplace especially when we are talking about majority vote and campaigns that function as marketing and not as political debate or deliberation.  But the answer is to bring back political debate, deliberation and collective action – not to capitulate to an individualism that is tantamount to despair.

The state is responsible for its violation of the human rights of women, but at the same time women have a right to question the state.  Democracy is a human right of a people to self-determination and pre-exists any particular form of political organization.  Equality of the sexes is fundamental to democracy, otherwise it is not democracy but androcracy.  Having been given the right to vote by states created by men, we are playing catch-up while men continue to shape the laws and customs to their own benefit, i.e. to treat rape as an individual crime for which sympathy is doled out or withheld on a racial basis to victim or perpetrator, rather than as a systemic hate crime against women that is to be eradicated.**   ‘Democracy’ itself cannot legitimize violations of human rights; like legal capacity it is a meta-right, a right that encapsulates a status for the exercise of freedom, and as a collective right, democracy remains accountable for the relations among individuals that it endorses and for those by which it operates.

The state should be the target of women’s political action and organizing, not the gender identity movement per se.  It is the state that bears responsibility within a human rights framework, and the state which, as the form of modern political organization that is answerable to democratic demands or can be targeted for political resistance if it rejects those demands.  The best and most successful organizing is being done in response to state initiatives like the proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act in the UK, which also benefits from a large grass-roots movement that was able to mobilize through an anonymous discussion board where women congregate to discuss political and nonpolitical issues of many kinds (MumsNet).  In the US our spheres of political action and debate are circumscribed, truncated and heavily influenced by political parties, funders and media that have created a political culture of spin and power rather than deliberation or collective action that can sustain itself independently, with some important exceptions.  We should learn from other countries and other struggles as we work intersectionally for women’s liberation.

 

*By gender identity laws I mean laws that allow men to change their legal classification to that of women, whether based on self-identification or on medical or social gatekeeping.  Self-identification laws are the most pernicious for women’s rights because they allow the greatest number of men to enter and represent the most complete denial of women as a political class, but laws that require gatekeeping are nevertheless problematic for the autonomy of the female sex to define itself.

**The Nordic model for ending prostitution, which provides support for women to exit the sex industry and penalizes sex buyers to criminalize the demand for commodified sex moves us toward a systemic approach by targeting sexual exploitation at the industrial level.

Diversity and heterogeneity

Many years ago in reading the book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, by Fatima Mernissi, I was introduced to the concept of heterogeneity.  Mernissi describes how the meaning of ‘harem’ encompasses two different possible ways of life, that have no elements in common with each other.

The concept has proved useful to me in talking about two different kinds of diversity in the disability community.  There is the usual kind of diversity which is intersectional, meaning that we may be alike in one way but we are diverse in others, e.g. disabled people are male or female (or intersex), of one or another ethnic group, homosexual or heterosexual or bisexual etc.  Then there is the diversity that comes from the heterogeneity of disability, what disability is depending on whether you are a survivor of psychiatry, a blind person, a wheelchair user, a Deaf person, an autistic person, or any of the other disability experiences.  Another way of saying that is that disability is a coalition.  It cannot even be said that we are all disabled by social barriers in relation to our impairments – for a survivor of psychiatry, the concept of impairment is both offensive and meaningless, it is solely the fact of being discriminated against through the ‘selection process’ of psychiatric diagnosis by which perpetrators identify us as suitable victims of violent experimental interventions.  This relates to disability because these perpetrators regard us as persons with disabilities, they regard us as having an impairment, and when the disability community comprises those who have been subjected to such life-changing discrimination along with those who experience having an impairment of any kind, we are equally a constituency whose rights are encompassed in the disability framework.

The transgender movement that claims that ‘trans women are women and trans men are men’ for all purposes can be seen in a similar way – aiming to make the category of sex/gender a heterogeneous one.  The term ‘woman’ in their view encompasses both those who are female (or intersex and assigned female at birth) and do not reject being identified as women, and those who are male and self-identify as women.  Is this a move that we should accept or reject?

Feminists argue that treating ‘woman’ in particular as a heterogeneous concept (the concept of ‘man’ hasn’t come under such scrutiny from the transgender movement) harms women.  I have written that it reverses the polarities and allows members of the oppressor class at will to reclassify themselves as members of the oppressed, and to consider themselves as more oppressed than actual women since they claim that being transgender is intersectional as well as a heterogeneous way of being ‘woman’.

I don’t hear from the transgender movement an argument as to why the move to remake sex classifications into sex/gender-identity as a heterogeneous concept is warranted or justifiable.  I hear appeals to concern for transgender people, for their mental health and well-being which is claimed to require acceptance of their self-declared identity – their identification into a desired sex and remaking of the classification of ‘woman’ in particular into a heterogeneous category of sex/gender-identity – as socially and legally valid for all intents and purposes.  I hear appeals to be inclusive, as if the remaking of our political, social, legal, cultural and physical identity as the female sex into a heterogeneous category that allows males in somehow is akin to demands by women of color, disabled women, lesbians, to be known in our femaleness and not be limited by white, heterosexist, ableist concepts of womanhood.  The transgender movement has taken our painful and disruptive failures to fully recognize each other, all women, as sisters, and turned them inside out to say, well you can’t recognize a woman so therefore there is no such thing outside of what anybody, male or female, can claim it is for themselves.

As I may have said elsewhere, I support the possibility of having gender identities for those who claim them – as feminists do not, contrary to the transgender advocacy position that claims all persons have a gender identity – and the possibility of having multiple genders (as some indigenous people and non-western cultures do) if we retain gender as a cultural construct without forcing anyone into a role related to sex stereotyping and gender has no implication for sex-classification.  I think that accommodations of transgender and nonconforming people’s needs for safety in dealing with police and in situations of bodily privacy and state custody need to be worked out similarly to other intersectional identity groups, without making transgender operate as a requirement to treat sex-classification as heterogeneous – i.e. without requiring the state and private individuals to accommodate the needs of male transgender persons *as a subclass of women*.

I don’t want feminists to label transgender people, gender nonconforming people, or anyone else as mentally ill or to deride anyone for their appearance.  However in an environment where male transgender advocates and their female, male, heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual allies physically attack and threaten lesbians and feminists routinely with actual violence and exclusion from communities – which endangers us greatly as already marginalized people in mainstream society – I cannot say that the situation is in any way a battle with two equal sides.  The first step towards any reconciliation is to end the transgender attacks against lesbians and for the rest of society to ally with lesbians and all women now.

Sexism on the left, 2

The failure of intersectionality, insofar as it fails us, is not primarily a failure of feminism.  Rather it is elevated expectations of feminism (or stricter standards applied to women’s behavior), and lowered expectations of all the other movements (or more permissive standards applied to men), that create the biggest problems.

Kimberlé Crenshaw took note of the disparate reactions by her students to similar questions of intersectionality in feminist and anti-racist movements in her article ‘Close Encounters of Three Kinds: On Teaching Dominance Feminism and Intersectionality.’  Recently I observed an example of a generic call for coalition-building issued by a white male leftist in the name of intersectionality, which completely failed to grasp the nature of intersectionality as actually illuminating what each movement misses because it ignores the issues faced by a significant part of its own constituency.  Thus, in a Counterpunch article Anthony DiMaggio fails to connect the dots that make #metoo a workers’ rights movement – surely elimination of sexual harassment would raise the status and bargaining power of women as workers! – and similarly fails to relate Black Lives Matter and similar protests against racially motivated police violence to class struggle – surely this repression, and the accompanying criminalization, is connected to maintaining a large segment of African Americans as a super-exploitable underclass.

Everyone seems to point a finger at other movements that should be intersectional – actually with the exception of feminism, which has taken on its own struggles internally now for decades, and in many spaces as a result of this painstaking work achieved some real success.

The problem becomes most acute for women now because the transgender movement has misused intersectionality so that it becomes not a call for inclusion but a demand to re-set the entire table of feminism on its own terms.  These terms are, like most other movements not led by women, dictated by men – by trans-identified-males who refer to themselves as trans women and refer to women, or females who do not identify as trans men, as cis women.  This is an extraordinary reversal of the polarities of dominant and subordinated classes, most extraordinary in that it is so widely and popularly accepted in left circles and the liberal mainstream.

A friend asked me yesterday, what was a TERF and how to understand where trans ideology comes from, why it has become such a conflagration?

I thought about it for a long time after the conversation, and these are some of the pieces:

After same-sex marriage equality was established in the US by the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision – a huge milestone – there was a vacuum in the lesbian/gay movement’s advocacy.  Although many lesbians in particular were politically and personally unenthusiastic about marriage, an institution that as we knew it enslaved women and privileged upper classes, I don’t think that anything else would have enshrined in law and public consciousness the honor and dignity of our relationships, and by extension our sexuality.  In a society where marriage remains the only way to create family between equal adult partners, and it rests on a sexual relationship, marriage equality stands in for, and opens public space for, our sexual and romantic relations to be acknowledged openly and celebrated.  We don’t all have to be married, and we can live marriage as we choose if we do marry.  We can be sexual outlaws or nonconformists, if that’s still who we are.  Marriage, I think, still creates more space for us as lesbians, gay men and bisexual women and men.

There is a connection between sexuality and personal expression, and in particular between homosexual orientation and rejection or divergence from the roles and expectations prescribed for one’s sex.  Homosexual and heterosexual are binary orientations, even bisexuality is binary in that we are dealing with two sexes.  Similarly gender is binary if we understand gender to be the sociocultural constructs related to the two sexes.  Cultural symbolism around sex does not need to be patriarchal; think of women’s autonomous spiritual practices and productions.  (I will refrain from including generally ‘goddess symbolism’ here as it can be subordinated or created through a male gaze, to serve men.)  We cannot escape the need for cultural signifiers relating to sex – there are knowledge bases available and relevant to women and not men, about our female bodies and their development and capabilities and powers, our cycles, our sexuality, our center of gravity and our energy.  Our motherhood or inability to become mothers or rejection of motherhood.  We need our language and our connections to each other around these experiences that are binary in nature within the context of society, as they are unique to women.  If we are homosexual we are these amazing female beings who bring this entire being to another female.  Men, including gay men, will have whatever binary experience they have on their side that is not necessarily about dominating or exploiting women or about entitlement to enact violence and sexual aggression (i.e. patriarchy).  Lesbians and gay men have a unique vantage point on the roles and expectations for our sex, respectively, necessarily because our sexuality is qualitatively different from heterosexuality, and we are a different kind of woman and a different kind of man.  But it goes deeper than that also; many lesbians grow up rejecting femininity and become proud butches, many gay men grow up being told they are sissies and come out to their beautiful selves.  In this gender nonconformity is the connection between lesbian/gay politics and the issue of gender expression and identity.

Transgender people who choose to express themselves in ways that violate gender binary expectations, or to live in an identity different than their sex, which may include body modification that creates a quasi-intersex body type and experience, have the right to enjoy all their human rights and not be excluded from society.  But if we really want to talk intersectionality, the gender identity movement needs to start by addressing anti-sexism, and the differential impact of gender identity and transgender identities on men and women, including those who are equally gender nonconforming and do not identify as transgender but as butch lesbians or the equivalent for gay men.  That movement needs to deal with the feminist analysis of gender as the vehicle for maintaining male supremacy and patriarchy, an analysis to which numerous lesbians contributed, and which leads women identifying with feminism to understand themselves, and all women, as by definition gender non-conforming because they resist the subservience demanded of women as part of femininity.   (Which is why we reject the name ‘cis’.)  Feminists also maintain that the distinction between transgender and non-transgender is a false binary as no one is a walking stereotype.  Even non-feminist women heft babies and diaper bags and strollers, mow the lawn and stack wood, for example.

Women are pushing back against the new political orthodoxy demanded of us in left circles and in a new male-led transgender-focused feminism.  In the UK feminists are getting mainstream airtime and media (for example, here, and news roundup with link here)  in their fight to prevent legal changes that would allow a male to receive a gender recognition certificate as a woman purely on his self-declaration.  Australian leftist journalist Caity Johnstone took note of the transgender movement’s policing of language as part of a liberal identity politics that masks authoritarianism.  In the US, we are impeded by the right-wing’s capture of the pushback against gender identity as a return to manly men and womanly women; attempts at coalition-building between feminists and right-wing women while potentially interesting are doomed to fail so long as feminists put feminism in the back seat.

Let’s have some rules for intersectionality.

1. Intersections have to go both ways.  I build bridges between lesbian/feminism and the psychiatric survivor movement.  That means I work in both of them, bringing out issues, experiences and perspectives that pertain to lesbians and other women who are survivors.  I have to say at present it is highly risky to bring lesbian/feminist ideas to the survivor movement, because of capture by transgender identity politics.  And for the moment lesbian/feminism is more open.  But in principle there has to be mutuality of engagement with the issues of a segment of each movement’s constituency that the movement is not paying attention to.
2. Intersectionality cannot require reversal of the polarities of an existing movement or cannibalizing it out of existence.  That is what the gender identity movement is doing to feminism.  We, lesbians, midwives and other feminists who are backed into a corner or simply have the chutzpah to stand up for ourselves, aren’t allowing ourselves to be eaten.

What else can you think of?

Sexism on the left

There isn’t much difference between the current transgender ideology that bullies women and ejects us from our own home ground, and ordinary sexism that has always existed in the left, in all the movements ranging from anti-war to the one I’m most familiar with, the survivors of psychiatric oppression movement.  The only difference is that anti-feminist men and women have found a way to obliterate the political existence of women as a dogma of leftist politics.  In order to be a bona fide, acceptable speaker, organizer, thinker in these movements, now, one has to agree that there is no such thing as sexism defined as systemic, institutionalized male supremacy over females.  Sex is said to have no political meaning, to assert such a meaning is considered tantamount to the bigotry that feminists lead the fight against – the biological essentialism of patriarchal society, particularly fundamentalist Christians, who believe that females must serve males and that both must stay in pre-defined roles.

Transgender ideology takes up part of the feminist agenda, which I welcome – the part that says we can all be ourselves, look how we want, dress and speak how we want, we don’t have to fit the roles that patriarchy assigned to our sex, we can cross over or do our own thing outside the box.  Marlo Thomas sang it in ‘Free to Be You and Me’ and it’s still what feminists believe.

But feminism has always been a movement that 1) fights against institutionalized male supremacy over females, and 2) pays attention to the body and particularly to women’s subjectivity as embodied female human beings.  So much of male supremacy happens by men asserting not just control over or imposed access to women’s bodies, but the negation of women’s subjectivity.  If she says no to sex, she can’t mean it, she really means yes.  If she doesn’t respond to you, she’s a whore.  Men impose their meaning on women and their meaning is a servile body.  It’s not entirely an object, not the same as a plastic doll, they want the subordination of women’s reason and conscience to their own, enacted in many ways but focused on sexual, emotional, reproductive, and caregiving service.  (Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, points out that women were not excluded entirely from the realm of contract, they were required to make one contract, that of marriage, which secured their inferior status.)

Women taking back our subjectivity meant our embodied subjectivity.  Not just in personal life and in heterosexual relationships, but as a matter of cultural archetype and policy claiming that our form was as much ‘in the image of God’ as that of males – or more, since it is females who birth males and females both, not the other way around – and that the world should be run from the standpoint of women, including our bodily experiences of menstruation, fertility, childbearing, menopause, our kinds of physical strength and endurance, our physical configuration and energy, our physical vulnerabilities and protections – as distinct from the socially imposed ones or the reaction to predatory male violence.  We got some changes made for some of the most obvious aspects of policy, like providing for pregnancy leave and prohibiting workplace discrimination including sexual harassment – though we know these measures are insufficient and don’t change the actual power relations much; as I write this the #metoo campaign is for the first time in memory succeeding in toppling the careers of sexual predators, not because of law but because of women rising up.

Lesbians are outside much of the focal points for male supremacy, we aren’t in a position of fighting for sexual equality in our intimate relationships or generally of dealing with unwanted pregnancy.  Having relations with other females, we are doubly negated in the patriarchy and our subjectivity is simply of no importance to anyone but ourselves.

Until it comes time for a male-bodied person who is heterosexual to declare himself a lesbian – then our subjectivity is derided and reviled if we cast him out, call him a man and deny him a place in our sisterhood.

The same way, all women’s subjectivity as women to define our own boundaries collectively, as well as individually, is derided and reviled and silenced when we assert that our movement is a movement of females to end male supremacy, and that males who want an identity other than that of men as it has been assigned to them need to create their own movement, with a separate identity, and not parasitize ours – not attack and feed off our political labor as men have done in every other sphere of life.

If our movements cannot fight sexism – cannot embrace as a core political principle the abolition of male supremacy over females, and the primacy of female people as the political agents of this struggle, then they are more than bullshit, they are another face of oppression.

Female autonomy

My introduction to feminism was women’s liberation.  ‘Do you agree with women’s liberation?’ a friend asked me, in junior high school in 1970 or 71.  I asked what it was and she explained that it meant a woman can do anything a man can do.  I thought about it a few seconds, and said yes.  It changed my life, to have the possibility of living as a full person in the world and not being required to be ‘a wife and a mother and…”

A slogan that I embraced and still remember from that time was, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’  It says that, contrary to the ideology that told me I had to be a wife and mother no matter what else I might become, I exist in myself and have no need of a man to be complete and for my existence to make sense.  The ideology that paired up boys and girls in elementary school, that insisted on a ‘smartest boy’ and ‘smartest girl’ in my first grade class, I could overthrow as authority once it was ridiculed as absurd.

As it turned out, the premise of female autonomy expressed in the slogan appealed to me as a lesbian – on the sexual level as well as other aspects of life.  But the premise of existential female autonomy is important for heterosexual women as well, to know themselves as existing in and for themselves, before any relationship they may have with a male partner.  On the species level, as we know, both female and male are necessary for sexual reproduction, with distinct reproductive contributions and the female partner contributing the vast majority of labor and physical substance.  Yet this fact implies nothing about the political relationship between females and males, if anything it suggests the greater dependence of males on females.  Men’s subjugation of women is not natural, it is not implied or made necessary by any biological imperative, and to attempt such justification suggests a fear of lesbianism, or at least a fear that heterosexuality is not appealing enough in itself to sufficient numbers of women for the species to continue.

If the species dies out because women are free and do not desire men or pregnancy (or because men stop desiring women or lose their potency), maybe it means that the species does not need to exist any more.  Species existence depends also on many other factors, such as climate and war, in addition to reproduction.  It is immoral to enslave any individual or group of individuals to the aim of continuation of the species.

At the individual level, everywhere we look, we do not see heterosexuality dying out, or an end to women choosing to become mothers.  Women’s bodies are powerful in birth and the choice to risk one’s own life and health to birth another human should be honored with gratitude while not obligating any woman who is not so moved.

As a girl faced with coerced heterosexuality as the only option, I learned to deny and suppress not only sexual feelings for other females but a sense of myself as autonomous with respect to the world at large.  Not being ‘naturally’ as I was expected to be, and not being free to be me, the paradigm of female service to others allowed me a kind of space to fit within a gender role.  I didn’t have to serve men; serving humanity, or anyone in need, especially women or other girls whom I was naturally drawn to, was safe.

I don’t know if all the ways I felt ‘different’ as a child and have known myself as ‘different’ throughout my life can be explained by being a lesbian.  I don’t feel fully at home in lesbian community or in any community.  I don’t accept my difference as impairment either, though I have been disabled by being treated as such.  My difference feels more than anything else, like a sense of my actual autonomous being in a way that connects me deeply to a sense of harmony with the whole.  While I need connection it is much less than I have been taught to believe is natural, either for ‘women’ or for anyone.  The connection I need is often not with other humans, it is something else.  When I need connection may be the time when I most need to be alone.

Female autonomy as a principle encompasses all these levels.  Each one of us is an actual autonomous being, and can know ourselves as such.  Sexually, we have a right to come to know ourselves and to be free to connect deeply with other females without hindrance, and/or to connect deeply with males on one’s own terms.  Socially, familially, we also have a right to choose to connect with other females without hindrance, with males on our own terms, and in mixed spaces.  I could equally say we have a right to connect with anyone we choose, without hindrance and on our own terms – as a friend commented to me – but there is a reason to differentiate as I have.

Patriarchy, the system by which males extract resources from females, hinders us from relating to other females to the exclusion of males – whether on a sexual, social, familial, organizational or political level.  And the same system deprives us of the power and freedom to control the terms on which we relate to males.  We still live under this patriarchal system despite same-sex marriage equality and limited rights to use contraception and terminate a pregnancy, limited criminalization of rape.  The smashing of female-only identities (such as lesbian, mother), spaces (festivals, showers, shelters, health care, sports, etc.), and political movements (feminism/women’s liberation) tells us it’s time to wake up again.  The second wave didn’t free us, we didn’t free ourselves, patriarchy is enmeshed with racism, colonialism, militarism, capitalism.  Individualist freedom-seeking – ok, I did not have to become a ‘wife and mother and…’ – meets its limits not only in the glass-ceiling for any kind of achievement within a public arena, in the unrelenting march of male violence of all kinds – rape, police killing, war, psychiatric assault, in the failure to create possibilities for women as public actors outside the idea of middle class careers, inaccessible to large numbers of us, and I’m sure we can go on and on.

The ultimate collective level of female autonomy would be large-scale political organization.  There are and have been in the past societies where women and men are separate halves of the political structure, where collective decision-making and responsibility are separated based on sex (e.g. see Barbara A. Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas) or where women have a separate military structure within communal, egalitarian democracy (e.g. Kurdish women as described here).  How do we get there, and is it enough?  Do we want instead to envision something like the stories of ancient Amazons who lived entirely apart from men except for times when they would meet with a counterpart male society for trade and (for heterosexuals among them) sexual relations?  Do we want lesbian-only societies that adopt girls to raise?  In any case there is a need for cooperative and respectful men if we are to live in peace and stability, whether in mutual harmony or at least free from aggression.  I think it is worthwhile to think about the implications of a principle of female autonomy for large-scale political organization, especially in light of contemporary and past societies where this structural feature seems to foster not only women’s autonomy, authority and integrity but also men’s respect for the same.

The concept and experience of autonomy is different in a cooperative economic and social context, than in a competitive and exploitative one.  When we have competition and exploitation (as modern capitalist colonialist patriarchy) those in the subjugated classes are expected to submerge their autonomy for the good of the whole, while on the contrary the individual drive of the dominant ones is lauded and even deified as an engine of dynamism and creativity.  When we flag this and call for autonomy, separatism, self-love and self-determination, the dominant groups and their acolytes try to shame us back into our place, first by appealing to cooperation as two halves of a whole, then by elevating the altruistic values they have projected onto us as a superficial ethic for everyone without changing the structure of exploitation/subjugation.

I think that this holds true for economic classes, sex classes, and race classes.  You can consider what you know of recent history and see if you agree.

What I read and observe about autonomy in a cooperative economic and social context, and what I experience in small constrained contexts within capitalist patriarchy, is freedom to be oneself while remaining connected to a whole.  A sense of place, of relationship and responsibility to others that doesn’t preclude fights and sorrows, heartbreak and rejection.  I don’t want to live in any of the lesbian or women-only communities I know of, but I am a lesbian, married, at home in my own house and land that becomes center of the four directions for my world.

I’d like to fight for and work on cooperative economics and politics in my local area but am stymied by centrist politics stifling the possibility of even a radical naming of the problems (such as calling the Democrats a corporate party, or calling attention to the different material interests of health care providers vs people taking control of our own health care and autonomy).

Forced psychiatry is the antithesis of any kind of autonomy, reaching into the body to disrupt the brain and psyche, the sense of self-organization and possibility of wholeness. Being cracked and broken one can then know oneself as wholly outside what they can do to break us, but it has othering implications, and if I can’t relate to male-defined/mixed-sex generic madness discussions or to the view of madness itself as a thing rather than the content of what we are sad about or turning ourselves inside out on, well there aren’t many places to go.  The male-violence aspect of forced psychiatry helped me to know I’m a lesbian but also chilled my relationship to all social, economic and political institutions with the fear of being prey, building and reinforcing my Jewish heritage instincts and my  caginess to appease the abusers of my childhood.  Female betrayal put me into the hands of psychiatry and kept me there until they were done with me.  This is a feminist issue and an issue that could only be talked about among women, yet even then there are no words most of the time, no ground for it to be fully heard.  No place for the twisted ugliness of abuse to be surrendered and healed, it has nowhere to go.

It’s also far in the past now.  I am not a ‘person with a psychosocial disability’ in my daily life unless my ordinary craziness is diagnosable as it is, and I care to frame my life in this way.  I’m tired and don’t need or want the identity except as a link to survivorship, ex-mental-patienthood that will never escape me and that I don’t want to hide or dismiss.  Other communities won’t fully hold me or embrace me, and neither will this one now, because of the gender identity witch-hunts finally reaching us, in the end that becomes decisive beyond any other dyke-baiting, dragon woman force of nature misogynies.

I don’t think we necessarily need separate political structures in a formal sense in order for female autonomy to be put into practice and respected.  Separate political structures can be another Noah’s Ark scenario, male leaders and female leaders as ‘smartest boy’ and ‘smartest girl’, created as an arbitrary demarcation without a consciousness of ‘women’s business’ or women’s political autonomy and liberation from men as a principle and purpose.  Respect for female autonomy can start anywhere by consciousness-raising and practice where we claim public space, public roles for the power and space we take in the world by being single mothers, business owners and skilled tradespeople, teachers, anywhere we are acting from strength and not performance, standing in our courage and linking in solidarity with other women whenever we choose to for pleasure, for resistance to male expectations and entitlement, for nurturing ourselves and each other and building our strengths.  And with men learning to back off when we bar the door, or simply prioritize women, instead of treating it as a challenge or a joke.

I’m thinking of Kate Millett, who died during the time I have been writing this blog post.  Reading Flying which I had bought from Kate and never read before, thinking of Kate’s art and her open lesbian desire in art and writing, her erudition and plain speech, how her life and charm and needs and insight touched everyone who came to know her in person or through her work, and her life like mine and any of ours an open puzzle, not solved and worked with all we have at any moment in our full hearts.

I can’t answer the questions posed by my work and advocacy about how we should ‘deal with’ each other’s pain and violence to self and the pain and violence we cause to others, all these frustrations and concerns when we are too far away in our own lives to reach each other and give everything that our sister needs.  I know that life is hard for all of us whether we identify as mad or mentally ill or not, and while my mind does shut off to some of my sisters’ pains, that’s my limitation and not an excuse to have them locked up and tortured.  I am an abolitionist, bearing witness to what I survived and trying to make reparations possible.

Cooperation is needed between women.  Maybe some things work best with a focus, like Mary Lou Singleton’s wonderful interview calling for reproductive sovereignty – ‘abortion on demand with no apology’ – and women taking back control over abortions and birth control, learning again together to do these things for ourselves outside the medical/pharmaceutical industries.  What else can we do politically, cooperatively and collectively as women to take back our sovereignty over everything that is ours?

Can we cultivate female solidarity against male violence and harassment in public places?  Not posses or roving teams, just women learning to make eye contact with other women in public, to defend each other verbally or physically – similarly to how the left is now promoting for white allies to defend people of color against racists.  I don’t want to involve men in this for now – I want it to start with women connecting with each other to name the aggression, let each other know we see, it’s real, we have each other’s backs.

To take back our sovereignty over being in public space in our female bodies, to not be objects of protection by the state or individual males.  Take back the night marches were part of this but at least in the US reportedly came to be associated with calls for better policing, which is double-edged especially for communities of color, and for crazy and disabled women.

Political class solidarity among women is different than creating women-only communities that try to be all things to all women, or at least all things to a small group of women.  For me intentional communities raise way too many red flags about trying to meet expectations, worse than marriage since no fundamental emotional connection and potentially intrusive interpretations of ‘the personal is political’ as ‘everything in your life is up for political discussion by anyone who disapproves of it.’

To link it back with some other points, I think political class solidarity may be better suited to the way we live now in modern non-indigenous communities, rather than trying to create or re-create ways of living that imitate our heritage past or contemporary indigenous people as functioning societies with internal political, economic, and cultural self-sufficiency.  For those of us who easily get ostracized if we’re not the ones in control (looking at many of us), whether as crazy or as ‘not our kind’ in one way or another, maybe having our own homes is a priority and (re-)creating the political solidarity movement of women, i.e. the women’s liberation movement, from where we are.  In-person in cities, in small towns, online.  Why not?

seamless community and healing

Intro and context (dry stuff at the beginning, skip if not interested)

I have chosen to review the WHO Quality Rights training modules, based on my understanding that the Mental Health Policy and Service Development team (Michelle Funk and Nathalie Drew) officially and publicly upholds the CRPD standard that requires abolition of involuntary treatment and involuntary detention (i.e. involuntary admission/retention) in mental health services.

This is a major step for WHO, as they are the health agency associated with the United Nations (though technically separate), and have a considerable influence in the health policy of countries throughout the world.  A number of activists/advocates in the users and survivors of psychiatry/people with psychosocial disabilities movement have been involved with writing and reviewing the modules to date, as well as UN experts who contributed to the CRPD standards.  Also there are psychiatrists involved.  It has been a large and diverse group.

An obstacle to more activists taking part in the review is the large amount of time needed for the volume of material, without remuneration.  I will describe why, for me, it has been worthwhile – not necessarily to encourage others to do the same, but to start a conversation among ourselves, raising the same underlying question and related ones:

• What is mental health policy following CRPD?
• What is the place of mental health policy within the overall goal of implementing the rights of people with psychosocial disabilities under CRPD?
• What are the possibilities for CRPD-coherent ways of understanding not just alternatives to conventional mental health practices, but alternatives to mental health treatments/services and their underlying perspective?

In particular, I am interested in exploring alternative forms of support that do not conceptually separate people or any of their experiences from the community and its ways of working with emotions, spiritual dimensions, and mental states.

Lesbian feminist community, healing, and capabilities of communities

In this post I am going to talk about lesbian feminist community, about healing, and about what it has to do (or not) with concepts of ‘recovery’ and ‘mental health’.

In my life there have been different threads that come together, diverge, come together again, in larger and larger groups of coherence.  (Think of it as joining strands into a thin rope, and then joining the ropes together to make a thicker and stronger one, etc.)

Lesbian feminist community, coming out as a lesbian, female autonomous spirituality, have been threads that diverged and came back together perhaps more than once, with deeper understanding.

Spirituality and healing began as separate threads and then converged.  I can’t recall how this even felt when they began as separate, but I recall marking the change when they converged.

Healing began for me as healing from psychiatric assault, then deepened into wider aspects of my life that needed to be healed.  At first it was healing from identifiable trauma but it has also become healing of anything that is hurting, any way that my life is in pain.

Healing the psyche began as separate from physical healing, but that too is converging.  As I get older, there is always a greater sense of physical vulnerability and mortality, and awareness that my body isn’t and never will be very well explained by conventional western medicine.  I haven’t gotten to explore other systems of healing in depth, or found practitioners who have worked any miracles with me.  Instead I find myself faced with more choices about conventional medicine and its risks, and also am attuned to psychic aspects of my body and its healing.

Lesbian feminist community has always been a space where women found healing.  Just being free of the constraints of the male gaze, knowing we had to do it all for ourselves and finding strength we didn’t know we had, connecting with each other on deep levels that let us know we are not alone.  There is a great joy to this connection, and to throwing off shackles, and we find we still have our core flame when we come back into the ordinary world where we need to be more armored to deal with men, with patriarchy, with everything that patriarchy feeds as barriers between people: racism, anti-semitism, ableism, capitalism, and more.

Is this healing something that lifts us out of any idea of our craziness?  For me, it has been.  Craziness is unworthiness in some sense, it is only a part of me that ever has separated out and judged, ‘that’s crazy.’  It’s a part of me that is defined by fear of crossing over a line that other people define in some way.  It’s an alliance with others’ judgment, against myself.  It feels like a kind of self-preservation and it is at bottom a kind of instrumental self-hatred, that may or may not help you to fight your way through a situation that is life-endangering (being institutionalized) but that is harmful in the long term.

It seems to me that many people find their way to this point (I am not crazy), from a number of different paths.  It seems like it is the product of a journey, and retroactively defines the journey.  Even if you know it intellectually, it is the emotional feeling of connection that makes you know it for real, come home to yourself in a way that cannot be undone.

Another thread that may be relevant here, a conversation I had with a good long-time friend, who articulated what happens when ‘long-term goals are so important, you are afraid of fucking it up, so in the short term you avoid it.’  I have had that fear, and I love how my friend put it so non-judgmentally.  I have that fear now, that saying the connection, and not-craziness, ‘cannot be undone,’ will undo it.  But my mind goes there, and I cannot help but take the step, and rely on my faith and trust in the thing itself, which got me here.

Can the healing I’m talking about be relevant to anyone, at any stage of their journey?  It took me so long to be able to receive it, in the way I describe.  I was working on my healing for a long time, and when I didn’t even say I was working on it anymore, this came.

Does it make sense to talk about valued communities of any kind, as holding the space for all of us, including those who don’t feel it?  I used to hate it when people told me that they would hold open friendship for me to come back to, as their way of announcing the friendship was over, or that they loved me while I knew they were deliberately excluding me from collaborations in which I had an interest.  This is still a rejection, clothed in sanctimony and self-interest.  In some rejections, there is an underlying affirmation, a willingness to keep exploring our own boundaries and each others’; despite the potential for this to be misread as an endorsement of misogynist rape culture ‘no may be yes’ it is something that happens.  We don’t have to be rapists, we can be attentive and care whether there is ever a yes and whether it is real or just a belief in the need to appease.

And, not everybody who is eligible will find their way to a particular community or feel it as home.  Not the psychiatric survivor or peer community, not the lesbian feminist community, not the Jewish community.  But can these communities in themselves, defined by shared values and beliefs, as well as shared experiences, history and traditions to a greater or lesser extent, foster and contain within themselves the ability to keep space and keep faith with all of their members, in good times and in bad?  Can healing be the same as reconciliation, or as finding home for the first time in a society where so many of us are effectively rootless?

This may be the same vision as the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King envisioned not only for activists but as transformation of the world.  Yet we can’t be naive or vague about what it means to create healing, to open the door to healing, to create space for healing, to invite healing.  Healing is messy, loud, it comes with conflict.  It doesn’t need to go somewhere else to happen – it doesn’t taint the space.

Maybe sometimes healing is trying to happen without asking, and may or may not be what’s happening when someone annoys you and persists in doing so.  How can we deal with that?  How can we get on with our agendas, if we need to, and not get derailed while also allowing this other thing to happen?

‘Recovery’ and ‘mental health’

And finally, what if anything does this have to do with ‘recovery’ and with ‘mental health’?

Like some other survivor activists, I dislike the term recovery and do not use it for myself.  I feel also a kind of judgment and shame in not doing so, does this mean I am not  ‘recovered’, that I am ‘still mentally ill’?  Well, no.  I reject the idea of ‘mental illness’ because it takes ‘craziness’ a step farther and says ‘there is something wrong with you’.  There is a pseudoscience and a set of experts and a way to fix that thing, and it is inside  you and you have to be taken apart to get it out.

I’ve talked about my definition of mental health.  I don’t actively use that concept in my life, it was an exercise in how I can connect to an idea that I can understand as a value, but that ultimately is too commodified to be coherent with my own values and beliefs.  I don’t pursue mental health, I live my life and try to feel good in my whole self and to be in harmony with creation.  To say this is not to define it as a goal or objective of any kind, rather a description of what I gravitate towards as plants gravitate towards light.

I am also committed to making coherent discussions between my point of view, and what it means for people to understand themselves as dealing with mental illness or working on recovery, or taking a recovery approach (in relation to themselves).  Our experiences don’t have to be the same, and I want to understand the nature of the differences: to what extent is it a difference in beliefs and values, to what extent a difference in the kinds of challenges we have faced?

WHO uses the ‘recovery’ framework in their materials, drawing extensively on work done by or in collaboration with users and survivors of psychiatry.  The understanding of recovery is not a simplistic one as ‘recovery from mental illness,’ rather it is (from Module 10):

• ‘a lifelong journey of growing and learning, gaining resilience, managing setbacks and celebrating successes’;
• ‘happening when people can live well in the presence or absence of a condition, diagnosis or symptoms’;
• ‘about regaining control of their identity and life, having hope for their life and living a life that has meaning for them whether that be through work, relationships, community engagement or some or all of these’.

There’s a lot to value there despite the criticisms I am making in the review process, where, like in this post, I am looking through two sets of eyes – one my own experience as someone who has no use for the mental health system (literally, I simply have no use for it, the same as, being a lesbian, I have no use for men as sexual partners), and the other my awareness that the mental health system is the social institution in modern societies that responds and takes responsibility for needs that I describe as healing and reconciliation.  Maybe this is what is happening: the mental health system is the way that modern society calls people back to itself, to its values and belonging, and it is the underlying beliefs and values of that society itself, reflected in the mental health system, that require self-hatred and alienation, separation and classification rather than creation and contribution from within.

Or maybe there is always a need to see with two sets of eyes, one that sees separation and another that sees the whole and calls it back to itself.

What I like about the recovery approach is building the person up rather than tearing them down (‘building on the person’s strengths and assets’).  The recovery approach could be an expression of emerging values in modern society that are turning back towards cooperation and respect for nature, including human bodies and inner knowing.  Our own innate capacity to heal and the creativity inherent in our movement and choices at every moment and throughout life.  (This is said to be related to Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, which I have been meaning to research.)

WHO also assumes the necessity to challenge a person’s ideas and keep these challenges in balance with support.  I would reframe to say that it can be valuable to offer a different perspective that occurs to you, that the other person may not be considering and that balances and complements the strengths they’ve been leaning hard on.  It may be something you have been thinking and then in a conversation the words come and the person can hear.  This is not ego and it is not a recipe or a practice.  If you go around challenging everybody, listening for holes and trying to fill them, you will be a smart-ass or a bully.  It’s part of building the person up, building on their strengths, and not a contradiction; not ‘here’s what you’re missing,’ but ‘consider this too.’

Back again to the experience of avoiding in the short term, something you deeply desire in the long-term because you are afraid of fucking it up.  This relates to what the recovery approach calls, ‘taking positive risks’.  But again it can’t be a recipe, and it can’t be ‘risk management’ where life is a negotiation between you and your therapist.  It’s ok if you mess up.  When you mess up is when you need to focus again on building yourself up and not tearing yourself down.

Implications for policy

Mental health systems should continue to learn from natural communities and supports – without trying to become them or to enfold them into its own structures, bring them under its governance (through regulation, funding or theory) or treat them as assets to be exploited in working towards a person’s recovery.  Mental health needs to keep its hands off my community and my healing, acknowledge its power, acknowledge that some people who use their services also have access to other spaces that do some of the same things and may do them better.

The dialogue and cross- fertilization can be useful – assuming we are taking CRPD absolute prohibition of coercive practices as a starting point – if both sides are recognized as being on equal terms, and imbalances in resources and institutional power and hegemony are acknowledged and compensated for.  The aim might be, to narrow the gap  so that eventually the public service functions related to healing and reconciliation are no longer separated from natural communities and natural communities have the strength and capabilities – and the power and freedom – to deal with all aspects of life for ourselves, not as an extraordinary time or isolated place but permeating and assuming the technologies and responsibilities needed everywhere.

Decisional dyslexia, and losing fear

Someone I love has dyslexia and I see how it affects her ability to navigate driving in a car or walking around in a city.  Which way to turn?  Left or right?  Does it mean that if I think I should go right, I should really go left?  And so on.

I realized that something comparable has at times affected me when I need to make a difficult decision.  It’s possible to lose my way, not because I secretly want something that I am ashamed of or because am not ready to have good things, but because of a cognitive or perceptual uncertainty that leaves me in a state of anxiety where I am likely to act quickly out of fear of doing something wrong.

Reading the book Spirited Lesbians, by Nett Hart (which should be known as a classic of lesbian feminism / feminist lesbianism), I was swimming through the chapter ‘Yellow’ where they (the book is written as ‘we’ and feels like ‘we’) talk about losing fear.

Sometimes as girls, our mothers try to protect us from rapists and other harms by teaching us to react to danger by telling authorities, calling home, doing the right thing that will get someone to come for us.  They didn’t teach us (mine didn’t teach me) to take care of ourselves out in the world.  To see clearly, look around for sisters, stand our ground, growl, or walk past stiff legged, raise our eyes and see where we are, who’s around, how we move.  Sometimes the best answer is, yes call home and have them come and get you.  But not always.  Sometimes home is where they will betray you into the hands of the violent state.

And, even with the best intentions home doesn’t take care of everything.  Reliable friends who love you don’t take the fear away.  Being in ourselves and for ourselves, knowing ourselves and our world, we act and do not second guess ourselves.  Second guessing is living with obedience, asking ‘what would jesus do’ or ‘how would my father/mother/sister think of that’ and it leaves us divided against ourselves.  Conscience comes not by internalizing shame but but externalizing justice.

Conscience is formed through living in community, acting in and on our relationships with other beings, human and non-human.  By attending to these relationships, not denying them and staying present with them, we can face the choices we have to make and the growls and howls and yelps we may need to express our truths, what we know.  We can also observe with increasing pleasure as others express their truths even if they contradict ours.

For me, all this is lesbian, lesbian feminist/feminist lesbian in origin, the principle of original female wholeness that is desire and self for itself as Nett Hart writes so beautifully in her book.  Don’t mistake what we’re talking about for patriarchal notions of ‘two vaginas for/from the male gaze’ – for patriarchy lesbians are nothing in ourselves, when we relate to each other and deny men we are a double negative.  For ourselves we are complete fullness, we are everything.

 

This connects to the ‘Double Female’ that Giti Thadani described in ‘Sakiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India,’ and to my exploratory writings on the theme of female autonomy as a first principle (including in my thesis Female Autonomy vs Gender Identity: A critical examination of gender identity in CEDAW jurisprudence and the Yogyakarta Principles).  It connects to my sense of intersectionality when I first explored it and tried thinking about the connections between feminism and abolition of forced psychiatry/ women’s oppression and psychiatric oppression, as a gap rather than a fertile space.  When we are ‘othered’ in the lesbian / feminist community itself, and have no secure home as lesbians in the psych survivor community, we find ourselves in multiply uncharted waters.  Some of us are uniquely alone and embrace that as a way of being in the world that does not have to be unsafe and is rather free to engage with all beings.  Nett Hart’s book acknowledges this also, that as lesbians swim upstream collectively and do not look at the banks but at our collective movement, some lesbians are in tributaries of their own also swimming upstream.  I love this recognition of the ways that we express our lesbian selves as part of a whole.