I was born in 1957. The word “colored” is on my birth certificate. The civil rights movement educated me around race identity, and I now identify as Black or of African descent.
When I was growing up, there were only two pronouns to describe oneself: she and he. As for gender, you checked a box: male or female. Same for bathrooms—it was men’s and women’s, or girls’ and boys’.
There were no terms commonly used like transgender, cisgender, and non-binary. They/them existed as pronouns but we used them only when we were not sure of someone’s sexual orientation, or when there was a plural subject.
After I came out to my mother at nineteen, she refused to speak to me for the next twenty years, and then again for a six-year period later in my life, when I was in my forties. By the time we resumed communicating, she had dementia and thought I was eleven.
Queer was a bad word when I was younger, equivalent to the “N” word. I remember in 1976 reading about Renée Richards, a professional tennis player, asking to compete as a woman in the U.S. Open and being described as a transsexual. It was the first time I had heard about a person transitioning, even though that term was not used then.
Queer people have had to fight even for their right to exist. The fight continues today. The University of Pennsylvania has just reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education to prohibit transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
In a June 27 essay for the New York Times, writer Andrew Sullivan argued that the gay rights movement had “radicalized and lost its way.” Sullivan, a British-American conservative commentator who is both an out gay man and a devout Catholic, has been known to stir the pot for many years, particularly around the issue of race.
Sullivan has been described as a proponent of “legitimation,” meaning that he thinks the goal of LGBTQ+ people should be to join the “mainstream” rather than push for “radical social change.” He was one of the first prominent proponents of the right of same-sex couples to marry, but has opposed efforts to ensure the rights and inclusion of trans people.
“The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect,” Sullivan writes in his Times piece. “But in the wake of victory, LGBTQ+ groups reneged on that pledge. They demanded the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted.”
Sulivan says that as he witnessed “all this radical change I wondered if I was just another old fart, shaking my fist at the sky, like every older generation known to man. Why not just accept that the next gay and lesbian generation has new ideas and has moved on and old-timers like me should just move aside?”
Good question. Let me try to answer it. Yes, Andy, you are an old fart. You should accept these new ideas and move aside. You especially need to move past the idea that those of us who are Black or LGBTQ+ or both should be thankful for the rights we have and don’t go making any more trouble for massa.
Sullivan, in his essay, argues that the words “gay” and “lesbian” have all but disappeared, replaced with an alphabet’s soup of acronyms. He feels proponents for inclusiveness have gone too far.
I disagree. I think that as long as some people are still not able to live their authentic lives, we have not gone far enough.
The civil rights movement also educated me to question my gender identity and not automatically accept what my parents and the hospital agreed to at the time of my birth. I use the pronouns she/her and combine my sexual orientation and race and say I am a Blesbian.
More importantly, I allow folks to identify how they want to identify and accept what they say about their identity even if I have not heard of it before. I am glad for groups including GLAAD, Black Lives Matter, and others for educating me to be more inclusive of all.
Here’s hoping Andrew Sullivan and others will accept the education as well.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.