Verbal Spankings and the People Who Love Them

There is perhaps nothing more satisfying as a teacher than when students say something asinine, and rather than having to respond, other students, students who actually get it, respond instead. This happened to me yesterday and I’m still completely overjoyed about it. I think the joy is two-fold. One, I didn’t have to  respond and get read as a biased responder because I teach the course and two, some of the students that I’m teaching are actually on the right page! They are being thoughtful and critical, even of themselves. Here’s what happened.

We were talking about gay rights, and specifically, Kenji Yoshino’s book Covering, where Yoshino argues that gays are allowed to be gay, but asked to cover (hide or tone down their gayness). Through personal experience and an examination of numerous court cases, Yoshino argues that while gays are protected as gay, they are not protected when they “act” on their gayness. Or when they “flaunt” it. When they take their gayness to “the extreme”. Of course, these acts of flaunting, these extremes are often broadly interpretted as any affirmation of the previously mentioned and supposedly protected gay identity.

So I asked my students what it meant to be “extreme” in your gayness. One student claimed she felt Gay Pride Parades in which men were naked but for body glitter was an example of extreme gay behaviour. She felt that kind of over the top behaviour ultimately hurt the gay rights movement because conservatives would see such events and it would affirm to them all the stereotypes of gayness they held. Before I was able to respond, a slew of hands went up. One woman suggested that gay pride parades specifically were not about sending a message to straight communities or trying to win support from conservative groups. Rather, they were a celebration of gay community, a moment where one could be queer and entertain the possibility of happiness, rather than be constantly faced with the dangers of being openly gay in a homophobic society. Another woman responded by saying that the notion that one could be extreme in their identity seemed ultimately ridiculous. If that were the case, she could be extremely black, or too black. I followed up by asking if she felt that when older folks wore stereotypically old folks clothes, like pantsuits, they hurt the battle against ageism. Of course not.

A different student suggested that “extreme” gayness, for her, was when people wore rainbow or triangle pins, buttons, or pathches on their clothing, hats, or bags. I responded by asking if she felt that Christians wearing crosses would be flaunting their Christianity by wearing a cross. She said no. Then, other students chimed in. One addressed the speaker specifically, saying “You have on a specific football team’s hat, and I really hate that team. I’m so sick of seeing those logos. It’s really disgusting that you would flaunt that.” He then pointed to his shirt, which had an action movie hero on it, and apologized to his classmates for his shameless flaunting of his action movie love. Another student said that she couldn’t believe that she had made these kinds of demands of people her whole life, and only now realised it. She said that if someone had made the demands of her that society routinely makes of queers and other minorities, she would be livid. She actually owned her part in making covering demands.

It was kind of amazing; the whole last 30 minutes of class were. It was an extremely rewarding teaching moment and there are so few, that I felt the need to share and document. So yay! students. You’ve restored my faith and my enthusiasm for doing this, at least for the time being.

what grief is

Someday, you will be teaching Race, Gender and Sexuality during the Spring semester. You will spend two weeks talking about the social construction of gender, and more importantly, the social construction of sex. You talk about how biology is flawed, how a two-sex system is a myth, how bodies themselves are never so simple as male or female. You will try to convince your students, at least if they won’t agree, to at least think: think about the possibilities–think about what it would mean to deconstruct this system, to be free of it. 

You will move on in your discussion to talk about sexuality, race. You will draw parallels between the constructions in these “truths.” You will explain that while “God said so” might work for your pastor, it is not a well-reasoned argument in the classroom. You will talk about discrimination, privilege, inequality, hate crimes. You will make jokes with your students about Kanye West, the “gay” agenda, abstinence only education. 

Then, two days away from the end of a class you feel is going really well, a class in which you have tackled serious issues, and have succeeded, at least sometimes, in helping students discover a new perspective and reconsider what they knew to be true, you will casually mention Thomas Beatie, a pregnant transgender man. 

You are unprepared for the repsonse, the sheer hostility such a figure provokes. You are caught so off guard that your breath is literally knocked out of your lungs, and you can feel, if someone says one more hateful thing, you might scream, or worse, cry. You rally as best you can, trying to remind students what you’ve been doing for the past six weeks. You remind them to question their knee jerk reactions, probe as to why they feel as they do. What are they afraid of? What is motivating them? What are they trying to protect? You try your very best to be level–to avoid “going off” or responding out of sheer pain and rage, because you know that such a repsponse is immediately discredited. You remind them they cannot possibly understand what it means to be Beatie–that his life has very likely not been fun and fancy free. That he probably didn’t just wake up one morning and decide he didn’t like boobs or periods and decided to take care of that. That he didn’t later decide he wanted to go back to “being a woman” by having a kid. That he doesn’t just get to have whatever he wants, whenever, how he wants it: as though being a transman and carrying a child is for kicks, just to show he can do it, or worse, just to piss you off. You can’t know, you tell them. 

When I got home, I wanted to call you. I wanted to say:

Today, today I fought for us. I fought for you. I do this all the time, but today I felt you with me. Today those tears unshed were yours. Today the control I exerted was for you, for me, for what we had, and what I hope we can have again. I don’t mean this to say I was fighting for our relationship, because that is over. I mean to say I was fighting for a world where people like you and I could be in love and have a life and just fucking be. 

And when this happens, when this day happens, and I come home, and I cannot call you, I realize this fight, this fight that I have fought a 1,000 times and will fight a 1,000, 000 more–I am losing this fight, as I lost the one for our relationship. In this, as in myself and us, I have failed.