Expanding the LGBT categories, and the need to honor life.

ORDINARY CITIZEN'S NOTES. 2 JAN 2014. FRI. N2.
Expanding the LGBT categories, and the need to honor life.

TWO THINGS COME to mind at this time as we ring in another year of journey in this mortal life. 

Two deaths--that of Jennifer Laude (in the Philippines) and Leelah Alcorn (in the United States).

We remember: Laude, killed by an American serviceman for reasons we do not yet know but we know one thing: the military has instilled in him a macho sense of the world, a macho patriotism, and a macho sense of binary relationships. In short, he was there for sex, and the sex is a commodity, and that commodity must be there, ever-ready for the taking, buying, consuming. 

It is like going to a 24-hour convenient store of Mercury Drugstore, or those 7-Eleven Stores originally from the US but now sprouting like mushrooms in every corner of the Philippine-land. Pretty soon, both these will extinguish the sari-sari store of the poor all under the guise of privatization, capitalism, and providing employment for the poor. In the meantime, the capitalists continue to laugh their way to the bank. 

Leelah's story is different, certainly, but it is not. 

Her mother does not understand things, and she resorted to her religion--whatever is that--to make sense of her power to impose upon Leelah her way of looking at the world that is not as simple as she saw it. 

Her mom's religion gave the mom an excuse: Make Leelah a boy again, because, her religion says, that 'she' as Leelah is the 'he' as Josh. 

The identity is complete, the quiddity final, and her mom's god decreed it. 

This is, of course, a case of bad metaphysics. 

Psychiatrists came in, and the medication. So now, we have another text: the medicalization of the fluid categories of gender. Sanabagan!

It is on this note that we need to understand the discourse of LGBT, the courageous discourse that demolishes our view of the world that sets the boundaries of everything into the contrasts of anatomy, physiology, and genitalia. We fail to get past these binaries, we do not understand things at all.

Even the LGBT categories, of course, are not enough. 

We need to account the fluid others: the asexual, the androgynous, the polysexual, and the transsexual. Unless the last T in the LGBT represents both the transgender, which Leelah is, and the transsexual, which others are. 

The world within and outside us is not simple.

It is complex, it is fluid, and the surprises are all around us.

HON/