5:57am July 7, 2014

In which I am both conservative and progressive, and this is not a contradiction.

In my own way, I am extremely conservative. Most people would laugh to hear it, but hear me out. I believe in long roots and family traditions. I believe in things that go back, and back, and back into the depths of time. I don’t believe in doing new things for the sake of new things. I believe in elements of a culture that is dying, a culture in which my great-grandmother lived at home almost until the end because her son stayed home and took care of her, for decades, though she was bedridden and needed a lot of care. I believe in elements of my traditional cultures even though other elements of those cultures are so unspeakable I dare not discuss them even to refute them.

I am conservative because my family is like the forest. We grow from deep roots in the ground, and when we are cut down, we spring back up again from roots and nurse logs. We have deep connections to things I have no way of naming. We are disabled, all of us, yet none of us use the term, because so many of us are disabled that none of us need it. Many of us don’t even talk about disability, it’s simply assumed to be a fact of life, not something you need to discuss. Not something you need to name. But still, something that you factor into every decision you ever make about anything. If the eugenicists has gotten hold of my family in the heyday of eugenics — poor, disabled, and in some cases mixed-race — you can bet I wouldn’t be here.

My great-aunt had cretinism — that’s what they called it — and married a man like herself, but faced strong resistance because everyone was afraid they’d have babies like them. That’s as close as eugenics got to my family. There are stories in the family of children being taken into care because the parents were (presumed) mentally ill and not able to take care of them. A few people put into institutions. But for a family in which every member I can think of was disabled, we got off light.

I am conservative because my family’s disabled landscape mirrors the landscapes in which we have lived. Rocks, trees, broken, growing at weird angles, growing in improbable places, struck down by lightning, but still growing back from the stumps. If you really look at nature, you see disability in every rock and tree. If wood nymphs and other elemental forest creatures representing the trees and the rocks and the streams exist, they don’t look like a Waterhouse painting, they look like me and my family. They look like people with Down syndrome, people with missing arms, webbed toes, babies stillborn because they were too severely disabled to make it. Any anthropomorphic nature spirit worth its salt is going to look like a disabled person. Probably a disabled person of nonstandard gender identity, at that.

But this is where things get weird, with the being conservative thing.

Because for all the things I associate with being conservative. All the things I associate with keeping to the old ways, the best of the cultural values that are slipping away as everyone gets forced into the mainstream. What most people call conservative has no room for me or my survival.

I have no gender. No gender at all. People have different words for this: agender, neutrois, nongendered, genderless. I prefer genderless. I have only recently gotten the courage to be open about this part of my identity, to start writing about it. I have only very recently been able to get up the nerve to tell people that I prefer the pronouns sie/hir/hirself, or ze/zer/zem/zemself or xe/xyr/xem/xemself. I strongly prefer the first set of pronouns, but in a pinch any pronoun will do, gender-neutral if possible. I understand how hard it can be to use new pronouns: I have at least as much trouble with Spivak pronouns as some of my friends have with sie/hir pronouns. So I would never force anyone to use pronouns they can’t use or find too uncomfortable to use. But even to assert a preference for pronouns, even to use these pronouns myself, even if nobody else were ever to use them… it feels like being given pure oxygen on the ambulance when my pulse ox reading dips below 85%. It feels like being able to breathe again.

I have been a lesbian for longer than I’ve been actively trying to figure out gender. It’s the closest word that fits. I was raised female, and am primarily attracted to women, but also nonbinary and genderless people. As a genderless person, there is no community for people of my sexual orientation, so asking me to leave the lesbian community on this basis just contributes to the problems nonbinary people face finding any community at all. So I still identify as a lesbian, even though I only identify as a woman in a purely sociological context: I often face misogyny and sexism. (And before anyone asks, trans women are just as much women as cis women, and should not be shut out of the lesbian community. My presence there should not mean their absence.)

I am disabled, and poor, things that go hand in hand when you’re too severely disabled to be employable. My parents are elderly, disabled, retired, and poor.

I was raised female, as I mentioned before, and that comes with its own set of problems. I’m not always read as female now, but I’m not always read as male either, and quite often I’m read as “I don’t know what the fuck that thing is” with all the potential violence that entails. But I grew up subject to misogyny and sexism, I am still frequently subject to misogyny and sexism, and my genderlessness has not protected me against those things the way the trans community expects it would. So I do face sexist oppression even though I am technically genderless.

While I go by a gender-neutral name (Mel), I have been persuaded to use a female name (Amelia) as my legal name, in order to avoid getting killed in hospital situations. Not hyperbole — being developmentally disabled and genderless and visibly gender-deviant is a high-risk thing and it’s gotten me in danger before.

Being white is one of the few things I have unambiguously going for me in the lists of privilege and oppression that you normally hear about. Being white, and being a little too young to be middle-aged yet. And those things, despite being just two things in a sea of oppressed identities, are huge in terms of helping my survival. You can’t just add up oppressions mathematically, one matching the other exactly. White privilege, in particular, counts for a lot in a country founded on black slavery and American Indian genocide.

Why am I listing all these things?

Because these are the reasons I can’t be conservative. Or at least, these are the reasons that normal conservatism is off-limits to me. These are the reasons that I have to demand cultural change on a massive, widespread level. Not just change to the mainstream culture that I have little identification with. But also change to the smaller, forgotten cultures that my family belongs to. The Okies, the Ozarks, the Minnesota Swedes. Not just those broad cultures, but the particular pieces of those cultures that my family is a part of. Because every culture, no matter how small it seems from the outside, has endless variations known only to those on the inside. And my cultures I learned from my family, and our particular take on these cultures is as shaped by things like generational poverty and disability, as it is by what region the people came from.

Sometimes your culture surprises you.

My father is politically liberal and culturally conservative, at least that’s the shorthand way we say it in our family. I expected a showdown of sorts when I came out to him as gay, and when I later tried to explain my first fumbling attempts at discovering my gender identity. His reaction to each was exactly the same:

“I grew up on a farm. You had hens that crowed like roosters. You had bulls that mated with other bulls. I saw it all the time. It’s natural. It’s okay, and anyway I knew this about you before you told me.”

I felt so accepted I almost cried with relief. This is the best of how our family handles things. We go back to what we’ve seen animals do, trees do, rocks do. We go back to our understanding of nature in order to help us understand ourselves, who are after all just another part of nature.

People assume that conservative means unaccepting of this kind of difference. Sometimes it does. But sometimes it doesn’t. Eli Clare is originally from a rural logging town of the Siskiyous near where my parents live, somewhat near where my mother grew up as well. He explains how if a new lesbian moved to town, he would fear for her survival. But he has a lesbian aunt whose lover has always been accepted as a member of the family, fully and without question. Nobody refers to her as her lover, nobody calls them lesbians, nobody would ever speak about it openly. But for every cultural marker that is used to show someone is someone’s spouse, she is given that marker. She is given all the privileges of being a spouse. And this is in a community known to most people as ‘rednecks’ and mocked mercilessly for being ‘backwards’ and ‘stupid’. Kinda like Okies and mountain people.

Mind you, these privileges are not privileges given to every lesbian in a community like that one. Any lesbian from out of town could potentially be in danger for her life. But a lesbian who has always been a part of the community might be able to quietly set up a life with a lover and have everything be as okay as it can get in that community. Nobody, least of all any of us who have lived or have relatives in highly conservative communities, is painting these communities as utopias of acceptance, nor are we trying to downplay the dangers. We are just saying, things are different than you think. And there are people who would choose a semi-closeted lesbian life in the rural community they grew up in, rather than an out-of-the-closet life in an urban area known for its vibrant gay community. And many people would never ever trade in the deep-rooted acceptance they get from their home community, for the liberal tolerance they would encounter elsewhere, from strangers who pat themselves on the back for not running away screaming.

I am upset that I can’t be conservative all the way. There is so much dying that I want to conserve. There is so much good in things that have been tested by time. And among liberals and progressives, I don’t always see a respect for that. I see trees being pulled up by the roots, and the roots hacked to pieces and destroyed, made into sculptures and heirlooms but no longer living, no longer the traditions that sustained a community. And I see this happening to trees that weren’t doing anyone any harm in the first place. For all that they talk about environmental damage, progressives’ approach to my cultures feels too close to clear-cutting old-growth redwood forests, for my tastes.

And yet I have to choose things, too.

I have to choose to forge cultures that will accept me, all of me, not just pieces of me, not just with pieces of me hidden. I have to choose to forge cultures that will accept other people who have been cast out of mainstream society, including the cultures I call home. I have to choose. It is hard.

We have to make room for trans women, trans men, genderqueers, nonbinary people, genderless people, genderfluid people, and everyone else on the vast spectrum of transgender identities. We have to make room for intersex people. We have to make room for gay men, lesbians, bisexual people, asexual people, pansexual people, polyamorous people, queer people, and all the variations on sexuality that exist. There are many variations on gender and sexuality that don’t even have names. There are many variations on gender and sexuality that don’t exist within the white, Western, queer community, and don’t want to, given that it’s white Westerners that did their best to destroy their own cultures’ genders and sexualities to begin with, then tries to steal them back as ’trans’ and the like. And the world needs to make room for all of these.

On a personal level, I need room to be recognized as genderless, I need room for my raised-female past and continuing status under sexism to be acknowledged, I need room for my lesbianism (since I have no better word for my sexual orientation) to be recognized. Hell, not recognized, I want these things to be accepted and celebrated, as natural as the deep roots that bind my family together. I want my culture, any culture, to see these things as beautiful.

I want to be able to go outside wearing whatever I want to wear, from a Victorian men’s suit to a granola hippie maxi dress, and not have anyone assume it reflects on my gender. I know this will never happen in my lifetime, but it’s a dream nonetheless.  

I want to be able to — if I ever find anyone I love in this way — love a woman as my life partner and live with her and have everyone accept her the way they accept that my parents are married. And I want her to be accepted both by my family and by lesbians, whether she is cis or trans, without that making the slightest bit of difference to her acceptance.

I want to not have to live in poverty. I want a community that accepts the contributions I make, whether they are monetary or not. I want to live in a community that takes care of its own. A community where when someone needs something, someone else does it, even if the two people don’t like each other. These are actually values I consider somewhat conservative in nature, although they could also be progressive, too. Ideally it would be the best of both worlds.

I want to live in a community where racism is not acceptable. Not just the racism that has my grandmother finally in her nineties making the switch from calling people “n-words” to calling them “coloreds”. But the racism I take part in, the racism all white people take part in, both the obvious profound racism and the subtle but equally profound racism. The racism of progressive whites and conservative whites alike. The power structures that allow this to continue.

I want to live in a community where oppression is not acceptable, where the structures that create oppression have been systematically dismantled and left impotent. Where oppression is understood as a multifaceted reality that depends on both individual people and larger power structures, and where each person has to do their part to get rid of it.

And all of this means that I can’t just be conservative.

Because part of being conservative is always looking to the past, looking to tradition for answers. And there’s a lot of ugly traditions out there. There’s a lot of ugly traditions in my own cultures. There’s a lot of ugly traditions in all cultures. And saying “It’s just my culture” doesn’t excuse it, doesn’t make it any better, doesn’t get rid of the problem.

So I need to be progressive because I need to make changes. To my culture, to mainstream culture, to other cultures. Because I need to be part of making changes that allow for a wider group of people to be accepted as part of the landscape. Not just within individual families that accept us personally, but within whole communities and cultures.

And that means that I can’t just be conservative.

But.

I can still be partially conservative. I can still conserve the parts of my cultures that nobody else, least of all progressives, seems to know exists. I can still tap into the deep roots in the forest of my family, the ones that matter, the ones I can’t throw away, could never throw away, could never want to throw away. I can still take the (conservative, in their own way) cultural values that nobody progressive has ever heard about, and use them to inform activism that everyone considers progressive by default. Because there are a lot of things culturally that are not bad to preserve and conserve. Not everything from the past is backwards and ignorant. Not everything new is good and wonderful. Everything needs to be evaluated on its own merits, not treated like a football team where you choose your side and choose your part line and that’s it.

I want to live in the redwoods and worship the redwood soil and mist and trees and sorrel and not be persecuted for my religion. I want to have an X on my driver’s license, birth certificate, and passport, instead of M or F, and I want to be addressed as Mx. instead of Ms. or Mr. I want people to grow up learning all the nonbinary pronouns in existence, so that people who have trouble with new words as adults won’t have trouble calling me sie and hir, or pronouncing them (see and hear).  I want to have the option to modify my body according to the body map in my mind, even if it doesn’t perfectly match a “male” or a “female” body.  I want to marry a woman or nonbinary or genderless person if I want to, regardless of their assigned gender, and have it be just as acceptable as any other marriage. I want to be able to do all this and live in a community made up of the people I grew up around, the people I call family, the Okies, the Ozarks, the Minnesota Swedes, the communities in California and Oregon that they all somehow ended up in eventually. And be accepted by people in these cultures. And be accepted as someone who has deep roots in these cultures, and fully appreciates those roots, even if I don’t act like the stereotype of any of them.

And somehow I think that may be too much to ask, and it makes me cry sometimes.

Because a part of me is conservative to the bone, just… not in the ways that most people have come to take the word ‘conservative’. Not in the ways that either most progressives or most conservatives would recognize. And a part of me knows that I will never survive, people like me will never survive, people like the ones I care about will never survive, without changes being made. And yet I can’t get behind “all change is good just because it’s change” or “there’s nothing good that comes out of old cultural traditions”, because of that conservative streak that tells me I am alive, my family is alive, we have all survived because of traditions that have never been written down, never been talked about, never even been spoken aloud. But that have been passed down with each generation nonetheless, actions speaking louder than words. I am conservative because I don’t want to lose those things. And I am progressive because my survival depends as much on changing bad traditions, as on keeping good ones. There’s no contradiction here, it’s just confusing to people who aren’t used to seeing things this way.

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