Don't let your schooling interfere with your education.
~ Pete Seeger

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Thou hypocrite...

It's not a sin to be yourself. How else can you be true to others? As the Bard said, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou cannot be false to any man." Does it not follow that, if you are not true to yourself, you are being false to others?

It is a sin to keep your children in ignorance of me, because I am who I am. First, you are bearing false witness - you are lying to your children. Second, you are preventing them from getting to know a truly beautiful and loving person. Third, you are judging unfairly. As Jesus put it:
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged ... and why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ... Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye: and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Worst of all, when you intentionally keep children ignorant of any particular group of people, whether they be blacks, or Jews, or gays, or trans, you perpetrate a culture of violence against those people. You may have no ill intentions, and may even believe that you are motivated by love, but the message you send to your children is that these people are evil or depraved - that they are people to be feared. Ignorace leads to fear, and fear leads to violence. That is when black men get dragged behind pickup trucks, and gay men get tied to a fence and pistol-whipped, and transwomen get stabbed forty times. Not because of anything they've done, but because of who they are.

Do you want that on your conscience?

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Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
~Helen Keller

Reading List for Information about Transpeople

  • Becoming a Visible Man, by Jamison Green
  • Conundrum, by Jan Morris
  • Gender Outlaw, by Kate Bornstein
  • My Husband Betty, by Helen Boyd
  • Right Side Out, by Annah Moore
  • She's Not There, by Jennifer Boylan
  • The Riddle of Gender, by Deborah Rudacille
  • Trans Liberation, by Leslie Feinberg
  • Transgender Emergence, by Arlene Istar Lev
  • Transgender Warriors, by Leslie Feinberg
  • Transition and Beyond, by Reid Vanderburgh
  • True Selves, by Mildred Brown
  • What Becomes You, by Aaron Link Raz and Hilda Raz
  • Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano

I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men's hands even at the height
of their arc of anger
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound
and it is His - the Christ's, our
Beloved's.
~Hafiz