It's not our business to be telling actors who they are

My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie, instead I watched the Tony Awards, a celebration of the best of Broadway. This year was a bit different. The Tony organization negotiated a deal with the Writers Guild of America, currently on strike which shut down many TV and movie productions. The deal was the ceremony would not use a script and the WGA would not picket. That was better than canceling the ceremony. The WGA felt the stage actors needed to be honored. So instead of an opening monologue or song there was an opening dance, and a pretty cool dance taking advantage of their new location in the gilded United Palace in Washington Heights. It also meant presenters were not announced. Their names appeared on the screen above the stage and when they got to the microphone they introduced themselves. Instead of telling a joke (Nathan Lane was one of a few exceptions) they got down to the business of announcing the award, listing the nominees (usually with a short scene on the screen), and naming the recipient. That meant the show ended on time. There was only one place where I thought this didn’t work. There were lifetime achievement awards for John Kander and Joel Grey. While the screen showed scenes from their work there were two dancers on stage. While nicely done, there was no mention of why these two deserved lifetime achievement awards. A bit reason to watch is to get a sense of shows I might want to see if they ever came to Detroit. And a few do. The idea of & Juliet does sound intriguing – what if Juliet doesn’t kill herself when she sees the body of Romeo? But the scene played during the ceremony was so into spectacle that it was a turnoff. A couple that do look intriguing: There’s Kimberly Akimbo, the story of a girl with an aging syndrome so that by the time she reaches 16 she looks 70. The actress, Victoria Clark, who won for Best Leading Actress in a Musical and said she’s definitely older than 65, looked like she was having a lot of fun playing a high school girl encountering first love. The other is Leopoldstadt a new Tom Stoppard play about a big Jewish family in Vienna from about 1899 to 1938. Here’s an article about the opening last October that talks about why Stoppard wrote the play. Brandon Uranowitz, who won for Best Featured Actor for Leopoldstadt, talked about how the show resonates today.

We are seeing a lot of those tiny seemingly little inconsequential things [that happen in the play] happening right now. It's a clarion call to pay attention to those seemingly inconsequential things that accumulate and lead to mass devastation.

A big thing going on during this Tony Award show was the celebration of identity. Towards the beginning of the show Michael Arden won Best Director for Parade. During a part of his acceptance speech the sound cut out and when it came back the audience was cheering wildly. Today I learned it was to cut out foul language. When he was growing up he had been called a slur for gay men and now he’s a “[slur] with a Tony.” Later Alex Newell won for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for their role in Shucked (a musical about corn? Who knew?). Yes, Newell is nonbinary and was in a sparkling gold dress as they accepted the award and thanked the show producers and the Tony organization for considering nonbinary actors. Newell is the first nonbinary actor to win a Tony. Shortly after that J. Harrison Ghee won for Best Leading Actor for their role in Some Like It Hot. Ghee is also nonbinary. When that show did one of its numbers for the ceremony I wondered about Ghee. I noticed this tall person in a dress and wondered: Male or female? Perhaps neither or both. Some Like It Hot is a musical version of the 1959 movie starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis who escape the mob by dressing as women and joining an all female jazz band. I’ve heard trans people say this concept is outdated. But the new musical has a different ending – living as a woman actually feels pretty good. In that case a nonbinary actor would be quite appropriate. Both Newell and Ghee presented as female with lovely gowns. I wondered how they ended up in the male Best Actor categories. That got me to an NPR article by Jeff Lunden about where nonbinary actors fit. Newell said that although the role they play is female, the word “actor” is not gendered and that is their profession. As for Ghee the character is first male, then female. The award category was less of a concern. I found there is a third player in this story – Justin David Sullivan, who is nonbinary and plays May in & Juliet. Sullivan declined to be considered for a Tony because that would have required them to choose a gender, and they felt they couldn’t do it. Lunden reported several theater awards have chosen to have nongendered performance awards. They include Washington's Helen Hayes Awards, Chicago's Jeff Awards, and New York's Drama Desk

David Barbour, co-president of the Drama Desk Awards, said for years they had nongendered performance categories, until they realized more men than women were taking home honors. At that point, they switched to gendered categories — but this year, they switched back. "It really became evident to us that there were a number of performances by nonbinary performers who were very likely going to be in the mix when the nominations came out," said Barbour. "And it's not our business to be telling actors who they are. We're not in the business of defining them."

Unless they agreed Team Sedition would get All The Powers

A new Congress has begun. In the House the first order of business – before anything else is allowed to happen – is to elect the Speaker. American news (and even Canadian news) has been talking about it because it hasn’t happened yet. For the first time in 100 years – news reports mention this frequently – a Speaker wasn’t elected on the first ballot. There have now been six ballots and still no Speaker. Jen Hayden of Daily Kos put up a post at 1:20 pm on Tuesday with a bunch of tweets. This is just after the proceedings got started. My favorite is Rep. Ted Lieu showing a photo of himself standing outside his office with a bag of popcorn saying he’s about to go to the House floor. Rep. Robin Kelly says she also has her popcorn ready. Even though there is no Speaker Republicans have shown their priorities. The metal detectors that have been at the entrances to the House since just after the Capitol attack have already been removed. In response to that Leah McElrath tweeted:

The GOP’s first priority was to make it easier to bring weapons onto the House floor—nothing unsettling or ominous about that. Nothing at all.

Back to Hayden’s post. Joe Sudbay tweeted that Andrea Mitchell asked Rep. Dingell if any Dems would support McCarthy “for the sake of the institution.” Sudbay added:

Republicans are will to destroy the institution and our democracy. But leave it to Mitchell to find a way to implicate Dems in their mess

And Fox News refused to talk about it. After the first vote Mark Sumner of Kos posted about the result and included:

Kevin McCarthy is such a huge egotist, and such a weak leader, that he’s already promised to hand over almost all the power of the speakership in order to secure his name above the door. He just wants it so bad. But in the first round of voting, Republicans whose philosophical position is roughly 1mm away from McCarthy’s own denied him the speakership because … again, he’s just that weak a leader. ... And right now, as this was being written, Kevin McCarthy lost the second round of voting before the clerk was even halfway through the alphabet. Damn. That’s … well, that’s Tuesday. So far. Everybody take a drink. But limit yourself to something non-alcoholic, because this thing looks like it could go on for a gallon or two.

Joan McCarter of Kos liveblogged the third round of voting. At the end of the day Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted:

The problem is…this isn’t just today. This is going to be everyday in the House Republican majority. It’s not just that they won’t be able to govern. It’s that they are going to be an embarrassing public train wreck while they refuse to govern.

Before the voting began today McCarter wrote about Republican meetings where McCarthy is trying to bring the far-right dissenters into voting for him. They refused. Speaking about the rest of the Republican caucus angry at McCarthy for suggesting bribes – as in certain committee seats the not-so-far-right Republicans thought they were going to get...

Right now, their anger is directed at the maniacs, but the more McCarthy courts them, the likelier they are to abandon him and look for an alternative.

Just before today’s voting began Sumner posted. He started by saying the Republicans haven’t had a party platform since the summer of 2020. Actually, I think they do, but not one they’re willing to write on paper. Their platform is to make miserable the lives of everyone not already rich.

That Republicans are conducting this farce in the form of a speaker election, is a sign of just how reflexively Americans have been taught to take out their frustrations on the party in power, even if the alternative offers them nothing at all. And now Republicans are giving a textbook demonstration of what it means to have no principles, no morals, no plans, and no loyalty. The Republican Party is dead. But hey, its corpse can still put on a show.

That’s also something Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has been saying.

It’s easy to complain that, over the last several election cycles, Republicans have had no positions except that they hate everyone and everything about the Democrats. Only that’s exactly what’s left of the GOP. Shambling about moaning “Woke! Woke!” is all the zombie can do.

Aysha Qamar of Kos posted before 1:00 today what’s happening on the Democratic side. In every vote all 212 Democrats voted for their leader Hakeem Jeffries. That’s a great show of unity. It also means on every vote Jeffries has gotten more votes than McCarthy. But the Speaker job goes to the winner of the majority, not a winner of a plurality. With that show of support Jeffries is able to mock the Republicans, talking about the “chaos, crisis, and confusion.” He said he and Democrats won’t save Republicans from their dysfunction. Hunter of Kos added some analysis. Those who are refusing to vote for McCarthy are the ones who were in favor of the sedition that happened two years ago. They’re not going to make their displeasure known through a couple show votes, then join the fold.

Look, once a sizable chunk of the Republican Party has decided that seditious revolt is better than accepting election results they don't like, nobody can really claim to be surprised that the same crowd would willingly sabotage their own party's governing majority unless that majority, too, agreed that Team Sedition would get All The Powers. These aren't people who do real well with the concept of “voting.” ... They despise the notion that people other than themselves should be in charge of things.

Hunter quoted a New York Times analysis:

The paralysis underscored the dilemma facing House Republicans: No matter the concessions made to some of those on the far right, they simply will not relent and join their colleagues even if it is for the greater good of their party, and perhaps the nation. They consider themselves conservative purists who cannot be placated unless all their demands are met — and maybe not even then.

Hunter added:

This is performative, for the would-be rebels. There's nothing McCarthy can give them that would appease them because the moment he agrees to a thing, the performance requires demanding something else—or the "far-right" no longer has demands to differentiate itself with.

There won’t be a consensus candidate. And any Republican who allows Democrats to win won’t be in office in two years David Nir of Kos ponders the question: What happens if Republicans never settle on a Speaker? Nir says that would be good for the country. Republicans weren’t going to do anything anyway except open investigations into Biden and his administration. Delaying that would be good. Anything else won’t get past the Dem controlled Senate. They only thing they have to do raise the debt ceiling sometime next summer and enact the government’s budget next fall. If either of those don’t happen there will be 300 more Democrats elected in 2024.

Alternately, of course, Democrats could propose to make McCarthy a pure figurehead, telling him that as long as he gives them the gavel and the majority on every committee, he can be “speaker.” Since he’s willing to give away absolutely everything to chase this dream—including what remains of his dignity—he might just say yes. But if he doesn’t, then let him twist. Like I say, we simply don’t need a Republican House, and we’d be better off without one.

Just before New Year I wrote the book Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe was my 46th book for the year. Today Kobabe had a seven minute interview with Rachel Martin of NPR. Kobabe said e wrote the book to explain what e was going through to people who already love er. Kobabe also talked about er lesbian aunt, who e thought would understand. But the aunt is a feminist and sees being a woman is joyful and celebratory and didn’t understand why Kobabe was turning away from it. When the book was first published Kobabe felt the wave of love and support. The pushback – it is one of the most banned books – didn’t come until about a year and a half later and e was amazed at the timing, the strength, and the longevity of it. The Cultural Tutor tweeted about eleven Christian churches that were hewn out of rock in northern Ethiopia more than 800 years ago. The Kingdom of Aksum had been what is now Ethiopia and some of the surrounding countries. This was the area that was second in adopting Christianity as a state religion. The Solomic Dynasty took control in 1270 and lasted until 1974. Before then was King Gebre Meskel. When Jerusalem fell to Islam in 1187 pilgrimages became more difficult. So Meskel had a vision to build an alternate Jerusalem. He created the complex at Lalibela and carved these eleven churches. Most churches – most buildings – are built by adding things together. These were carved – stone was subtracted out, building in reverse. It took 24 years. They are all carved into pits below ground level or carved into hillsides. William Dalrymple, an art historian, tweeted pictures of the Catacombs of Ancient Alexandria. It is implied the catacombs were where 2nd Century Christians hid, similar to the catacombs near Rome. But Dalrymple doesn’t actually say that. These underground chambers are quite interesting because the walls are heavily carved – and they show a strange mix of gods. There are the gods of the Pharaohs – Horus and Anubis – and of Rome – Dionysus, Hermes, and Zeus. The Christ drives a chariot across the heavens. The ankh is carved beside the cross. Isis nursing Horus becomes the Virgin nursing the Christ child. Dionysian vines become symbols of the Eucharist. And Apollo with a lamb is repurposed as the Good Shepherd.

Turtle on roller skates

This is post 5000! In the last fifteen years I’ve put up five thousand posts to this blog. I’ve written about a wide variety of topics over those 5000 posts, though there is one overarching theme. I call the blog Gay Crows Nest and say I’m looking at the culture from the gay perspective. However, the major theme is now about various groups and individuals who try to assert they are superior to others, causing oppression to those others, and the many ways the oppressed resist and build community instead. I poked at my calculator and see since I started blogging there have been about 5,500 days. That does not mean there were only 500 days in 15 years I did not blog – this year I’ll blog only 215 of 365 days, though that’s almost 6 Mb of writing. What it means is before the pandemic I tended to break up a day’s writing by major topic into separate posts with minor topics in one “tidbits” post – I don’t think I’ve used the “tidbits” flag since 2019. In 2009 I posted 459 times, a record I’ll probably never match. Since the pandemic started – and that first year I posted nearly every day (I didn’t have much else to do) – I changed my method, posting only once a day no matter how many topics were in the one post. And 2020 remains my year with the most writing, about 12.7 Mb in 333 posts. Today I went down to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see a couple of their temporary exhibits, then attend the Detroit Film Theater showing of the 2021-22 winners of the British Arrows. Yes, that means I spent money to sit through 75 minutes of the best British TV commercials. I watch very little American TV and I always mute the commercials. The winners of the Arrows are enjoyable because the British sense of humor is so different from ours and many of these little scenes are wildly imaginative. Many don’t give an indication of the corporate name or the product until the end. Some of them are for charities rather than companies. The Arrows have, of course, a website of the winners and I see the presentation in the theater didn’t include all of them. My favorites: A turtle roller skating through traffic turns out to be an advertisement for train travel. In the middle of a Medieval battle sequence and death scene is a guy in a bathrobe with an ironing board who keeps asking the scene to be replayed – an ad for the replay feature for Alexa/Amazon streaming. Four people surf the wind, gliding over the fields and through the forests, in an ad for Burberry. In a Starbucks commercial Gemma claims his real name of James. Sometime in the 9th Century a bunch of Danes ready to invade England are held up because their leader refuses to wear a helmet. Volvo said the ultimate safety test isn’t dropping their car from 100 feet, it’s transitioning to all electric as a response to climate change. Disabled athletes show how much determination they have to get into the Paralympics – they should have sports available to them because they are 15% of the world population, which is 1 billion people. Yesterday I wrote that I had read 45 books this year. Make it 46. I had started one with 230 pages that I thought would take a few days and into the new year. But this one is a graphic story, pages of cartoon style pictures and few words, and I finished in a day – not even staying up late. It is Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, a memoir. Maia was born female but definitely doesn’t feel female, yet doesn’t feel quite male either. Maia doesn’t like the nonbinary they/them pronouns so settled on e/em/eir – if e could work up the nerve to insist people actually use them. E took quite a while to figure out what eir identity is. As for orientation e settled on bisexual, though better yet, just leave sex out if it. It is quite a journey of self discovery. Yes, this is one of the books Republicans love to ban. In this case I see their point – a tiny bit. Kobabe includes images of menstrual blood (which for er includes a great deal more discomfort than the usual female), a dildo in a harness, and fantasies of two naked men. However, the need for this sort of book to be available to queer kids and the need for cisgender kids to understand what some of their peers are going through far outweighs any squeamishness some adults might have. I’m sure the kids are puzzled – you’re upset about images of that? Yeah, I know the real purpose of banning the book isn’t because of a few uncomfortable images, but to deny queer kids the understanding that what they are experiencing is just a small piece of the vast panoply of normal ways of being human, and thus oppressing them. Maia struggles for so long because e doesn’t know there are words for transgender and nonbinary, that such things exist. So buy the book, read it, and give it to the youth in your life. The news has been full of the big snowstorm that arrived just before Christmas and fouled air travel with thousands of flights canceled per day. Yes, the storm also snarled train, bus, and car travel (with dozens dying in Buffalo), but with a lot less consequence. In air travel, the worst is definitely Southwest Airlines who, a week later, is still stumbling around and canceling flights. There are now reports explaining why Southwest canceled nearly 16,000 flights over the week and will likely pass 18,000 flight before they’re back close to normal. Hunter of Daily Kos explained some of their problem is they don’t use the hub system of other airlines, instead they use a system with a web of routes and shorter flights. That means their planes and crew have a greater number of airports where they might be stuck. But the majority of the problem is that Southwest uses a scheduling system that’s 20 years old and crashed when overloaded. Wrote Hunter:

It's the central theme of capitalism, pandemic-era or not; if you design systems meant to squeeze maximum efficiency while spending the minimum possible on robustness, those systems will fail during unexpected stresses because that's what they're built to do.

The system is 20 years old because the board spent the money instead on paying shareholders. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reported the company spent $6 billion on stock buyback – and the only reason to do that is to boost stock price as a favor to investors. And that $6 billion did not go to upgrading the computer systems. Southwest gambled that they could get away with it, but lost the bet. Though maybe the company leadership will get away with it. Pennyfarthing quoted journalist Adam Johnson, writing on Stubstack, who wrote:

All of this is a toxic brew of mutual antagonism. “Customer satisfaction” is at a 17-year low, and the only human face people can take their frustration out on is a low-wage worker. Obviously there’s never an excuse to yell at anyone in customer service. The point is not a moral one—it’s that it's by design. Indeed, corporate executives very much want you to vent your frustration on their low-wage workers. This way you get the vague feeling of agency and control in a system designed to remove any and all forms of it. Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters, absorbing all the frustration and anger brought about by our greasy, cost-cutting executives. Add to this the severe mental and physical harms—and death—laid at the feet of low wage workers during the pandemic, and our built-in system of mutual antagonism compounds dozens of other stressors. We are conditioned to get mad at the human face we see before us, the “representative” of the company who personally profits nothing from our purchase. We are conditioned to get mad at the waiter when our food is late (and penalize this “bad service” with a bad tip) when the vast majority of the time it’s due to understaffing by a cheapskate boss. We are conditioned to get upset with the enforcer of arbitrary rules at a hotel checkout, despite it not being their rule at all. We are conditioned to be hostile to the very people we should have the most solidarity with.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a few Democratic members of Congress are investigating the situation and intend to force Southwest management to compensate stranded travelers for the useless tickets plus the meals and hotel stays customers had to pay for. I hope they can make it happen. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about Republican hypocrisy. She listed several examples, such as Sen. Lindsay Graham saying abortion law should be left to the states and then later proposed a federal abortion ban. And of Republicans yelling about voter fraud while they’re the ones indicted for voter fraud. Clawson wrote:

If you think that consistency within any specific issue is desirable, or that doing a turnabout on one thing represents hypocrisy, all of these things look ragingly hypocritical. But that’s misunderstanding how the right-wing thinks. It’s actually really simple: The right-wing belief system is that if it benefits them, it’s good. If they want it, it’s right. If it helps them gain power, it’s proper. ... So rather than talking about these turnabouts as hypocrisy, we should be talking about how they show that Republicans don’t believe the rules should ever apply to them. How they’re rejecting any accountability for the powerful even as they insist on the most brutal forms of punishment for people without power. How all they care about is themselves and what benefits them right now, without any thought to anyone else or a future past their own most immediate ambitions.

Note: If it benefits them right now it is good, even if it contradicts what they said at any time before. That is similar to a way I wrote about before – the conservative position can be summarized: “I can tell you what to do. You can’t tell me what to do.” And all of that is about someone trying to justify why they should be above us in the social hierarchy and oppressing us as part of their justification.

I long for a world where my actions weren’t gendered

Michael Harriot tweeted a thread. Here’s part of it.

EVER SINCE black people got the right to vote, the same party has been in control of the South. It’s not Democrat OR Republican. It’s the Lily white faction. Whichever party controls the Lily white faction controls conservative politics. It’s why Nixon’s Southern Strategy worked. It’s why Reagan’s first major speech as a candidate was at the site where Klansmen murdered civil rights workers. And for years, EVERY successful Republican stoked this faction. Remember when Bush’s campaign said John McCain had a Black baby? Lily whites. ... But White voters in the South don’t love the GOP. They love TRUMP. They generally despise politicians. As you can see?, they don’t care about abortion, fiscal conservatism or religion. But they will NEVER vote for a Democrat. They might like the policies but they can’t do it. Their grandparents were Democrats, so it’s not party allegiance. Their parents voted for people like Reagan & Bush, so it’s not the establishment. But the churches, schools and entire society have cemented their support for the Lily white faction.

Harriot ended by saying don’t ask black people to fix it because if they did the lily whites will rise again. A few months ago my friend and debate partner tried to convince me that Republicans, as despicable as they are, weren’t racist. Here’s another way to respond to him: They are fine with using racism to gain power and racists like what they do to the point of voting for a candidate based solely on their willingness to support racism. A few days ago I had written that voting rights activists were upset with Biden for not putting his bully pulpit to use for voting rights, saying instead that the problem will be solved by voter turnout. But, turnout alone can’t overcome new voter suppression laws or finely carved gerrymandering. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos added one more reason: In Georgia, where new Senator Raphael Warnock is up for reelection in 2022, the legislature has already passed laws to allow them to overturn elections they don’t like. They’re already working to take over the elections board in Fulton County, the county with the most Democrats. High turnout in voting cannot overcome election theft (which is quite different from voter fraud, which is quite rare). Last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press included an opinion piece by Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald. Pitts, who is black, has written about racism for about 40 years. This particular column was about Critical Race Theory and its sudden appearance as the imminent cause of the downfall of America. Yeah, wrote Pitts, just like the hyperventilation over War on Christmas, sharia law, and gay wedding cakes. Pitts concluded:

Today, it’s critical race theory. Tomorrow — mark my words — it will be something else, some other pithy term to serve as a repository of all that the white right fears. There are many things for which they should be afraid — life, health, future. But sadly, they fear nothing quite so much as the loss of whiteness and its privileges. As I said, I know this terrain well. Yet I keep hoping it will surprise me someday.

The phrase that prompted me to write about it is, “they fear nothing quite so much as the loss of whiteness and its privileges.” I’ve been saying this for a while now. They’re afraid that their position at the top of the social hierarchy might be in jeopardy. Testimony before the House January 6th Commission has begun. Today they featured four officers from the Capitol (or maybe DC) Police. Leah McElrath tweeted short clips of the testimony with her commentary:

See the expression on Officer Michael Fanone’s face and the direction his eyes are pointing and the look within them in this clip? This is what it looks like when someone is reliving a trauma during a retelling. I’ve born witness to this in my work as a trauma therapist. These officers are not just testifying at the #January6thCommission hearing. They are RELIVING the trauma they experienced. For us. For our country. For our democracy. Because they know the danger we are facing. They have lived it. ... Importantly, notice how often the officers refer to the impact on them of their sense of BETRAYAL—both on the day of the insurrection and in the Republican response afterward. Violence experienced in a context of betrayal can be far more traumatizing than otherwise.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos from a couple weeks ago quoted Josh Marshall of TPM:

I’ve seen numerous journalists and commentators refer to this as Trump’s ‘revisionist history’ of the events of January 6th. That’s the wrong way to look at this. No one, especially Trump’s target audiences, forgets the pictures of Capitol Police officers being struck with flag poles and dragged into the crowd for beatings or insurrectionists marauding through the halls of Congress. The point of his over-the-top claims isn’t to litigate the particulars of any specific encounter. Their very absurdity is less an effort to deceive as a demonstration of power. They are meant to make the case that the whole event was justified, righteous and right.

From another roundup a couple days before that, Dworkin quoted Katie Sherrod:

If black and brown children are old enough to experience racism, white children are old enough to learn about it.

Then a quote from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of The Atlantic:

When contemporary democracies die, they usually do so via constitutional hardball. Democracy’s primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries, but rather politicians—Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who eviscerate democracy’s substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality. This is precisely what could happen in the next U.S. presidential race. Elections require forbearance. For elections to be democratic, all adult citizens must be equally able to cast a ballot and have that vote count. Using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of this principle is strikingly easy. Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities (e.g., the oval on the ballot is not entirely penciled in, or the mail-in ballot form contains a typo or spelling mistake). Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic, for it denies suffrage to many voters.

Clio2 wrote for the Readers and Book Lovers group of the Kos community about being nonbinary.

“Nonbinary” can signify a sense of gender that is someplace in-between, a bit of both, neither, varying, nonexistent, outside the system altogether, contradictory, evolving, or quite removed from the usual way we think about gender.

The discussion worked through four anthologies for a total of nearly 100 essays written by nonbinary people that describe what such a life is like. The first time a person deals with being nonbinary is almost always over clothes. In our society, as in many, clothes are highly gendered. So this is the place where a person’s sense of self smacks against societal expectations. Clio2 also discussed feelings. We’re told feelings aren’t facts, but strong feelings are a fact that indicates something is going on. There is gender dysphoria, when there is a conflict between gender expectation and personal gender understanding. Sometimes that includes a mismatch between gender and anatomy (which we usually call transgender). There is also gender euphoria, the joy felt when a sense of gender is affirmed. There is a wide spectrum of what nonbinary people call themselves – metagender, genderfluid, and many more. In America we’ve somewhat accepted “they” as the pronoun for nonbinary, though many others are considered, such as “xe.” One of the quotes from an anthology:

I long for a world where my actions weren’t gendered and I could just interact as a human, where people, trans and cisgender alike, didn’t have to carry around the constant pressure of gender roles thrust upon them.

That quote is from Haven Wilvich, from page 61 of Nonbinary Memoirs of Gender and Identity, edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane.