These are taken from a couple of my forum posts. I figured they should be in my blog as well, since I believe them pretty firmly.
On Homosexuality:
You want to understand homosexuality? Try a thought experience. For you straight folks, imagine a world where acceptable orientation standards are reversed. It is morally objectionable for you to love someone of the opposite gender as yourself. Now imagine just one day out of the blue (or even just because someone else you know once mentioned the possibility to you) you begin to think about what it would be like to be in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex. That feeling never goes away, and you understand that if you told anyone at all, they may think that you are weird.
Just like that, you are now hiding from everyone. You wouldn't dare tell them that you believed it should be okay to love whoever you want. When your friends make mean comments about others who have come out, you play along to avoid being shamed. You feel like you are betraying your beliefs with every word. Imagine you do find someone of like mind, and you fall in love. You spend hours a day, lay awake all night worrying that someone might find out about how you feel about each other. You avoid each other in the hallways - you are afraid to so much as touch one another, to hug, to even brush your sleeve against theirs incidentally in the lunch line - because someone might see you and know your secrets.
This puts unbareable stress on your relationship, and most of the time, you will break up with the person, only to sabotage the next relationship, and the next and the next. You would think coming out would solve this problem, just standing up and telling everyone how you really feel. If you do this, two things may happen. Your partner may break up with you to avoid being labeled. They may never speak to you again, or in some cases, to prove themselves as one of the normals, they may beat you in public. The second thing that will happen is everyone will now stare, whisper, or become violent towards you. You will never be the same in their eyes. If you're lucky enough to have friends, they will introduce you as "the gay/lesbian friend" like that tells the person everything about you. You are just another instance, acting in the name of all gays and lesbians (I guess the bisexuals, transgender, pansexual etc fall into this category too...). You are no longer an individual but an instance of a group.
If you manage to make friends within the community, you will have more sleepless nights dealing with hosts of social problems. Suicides, violent attacks, threats, pain and suffering. All you have is each other, and each loss is felt personally - it shakes the very world you live in. Especially when your partner or a loved one falls prey to a violent beating that leaves them brain-dead or just plain dead. Or were that same loved one to kill themselves because of the stresses of being the odd one out.
This is the experience of thousands of gays and lesbians.
This is what we deal with in our lives.
Thank you for anyone out there who treats us like human beings and not just some deviant to be gawked at and mistreated; stereotyped and destroyed.
On Gender:
Yes, the world is built on patriarchy. Yes, there are still double standards.
You can argue until you're blue in the face about who should be in charge, but the matter behind all this is our own concepts of gender. If we want to lose the patriarchy, we need to stop looking at things as a divide. We need to judge people based on their personal traits and not whether their birth certificate has an M or an F. Starting at childhood.
The first step on the way to destroying the divide....stop putting your children in pink or blue footy-pjs. There have been a few studies that find that children are treated differently based on their perceived gender. Second, don't buy your little girl an oven play-set or an ironing board as a toy. Or any other stereotypical type of toy that promotes some gender ideal. The problem is that women are painted as victim and conditioned away from having the same hopes and aspirations as men.
Stop pretending there is this line dividing men and women, that we are somehow different. We're not. Until this stupid little gender fence is kicked down and trampled to the ground, we'll treat people based on which side they come from, not who they actually are.
There are no sides.
We've just been pitted against one another to keep the system going the way it is.
View User's Journal
Decimating the fine line between genius and insanity...
 |
Epistemic
Community Member |
