What humans do, too often
Responding to culturallyboundgender's piece
Culturallyboundgender’s article is entitled, "Toward an End to Appropriation of Indigenous “Two Spirit” People in Trans Politics: the Relationship Between Third Gender Roles and Patriarchy. " Both the piece and the commentary are illuminating and I’m grateful for the discovery. Check it out here to best “place” my writing below.
My first thought: “what a wonderfully rich dialogue.” My second gave rise to a third, and so on, so I am sharing them here. After all, the exploration of meaning from differing standpoints is very much a stop on the Anisotropic Road.
Theorizing to understand, justify, judge, celebrate, condemn, most certainly presume and label relative to history is a human practice in both written or oral traditions. We seek to “know” even when what we call knowledge is speculation wrapped up in language we invent to represent meaning. That meaning becomes contested as we seek to convey, impose and defend the understanding we call knowledge.
We are all reflections of our current time as much as of our personal and collective histories. We must live in the here and now, yet seem caught up in reaching for a certainty from the past to justify what we need here and now. Many seem to don an identity to escape a current reality, seeking, yearning for something external to give permission to be.
I am both elevated by the perspectives in this thread (so much resonates) and dismayed by something I can't quite grasp. I think that has something to do with the sense that we're giving energy to the past when it is needed for the future.
Perhaps the real challenge is self-acceptance. I am a "no labels" sort, while recognizing that categorization and pattern recognition is an inherent human capacity and need. We also have a capacity to move from taxonomy to ontology, from hierarchy to relationship.
These days, I receive and consider everything through a lens of grief born of differing understandings of reality. It brings both fog and clarity with respect to both the yesterdays lived together yet with an immeasurable, unrecognized difference and the potential tomorrows that are shaped by actions today.
The creation of the latest Canadian string, LGBTQ2SAI+ does not communicate progress to me. I forget where Q fits as I'm old enough to remember that it meant "questioning" and not the gay "N" word. Popular use by mostly heterosexual and LGB youngsters is a politicization, big and small "P", that is reductive, divisive, phobic. It presumes a commonality that does not exist except through celebrating a victim status that is being weaponized to exert a form of power.
It does give me an understanding of the resentment many feel about appropriation, because this appropriates a part of me as an erasure.
On that I will ponder because, as a artist, writer and creative innovator in systems thinking and governance models, I know that every single thing is not a single thing, but an expression drawn from everything else. Intent matters. It is not hard to discern learning to exploit from learning to integrate, grow, honour and share. It is in the how and why that meaning is found, rarely in the what, as no “what” is wholly self-explanatory.
Nonetheless, the “what” assumes a life of its own, with consequences.