Saturday, October 6, 2007

This Woman's Work

I'm sorry that I traumatized you the other day with visions of Burt Bacharach's sex life. It won't happen again. To make it up to you, here's a great quote, in honor of this whole ENDA situation:

"...the moral center of a movement is not defined by how well and how long we fight for our own rights. Important as that is, it's also enlightened self-interest: We all want our own rights. The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us, for those more easily left behind."
--Riki Wilchins, from "Gender Rights Are Human Rights"

This comes from an essay in the book Genderqueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary. It's a collection of essays from various people, and so it gets rather spotty at times, but in general it's pretty interesting, and I recommend it. What's so great about the gender binary anyway? (And I really do challenge anyone to answer this...especially from a female perspective. There's another essay in the aforementioned book claiming that being a woman in a patriarchal society is to be inherently genderqueer. That might be pushing it a little, but as things are, women don't seem to have anything to gain from the gender binary.) What else is this ENDA thing showing me, other than the fact that some people have strange ideas about discrimination? We need some transgender politicians, obviously.

1 comment:

icarus said...

i like that quote a lot, especially with the current ENDA situation.