My life in books

In How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz defines transexuality as well as a once used but now outdated term, transexualism, as “conditions in which people hope to change the bodily characteristics of sex. (The terms apply whether or not the individual has undergone surgery.)” She goes on to say that, in modern usage, “transsexuals are a subset of ‘transgendered’ people, an umbrella term used for those with various forms and degrees of crossgender practices and identiacations. ‘Transgendered’ includes, among others, some people who identify as ‘butch’ or masculine lesbians, as ‘fairies,’ ‘queens,’ or feminine gay men, and as heterosexual crossdressers as well as those who identify as transsexual. The categories are not hermetically sealed, and to a certain extent the boundaries are permeable.” (This book was published in 2002; since then, the term ‘transgendered’ has fallen out of usage, to be replaced by transgender, or simply, trans. In discussing the book, I will use some of the terms that Meyerowitz uses, such as transsexual defined specifically as a trans person who has had, or is seeking, medical intervention toward gender confirmation. I will avoid other terms which in my opinion are now too outdated to be respectful of trans experience, or which define a trans person solely by their type of transition, which Meyerowitz does throughout the book. Readers are therefore cautioned that they may find the terminology is this book to be reductive, outdated, or even traumatic.)

Thus, the book focuses on a particular subset of trans individuals, specifically, those who feel that some degree of medical intervention or body modification is part of satisfying their personal sense of their gender identity. It looks at the history of expression and fulfillment of this desire in the North American context - those who have sought to ‘change their sex,’ and those who have provided, or sometimes withheld, that process.

There have always been people who did not feel that the gender assigned to them based on their physical sexual anatomy was who they really were; in some cultures, there have been acceptable social avenues for them to take on the gender they identified as, in others, some have simply lived in discomfort, or found individual ways to ‘pass’ as their true gender. But it has only been in the past hundred years that the idea of devising surgical procedures that could give a person at least a semblance of functioning sexual organs that matched their gender identity has been part of the conversation, and only in the past 50 or so that the techniques have become relatively available to most of those seeking a physical change.

Meyerowitz notes: “ ‘transsexualism,’ defined in part by the request for surgical sex change, did not appear as a medical category until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when doctors David O. Cauldwell and Harry Benjamin first coined and publicized the English term transsexual and when Christine Jorgensen first appeared in the press.

But the concepts of ‘sex change’ and ‘sex-change surgery’ existed well before the word transsexual entered the medical parlance. In the early twentieth century European scientists began to undertake experiments on ‘sex transformation,’ first on animals and then on humans.”

Much of the early European research and experimentation into what is now referred to as gender confirmation surgery took place in Germany, home of such leading researchers into the psychology and physiology of sex as Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, but this research was abruptly halted when the Nazi party came into power. Still, many individuals had by this time received various kinds of surgical treatment intended to remove unwanted sexual organs and in some cases, create functional vaginas for transexual women.

Many of these techniques had already existed for some time - it was the use of these techniques to help transgender individuals that was new. “Sex-change surgery, then, did not take root when and where it did because of new or unusual medical technology. It took root in part because Germany had a vocal campaign for sexual emancipation. In Berlin, Hirschfeld and others worked to remove the legal and medical obstacles to sexual and gender variance, to enable homosexuals, crossdressers, and those who hoped to change their sex to live their lives as they chose.”

However, while the awareness of surgical possibilities became part of the American sexological landscape, beginning in the early 1930s, most American physicians did not offer the procedures, despite a large number of individuals seeking such surgery. In a few cases, sympathetic surgeons were warned that surgery to remove healthy organs was illegal and could result in serious ramifications if they attempted such procedures.

Meyerowitz devotes several chapters to accounts of early transsexuals whose stories were extensively covered in the media - such women as Christine Jorgensen, Charlotte MacLeod, and Tamara Rees - noting how these stories made the public - including other transgender people who might otherwise have thought themselves alone, the only person with such feelings - aware of trans people and the possibilities of gender confirmation surgery. Unfortunately, publicity did little to distinguish between transvestites and transexuals, or transsexuals and intersex persons seeking surgery to establish their chosen biological sex, nor did it affect the prevailing notion that transsexual women were more akin to gay men than cisgender women. And curiously, there was little interest in the stories of trans men. In fact, most physicians who provided care for trans people believed that trans men were rare, perhaps as few as 10 percent of trans individuals, and some questioned “whether there should be such a diagnosis as ‘transsexualism’ for females.”

Meyerowitz also discusses the development of better surgical techniques over time. Since surgeons mostly saw trans women in their practices, techniques in vaginal construction were a major point of concern. Trans women, however first had to find doctors willing to remove the penis and testicles. This was a major roadblock for some time. Some trans women were so determined to receive confirmation surgery that they attempted to remove their own penes and testicles, leaving doctors with no choice but to complete the desired surgeries. Trans men were less likely to seek out surgery in the early years, perhaps because hormone treatments were sufficient to help most achieve a body they could feel somewhat comfortable in, and phalloplasty techniques at the time were notoriously unsatisfactory. Trans men did seek out mastectomies and hysterectomies, but the reluctance to remove healthy, but unwanted, organs made these surgeries difficult to obtain.

The media focus on transsexuals also brought about a debate, in both the public and professional spheres, over the nature of sex and gender. Among the European sexologists who pioneered gender confirmation surgery, the predominant concept of biological sex was of a universal bisexuality, with individuals located on a spectrum. The transsexual person simply moved along the spectrum, bringing out more if the characteristics associated with the other end of the spectrum. This concept, however, was not common in America, nor did it find much acceptance when proposed.

What came to predominate, and to influence future thinking about sexual identity, was the idea of a psychological sex that was distinct from, though usually in accord with, biological sex. This was the ‘invention’ of gender as a concept.

“In the first half of the twentieth century the theory of human bisexuality had, for some doctors and scientists, redefined sex and legitimated sex-reassignment surgery; in the second half of the century a theory of immutable gender identity came to replace it. In the 1940s and afterward, scientists who studied intersexuality adopted the concept of a deeply rooted sense of “psychological sex.” Some of them suggested that hormones or genes created psychological sex, but others considered it conditioned, imprinted, or learned. In any case, they claimed that no one could change an adult’s psychological sex. Once established, they asserted, the sense of being a man or a woman remained armly entrenched, immune to both psychotherapeutic and medical interventions. They applied this conception of psychological sex—which they later labeled “gender role and orientation” and “gender identity”—first to people with intersexed conditions and then to transsexuals. In this view, the mind—the sense of self—was less malleable than the body.”

However, instead of bringing about an acceptance of surgical intervention to match biological sex to gender, the overall response was to promote the enforcement of rigid standards of gendered behaviour in childhood and support psychotherapy to correct apparent gender non-conforming begaviour, to ensure that the child developed the ‘right’ psychological sex by adulthood. Interestingly enough, the same attitudes prevailed among those who thought that human were to some degree bisexual, in that everyone had some characteristics of the “other” sex - firm education in appropriate gender roles was necessary to minimise the consequences of this bisexuality. Few questioned the necessity of a clear demarkation between male and female. The result was the pathologising of transsexuality as a psychiatric disorder.

Physicians were already gatekeepers, due to their power to offer or withhold available surgical procedures. Pathologising trans people further added to the adversarial relationship developing between doctors who had the technical knowledge to do the surgeries desired, and trans people who sought surgical interventions. Many doctors tried to ‘cure’ their trans clients first. Trans people tried to figure out what they had to say and do to obtain surgery. Many trans women sought to appear hyperfeminine to persuade doctors that there was no way they could live as men. Discussing sex was a dangerous topic - acknowledging desire for men, while appropriate behaviour for a straight trans woman, ran the risk of being diagnosed instead as a gay man, ineligible for surgery. For trans lesbians, the problems were even more difficult, as their sexual orientation could be read as male heterosexuality, and cause for attempting treatment rather than surgery. Many insisted they felt no sexual desire. The need to tailor their life experiences and presentation to convince doctors to approve surgery led to an assumption among doctors that trans people were inherently deceitful. And so the gatekeeping became a major obstacle in the quest of trans people to reshape their bodies to match their identities.

Adding to the problems faced by trans people seeking surgery was the confusion of the medical establishment between transsexuality, transvestitism, and homosexuality. Some felt that trans women were gay men so horrified by their homosexuality that they needed to erase it by becoming women. The debated how to distinguish true trans people from gay people or cross-dressers. Similar discussions developed in the queer community, with various groups - gay men, lesbians, drag queens, heterosexual transvestites - arguing over how trans people should be viewed. One of the difficulties her was that some people who had identified as gay men, drag queens, or butch lesbians, eventually realised that they were in fact trans women and men. Meanwhile, trans peoples’ attempts to define themselves simply as people assigned a gender that was not congruent with their identity were often ignored.

In the 1960s, one consequence of the general ‘sexual revolution’ was a relaxation of defined gender roles, and an openness toward sexual experimentation, that on the one hand, gave many young people the chance to explore androgyny and even living as another gender, and on the other, made it easier for distinct subcultures to emerge, drawing distinctions between those who were gay or lesbian with marked preferences to adopting behaviours associated with another gender, and transexuals who identified as a gender other than the one socially assigned them. Lines of demarkation grew up between those who sought gender confirmation surgeries, and those who identified as ‘fairies’ or ‘butches’. Transsexuality was at least for some distinguished from homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the medical profession was making distinctions based on the path patients had followed to an awareness of their gender identity. They tended to favour the person who had tried to live a conventional life, followed the heterosexual rules for their assigned gender, and lived lives of quiet desperation. Those who came to a desire for gender confirmation surgery through experiences as living as gay men and drag queens, who had been sexually adventurous, were often seen as poor candidates for surgery.

Another consequence of sexual freedom was the eroticisation of trans people. Pornographic images of the feminised bodies of post-surgery trans women began appearing. This was accompanied by erotic images of ‘half-men, half-women’ - trans women who had received hormone treatments and thus had both breasts and a penis. “The sexualization of MTFs went hand in hand with the legalization and commercialization of sexual expression. In this changing sexual climate, the tabloids and pulps presented their stories as less concerned with what the main-stream press dubbed ‘desperately unhappy lives’ and more concerned with titillating adventures.”

Meyerowitz records the low changes in the mainstream medical profession’s attitudes toward gender confirmation surgery, and the work of transgender activists in bringing about greater awareness and acceptance for their situation. Slowly, hospitals began to open gender identity clinics where surgeries were performed on trans men and women, starting with Johns Hopkins in 1965: “By the end of the 1970s more than a thousand transsexuals had undergone surgery at the hands of doctors based at American universities, and fifteen to twenty “major centers” conducted transsexual surgery in the United States.”

Unfortunately, demand far exceeded supply, and the doctors running these clinics set up strict conditions. Again, professional gatekeeping came between the transgender individual and their right to control their own body: “By the end of the 1960s the doctors required psychological evaluation to ascertain that patients had longstanding crossgender identiacation and no severe mental illness. The doctors also wanted patients to live as the other sex and take hormones for a number of months or years before undergoing irreversible surgery. They looked for patients with the intelligence to understand what the surgery could and could not do, and with what they considered realistic plans for the future, especially employment.” Preference was given to those whom doctors felt could most easily ‘pass’ and who presented as ‘quiet’ and highly conventional in their gender expression. Trans lesbians and gay men were unlikely to be approved.

As the availability of surgery grew, legal issues became more important, and courts were increasingly asked to rule on whether a trans person could change their birth certificates and other key documentation from their assigned gender to their true gender. Thanks to the supportive testimony of a number of doctor-advocates, a series of precedents were established where the courts did order the official change of sex on birth certificates, which was the first step to obtaining new documentation of other kinds, and offered a trans individual the ability to provide legal proof of their gender when required. However, where the courts were tending to define gender by reference to genital appearance, governments held onto older ideas and defined gender by (presumed) chromosomal composition. And even the courts provided no hope fir trans people who had not, or could not, have surgery. This was particularly onerous for trans men, for whom phalloplasty remained an unsatisfactory option lacking in both sensation and function.

As the era of liberal sexual freedom that marked the 60s and 70s began to change, Meyerowitz documents shifts in acceptance among both gays and lesbians, and feminists, toward transgender men and women. The prevailing gay culture had adopted the “cult of the macho” and rejected the drag and fairy culture that had supported trans women in transition. At the same time, lesbian culture began to see trans men as butches who were deserting the fold for a safer, moe privileged life. Feminists critiqued trans men and women as reactionaries who reinforced gender stereotypes that the women’s movement was fighting to change, and distrusted trans women who, they believed, had grown up with male privilege and could never be, culturally or psychologically, women, thus establishing the trans-exclusionary (TERF) streak in feminism which remains a problem to this day.

As the conservative 80s set in, the few legal victories trans activists had achieved were rolled back, and existing surgical clinics came under attack from both the right, with a renewed insistence that surgery enabled mental illness and that trans individuals required treatment to restore the ‘proper’ gender identity, and from the left, with a strong critique of the rigid gender roles doctors required of prospective surgical patients. But as their rights were being denied and the few gains made eroded, trans people fought back, forming advocacy organisations, building communities and working to educate both the public and the medical profession on the realities of being transgender.

As Meyerowitz says, “The rise of the transgender movement capped the century in which sex change arst became a medical specialty and transsexuals arst emerged as a visible social group. From the early twentieth-century ex- periments on changing the sex of animals to the liberationist move- ment of the 1990s, the topic of sex change had served as a key site for the deanition and redeanition of sex in popular culture, science, medi- cine, law, and daily life. In a century when others had challenged the social categories and hierarchies of class, race, and gender, the people who hoped to change their sex had brought into question another fundamental category—biological sex itself—commonly understood as obvious and unchangeable. In the modern push for self-expression, they had taken the meanings of self-transformation and social mobility to a new level, and from the margins of society, they had grappled with the everyday ways in which unconventional individuals confounded and provoked the mainstream. In the process, they had engaged with doctors, scientists, reporters, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay libera- tionists, among others. Together, these various groups had debated big questions of medical ethics, nature and nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. None of them could ax the deanition of sex, which remains a topic of debate in medical journals, courtrooms, and television talk shows, and none of them could settle the question of the interconnections among sex, gender, and sexuality. Still, by the end of the twentieth century, the transgender activists could hope at least for a future in which the variations of sex and gender might no longer elicit stigma, ridicule, harassment, or assault.”

It’s hard to deny that the United States is teetering on the edge of becoming a theocracy, in fact, if not in name. The religious right, a minority among American citizens and voters, holds an undue amount of influence over one of the country’s two main political parties, and its purported values influence the national conversation on social policies to an extent much greater than its numbers would warrant.

Many words have been written about just how this has come about, that a nation founded by religious dissenters who, informed by their experiences as a disadvantaged religious minority, sought to create a political system that embraced the separation of church and state, has become by far the least secular of the developed, democratic nations. A commonly accepted analysis points to the alliance of politicians and evangelicals in the late 1970s, that made abortion a key issue dividing the country into two political camps. However, in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, historian of religion Kevin Kruse places the turning point much earlier, during the Eisenhower era. In his Introduction, Kruse notes:

“In his acceptance speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention, he promised that the coming campaign would be a “great crusade for freedom.” As he traveled across America that summer, Eisenhower met often with Reverend Billy Graham, his close friend, to receive spiritual guidance and recommendations for passages of Scripture to use in his speeches. Indeed, the Republican nominee talked so much about spirituality on the stump that legendary New York Times reporter Scotty Reston likened his campaign to ‘William Jennings Bryan’s old invasion of the Bible Belt during the Chautauqua circuit days.’ On election day, Americans answered his call. Eisenhower won 55 percent of the popular vote and a staggering 442-to-89 margin in the Electoral College. Reflecting on the returns, Eisenhower saw nothing less than a mandate for a national religious revival. ‘I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spiritually,’ he confided to Graham. ‘We need a spiritual renewal.’ “

Indeed, as one reads Kruse’s account of Eisenhower’s inauguration, it’s hard to argue with this. Eisenhower was the first to encourage his entire cabinet to attend religious services with him before the inaugural ceremonies began. He chose to be sworn in on two separate bibles, each opened to a verse chosen by Billy Graham, about Christian stewardship. He offered a prayer if his own writing following the taking of the oath. The inaugural parade opened with a float that, while ecumenical in nature, proclaimed that “In God We Trust.” And four days later, Eisenhower attended the first ever National Prayer Breakfast. None of this was traditional in the event.

Kruse goes on to say: “All this activity took place in just the first week of February 1953. In the months and years that followed, the new president revolutionized public life in America. In the summer of 1953, Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and members of their cabinet held a signing ceremony in the Oval Office declaring that the United States government was based on biblical principles. Meanwhile, countless executive departments, including the Pentagon, instituted prayer services of their own. The rest of the Capitol consecrated itself too. In 1954, Congress followed Eisenhower’s lead, adding the phrase “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. A similar phrase, “In God We Trust,” was added to a postage stamp for the first time in 1954 and then to paper money the next year; in 1956, it became the nation’s first official motto. During the Eisenhower era Americans were told, time and time again, that the nation not only should be a Christian nation but also that it had always been one. They soon came to believe that the United States of America was ‘one nation under God.’ “

It is Kruse’s thesis that this was the consequence of a campaign begun during the 1930s by industrialists concerned over the effects of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘leftist’ New Deal policies on what had been up to that point relatively untrammeled capitalism. Having tried, and failed, to convince the public directly of the benefits of minimally regulated free enterprise, corporate interests took a leaf from Roosevelt’s own book, which promoted his reforms with biblical references and the preaching of a social gospel, and began to develop their own theological argument in favour of free enterprism, Christian libertarianism. One of the leaders of this theological movement, James W. Fifield Jr., went so far as to label the vaguely socialist reforms of Roosevelt as “state paganism” and likened them to Germany and Italy under the fascist totalitarianism of Hitler and Mussolini. This argument was based in a concept of parallelism between free enterprise and Christian salvation - that just as capitalism rewarded the individual efforts of the capitalist, Christ rewarded the individual efforts of the penitent with salvation. Policies that aimed at collective good sought to replace individual striving toward both wealth and grace with dependence, replacing Christ as the giver of all good with the state.

Funded and supported by wealthy industrialists, politicians and public figures such as former president Herbert Hoover and Hollywood celebrities Cecil B. deMille and Ronald Reagan, Fifield and others, among them his long-time friend Norman Vincent Peale, conducted wide-ranging campaigns to bring as many clergymen - mostly Protestant ministers, but also some conservative Catholic priests and rabbis - across the country into the fold, persuading them that the New Deal was just one step away from a rejection of God and an embrace of National Socialism. Their organisation, Spiritual Mobilization, would eventually claim over ten thousand “minister-representatives” prepared to “....exalt the dignity of individual man as a child of God, to exalt Jesus’ concept of man’s sacredness and to rebuild a moral fabric based on such irreducibles as the Ten Commandments.” The equation of Christianity with individual freedom, and the construction of the welfare state as the enemy of both, ensured that policies ranging from taxation to pensions for the elderly were identifies as not just liberal, but immoral, against the natural order as created by God.

Advocates of Christian libertarianism also sought to bring political and economic leaders into their movement. One key tool was the promotion of prayer breakfasts across the country, and particularly in Washington DC, where prominent men of government and industry were invited to meet with their peers, pray, and discuss the ways in which partnering with God - and rejecting government interference - could improve their business prospects. Soon both the
Senate and the House of Representatives hosted regular prayer meetings, largely attended by conservative politicians already opposed to New Deal policies.

By 1949, the gospel of Christian libertarianism had been taken up by a charismatic young preacher, Billy Graham, who fed on the anxieties of an America that was no longer the world’s only nuclear power to promote the message of individuality, reliance on God rather than the state, and free enterprise as the answer to the threat of Godless communism.

“In 1954, Graham offered his thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and capitalism in Nation’s Business, the magazine of the US Chamber of Commerce. “We have the suggestion from Scripture itself that faith and business, properly blended, can be a happy, wholesome, and even profitable mixture,” he observed. “Wise men are finding out that the words of the Nazarene: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you’ were more than the mere rantings of a popular mystic; they embodied a practical, workable philosophy which actually pays off in happiness and peace of mind. . . . Thousands of businessmen have discovered the satisfaction of having God as a working partner.” “

Graham was instrumental in persuading Eisenhower to run for President, and while he did not openly declare his support, many in the Christian libertarianism movement urged voters to think carefully and choose the candidate God would want as president, and suggested issues to consider that strongly favoured the Republican candidate. The strategy was effective, Eisenhower was successful, winning with a strong majority in the electoral college. The prayer breakfasts continued, emphasising the essential connection between Christian libertarianism and political policy. “In February 1954, Eisenhower, Nixon, and several cabinet members returned to the Mayflower ballroom, along with nearly six hundred figures from government and business. Chief Justice Warren offered the main address of the morning. Speaking at length on the role of religion in American political life, he concluded that “no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have, from the very beginning, been our guiding genius.” Looking forward, the chief justice urged the crowd to adhere to “the spirit of Christian religion” to ensure that the country remained strong both in spirit and substance in the days and years to come. In the end, Warren stated emphatically: ‘We are a Christian nation.’ “

Under Eisenhower, meetings of senior officials in the executive branch - many of them new appointments with ties to the corporate sphere - routinely opened with prayer, either silent or spoken. Employees were urged to attend services regularly, and to facilitate this, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish services were offered in several government buildings, including the Pentagon, on a regular basis.

While Eisenhower did remove many of Roosevelt’s regulations on corporate enterprise, he failed to kill the welfare state, thus losing some of the support of the Christian libertarian movement. He did, however, succeed in “sacralsing” government and linking the American ideal of freedom with the importance of religion. He made Independence Day a National Day of Prayer. The success of this movement to brand the United States as a Christian nation and to establish “faith as the foundation of freedom” was demonstrated when, in 1954, both Republicans and Democrats supported the bill that added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Around the same time, the motto already found on most coins, “In God We Trust,” was added to the design of paper currency, and a very popular stamp bearing the motto was issued. In 1956, “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum” as the official national motto. In the public eye, the connection between religion and government was well established, though the principle of separation of church and state was still observed in the insistence on nondenominational language. Indeed, some stressed that the God of America was the God not only of Christians of all kinds, but also the God of Jews and Muslims. Only pagans snd atheists, it seemed, were unAmerican.

The reinterpretation of the founding fathers as intending to create a Christian nation, one based in biblical faith, grew common in public discourse, normalising a relationship between church and state that was in fact a relatively new development. A consortium of advertising companies, seeing the importance to their own industry of promoting the aims of the corporate movement to bring religion into politics to support their interests, began producing “public service” copy for newspapers, magazines, radio and television. These campaigns stressed the importance of religious institutions in American life, reminding Americans that “religious faith, cultivated by our churches and synagogues, is one of the foundations of our nation and of our dedication to human rights and individual liberty, as suggested in our national motto, ‘In God We Trust.’”

At the same time, the work of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and the flood of anti-communist propaganda created a fear of ‘godless communists’ aiming to destroy both secular snd religious freedom by undermining the free and Christian nation they lived in. Using a trope many of today’s progressives would recognise, Americans were warned that a secular, socialist society would take away their freedom to celebrate Christmas. Anti-communist organisations, funded and supported by corporations who feared the impact of labour unions on their bottom line, produced propaganda and media spectacles, often featuring some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, all expounding on the evils of communism - which was often framed as anything much further left than the John Birch society.

And the people, their receptivity to this message enhanced by the fear of communism and the anxieties of the Cold War Era, adopted this concept of extreme, public religiosity as an essential part of the American way of life. Religious-themed books proliferated on best-seller lists - Angel Unaware, The Robe, Life Is Worth Living, A Man Called Peter, This I Believe, and The Greatest Faith Ever Known, The Power of Positive Thinking, The Silver Chalice. Televangelism began, with popular ministers having their own local and national prayer programs. Hollywood turned to Biblical themes for its blockbusters. In the wake of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, four thousand stone monuments bearing those Bible verses were erected on public land across America.

Kruse presents his argument carefully and in great detail, showing the growing presence of religion in the workings of government during Eisenhower’s administration, and detailing the network of connections between Christians liberationists and government officials, from Eisenhower and his vice-president, Richard Nixon, down. He also looks at the conflicts initiated by the encroachment of specific religious practices into daily life - for instance, the controversies over prayer and the distribution of King James Bibles by the Gideon Society in schools.

In a striking example if the success of this campaign for religion in public life, a legal challenge against the introduction of a prescribed prayer in the schools in New York state was rejected on the grounds that public religious observance was a traditional aspect of the American way if life. In support of their decision, one if the judges cited: “the references to the Deity in the Declaration of Independence; the words of our National Anthem: “In God is our trust”; the motto on our coins; the daily prayers in Congress; the universal practice in official oaths of calling upon God to witness the truth; the official thanksgiving proclamations beginning with those of the Continental Congress and the First Congress of the United States and continuing till the present; the provisions for chaplaincies in the armed forces; the directions by Congress in modern times for a National Day of Prayer and for the insertion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag; [and] innumerable utterances by our presidents and other leaders.”

Kruse goes on to observe: “Most of these were recent innovations not yet reviewed by the courts, but no matter. In a sign of how swiftly and thoroughly the religious revival of the 1950s had taken root, these judges cited changes that had occurred in their own recent memory as proof that the country’s religious roots stretched back to time immemorial.”

When the Supreme Court reversed this ruling and agreed that there should not be mandated prayer in schools, the majority of Americans were angered by the decision, engaging in ‘slippery slope’ arguments that, once again, ended up with the spectre of a ban on Christmas. When the .supreme Court later ruled that mandated devotional readings from the Bible in schools were also unconstitutional, the demand for a constitutional amendment, which had ben broached from time to time in the past, began to gain more support. A petition was submitted to Congress which read: “Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States by its decisions has virtually outlawed the right to pray or read Scripture in public schools and other institutions, we, the undersigned citizens, respectfully petition you to take the initial steps necessary to bring about an amendment to the Constitution which will forever guarantee the protection of our Christian traditions and the right of our people to pray and honor Holy Scripture in their institutions.”

The election of Richard Nixon only served to heighten both the trappings of religion that now surrounded the office of the President, and the partisan nature of this display of piety. Nixon had worked closely with Billy Graham for many years on the Christian libertarian project, and now welcomed him into the White House as an advisor. Both Graham and Norman Vincent Peale spoke during Nixon’s inaugural ceremonies, which included a full church service. Nixon, with Graham’s encouragement, ordered that weekly religious services be held in the White House. Officiating ministers frequently delivered sermons that stressed not only Christian values, but conservative political policies. A decade later, Ronald Reagan upped the piety content further: “Rather than simply reaffirm the old faith of the Eisenhower era, Reagan created new political rites and rituals suited to his own time. The silent prayer at the end of his speech was one innovation; the sign-off of “God bless America” was another. While the phrase had a long history in American culture, it had actually been used only once before in a major address by a president or presidential candidate. ... Earlier presidents and presidential candidates had used other forms of divine invocation, of course, but only sparingly. ...the eight presidents from FDR through Carter called for God’s blessing in less than half of their speeches; indeed, most of them did so in only a quarter. But from Reagan on, presidents have asked for God’s blessing in roughly nine out of every ten speeches they made. Reagan’s campaign represented a turning point, a moment when this “God strategy” became the new norm.”

Any objective observer can confirm that, in recent decades, the rhetoric and ritual of Christian piety has become an integral part of the American political scene, to a degree unknown in any other major modern democracy. While Republicans presents themselves as the party of Christian values, Democrats have also adopted the cloak of public religiosity. The country as a whole has accepted this relatively recent cultural shift as a long-standing tradition, believing without question that the United States us, and always has been, a Christian nation, ‘one nation under God’ destined to lead the world because it, like no other country, is founded in religious truth. It’s a dangerous myth, and taken too far, can lead to the establishment of a repressive theocracy - as the critics of this movement have argued at every step along the way.

In the current American political environment, I doubt there are enough people willing to read this book, or other critiques of the entanglement of religion and governance, to effect any kind of change. And that gives me yet another reason to worry for the future of America, and the world that must live with whatever it does.

I have not read much on trans history, theory and activism. I’ve read Feinberg and Bornstein, but in general, this is an area where I feel a real need to learn more, to widen my perspectives and understanding. I approach the topic from an absolute conviction that trans men are men, trans women are women, trans non-binary folk are non-binary folk, and that in everyday circumstances, the question of one’s being trans or cis is relevant for health and medical issues and otherwise is no one’s damn business. But it’s important to me to learn from trans folk what they want me, as a cis person, to know, and so I’m reading more theory and lived experience by trans folk.

Julia Serano’s book, Excluded: Making Feminism and Queer Movements More Inclusive, seemed an obvious place to start. I’m a feminist, and queer, and have long been aware that trans folk have not been fully included in these activist spaces. And as a feminist and a queer person who has cis privilege, it’s my responsibility to understand why that’s happening and how to change it.

In her Introduction to the book, Serano briefly discusses the ways that transgender folk are excluded, noting that “... they are all steeped in sexism—in each case, exclusion is based on the premise that certain ways of being gendered or sexual are more legitimate, natural, or righteous than others.” She goes on to state: “... I believe that sexism-based exclusion within feminist and queer circles stems primarily from a handful of foundational, albeit incorrect, assumptions that we routinely make about gender and sexuality, and about sexism and marginalization. These false assumptions infect our theories, our activism, our organizations, and our communities. And they enable us to vigorously protest certain forms of sexism (especially sexisms that we personally face!) while simultaneously ignoring and/or perpetuating other forms of sexism. In short, the way we describe and set out to challenge sexism is irreparably broken. My main purpose in writing this book is to highlight these fallacies in our theory and activism, and to offer new and more accurate ways of thinking about gender and sexism that will avoid the pitfalls of the past.”

The book takes the form of a series of essays in two sections, the first dealing with exclusion, particularly from the author’s perspective as a trans, bisexual, femme woman. The second section consists of essays “... that forward a new framework for thinking about gender, sexuality, sexism, and marginalization.”

Serano begins with the observation that transexualism and transgenderism are often critiqued in feminist theory because they, as some feminists argue, “reinforce the gender binary.” A significant body of feminist work sees the source of sexism in the existence of a ‘gender system’ and posits that the way to end sexism is by ‘moving beyond gender’ - these theorists see gender as wholly socially constructed. Serano calls this approach gender artifactualism, and identifies it as a perversion of the famous statement that the personal is political.

Gender artifactualism may be seen as a response to gender determinism, the belief that women and men are born with predetermined sex-specific behaviors and desires. The argument that gender roles are ‘programmed’ by one’s biology implies that the observed differences between men and women are both natural and immutable, and this is frequently used as a justification for a vast range of sexist attitudes and behaviours.

Serano sees both gender artifactualism and gender determinism as ‘homogenising’ - either one assumes that there can be little to no individual variation in gender and sexuality, because in either case, behaviours are programmed, either by biology or by socialisation. In truth, however, variety is widespread in these areas - there is a wide range of gender identifications, ways being gendered (or not), and ways of being sexual (or not). Looking at this variety, Serano argues instead that a theory that matches this reality must be holistic, and include multiple factors in understanding the genesis and nature of gender, including factirs associated with biology, environment, and socialisation.

“The holistic model that I am forwarding here begins with the recognition that while we may be biologically similar to one another in many ways, we are also the products of biological variation—nobody shares our unique genetic and physiological makeup. And while we may share the same culture, or may be subjected to the same social expectations and norms, we are also each uniquely socially situated—nobody shares our specific set of life experiences or environment. Therefore, while our shared biology and culture may create certain trends (e.g., a preponderance of typical genders and sexualities), we should also expect the variation in our biology and life experiences to help generate diversity in our genders and sexualities.”

She goes on to say that “Because gender and sexuality have many biological, social, and environmental inputs, they are not particularly malleable—in other words, changing one or a couple inputs would not likely result in a huge overall effect. This explains why most of us find that we cannot easily or purposefully change our genders and sexualities at the drop of a hat (despite some people’s claims that “gender is just performance” or that one can simply “pray away the gay”). Like our tastes in food, most of us experience our genders and sexualities to be profound, deeply felt, and resistant to change. Sure, sometimes people experience shifts in their gender or sexuality, just as our taste for certain foods may change over time. But when these shifts do occur, they are almost always inexplicable, unexpected, and sometimes even downright unwanted (at least at first). Such shifts might occur as a result of changes in some combination of our physiology, environment, and/or life experiences.”

Serano argues that, rather than locating the source of sexism and cissexism (and other forms of oppression based on identity) in a monolithic gender system, we need to see this too as a complex set of interactions derived from the existence of multiple marked states - that is to say, characteristics or behaviours which are noticed because they differ from what is assumed or expected.

“... unmarked/marked distinctions may arise from our own personal biases and expectations, or they may be culturally ordained. In either case, the process of marking a person or trait often occurs on an unconscious level, and therefore takes on an air of common sense: It just seems “natural” for us to focus our attention on people who we view as exceptional or different from us in some significant way.”

As Serano points out, reactions to marked states can be positive, negative, or neutral, but they define the marked state as both remarkable and questionable, in that we feel entitled to notice and comment on the marked state, and to ask questions about someone exhibiting a marked status. Marked traits which are seen negatively, or stigmatised, are often thought of as being suspicious, artificial, dubious, inauthentic, invalid, unnatural, exotic, or alien. The effect is often to dehumanise the people possessing the marked trait. For Serrano, the importance of understanding the distinctions between marked and unmarked states is that “... it appears to underlie all forms of sexism, as well as marginalization more generally. This is not to say that being marked is the same thing as, or necessarily leads to, being marginalized—as I alluded to in previous examples, we are just as capable of being indifferent to, or even impressed by, someone who is deemed marked as we are of invalidating them. But what is true is that the act of marking automatically creates a double standard, where certain traits are viewed and treated differently than others. This act of marking essentially divides the world up into two classes: those who have the trait in question (for whom meanings and value judgments will tend to “stick”), and those who do not (and who are therefore beyond reproach). These double standards provide the underlying architecture that enables sexism and marginalization.”

It is the existence of such double standards with respect to stigmatised marked traits that leads to marginalisation, as those exhibiting such traits are consistently seen and treated differently, in a multitude of ways. The fact that multiple double standards can be applied to a single marked trait, and that the same double standards can be applied to many different marked traits, results in the complex experiences of marginalisation reported by those exhibiting marked traits - being seen, for instance, as sometimes dangerous, sometimes exotic, sometimes ignored, sometimes to be pitied - but never to be seen as simply another individual human being.

“Thinking about sexism and marginalization in terms of myriad double standards implores us to challenge all double standards: those that are prevalent, and those that are rare; those that negatively impact us, and those that negatively impact others; those that we are currently aware of, as well as those that are currently unknown to us. Having such a mindset can make us more open to learning about new double standards when they are first described to us (rather than outright dismissing them because they do not fit into our worldview), and more mindful of the fact that we ourselves are fallible (as we may be unknowingly engaging in, or enforcing, certain double standards ourselves). Perhaps most importantly, thinking in terms of myriad double standards encourages humility, as it forces us to admit that there are many aspects of gender and sexism that we do not personally experience, and therefore cannot fully know about. For this reason, it would be conceited for us to project our fixed and limited perspective of the universe onto other people.”

Serano identifies three general types of double standards at work in marginalisation: universal assumptions, hierarchies, and stereotypes or attributions.

“When we talk about sexism and marginalization, we often talk about them in terms of some overarching ideology or ism that is prevalent in society. Isms are generally composed of the three types of double standards that I have discussed so far. For instance, traditional sexism (the overarching ideology) consists of a universal assumption (that maleness and masculinity are the norm), a hierarchy (that women are seen as less legitimate and important than men), and a slew of stereotypes and attributions.”

Having established the basic tenets of this theory of gender, and the processes of sexism and marginalisation, Serano goes on to propose a holistic approach to feminist as a means of combatting such marginalisation. She begins by defining holistic feminism as “...a wide-ranging movement to challenge all double standards based on sex, gender, and/or sexuality. Furthermore, this approach to feminism remains committed to intersectionality and working to challenge all forms of marginalization, rather than focusing solely on specific forms of sexism.”

Some of the tools or methodologies of a holistic approach to feminism, in Serano’s model, include:

Expecting heterogeneity - combatting the homogenising of marginalised groups that arises from stereotyping and universal assumptions by recognising that individuals within a marginalised group will differ in many ways;

Challenging gender entitlement - rejecting the societal expectation that people identify and express their genders in particular ways and the punitive response to those who do not follow social expectations, refusing to police the autonomous and consensual genders and sexualities of others; and

Self-examining desire and embracing ambivalence - examining our attractions (and lack of attractions) for indications of unacknowledged double standards, and understanding that sexual attractions and practices can have both empowering, positive, aspects, and disempowering, negative aspects.

Serano also stresses the importance of understanding the ways that invalidation is used as a technique against multiple marginalised groups - indeed, she notes that it is possible to identify a previously unrecognised marginalisation by observing that those who share in are invalidated in specific ways. There are many forms that invalidation can take, such as: suggesting mental incompetence; sexualising the marginalised group; attributions of immorality, danger, deceitful or manipulative behaviour; describing and treating the marginalised group as being unhealthy, sick, or diseased; seeing the marginalised group as anomalous, exotic, open to fetishisation or being an object of fascination or study; identification as unnatural, inauthentic, or fake.

This model of holistic feminism, and the theory of marked states and double standards that underlies it, appeals strongly to me. It recognises the multiplicity of marginalisations and invalidations that are at the root of any oppressive situation, and leaves room for differences and commonalities among marginalised groups to be acknowledged and incorporated into an ongoing life of activism. It allows for the identification of unacknowledged firms of marginalisation, and their inclusion in an activist framework. There’s much to consider here, and I’m now looking forward to reading more of Serano’s analysis and theoretical work, to see the development of this model.

Michael Adams’ book, Could It Happen Here? Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit focuses on the results of public opinion research and a variety of social and economic metrics in the attempt to determine whether a populist movement of the kind that swept Donald Trump into power could take root in Canada. Ironically, I started reading it during the Ontario election, and found that I had to take a break as, despite all of Adams’ citations of public opinion suggesting that Canadians are supportive of immigration, government intervention, social safety nets, gender equality, lower levels of income inequity, and all sorts of other nice-sounding things, the popularists under Doug Ford smirked and dog-whistled their way to an electoral victory.

So, even before I’d read to the end, and knew Adams’ final assessment, I had an answer to his question. Yes, it can, and it did. Writing in 2017, Adams was more hopeful: “Could Canadians suddenly find themselves seized by the rage-fueled politics of exclusion and enthralled by a tough-guy autocrat? I suppose anything is possible. But if we go beyond the fleeting politics of the day and look more closely at those underlying values, the answer becomes clear: we’ve had our flings with polarizing populists, but when the buzz wears off, we always seem to muddle our way back to the middle.”

So the question for both Michael Adams and myself now, is why, if Canadians hold such equaliarian values, comparatively speaking, did it happen anyway?

I have to state here, for those who don’t know this about me, that not only do I know the author, I used to work for him at the public opinion research company he founded, Environics. In fact, I worked as a research analyst in the public opinion division, and I’m very familiar with the kinds of research data he drew on, how it’s collected, analysed, tracked, interpreted. While I’ve been retired for a while and haven’t had access to the most recent data, I know where it comes from and the methods involved in conducting the research he draws on. So my thoughts here are the thoughts of a former insider, so to speak.

Of course, one thing that both Adams and I would say, and in fact he addresses this in the book, is that the outcome of this election is very much a consequence of the first-past-the-post electoral system that is still used in most of Canada at the provincial level, and in federal elections, and our parliamentary system. The truth is that only about a quarter of eligible voters favoured the Conservative platform, and among those who actually voted, 60 percent voted for candidates of other parties. Which really gives us the answer as to how it happened - conservative supporters were more likely to vote than supporters of other parties, and the anti-populist vote was split between centre and left, leaving the unified right to coast to a majority victory with minority support.

So in some ways, the electoral results doesn’t completely invalidate the conclusions Adams draws from the research. On most of the factors cited as differences between Canada and the US - acceptance of immigrants, trust in social and political institutions, rejection of authoritarianism, support for social equality - the differences aren’t absolute. While a majority of Canadians hold all these beliefs, there’s a minority of 20 to 30 percent that don’t - and these are more likely to be older Canadians, and older Canadians are also more likely to vote. And in this election, it’s that minority that’s taken the rest of us hostage.

I’m 63 myself, and I hope that this election was in part the last gasp of an older generation that is less likely to be comfortable with the social changes taking place, the increasing diversity, the movements that are bringing immigrants, people of colour, Indigenous people, queer and trans people, all kinds of marginalised people to the table. But the other question I have for Michael Adams and the research he draws on is this - what is the relative importance placed on these values by those who espouse them, and how did that play into the Ontario election?

When it comes to a choice, do Canadians put multiculturalism, gender equality, support for immigration, ahead of promises of personal financial comfort, lower taxes, cheaper goods and services? Are more privileged Canadians willing to give up some of their privilege to see the values they claim to hold put into practice, or are they just paying lip service to social equity?

I think it’s the answers to those questions that will tell us if this can happen here, again.

In Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, James Daschuk sets out to tell the history of the European colonisation of the the Canadian Great Plains as it affected, and continues to affect, the health of Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. As he states in his introduction: “Racism among policy makers and members of mainstream society was the key factor in creating the gap in health outcomes as well as maintaining a double standard for acceptable living conditions for the majority of the population and the indigenous minority.” This book shows how that double standard was created and maintained.

“Canada consistently places among the top nations in the world according to the UN Human Development Index. In its report for 2007–08, only Iceland, Norway, and Australia ranked higher than Canada in the criteria considered by the United Nations. Yet also a regular story is the dismal condition of Canada’s indigenous people in comparison with its mainstream population. The gap between these populations is so wide that official communications of the Assembly of First Nations, the largest aboriginal organization in the country, state that Canada’s indigenous population would rank sixty-third on the same index, the equivalent of Panama, Malaysia, or Belarus. On average, indigenous Canadians can expect to die between five and eight years earlier than other Canadians. Canadians have come to expect the highest-quality medical care as their national right, but indigenous people routinely suffer from poverty, violence, sickness, and premature death. Substandard health conditions are so entrenched that a recent text on the social determinants of health listed aboriginal status as a key predictive variable in the analysis of the country’s overall health outcomes. The chasm between the health conditions of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians has existed for as long as anyone can remember; it too has become part of who we are as a nation. The primary goal of this study is to identify the roots of the current health disparity between the indigenous and mainstream populations in western Canada. Health as a measure of human experience cannot be considered in isolation from the social and economic forces that shape it. In Canada, the marginalization of First Nations people has been the primary factor impeding improved health outcomes for all of its citizens.”

I don’t think I could present a better summary of Daschuk’s work than the one published in the Literary Review of Canada, written by Anishnaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair, department head of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, from which I quote below:

“In the book, Daschuk presents an intricate examination of how Canada cleared the plains coldly and opportunistically, taking advantage of a famine caused by the loss of bison populations, due to the flooding of Nakota, Dakota, Nehiyawak, Niitsitapi and Anishinaabe territories by settlers. Methodically, using draconian legislation regarding Indians and starvation, Canadian leaders coerced indigenous leaders into signing treaties and acquiescing to federal control—all in an attempt to exterminate indigenous peoples from the national consciousness. In other words, Indians were forcibly and willfully manipulated, removed, and murdered for the sake of “progress.” None of this is an overstatement: it’s all there in the evidence Daschuk unearths in deft research and prose.

The most remarkable aspect of Clearing the Plains is the narrative arc of the book. He draws a direct line connecting 19th century Canadian Indian policy, Sir John A. Macdonald’s railroad, western settlement, Canada’s economic foundation and territorial theft of indigenous communities, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The conclusion of this story is that indigenous peoples now experience, a century and a half later, dire circumstances due to these events: the lowest life expectancy, the greatest amount of poverty and ostracization, and the highest amount of racism and violence. Simply put, the situation indigenous communities face today is the result of an elaborate and extensive plan in which every Canadian is culpable. Throughout the 19th century, Canada pursued a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities,” Daschuk states, that continues to “haunt us as a nation still.”

In 340 pages Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains does more to tell the true story of Canada’s history than the entirety of Eurocentric pioneer narratives, “award-winning” textbooks, and self-congratulatory encyclopedias that flood bookstores, libraries and classrooms across this country. Daschuk announces the secret that indigenous peoples have been telling all along but Canadians weren’t ready to hear (frankly, until one of their own said it): Canada’s settlement, growth and economy was not a simple, earned and positivistic set of events but a cold, methodical and exploitative plan built on sacrifices by and theft from indigenous peoples.”
(http://reviewcanada.ca/the-lrc-25/clearing-the-plains/)

This is the story of a genocide, in which all settler Canadians are complicit. Daschuk begins with a picture of life before the influence of English and French fur traders began to affect the Indigenous Great Plains peoples, a semi-nomadic life that hunted bison in a sustainable manner, and prohibited hunting of beaver to ensure the water supply, dependent on the dam-building behaviours of beavers, remained stable. The coming of white settlers and traders was felt on the Plains long before whites actually reached the area. The growth of European colonies in the east pushed the Indigenous peoples of Central Canada westward, destabilising conditions across the continent. Trade in horses along the north-south trade routes with Mesoamerica brought changes to long-established hunting methods. And with both these movements came smallpox, which would irrevocably affect both the demographics and the population levels of the Plains peoples. Other diseases - tularaemia, tuberculosis, whooping cough, venereal disease, measles - followed as contacts with Europeans increased and the fur trade encroached on the Plains economy and ecology. The fur trade, with its insatiable demand for beaver pelts, its introduction of highly distilled alcohol products, and its creation of competition for hunting grounds among the peoples who took part, further impacted the Indigenous Plains nations’ stability and way of life. Food shortages became a serious threat to the Plains peoples. Violence between Indigenous peoples, between whites and the Indigenous hunters they exploited, and between rival trade companies Hudson’s Bay Co. and North West Co. was endemic. “By 1821, the Canadian northwest was in social, demographic, and environmental crisis. Harsh climatic conditions compounded by the eruption of Mount Tambora, along with catastrophic disease episodes, created severe conditions for the physical environment and people of the northwest.”

Throughout the 19th century, as the fur trade, followed by the beginning of white agricultural settlement, followed by successive gold rushes, and an increased military presence, brought more and more movement of white people into and through the plains in both Canadian and American territories, waves of infections swept through indigenous communities, decimating populations already weakened by malnutrition due to the hunting out of fur-bearing species and the buffalo and bison. With the end of the traditional bison economy and the more recent fur-trade economy, the only option for many Indigenous communities was to negotiate treaties and convert their economies yet again, this time to an agricultural economy under the reserve system. Many treaties included, at the insistence of the Indigenous parties, the provision by the government of a “medicine chest” to combat the frequent epidemics, and rations during times of famine - provisions rarely honored by the government once its goal of isolating Indigenous peoples on reserves was achieved.

The deadly conditions continued, exacerbated by Government policies and lack of concern at the highest levels for the suffering of Indigenous peoples, bereft of their traditional ways of life, hemmed in by restrictive laws, weakened by famine and disease, subjected to multiple forms of abuse by Department of Indian Affairs employees and agents.

Daschuk’s account concludes with the following comments:

“This study has shown that the decline of First Nations health was the direct result of economic and cultural suppression. The effects of the state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities that began in the 1880s haunt us as a nation still. The Cree negotiators at Treaty 6 recognized the need for their people to adapt to the new economic paradigm taking shape in the west. They acknowledged that the conversion would be difficult. What they failed to plan for was the active intervention of the Canadian government in preventing them from doing so. Tuberculosis and pathologies that have emerged in aboriginal communities in recent decades are the physical manifestations of their poverty and marginalization from mainstream Canadian life.

The gap between the health, living conditions, and other social determinants of health of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians continues as it has since the end of the nineteenth century. While Canadians see themselves as world leaders in social welfare, health care, and economic development, most reserves in Canada are economic backwaters with little prospect of material advancement and more in common with the third world than the rest of Canada. Even basics such as clean drinking water remain elusive for some communities. Identification of the forces that have held indigenous communities back might provide insights into what is required to bridge the gap between First Nations communities and the rest of Canada today.”

Canada’s genocidal war on Indigenous peoples continues.

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, is a collection of work memorialising and expanding upon the significant contributions to social justice theory made by the women of the Combahee River Collective (CRC). Taylor’s stated intent in this volume is “an effort to reconnect the radical roots of Black feminist analysis and practice to contemporary organizing efforts” and “to show how these politics remain historically vibrant and relevant to the struggles of today.”

The Combahee River Collective, “a radical Black feminist organization formed in 1974 and named after Harriet Tubman’s 1853 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 enslaved people” formed in reaction to both the white feminist movement, and the civil rights movement. The women of the CRC - including Barbara Smith, her sister Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier - were painfully aware that white feminists were not paying attention to racism and the particular conditions experienced by the black woman in America; at the same time, they felt that a focus on racism alone was not a sufficient basis for critical analysis and action planning relevant to black women’s liberation.

While it would be some years yet before Kimberlé Crenshaw named and defined intersectionality, the CRC “...described oppressions as “interlocking” or happening “simultaneously,” thus creating new measures of oppression and inequality. In other words, Black women could not quantify their oppression only in terms of sexism or racism, or of homophobia experienced by Black lesbians. They were not ever a single category, but it was the merging or enmeshment of those identities that compounded how Black women experienced oppression.”

The CRC also introduced the concept of identity politics into radical social analysis, arguing that “...oppression on the basis of identity—whether it was racial, gender, class, or sexual orientation identity—was a source of political radicalization.” Furthermore, identity politics meant that “experiences of oppression, humiliations, and the indignities created by poverty, racism, and sexism opened Black women up to the possibility of radical and revolutionary politics” - it provided a point of entry for an oppressed group to work towards their own liberation. For the CRC, identity politics was connected to coalition building. They believed that different oppressed groups, in working together on the issues affecting the liberation of those oppressed groups, could effect real change. Identity politics allowed people to radicalise around their own oppression, identify the specific issues affecting their own conditions - and then join with other groups to address multiple issues together.

The CRC was a truly radical political movement, operating from a socialist base that acknowledged the importance of class in an understanding of the oppression of black women, and within a spirit of internationalism that declared solidarity with the “global movement of Black and Brown people united in struggle against the colonial, imperialist, and capitalist domination of the West, led by the United States.”

The first chapter of the book is, inevitably, a reprinting of The Combahee River Collective Statement, a historic document that sets out the results of the Collective’s analysis. They begin by stating:

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”

I remember reading, and being deeply affected by, the CRC Statement. I think it is an absolute necessity for any feminist or anti-racist activist to read it, and one of the things that delights me about Taylor’s book is that she has made the Statement readily available in print. If you are unfamiliar with it, there are also a few places where it can be found online, if you look for it. It is an important document, more so now than ever as we witness the failure of white feminism or socialist action or civil rights movements alone to radically transform our world to one in which true social justice is the rule, not the fervently hoped for, rare in practice exception.

The Statement is the heart of this book. What follows in the interviews conducted by Taylor with Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier and Alice Garza, and the comments of Barbara Ransby is the background, contextualisation, extension, and evolution of these essential ideas, presented to a new generation that can build on them to bring about real change, true liberation for all.

These interviews are powerful, thoughtful, often raw, always real, explorations of what it means to be a politically and economically radical black feminist. They are steeped in intersectionality, in the importance of seeing the indivisibility of multiple marked statuses. They are fearless in calling out both white supremacy and late-stage capitalism as poisonous ideologies that limit social justice. They are historically and immediately important.

It has been 40 years since the publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement, and it remains an important document in the body of theory that informs the broad social justice movement, and the specific Black feminist movement. In bringing together the statement and the voices of those who created it, and who have incorporated its ideas into their own movement, Taylor reminds us of its power and truth.

Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization, edited by Peter McFarlane and Nicole Schabus, is exactly what the title says. A collection of essays on the mechanisms of colonisation, resistance, land claims, and true reconciliation by noted Indigenous thinkers and activists including Glen Coulthard, Taiaiake Alfred, Arthur Manuel, Pamela Palmeter, Bev Sellars and others, this volume was produced by The Federation of Post Secondary Educators of BC and is available for download at http://fpse.ca/sites/default/files/news_files/Decolonization%20Handbook.pdf

It’s an important collection of voices that need to be widely heard and understood, because these issues speak to the essence and survival of Canada as a nation. We settlers live on stolen land.Indigenous people’s land, taken through conquest and deceit and the arrogance of such legal fictions as the Doctrine of Discovery. If we are to work through this history that poisons our relationships with Indigenous people, with the land, with more recent arrivals on these lands, with our notions of what Canada ought to be, then the first thing we need to do is decolonise our relationships, and to remake the theft into a true partnership.

This book provides insights into what has gone before, and what must come after, in order to make this a reality. It’s not easy for settler peoples to acknowledge that what was done, was wrong. But that’s the first step. The essays collected here show first how it was done, and how government policy continues to support colonisation, land theft, and genocide under the goal of extinction of land title and special status, and second, how Indigenous peoples are resisting these goals.

These essays speak to everyone living within the nation called Canada. Much of the work is by Indigenous people, addressing Indigenous people. But the teachings are important for those of us from settler backgrounds, and those who have come as immigrants to the Canada built on colonialism. We all need to understand where we have come from, in order to see where we can go to, as Indigenous people and allies, as partners in defending the land and water, in a truly postcolonial world.

Ijeoma Oluo is a writer and journalist who has focused on writing about misogynoir, intersectionality, online harassment, the Black Lives Matter movement, race, economics, parenting, feminism and social justice. Now she has written a book, So You Want To Talk about Race, which brings together her thinking on these topics in an accessible introduction to the basic concepts of the discourse, for the person who wants to enter the conversation on racism in a useful way.

She tackles the hard questions head-on, with clear examples and plenty of practical metaphors to get the important ideas across. In each chapter, she addresses a different, common area of discussion around race, and provides specific ideas about how to tackle the issues, what things to keep in mind, even, where relevant, key facts for engaging in argument. The topics she covers are wide.ranging, and important. The intersectionality of race and class that pushes back against the idea that policies aimed at reducing poverty are also going to resolve race-based poverty. The definition of racism as a structural phenomenon, not an individual one, and how that affects the discourse. The effect of micro-agressions. What privilege is, and why you need to check it. The depth of misogynoir (google it) in our society, and why it hurts black women so badly. The politics of cultural appropriation. Social issues such as affirmative action and the school-to-prison pipeline.

This is more than just an introduction to concepts. It is also a training manual, in a sense, that addresses the issue of how to have a productive conversation about race. It’s an important book for anyone, and particularly anyone white who genuinely wants to talk about issues of racism without harming the people of colour you’re talking to. And for those who want to engage with those who seem ignorant about racism, but teachable.

As a disabled person, a queer person, and a freelance cultural studies scholar, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer is exactly the sort of book you’d expect to find me reading sooner or later. There are many reasons to consider the relationship between crip theory and queer theory, and how they relate to other bodies of theory - feminist studies, race theory among them. Disability and alternative sexualities are situated in the body, they share a history of being pathologised, and seen as states requiring medicalisation, rehabilitation, and isolation. They carry high risks of stigmatisation. They challenge and subvert narratives of normality in a way that gender and race do not. As McRuer notes, “Able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.”

The book is structured as a series of essays examining various aspects of disability theory, or “crip theory” with particular attention to how they intersect with queer conceptualisations and experiences. The first chapter focuses on ways of “coming out” and becoming identified as disabled. McRuer points out that self-identification as disabled is something that occurs in opposition to a compulsory ablebodiedness inherent in society, much as coming out as queer occurs in opposition to compulsory heterosexuality.

“In many ways, the system of compulsory able-bodiedness I analyzed in the introduction militates against crip identifications and practices, even as it inevitably generates them. Certainly, disabled activists, artists, and others who have come out crip have done so in response to systemic able-bodied subordination and oppression. Stigmatized in and by a culture that will not or cannot accommodate their presence, crip performers (in several senses of the word and in many different performance venues, from the stage to the street to the conference hall) have proudly and collectively shaped stigmaphilic alternatives in, through, and around that abjection. At the same time, if the constraints of compulsory able-bodiedness push some politicized activists and artists with disabilities to come out crip, those constraints simultaneously keep many other disabled and nondisabled people from doing so.”

The next section of McRuer’s book is titled “Capitalism and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer Domesticity” and is centered around the case of Sharon Kowalski and the disability-informed strategies utilised by proponents of same-sex marriage. He argues in particular that “...intracommunity debates over gay marriage and other “normalizing” issues are centrally about disability and disability oppression.”

“...the lesbian and gay emphasis on normalizing issues such as marriage deploys a fundamentally “stigmaphobic” strategy, “where conformity is ensured through fear of stigma” (Trouble with Normal 43). The stigmaphobic strategy is most troubling, for Warner and other queers, because it proscribes larger discussions of social justice and queer cultural generativity. To cite just one crucial example: most of the complaints about lesbian and gay partners not being able to get health insurance through their spouse have not included an acknowledgement of how many people in general don’t have adequate health insurance, let alone a broader critique of the corporate health insurance industry (a critique that was fairly basic to earlier gay liberationist and feminist writing).”

He further discusses ways in which the heterosexual nuclear family, constructed under capitalism as a means of reproduction of (able-bodied) workers, is inimical to disabled domesticity. As a site of (re)production, the disabled are increasingly moved out of the home and into institutions.

As a personal sidenote on this point, when I arrive at a hospital to receive medical care, I am generally assumed to be a transfer patient from a longterm care facility. The idea that I live at home in my condition is not considered. One side effect of this is that ambulance services, which are normally required only in emergency situations by able-bodied people, but which are necessary for me to travel anywhere, are covered by various forms of government or private insurance for disabled people being transferred from institution to institution, but not for me if I travel from home to a medical facility for non-emergency care, a “loophole” which has increasingly placed me in debt. Disability and domesticity are viewed are mutually incompatible and no provision is made for those who insist that it is not.

In the third section of his book, “Noncompliance: The Transformation, Gary Fisher, and the Limits of Rehabilitation,” McRuer starts by discussing the idea of rehabilitation as reflected in the situation of Sharon Kowalski. Where Thompson and Kowalski perceived the possibility of a rehabilitation that involved a return to the home for care, and encompassed the idea of home as a queer and crip space, Kowalski’s parents could only understand rehabilitation as a return to the compulsory state of heterosexual ablebodiedness: “for them, able-bodied/heterosexual normalcy began at home, and if Sharon could not return to such a state of normalcy, then she would have to remain incarcerated in nursing homes.” With this as a starting point, McRuer goes on to “... address disability studies critiques of ideologies of rehabilitation more directly, through consideration of a few texts produced in the normalizing decade after Sharon Kowalski did, in fact, return home to live with Thompson and Patty Bresser.”

The first of these texts is a documentary, The Transformation, which chronicles the intervention of a fundamentalist Christian mission in a community of Black and Latinx transfolk; the film follows the recruitment of Sara, a trans woman, into the ministry and her transformation into Ricardo, showing “...[the] journey from the transgender streets of New York to a housed, married, and Fundamentalist Christian life in Dallas.” The second text is the journals and short stories of black writer Gary Fisher, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, edited and published by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick three years after Fisher’s death from complications of AIDS. McRuer also discusses Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.

McRuer presents mainstream concepts of rehabilitation as focused on repairing and removing alterity and recreating homogeneity. It implies that “...the rehabilitative contract (“everyone agrees”), then, essentially stipulates that, in return for integration, no complaints will be made, no suggestions for how the world, and not the disabled body or mind, might be molded differently. No complaints will be made even if the contract in effect relegates disabled people to the margins.”

Rehabilitation becomes a process of normalisation, of demanding that the queer, disabled, damaged, different, degraded self be made normal, or be excluded, institutionalised, outcast. Narratives that bring the subject home, render them as able, acceptable, capable, while remaining a queer and disabled person still are seen as resistant, non-compliant.

The fourth essay in McRuer’s examination of crip theory, “Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate Universality and Alternative Corporealities,” is an exploration of composition, corporations, and corporeality:

“Chapters 2 and 3 focused on highly charged institutional and institutionalized sites where cultural signs of queerness and disability appear and where, in many ways, they are made to disappear to shore up dominant forms of domesticity and rehabilitation, respectively. In this chapter, I turn to another institutional site, the contemporary university, where anxieties about disability and queerness are likewise legible. In particular, I extend the critical dialogue on composition and the contemporary university by arguing for alternative, and multiple, corporealities. I contend that recentering our attention on the composing bodies in our classrooms can inaugurate and work to sustain a process of “de-composition”—that is, a process that provides an ongoing critique of both the corporate models into which we, as students and teachers of composition, are interpellated and the concomitant disciplinary compulsion to produce only dis- embodied, efficient writers. Most important, I make the somewhat polemical claim that bringing back in composing bodies means, inevitably, placing queer theory and disability studies at the center of composition theory.”

As McRuer notes, one consequence of compulsory heterosexuality and ablebodiedness is that social and cultural institutions are constantly engaged in a process of composing straight, able bodies capable of production and reproduction within the corporate, capitalist system.The teaching of language usage, of composition, is a part of that process, of creating bodies fit to serve corporate needs through their uniform skills of composition and communication.

The fifth section, “Crip Eye fir the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies” begins with a discussion of the politics of how society sees - and represents for others to see - the disabled. Taking the media text Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a point of departure, McRuer examines the ways in which representations of disability rooted in a model of progress and normalisation fail to serve the disabled but instead support the narrative of compulsory ablebodiedness: “In other words, some things don’t keep getting better; visual rhetorics of disability do not necessarily improve over time, nor do they posit (or construct, instruct, or assure) a disabled viewer.” McRuer offers a counterpoint in the masochistic performance art of Bob Flanagan, who incorporates both bdsm and his cystic fibrosis into his work, to the point if titling one performance piece “Bob Flanagan’s Sick” - suggesting “In a moment of danger and noncompliance, however, “some future person” or collectivity might detect in that sick message the seemingly incomprehensible way to survive, and survive well, at the margins of time, space, and representation (they might, in fact, detect that surviving well can paradoxically mean surviving sick).”

Taken as a whole, McRuer’s book interrogates and challenges assumptions, constructions and representations of disability, showing how disability queers the master cultural narrative if productive, corporatised, consumerist normality. It raises questions, and dies not always offer answers, only new ways of considering the disability identity and its relation to the social structures that surround it. It’s not an easy book, but it is a mist thought-provoking one.

Gregory Woods’ Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World is an interesting look at some of the queer people and communities who have undeniably influenced modern cultural development, from Oscar Wilde to Yukio Mishima, and how these artists and communities have been viewed.

Woods begins by defining his idea of the Homintern (a play on the international Communist organisation, Comintern, which advocated world communism): “The Homintern is the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life. Imagined as a single network, it is either one of the major creative forces in the cultural development of the past century, or a sinister conspiracy against the moral and material interests of nation states. You decide.”

However, Woods makes it clear that he is not speaking of some actual secret organisation or conspiracy to make the world more queer, but rather a loose conceptualisation of the international community of queer cultural workers, the artists, writers, musicians, critics, aesthetes, sponsors and patrons who held salons and operated clubs and galleries and publishing houses and other businesses and establishments where culture makers could gather, disseminate their works and perspectives, pass on their world views to future generations, straight and queer. But at the same time, he reminds us that the “homosexual” has frequently been seen as a fifth columnist, as a security risk, as a traitor more inclined to identify with “his” own kind across international birders than with his country if birth.

“There was no such thing as the ‘Homintern’. It was a joke, a nightmare, or a dream, depending on one’s point of view; but, despite its lack of substance, it still occupied a solid and prominent site near the centre of modern life. ... The coining of the expression ‘Homintern’ is often attributed to Cyril Connolly, less often to Maurice Bowra, and sometimes to W.H. Auden; but Anthony Powell thought its source was Jocelyn Brooke, and Harold Norse claimed it for himself. Most plausibly, it was the felicitous invention of many minds, unknown to each other, at more or less the same time. Anyone who pronounced the relatively new word ‘homosexual’ with a short first ‘o’ – and that is likely to have included anyone with a classical education – could have made the camp pun. ‘Homintern’ was the name Connolly, Auden and others jokingly gave the sprawling, informal network of friendships that Cold War conspiracy theorists would later come to think of as ‘the international homosexual conspiracy’. In fact, the Homosexual International was sometimes only superficially international and sometimes only half-heartedly homosexual: it was also a matter of surfaces, fashions and styles. The term tended to be applied to networks only of men, in part because those who thought of such a potential conspiracy as a threat tended not to think of women, let alone lesbian women, as having sufficient influence to be worth worrying about.”

Woods also reminds us of the at-times commonly held belief that “homosexual cliques” controlled access to the cultural world, offering preferential access to artists who were gay themselves, or incorporated gay aesthetics into their work. The Homintern may not exist, but it has been, and still is, believed to exist (think of the religious right’s harping on a mythical ‘gay agenda’), and thus affects the ways in which queer people, communities and culture are seen and treated.

Woods begins his meditation on the interactions of gay aesthetics with the larger scope of modern culture with an examination of the influences of Oscar Wilde - his art, his role in the aesthetic movement, and his homosexuality, imprisonment and exile. Wilde’s work influenced a generation of continental writers, many of them also homosexual, but the tragic circumstances of his later life reinforced an association between aestheticism, decadence, and sexual deviance, and motivated a generation of straight writers to “butch up” as much as possible to avoid any suspicion that they might be “like Oscar Wilde.”

He also notes the effects of psychological and psychoanalytical exploration of sexuality, including deviant sexuality, centred around such German and Austrian thinkers as Freud and Kraft-Ebbing. Woods suggests that these effects were particularly pronounced in England: “The fact that the new sciences of sexology and psychoanalysis were of predominantly German and Austrian origins inspired in some British nationalists and jingoists the suspicion that sodomy itself was being promoted by a conspiracy of German-speaking perverts against the moral purity of the British Empire.”

From these beginnings - which in combination mark the end of an era where gay sexuality was kept hidden and as unremarked as possible, by all but the most daring of wilful outcasts, and the start of the modern era of sexual ferment and freedom when the love that once dared not speak its name became able to shout it proudly in the streets - Woods takes us on a tour of queer engagement with culture and public discourse, from the literary salons of Natalie Barney to the ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev, from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the Weimar Republic’s Berlin club scene to the idyllic pleasures of sultry Capri, and on to the post-war “Sodom-on-Hudson,” Greenwich Village.

The book reads like a massive combination cultural tour guide and gossip sheet to all things queer, following a somewhat idiosyncratic itinerary through the 20th century, stopping frequently to exclaim “something interesting was said here” or “here is where these people were” - and then proceeding to tell you absolutely everything about it. As an organising conceit, the idea of the Homintern allows Woods to trace connections, networks, of acquaintance, of influence, of correspondence, of personal relationship, between people, places and even times, giving a sense of organicity to the idea of queer culture(s). It is a “who’s who” of queer artists and thinkers, and a celebration of their lives, scandals and achievements.

What is lacking, unfortunately, is an actual argument in support of the grand claim made in the book’s subtitle. There is much exploration of the minutiae of gay culture, but not much critical exploration of its themes and subjects, or indeed of its influence on mainstream culture. What critical analysis there is, is mostly about theories of homosexuality, and the ways in which changes in society influenced attitudes towards being gay.

What this book offers, essentially, is a vicarious journey through the lives of a number of well-known creative gay people, rarely rising above the level of reportage about their notable achievements, social habits and domestic arrangements. The depth of detail, and the research involved to produce such a tome, is impressive. However, the Homintern ultimately dissolves into a simple narrative of who worked with whom, who vacationed with whom, where they partied and with whom they slept while they did all that. I don’t know what I was expecting from a book so expansively titled, but what I got was little more than a crowded landscape of biographical notes about people linked by a common sexual orientation and shared occupation.