Laurie Essig

How American Christians help kill African gays

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So Uganda has decided to execute homosexuals.  Crazy Ugandans.  But what if their craziness, their foaming at the mouth, queer-hating policies are actually being sold to them by leaders of conservative Christianity in the US? I'm not saying that Ugandan political leaders can't come up with blaming the gays on their own.  Obviously they're as smart as the GOP.  I mean, if you can't blame the Jews or the Blacks, then Gays are the next obvious choice. But what if Christian missions and US Anti-AIDS funding have helped foment the idea that homosexuality is a "foreign disease," a form of Imperialism brought to the African continent by the decadent North and so a sort of foreign invasion? A report released by Political Research Associates says that there are direct connections between seeing Homosexuals as a foreign enemy and American religious groups and the US government, especially with its PEPFAR funds. Apparently the American conservatives have sold homophobia as a sort of liberation movement.  Kill the Homos and Protect the Motherland (note how easily "Jews" or "Blacks" or "Foreigners" could replace "Homos")

“When it comes to homosexuality… many African religious leaders view progressive social witness on LGBT equality as a ‘Western agenda,’” writes Kaoma. “In many respects, their denunciation of homosexuality is an attack on the West rather than a statement about human sexuality.” That’s one reason the anti-gay rhetoric prevalent in Africa often resembles modern European anti-Semitism: gay people, like Jews, are seen as subversive, foreign, and enervating, threatening the nation’s unity and virility.

Uganda’s Radical Anti-Gay Measure and the American Religious Right | International | ReligionDispatches. As Allison Kilkenny points out today on True/Slant, anti-gay American ministers like Rick Warren have close ties with Ugandan ministers and have repeatedly refused to take a stance against the Ugandan death penalty for gays. Well, hell yeah.   Imagine if we could kill the homos here?  We'd have so much more time to focus on hetero marriage and getting rid of not just abortion, but birth control too.  Damned homos are messing up the mission of the far right in the US and unlike many African countries, they cannot say that homosexuality is a foreign invasion.  Or maybe they could.  Sure, why not?  Homosexuality would go away if we just successfully shut down the border with Mexico and Canada, because they're so gay. And real Americans and real Ugandans are manly and virile and do not take it up the ass. This sort of conflation of gay sex and national security has been around for a long time, at least since the time of King Edward II, if not before.  But what is different about making homosexuality a national threat now is the way post-colonial narratives of liberation get married to older, colonial narratives of the White Man's Burden, all in an age where the boundaries of the nation state are nearly meaningless since communication and actual humans traverse them with few impediments. The result is a world where Rick Warren cannot kill gays at home, but he can virtually kill them in Uganda.  A postmodern story of politics and desires played out on gay bodies that will soon be dead.

Caster Semenya, sex, and sports

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The sports world is confused.  Yet another athlete is refusing to fit neatly into the gender binary upon which it is based.  This time we have  Caster Semenya, a young woman who ran 800 meters in 1 minute, 56.72 seconds at the African Junior Championships.  Now she's running in international competition and rumors are circulating that she's really a boy.  According to an article in the Daily Telegraph, one of the international officials close to the case said:

"She has got the arms, the forearms, the throat and the facial hair of a young boy. They will keep coming up and saying she has passed the test but the test isn't perfect anymore." Actually, the test was never perfect.  How, after all, is the sex of a runner to be determined?  This has been a problem since the introduction of women into organized sporting competitions.  As biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has demonstrated, determining a person's sex is a very messy business that is not easily confined in the neat little categories of boy or girl. There are external body parts, reproductive organs, secondary sex characteristics, and chromosomes (not to mention gender presentation, cultural norms, and a bunch of completely non-biological ways of determining a body's sex).  In fact, Fausto-Sterling argues, when all of these factors are taken into account, it means that something like 2-4% of all babies born are not easily male or female.  There are all sorts of variations: people with chromosome combos like xxy and xNull and babies with testes but penises under 1cm at birth who are considered "really" girls and people with male and female naughty bits. As a culture, we Americans pretend not to see (or be) these intersex bodies.  They're too messy, too disturbing to the binaries we hold dear: like male and female, black and white, good sportsmanship and cheating.  In fact, we so refuse to accept that these bodies exist that most hospitals in the US will treat intersex babies as a medical emergency, often forcing parents to decide on a sex and allow their infant to be surgically altered before they even leave the hospital. But what to do with those bodies that slip through the sex police at the hospital?  What to do with those that manage to grow up and exist without being clearly male or female?  Perhaps the best thing to do is mark them as racially other?

Australian coach Nic Bideau, who has been around the international circuit for 20 years, said often the African nations produce these people who are born with a mixture of chromosomes and display both male and female characteristics.

Gender question about runner | The Daily Telegraph. Oh, it's the Africans producing intersexed bodies, not ""civilized" countries like Australia or America?  Such a ridiculous claim can only be made because of the Victorian racial science that produced both Empire and Sports.  According to the Victorian scientists, highly influenced by Darwinian theory, the most advanced cultures were those with the most extreme sex differentiation.  Who was more sex differentiated than the Victorian middle class?  The "ladies" stayed home and fainted; the men shot lions in Africa and were aggressive in the market.  Ah, but sadly, as industrialization swept all the men into desk jobs, a genuine fear arose that the men were being feminized by modern culture.  A movement developed to introduce sports into schools to butch up the bourgeois boys.  This movement, known as Muscular Christianity, was a favorite of Teddy Roosevelt's and was what brought the YMCA's to every town in America. After all, if bourgeois boys only knew the soft hands and softer stomachs of desk jobs, they would be like women and the white middle class would lose their status as the most evolved group among humans.  They would become like other groups without extreme gender differentiation:  the working class, homosexuals, the Irish, and, of course, Africans. So here is poor, young, Semenya running really fast, but everyone's insisting she's not really a girl since you know, those "Africans" produce bodies that are not sufficiently gender differentiated.  Because they're not as evolved as Australians and Americans, where men are men, and women are women.  In "civilized" countries, babies born outside the binary are surgically altered, hormonally treated, and forced to abide by iron law of sex and sports: play by the rules of gender or get thrown out of the game.

Caster Semenya, sex, and sports

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Cover via Amazon"][/caption]

The sports world is confused.  Yet another athlete is refusing to fit neatly into the gender binary upon which it is based.  This time we have  Caster Semenya, a young woman who ran 800 meters in 1 minute, 56.72 seconds at the African Junior Championships.  Now she's running in international competition and rumors are circulating that she's really a boy.  According to an article in the Daily Telegraph, one of the international officials close to the case said:

"She has got the arms, the forearms, the throat and the facial hair of a young boy. They will keep coming up and saying she has passed the test but the test isn't perfect anymore." Actually, the test was never perfect.  How, after all, is the sex of a runner to be determined?  This has been a problem since the introduction of women into organized sporting competitions.  As biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has demonstrated, determining a person's sex is a very messy business that is not easily confined in the neat little categories of boy or girl. There are external body parts, reproductive organs, secondary sex characteristics, and chromosomes (not to mention gender presentation, cultural norms, and a bunch of completely non-biological ways of determining a body's sex).  In fact, Fausto-Sterling argues, when all of these factors are taken into account, it means that something like 2-4% of all babies born are not easily male or female.  There are all sorts of variations: people with chromosome combos like xxy and xNull and babies with testes but penises under 1cm at birth who are considered "really" girls and people with male and female naughty bits. As a culture, we Americans pretend not to see (or be) these intersex bodies.  They're too messy, too disturbing to the binaries we hold dear: like male and female, black and white, good sportsmanship and cheating.  In fact, we so refuse to accept that these bodies exist that most hospitals in the US will treat intersex babies as a medical emergency, often forcing parents to decide on a sex and allow their infant to be surgically altered before they even leave the hospital. But what to do with those bodies that slip through the sex police at the hospital?  What to do with those that manage to grow up and exist without being clearly male or female?  Perhaps the best thing to do is mark them as racially other?

Australian coach Nic Bideau, who has been around the international circuit for 20 years, said often the African nations produce these people who are born with a mixture of chromosomes and display both male and female characteristics.

Gender question about runner | The Daily Telegraph. Oh, it's the Africans producing intersexed bodies, not ""civilized" countries like Australia or America?  Such a ridiculous claim can only be made because of the Victorian racial science that produced both Empire and Sports.  According to the Victorian scientists, highly influenced by Darwinian theory, the most advanced cultures were those with the most extreme sex differentiation.  Who was more sex differentiated than the Victorian middle class?  The "ladies" stayed home and fainted; the men shot lions in Africa and were aggressive in the market.  Ah, but sadly, as industrialization swept all the men into desk jobs, a genuine fear arose that the men were being feminized by modern culture.  A movement developed to introduce sports into schools to butch up the bourgeois boys.  This movement, known as Muscular Christianity, was a favorite of Teddy Roosevelt's and was what brought the YMCA's to every town in America. After all, if bourgeois boys only knew the soft hands and softer stomachs of desk jobs, they would be like women and the white middle class would lose their status as the most evolved group among humans.  They would become like other groups without extreme gender differentiation:  the working class, homosexuals, the Irish, and, of course, Africans. So here is poor, young, Semenya running really fast, but everyone's insisting she's not really a girl since you know, those "Africans" produce bodies that are not sufficiently gender differentiated.  Because they're not as evolved as Australians and Americans, where men are men, and women are women.  In "civilized" countries, babies born outside the binary are surgically altered, hormonally treated, and forced to abide by iron law of sex and sports: play by the rules of gender or get thrown out of the game.