Sexuality as choice vs sexuality as inborn: a false dichotomy?

I recently found this via Trinity's Livejournal. While i probably have somewhat more sympathy for the radical feminist position than Trinity does (or at least i find radical feminism's critiques of patriarchy and society in general powerful and persuasive enough to consider it a hugely important body of theory despite some of the things i'm not sure i can accept about it, and i tend to think it's a straw man to consider all radical feminism to be dependent on some of the more extreme premises inherent in this checklist), there are certain things that some people seem to regard as essential to radical feminism which i will instantly turn into your enemy if you try to defend them. Transphobia is one of them, condemnation of any kind of consensual sexual practices as somehow equatable to rape is another (which Trinity more than amply expresses my views on). One which i hadn't really encountered before (or at least not so explicitly) is this "all women are lesbians, and if they think they're not they need to be liberated from their false consciousness" thing...

OK, so, on a personal level, i really don't "get" why a woman (or a man, for that matter) would be sexually attracted to a man - but i don't doubt or question the reality that women, and men, are sexually attracted to men...

The responses to Yawning Lion's post point out how the "sexuality is malleable" argument is used as fuel for condemnation of people's sexuality and attempts to brainwash it out of people (which have a lot of parallels with the many nasty things that have been done to disabled people under the ideology of "behaviour modification"); however, it strikes me that the idea that sexuality is inborn has the potential to be used in oppressive ways, or to deny people's lived realities, as well...

The debate about whether sexuality is something people are born with, something socialised into people through external agencies beyond their control (ranging from intra-family abuse at the individual level to patriarchal cultural values at the "macro" level), or something that people freely choose, seems to be one that will never end - but, IMO, it's actually a distraction in terms of liberation...

One (disabled, lesbian) friend said to me that the reason she thought a higher proportion of disabled than non-disabled people were queer is because of the higher likelihood of sexual abuse happening to disabled children (either in family-home or institutional settings). The issue i had with this theory was that, if it was accepted as true, it could be used as fuel for arguments that queer sexualities are the "product" of abuse and therefore somehow pathological.

However it seems to me that the libertarian response to this, and the one which would be consistent with the social model of disability, and acceptance-of-diversity in general, should not be to deny vociferously that a person's sexuality could ever be influenced or "caused" by abuse, but to affirm its validity regardless of that fact.

Likewise (or conversely), a lot of people seem to have a lot invested in denying the possibility that someone could "choose" their sexuality, seemingly based on the idea that something freely chosen is somehow a less valid part of one's identity than something congenital and inalterable.

My response to that debate is: why can't it be all of the options? Why can't it be accepted that some people are born gay, some achieve gayness, and some have gayness thrust upon them? There are as many possible experiences of sexuality as there are people with sexualities; I don't see why it has to be either/or, when it might be option 1 in some cases, option 2 or 3 in others, and a bit of all of them in yet other cases...

There's an obvious parallel here with disability and impairment. Attitudes towards disability may vary between those with congenital impairments and those with acquired impairments, but neither group is any less "genuinely" impaired or disabled than the other. Why should it be any different with congenital or acquired sexualities? (I am going to post fairly soon on hierarchies of impairment...)

There is not necessarily a hard and fast distinction between aspects of a person which are "freely chosen", and those which are "socialised", due to biology or to any other external factor. One thing which is important on a personal level to me is trying to disentangle those "lacking" aspects of my own personality which are due to my impairment, and thus "inborn", from those which are the result of depression and/or PTSD from living in a society without understanding or acceptance of that impairment; however, i recognise that what is really important is not whether some hypothetical version of myself, with identical biology but raised in a "perfect", prejudice-free society, would have those negative traits or not, but whether or not it's feasible for me to change them. Even if I, or any other disabled/queer/whatever person, are who we are because of things that happened to us that "should not have" happened to us, we still deserve acceptance for who we are, not an obligation to change or "cure" ourselves (unless, of course, we want to change in that way).

Of course, that analogy doesn't really include the "freely chosen" bit: having tried and failed to be attracted to people of both sexes, i am forced to conclude that i cannot change my sexuality, and that i am exclusively attracted to women whether i like it or not. (Thus i probably shouldn't feel the guilt i sometimes do over being "inherently patriarchal" or "sexist" for such "discrimination"). However, i wouldn't ever try to deny someone's claim that ze did choose hir own sexuality. (I'd probably submit that such a person would have to have had the capability to fancy both genders to begin with, in order to have chosen one or the other, but i have no pronlem with different people having different capabilities in the realm of sexuality any more than in any other realm of human experience). Thus, while i might kind of envy someone who can choose hir sexuality, i believe that, consistent with libertarianism as a general social principle, they have the right to make that choice, and no one has the right to deny them that choice, regardless of whether or not everyone else has the ability to make that choice (I also need to write something about libertarianism and recognising different capabilities...) - a "chosen" sexuality is neither more or less valid IMO than an "unchosen" one.

It is up to us and us alone, whoever and whatever we are, to conclude both whether we are "broken", and whether we want or need to be "fixed". If a behaviour or a human difference harms no one, then no one has a right to condemn or attempt to alter it in anyone but hirself, and whether it is "chosen" or not is immaterial...

(this turned out a lot longer and ramblier than i intended it to... but at least i wrote it :) )

Weird writer's block thing...

At the moment i seem to have this strange thing going on in my head where, for the last 5 days or so, there have been an increasing list of blog posts that i have been intending to write, saying to myself every day "i'll definitely write them today"... and then not writing them.

I think this might have something to do with the recent change in the weather and its physical and mental effects on me, although i'm not 100% sure. I've certainly been feeling a lot of general depression, isolation and alienation from myself and the world in the last week or so that i can't really attribute to anything else. I'll probably post in more detail soon about how i feel about the whole SAD phenomenon, in relation to evolutionary biology and stuff...

Anyway, i think i've been given a kick up the arse by the fact that Miss Crip Chick says that I have inspired her... which means i'm going to have to at least attempt to live up to that... so i'm going to at least attempt to write something tonight...

if i don't post again tonight, it'll be another few days, cos i'm going to be doing stuff over the weekend... but part of my purpose of posting this is that seeing it on my blog will make me post things...

(i'm also coming up with a really frustrating temporary mental block on whether it's spelt "weird" or "wierd"... i've aleady edited the post title twice, and neither spelling looks right...)

(oh yeah, for anyone who might be reading this and want to be involved in Housing4All, there is now a mailing list which can be signed up to here)

Housing4All: demo report and photos

On Monday (17th September 2007) the newly formed campaign group Housing4All held its first demonstration for accessible housing for disabled people and against Birmingham City Council leaving disabled people homeless, outside the Council House in Birmingham City Centre.

10 protestors from Birmingham (all of whom both had some form of physical or mental impairment, and had been homeless due to housing inequality and access issues) "camped" outside the main entrance to Council House with sleeping bags and placards (with such slogans as "You say we have "special needs", but we just need equal rights", "Free Our People" and "Housing is a Human Right") for several hours, drawing the attention of council employees, passers-by (including homeless people), and workers dismantling the stages for the arts festival which had been held in Birmingham over the weekend.

They were later joined by people who had come from as far as Cambridge and Reading after having seen the protest advertised on Indymedia.

Housing4All demanded an audience with John Lines (BCC Cabinet member in charge of housing issues), but were told that he was in an "executive meeting" that lasted all day and thus was unable to speak to the demonstrators. However, Neil Traynor, a Housing Strategic manager for BCC, did come out of Council House to address the protest, and agreed to speak to 4 of the protestors in Council House's reception area. He promised to look at the case, talk to the Housing Department and get back to Housing4All on Tuesday with a view to identifying 2 bedroom properties which might be suitable to have adaptations put in place for the disabled man and member of Housing4All who had been allowed to become homeless despute being "top priority" on BCC's housing list for almost 2 years (however, as of today (Wednesday) there has been no reply from Traynor or his department).

A passing Green Party activist took photographs (below) and pledged her party's support for Housing4All and for the cause of disabled people's liberation in general, and Liberal Democrat councillor Emily Cox also gave protestors her card and offered what help she could in influencing the Council to provide accessible housing.

After the demo, protestors went to a nearby cafe for refreshments and a discussion of where to go next. The activists from Reading and Cambridge confirmed that the criminal lack of affordable, accessible accommodation is not just a Birmingham issue but a nationwide issue, and many housing-related issues (including squatting, housing co-ops, energy sustainability and the closure and selling off of "care homes") were discussed, with agreement that a national network of activists for accessible housing was urgently needed.

It was agreed that there would be more Housing4All actions in Birmingham, with the next tentatively scheduled for approximately a fortnight away.

To get in touch with Housing4All phone Tom on 0121 2447985 or 07816 275985, leave a comment here or email me. A mailing list will soon be set up for discussion and update...



Housing4All protestors outside Council House


Neil Traynor, housing manager for BCC, talks to protestors

I want

seen outside a bike shop on my local high street...



(image shows an adult sized tricycle with a big shopping basket on the back, painted in bright shiny red and black, and with the word "FREEDOM" in bold black letters on the side of the frame)

just need to add a couple of pennants (red&black/green&black flags) and a few stickers with DAN, anti-war, anarchist etc slogans on... how much more radical crip chic can you get? ;)

(it's still not as cool as Esther's recumbent, tho...)

The Force is with us

(from a very hilariously mistranslated Chinese subtitled pirate DVD of Star Wars Episode 3 - see here)

Housing4All: action in Birmingham on Monday!

Housing4All is a newly formed campaign for accessible housing for all citizens, highlighting the totally unacceptable lack of accessible housing for disabled people in housing need in Birmingham.

Yet another disabled person has become homeless in Birmingham this week as a result of the criminal lack of accessible housing provision by Birmingham City Council. The individual, who is a wheelchair user and also has seizures, does not want to be named publicly as he is going through a very stressful time. Despite having been categorised as the top level of priority on the housing list for over a year, and having been promised accessible accommodation over a month ago, and despite the lobbying of the Centre for Independent Living (CIL), he has been offered nothing suitable, and now has to leave the property where he has been living temporarily, with his belongings packed in boxes, by this Monday (17th September).

As a result of this, Housing4All has been formed as a campaign for accessible housing for all citizens, and has demanded an immediate response from Birmingham City Council to this inhuman and totally unacceptable treatment (which is in breach of EU human rights legislation), and the immediate provision of accessible accommodation which Birmingham City Council up to now have failed to fulfil.

This case is just one of many examples of disabled people across the UK being treated as less than full human beings by not having their most basic rights and needs met. We demand, not "special treatment", but equal treatment with all other people, meaning that we have the same access as anyone else to all the fundamental aspects of full membership in society - whether housing, employment, medical treatment or any of the other social opportunities that non-disabled people take for granted, but that we are prevented from accessing by social and economic barriers unfairly placed in our way.

In Brown's Britain, despite central and local government rhetoric about independence and empowerment, many disabled people's only choices are homelessness, completely inaccessible housing in which it would be impossible to live a tolerable life, or imprisonment without charge or hope of release in the totalitarian institutions euphemistically named "care homes" (which have been recently ruled by the Law Lords to not be covered by the Human Rights Act).

If any other group in society were subjected to this, it would be seen as completely outrageous and unacceptable by 99% of the political spectrum, but because we are seen pervasively, even by those who claim to defend "freedom" and human rights, as inferior by our very nature this sort of inhuman treatment goes unremarked on. We demand independent living for all disabled people, regardless of the severity of their impairments, in housing with all necessary adaptations to give us equal access to fundamental human freedoms as non-disabled people. Liberty and Equality must be for all, or they are for none!

If Housing4All has not received a response from Birmingham City Council about this case by 5pm on this Friday (15th September), then we will take non-violent direct action on Monday. Details of the time and location of the action will be announced over this weekend. Anyone who is interested in becoming involved with Housing4All or in being a part of the action can contact Tom Comerford (Coordinator of Housing4All and member of DAN, the Disabled People's Direct Action Network) by email on tomcomdan@hotmail.co.uk or by phone on 0121 2447985 or 07816 275985.

White Crow

I've seen quite a few crows around Birmingham with some white in their plumage - typically one or two wing feathers, but several (especially in the Cannon Hill Park/Rea Valley Walk area) with enough to look mottled with white or almost piebald. This one, which i saw in the Hall Green/Shirley area, had more white on it than any i'd previously seen...

(Apologies for the blurriness of the pics, which is due to the crow being about 100m away, the closest i could get before it flew away)





(It also looks more grey than white in the pics (at least on this monitor); it looked more white to me when i was taking the photo...)

I'm not sure if there's any advantage or disadvantage to white feathers on a crow; possibly it might make it more conspicuous and more of a target to predators, but i'm not sure what would eat a crow in a big city anyway. I imagine that living in relatively predator-free urban environments enables animals to survive with a lot of conditions that would make them more vulnerable to predators in the wild (that would certainly account for the number of disabled pigeons i see, limping about with multiple toes or even whole feet missing). It's cool to see intraspecific biodiversity in species other than humans, anyway...

(Another odd thing about crows in Birmingham is that i see them pretty frequently gathering in large flocks (50+) - rooks and jackdaws usually do that, but crows tend to be solitary, hence the saying "a crow in a flock is probably a rook, a rook on its own is probably a crow". These are definitely carrion crows (Corvus corone), tho... must be another adaptation-to-urban-environment thing...)

Pity is NOT friendship.

This advert has recently been appearing all over Birmingham. For those who are visually impaired or whose browsers don't display the image, the text of the ad says "Make a friend, change a life... Bring a little sunshine into someones [sic] life, become a friend to a disabled person. Call Share-Friends on 0121 303 0572, www.birmingham.gov.uk/share". The picture shows a black woman in a wheelchair sitting next to a white woman presumably in some other kind of seat (they appear to be sitting in a garden), seemingly talking and laughing with each other. I've seen basically the same advert around Brum before with pictures of different people (in each case a visibly disabled person and an apparently non-disabled person), but at the moment it seems to be just the one picture pretty much everywhere, on all the council advertising hoardings.

(This particular photo is a bit odd actually, because on my first glance at it, i didn't notice the wheelchair (you can't see much of it) and presumed the white woman to be the disabled person and the black woman the non-disabled one. The black woman is quite smartly dressed and, if interpreted stereotypically, her body language could indicate that she is "in charge" both of her own life and in the friendship situation. The white woman is sitting in a kind of "slumped" position, wearing shapeless clothes and looks a bit like the stereotypical image of a "disempowered" mentally disabled person. Possibly this is intentional, i don't know...)

SHARE (why the name is capitalised i don't know, since it doesn't seem to be an acronym) is a council service aimed at disabled people, but seemingly rooted in a medical/deficit model of disability. In addition to this "Share Friends" programme, it runs "Share Options", which seems to be only for people with physical impairments, helping them to access leisure activities, and "share Positive Moves", which is only for people with learning impairments, and essentially seems to be foster care, but for adults. The existence of the latter says a couple of particularly telling things to me, about a) the post-Thatcherite outsourcing of previously state-provided services to the "private sphere" of the family (with typically pseudo-libertarian rhetoric ignoring or disguising the fact that the family can be just as much an oppressive institution as any "total institution" run by the state), and b) the fact that adults with learning disabilities are viewed, fairly transparently, by service providers as analogous to children.

This service seems to me to be a weird mockery of friendship. The SHARE website says "Service users who are eligible for befriending must... [h]ave a poor social network and few social or leisure opportunities". Who would want to be stigmatised by being labelled in this way? My impairment does affect my ability to make and keep friends, which leads me often to deeply painful feelings of isolation and even despair, but i can think of few things more degrading than being assessed by the council for how lonely and isolated one is in order to be considered eligible for an artificial "friendship service". Phrases like "Bring a little sunshine into someone's life" are so patronising and pity-eliciting that they are just sickening.

Under the section labelled "What are the characteristics a SHARE volunteer needs?", one of the characteristics listed is "Able to treat their friend as an adult - a volunteer should recognise that sometimes disabled people are treated in a child like way, but your friendship should be equal." - but how can a friendship be equal if one of the people in it has been formally assigned by a local government body to be a "friend" to the other, and "recruited" through such blatantly patronising rhetoric?

The sort of person who would volunteer for something like this is extremely likely to be the sort of patronising "do-gooder" who would expect a "poor little disabled person" to be oh so grateful for their stooping down from a position of non-disabled privilege to oh so magnanimously offer them the gift of (inevitably profoundly unequal) "friendship". This is about as far as i can imagine from a true, reciprocal friendship. True friendships are freely entered into by both parties, based on things that they naturally, organically find in common with one another (even though i appreciate, all too much, that many impairments, including my own, can make that more difficult - but i just can't see any other way); a formal structure (like a school or an office, for example) might provide the opportunity for a real friendship to occur, but in no way can it ensure that a frirndship will develop.

Friendship for me is fundamentally a relationship of equality; in fact, it's the paradigmatic freely-entered-into relationship of equality, It's about reciprocity, about love and loyalty freely given and freely returned, about mutual aid. True friendship is something of such emotional and intellectual heaviness for me that i think it would be fair to say it's something sacred - it's the model, for me, of what, in my ideal world, all human relationships would be like. It's also something that, for me, is very, very rare (and all the more prized for its rarity); there have probably never been more than 10 people at any one time, and no more than 50 in my whole life so far, that i can/could count as true friends. There have been far, far too many people who i have wanted to be able to count as true friends, but who i (for reasons then and in many cases still unknown to me) fell away from (or they fell away from me). Nevertheless, i would never in my wildest or most despairing dreams consider applying for an artificial version of friendship, built on such a profoundly unequal starting point.

I did consider the possibility that disabled people could subvert this scheme by using the volunteering structure to build contacts with one another (taking on the "client" and "befriender" roles arbitrarily) and build genuinely equal and reciprocal solidarity-based friendships (and get some paid expenses out of it), but i don't know if that could work in reality - such a friendship would still, to me, seem "artificial", tainted by the falseness of its structure. I believe it's no coincidence that most of my closest friends are fellow disabled people (and those who aren't mostly either have some level of neurodiversity about them, even if they don't identify as "disabled" because of it, or have had experiences for other reasons which parallel those many or most disabled people have had), but simply having an impairment, or even being socially isolated as a result of disabling attitudes to it, don't in any way guarantee a desire for solidarity on the basis of disability, and certainly don't imply the desire, or the ability, to be friends with every single other disabled person...

Friendship genuinely does change lives. But friendship is free and equal. Pity is neither. Condescending portrayals of disabled people and artificial schemes such as this can only perpetuate disabled people's social exclusion and prejudiced views of us as inferior to others.

For some great posts about pity (posted in the blogswarm against Jerry Lewis's telethon, which i rather stupidly missed), go to these blogs:

Andrea's Buzzing About
Ballastexistenz
Chaotic Idealism
Growing Up With A Disability
The Rett Devil's Rants
SM Feminist
Whose Planet Is It Anyway?

(order is strictly alphabetical... apologies to any i missed!)

People stopping blogging, deleting their posts, and stuff.

I just found out that Elizabeth McClung (of Screw Bronze) has deleted all her blog posts from the last month, because she has come to believe that her writing "is basically crap". The posts deleted included a really good review of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, pointing out the same major problems in its treatment of gender identity that had bothered me when i read it, and i had been planning to link to it in a few places (notably Barbelith) and to comment on it with my thoughts and those of my (female-identified) intersex friend who also read it. There were also quite a few of her usual witty, sarcastic, intelligent and insightful posts on disability, impairment and sexuality issues.

I respect the right of any writer to withdraw their own work, and i tend to think that people know themselves better than anyone else does - but, as one of the many people (judging by the comments to her post about the deletion) who didn't think her writing was "crap", it saddens me to lose her posts. I don't know who has been telling her that her writing is crap, but, IMO, they are very, very wrong.

Then there's Trinity of The Strangest Alchemy, who posted recently that she was going to stop blogging about feminism. Trinity's blog (which, unfortunately, because it's on Livejournal, i can't post comments on) is/was one of the main places online that i went for intelligent, taboo-busting discussions of feminism, particularly sex-positive feminism) - threads like this one, this one and this one are great examples. While i didn't always agree with her 100% (she's a little harder on radical feminism than i would be, but as she is/was one of the few voices providing balance to the rad-fem/sex-pos debate, i don't mind that), she was, again, massively insightful to read, and again it saddens me that i won't see more writing on that topic from her.

Other people have done this, and i know it's a normal part of life in the blogosphere - Thirza of Fit of Pique, for example, hasn't blogged since April (i still put hir on my blogroll because of some really great posts from January/February), and i realise that ze probably stopped because of major real life identity changes. Larry Arnold hasn't blogged in a while, but i know he's busy organising stuff in real life and will probably get back to blogging soon. I've found quite a few other blogs that i would have linked to if the last post on them hadn't been months or years ago.

It still saddens me to "lose" good writers, tho. Elizabeth in particular, if you're reading this, i think that your Middlesex review wasn't just good, but important, as you are the first person i've come across who has pointed out the same problems i saw with the book, and i'd really like to see it online again...

Alan Moore knows the score

Alan Moore, legendary comic book writer (author of, among many other masterworks of the form, V For Vendetta and Swamp Thing), links anarchism, biodiversity and (implicitly) the social model of disability in an Infoshop News interview here:

Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world. Nature, and the forces of evolution—if you happen to be living in a country where they still believe in the forces of evolution, of course —did not really see fit to follow that “in unity and in uniformity there is strength” idea. If you want to talk about successful species, then you’re talking about bats and beetles; there are thousands of different varieties of different bat and beetle. Certain sorts of tree and bush have diversified so splendidly that there are now thousands of different examples of this basic species. Now you contrast that to something like horses or humans, where there’s one basic type of human, and two maybe three basic types of horses. In terms of the evolutionary tree, we are very bare, denuded branches. The whole program of evolution seems to be to diversify, because in diversity there is strength.

And if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.

(Can Blogger do the quote tag where the quote is indented from the rest of the text as well as bolded?)