Non-binary gender petition

This wouldn't be perfect, but it's a good start.

This is a petition at White House dot Gov to request the government to officially recognize non-binary genders in official contexts. I'd love for you to go and sign it.

I know it's not likely to result in any action, but raising awareness helps in itself.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/recognize-non-binary-genders/80HYg71P

My sweetie Lisa's jewelery

My sweetie Lisa Hunter, who makes awesome and pretty jewelery, is crowdfunding her business via Indiegogo (which is something rather like Kickstarter). You may have seen the bracelet I wear all the time that she made. Her page there has photographs of some of her other pieces.

Not only do I want to see her efforts succeed because I care about her quite a lot, but I also think she makes really beautiful things that deserve a chance at wider recognition. If you have a minute to spare, I'd be grateful if you'd take a look at her page here. If you like what you see, please consider contributing and/or sharing it more widely!

Many Minds, One Heart - SNCC's Dream for a New America

So I'm pushing through reading all of "Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America". It's one of two monographs I need to read for my history class. We need to read both and write a paper on one, and I was originally making the damage-control choice of just reading the other one to help keep up with the rest of life that's been happening. But since the mid term is coming up and stuff about Many Minds will be on it, I'm going to read it. It helped to realize that while the book is 463 pages long, only 257 of them are actually the book. The rest is appendices, bibliography, end notes, and index.

So as I read this, there are bits that I find really interesting and worthwhile. But to me, it feel like the majority of this is focused on inter-group and cross-group dynamics. How all the people within this alphabet soup of organizations worked together or failed to. It feels to me like it's as much about how small groups of people organize themselves and learn from each other (or fail to) as it is about the historic actions of those groups.

And my feeling that way is making me wonder if there's something wrong with the way I am assimilating all this information. That maybe I'm failing to form some kind of larger framework for all of this knowledge that the author is trying to create for me. But I have to admit that I'm getting a little bit lost in the chaos.

(no subject)

I'm reading two pieces written by lesbian activists who are against the expansion of traditional marriage to include partners of the same sex.

It's made me realize that it could be looked at as heteronormative society imposing a marital hegemony onto the LGBTQ community. Rather than recognizing a variety of new and beautiful forms of relationship, we sort of defang the serpent by squeezing it into an inherently gendered form that magically becomes worthy of social recognition.

I'm not sure if I feel that way. But there's been so much material to read in this course that's made me examine my thinking in some really fantastic ways.

In her conclusion, Nancy Polikoff writes that fighting for lesbian and gay marriage contradicts efforts to disconnect economic benefits from marriage and distracts from the need to make basic health care available to everyone. It requires emphasizing similarities between queer values and heteronormative ones. That it values long-term monogamous couples over all other relationships. She writes:

"I fear that the very process of employing that rhetorical strategy for the years it will take to achieve its objective will lead our movement's public representatives, and the countless lesbians and gay men who hear us, to believe exactly what we say."

I can really see what she's getting at there, and it's a little scary. It's a warning that the ability for queer folks to marry will create a mirror of existing culture and society, losing an opportunity for GLBTQ folks to use their own experiences in creating communities of recognition and their own forms of relationship to transform larger society. Instead of we GLBTQ folks making society at large more fabulous, they will make *us* more plain.