Today, I attended the first of an 8-week series of a workshop on sexual orientation and gender identity at my new church (new because I'm new to the area--and I really must learn to call it a fellowship and not a church). It's actually part of the UU Welcoming Congregation process, but in this case, it was being done as an Interfaith effort and was actually run by a woman from another church. While most of the people there were UUs, there were people from other denominations, too, including a minister.
I learned a couple new terms that I think are worth mentioning, not because being up on the latest PC terminology is important, but because each has important implications.
The first is affectional orientation as an alternative to sexual orientation. This is important because it speaks to the truth that orientation is not about sex and is not limited to sex. People who are straight get that they're straight all the time and that being straight isn't about having sex or engaging in various sex acts or wanting to do so. It is about who you love and who you are as much as it is about whom you sleep with. More, in fact. So affectional orientation serves as a reminder that being gay is not about "having gay sex"; that engaging in sex acts with a person of the same gender doesn't make you gay; ad that engaging in sex acts with a person of the other gender doesn't make you straight.
The second is cisgender. Turns out, I'm a cisgender woman. This is a term that is, to some degree, opposed to transgender. A cisgender person is a person who identifies as her or his birth gender. A cisgender man is a man who was born a man and who identifies as a man, and a cisgender woman is one who was born a woman and identifies as a woman.
Why not just say "normal," you may be asking? That is precisely the point, at least for me. The idea of having and using a term for what most people tend to think of as normal and to prescribe as normative is wonderful. It helps us avoid lumping the world into "normal" things that don't need names and "abnormal" things that do. If everything is named, then there is no "gold standard" for what people are "supposed" to be; at least, not one implied in the nomenclature. But if words for people who don't fit the majority pattern are used and everyone else is just vaguely thought of as "normal," there is definitely an implied value judgment.
I'm not saying that these new-to-me terms will change the world or insisting that everyone use them in a PC way. I do believe that they reflect the changing nature of the way in which we view reality, and that they have the potential to help move that change along.
And the sooner that change is complete, the better the world will be. Because homo-, bi-. and transphobia are bad for absolutely everyone, not just their obvious victims. But that's a topic for another entry.
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