Beyond the Battles of Berkeley

In the midst of melee, meaning gets lost...

Brawling with the so-called "alt-right" has become fashionable in Berkeley. My city has become a magnet destination for white nationalist Trumpers itching to fight and anti-fascist demonstrators rising to the bait to take them on. We all wind up with a testosterone-infused mess that has nothing to do with actual issues. The powers that be even cancelled the Saturday farmers market to indulge this rumble. With Ann Coulter supposed to arrive for her cancelled speech this week, this pattern shows no sign of letting up any time soon.

Yes, the "alt-right," white nationalists are disgusting. As a woman, a queer and a Jew I haven't the slightest doubt as to which side I'm on. I have every intention of showing up for meaningful protest, just not a remake of the Sharks meet the Jets, (remember West Side Story?).

As a young dyke I was involved in groups such as Lesbian Schoolworkers, (who fought against the Brigg's initiative) and Lesbians Against Police Violence among others. We studied racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other isms. We also talked about socio-economic class and read Lenin and Marx, learned about dialectical materialism, which I never got quite right. Our anti-capitalist veiwpoint was based in a class analysis alongside identity discrimination. Perhaps if the leftist groups today had taken socio-economic class seriously in the first place, we wouldn't be stuck with this regime we have now.

The perspective of class has been lost completely, except perhaps in the dogmatic, highly regulated, left. In single issue groups, oppression is attributed to one factor whether it is race, gender presentation, ethnicity or immigration status. Perhaps, if we had organizations united around the genuine and multiple sins of capitalism. We could reach a place of unity.  Instead, groups focusing on separate issues are formed and led by the most bourgeois, entitled members of each identity.

The separation of urban and rural people is one of the main reasons for our situation today. Rural folks would have to accept the fact that we live in a heterogeneous, pluralistic society. The straight, white, Christian male is no longer the prototype American and hasn't been for quite a while. The nineteen fifties hold no magic for anyone outside of this limited narrative. And, as for our side, the side of history, punching a Nazi may be good for morale in the moment but it does not a movement make. Fighting is just another toxic ideology. It will take a purposeful, reasoned movement with a multi-issue program to initiate real change.

Lets create a more comprehensive analysis of what has gone wrong in our country, so we can figure out how to change it. We can start by integrating class analysis with identity politics and promote an understanding of a wide array peoples' situations in the under class that includes, but it not limited to, our understanding of all the isms that are dividing people today and placing Berkeley in the cross-hairs of civil war.

Does Transitioning Fight Oppression?

Biologically, I am a lesbian Yes, I consider myself to have been, not only born a female, but born a lesbian.  I am a feminist. I have absolutely no idea how "women" feel. I don't believe that I've ever felt like one. Men are even more foreign. I have always just felt like a person, one saddled with organs and anatomical features that cause me to be percieved as a female person.

I used to see a world divided into two types of people, functional and decorative. Each person has traits from each category but "women" skew toward decorative, "men" functional. Words like interior versus exterior could be used as well. But this is all a bit too simplistic. I actually find each package full of sex roles disgusting and any person who acts as one package, quite limited. The nature of each makes them anti-human and unacceptable. We are all so much more than either of those options. 

I wonder that if I were young today would I transition to a man? I might consider it but only because present-day options are so limited. For me, it would be a terrible mistake. The gendered world today is full of the misguided notion that all a person has to do is be the right gender, or no gender, and their problems will be solved. The idividual solution is the only one actively proposed today. It is the Ayn Rand gender solution.

Sexism is not some gender-binary equation. It is systemic, an integral part of the capitalist economy that exploits labor by race, class, gender and a litany of other things. It's a different issue than changing your body. Ideally, we should all be able to do whatever we want, pursue whatever inspires us within the context of the body we already have. Transforming the physical body is not the answer. Go ahead, if it floats your boat. Have all kinds of plastic surgery too! Just don't expect your decision to weigh in against the dominant paradigm.

We used to see broad-based gender stereotyping and discrimination as a social problem.That is something that was the basis of oppression. It required organizing, mobilizing, conciousness-raising, demonstrating and fighting for something better.

You can appoint yourself a god or a goddess. It may do wonders for your ego but nothing will change. Transgendered people have become frontline symbols for a much bigger, more compelling problem. They have been deluded into thinking that by simply altering a body you can make oppression vanish. If that were true, every movie actor would have already changed history. Do what you like to your own body. But don't delude yourself. Only organizing in the outside world can cause the struggle for justice to begin.

Why I'm a Bad Feminist...

A writer friend said to be a good feminist you just have to love women and show it. Although she is a lesbian, she meant this in a platonic, political sense not in a literal one. And suddenly I realized, ah there's the rub, the defining problem, the friction between me and feminism. Do I love women? That seems like an overly broad question, very much like: Do I love children? or Do I love Jews or Muslims? Do I love African-Americans? Of course the answer to all these questions can only be, I love some of them, feel indifferent to most and despise a handful. It all depends.

When I first identified as a feminist and a lesbian, it was 1970. Women's style included big hair, high heels, an Mrs. degree and almost no job options. The question of breeding was big in a racial sense but in a reproductive sense having children was not viewed as whether or not, simply when. I found women attractive and, for the most part, fabulous. They/we were also more powerless then. I guess the romance of oppression held some validity for me. We had each other's backs, we were fighting for a big slice of what I had yet to recognize as a moldy pie.

I conveniently ignored the "moral majority" women who hated my very existence. I wrote the women who supported the Nazis, the pogroms, fascism in all its forms out of my exclusive distaff cadre. Did I love the wealthy women matrons or high-level managers or princesses who treated me like dirt? In theory, we were all one sisterhood, rising up together to build a new world. Beautiful as this sentiment may be, it was and is not realistic. The fact of a limited degree of shared oppression doth not a kindred soul make. Jews know this, we fight one another like cats and dogs. Thereby the expression, two Jews, three opinions.

Queers know this. When our movement was young, gay men thought nothing of not including lesbians in everything from books to classes to strategy meetings. It wasn't until the AIDS crisis in the eighties that gay men and lesbians came together to fight jointly for anything.

And, believe me, people from all other minority groups know this as well. The powers that be skillfully pit us against each like rats in a cage fighting for crumbs.

I love some individuals and not others. As a leftist politico, I love the ideal of a just and humane society where the basic needs of all are provided for. I love worker's protections and freedom from prejudice. Do I love all other leftists fighting for the same objective? Let's just say I respect our joint struggle as well as each individual's good intentions, if they seem to have them. The same goes for women. My love is not unconditional. I'm a demanding taskmaster, a loose canon, an unreliable narrator, a bad feminist.  

Identity Issues and Boomer Homophobia...

Lately my queer identity has overpowered the other ways I identify myself. My various identies seem to ebb and flow depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, especially when among reserved folks, I feel terminally abrasive and jewish, in very sex-role circumscribed situations where all faces are male, I feel extremely female and among the economically privileged I feel very working-class. Now, among almost everyone I am beginning to feel really old. Yet, at rare and wonderful moments I feel as though I represent a universal human being, connected in many ways to everyone. It's never a question of one identity trumping the others, it's a far more fluid situation.

Of course, I feel very queer when I am singled out for discrimination. For example, I belonged briefly to a writing group that was overwhelmingly heterosexual. They were, like me, older lefties who were serious about writing. The format of socializing was very different from what I'm used to. The women didn't  reach out to each other very much. The person I got the most support from was a man. It wasn't a come on thing (he was married with kids), he just liked my writing. But I wasn't there to make friends so I let it go. The real reason I wound up leaving the group was that queer issues were not taken seriously. Civil rights issues for other racial and ethnic groups were, rightfully, regarded as an important struggle. But when I wrote a memoir piece about homophobia on the job they viewed it as a story about individual indiosyncracies presenting problems in a specific workplace.

An acquaintance of mine wound up in a nursing home. She was suffering from dementia. Her close friend/ex-lover would visit her there. The staff assumed she was her sister until one day she explained that Nan, in better days, had been her lover. This admission was a terrible mistake. Once the other old women realized that Nan was a lesbian, they became aftaid of her. In her dementia, Nan believed that she was in her own home and would sometimes wander around naked. Her roommate and fellow patients now considered her nudity a sexual come on. Due of the lack of conciousness and support of the staff, Nan had to ultimately find another place to live.

Homophobia, by its very definition, means fear. Will folks of the boomer generation and older ever overcome the way they were raised? As an old dog, I have learned quite a few new tricks so perhaps there is hope that one day we will come together to fight for us all.