Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [18]
TRANSGENDER AND GENDERQUEER FOLKS
Transgendered people form a variety of communities, all of which have much to teach to those who are interested in transcending their gender-role programming. Dossie, in the early years of her feminism, found friends and lovers among male-to-female transsexuals who became her wonderful role models for how to be female, indeed often ultra-feminine, and still be assertive and powerful.
What we can all learn from transgendered people is that gender is malleable. From people who take hormones to express male or female gender, we learn about how some behaviors and emotional states may be hormone related. People who have lived parts of their lives in both gender modes, physiologically and culturally, have a great deal to teach us about what changes according to hormones, and what does not, and what gender characteristics remain a matter of choice no matter what your endocrine system says. Genderqueer people—those who choose to live their lives somewhere between the usual gender roles—are softening the boundaries of gender and demonstrating what life without binary gender might look like.
If you think this doesn’t apply to you, that you are certain of your gender and that it’s immutable, please consider that a great many people are born with characteristics of both genders: depending on whose definition you use, anywhere from two to seventeen babies out of a thousand are born with chromosomes and/or genitalia that place them somewhere between the extremes of the gender continuum. We’re not generally aware of these people in our midst because their appearance is usually surgically altered early in life, but it appears that Mother (Father?) Nature doesn’t believe in only two genders, and neither do your authors. And a great many people whose genitals and chromosomes are all lined up with biological norms nonetheless feel strongly that they would live more happily and appropriately when presenting as a different gender than the one the doctor assigned to them at birth; you may have such people among your friends and family without knowing it unless they choose to tell you.
Transsexuals can tell us a lot about how differently other people treat you when they see you as a man, or as a woman. Perforce, transgendered people become experts at living in a very hostile world. It takes a strong-minded person to stand up to our culture’s rigidity about “real men” and “real women.” No other sexual minority is more likely to suffer direct physical oppression in the form of queer-bashing. It was mostly transgendered people, butch women and drag queens, who rebelled against police brutality in the famous Stonewall riots of 1969 that initiated the Gay Liberation movement. Transgendered people can teach us a lot about the determination to be free.
TANTRA AND SPIRITUAL SEX PRACTITIONERS
Celibacy is not the only sexual practice of the spiritually inclined. Early examples of religious communities based on nonmonogamy included the Mormon church, the Oneida community, the practices of maithuna and karezza in tantric yoga, and the temple whores of the early Mediterranean goddess worshipers. Tantra as we know it today is actually a Westernized form of classical tantric practice taught in workshops in most major cities and in many excellent books and videos. Other classical spiritual/sexual traditions have been updated for Western consumption in practices like Healing Tao and Quodoushka. Pagans and Radical Faeries come together for festivals and gatherings to celebrate ancient sexual rites such as Beltane, or make up their own rituals that are appropriate to current lifestyles, like the open sexuality of Faerie gatherings or the more subtle eroticism of sacred dance and drumming.
These practitioners understand that sex is connected to the spiritual. As we said in an earlier book, “Every orgasm is a spiritual experience. Think of a moment of perfect wholeness, of yourself in perfect unity, of expanded awareness that transcends the split between mind