Café Culturel

Last night I had a big adventure. Spoke at Café Culturel on the topic(s) of "Bisexuality, Polyamory & Genderqueer". It's the first time I've done that kind of talk at an event that wasn't put on by-&-primarily-for LGBTQ people.

The format is talk for about 25 mins, break and then take questions. I felt the talk went quite well, and lots of people said nice things to me like they'd enjoyed it or their attention didn't wander. But taking the questions! wow! that was interesting - in a scary way :-)

Most people asked things that in my world were quite sensible. One person came out to the group as genderqueer and another came out as polyamorous. The poly one said ze didn't know any other poly people in Nottingham and I was able to say "well catch me later and I can introduce you to at least two more in this very room!" So that was all really cool, and I feel happy that I catalysed a safe space for people to come out in & for that conversation to happen.

Then this one person went off on a big thing about how people like me shouldn't talk about our lives because we might influence people who would otherwise have been able to live a normal life! Ze was getting shouted down from various places in the audience. Ze was saying things like I was obviously very mixed up in the head and it was good that I was happy because better that than have to be kept in the loony bin!! (shouts of disagreement and outrage from the rest of the room)

I wasn't too hooked by what ze was saying and I was still interacting with em (and saying to the rest of the people "let em speak") because despite it getting a bit personal I was actually quite curious about what was behind all that. I said at one point "So is it that you think people are happier if they're normal?", and ze said no. So then I wanted to get to: well so there must be some bad outcome you foresee from my alleged influence, so what is that outcome that you don't want? But then the chairperson interrupted (feeling the audience was getting a bit too shouty and heated) and sort of smoothed it all over and got the person to be quiet, so I never did get to the bottom of that.

Then we got onto genetics. What was interesting to me about that was how much people seem to have invested in that whole question of "how did we get this way". I always liked genetics as a subject and I chose it as my "subsid"[iary subject] in the first year of my degree, and I've read Dawkins and others of zeir ilk since then. But as it pertains to the question of sexual orientation, my overriding feeling about it is an immense lack of interest and "Who cares?" So what if it's genetic, so what if it isn't. So what so what so what! What relevance does that have to the quality of human beings' experience of life?! Whereas all this i.m.e. fascinating stuff about how we construe the world and how we develop our sense of ourselves and how society deals with difference, and all that, has an immediate impact on every moment of our lives. And yet we seemed to keep coming back to genetics again and again during the rest of the sesh.

[aside: yes I do know that it's used as evidence for why people should have rights, but I consider that v dodgy ground on which to base an argument for rights, and thus not useful for that either]

E.g. this one person said (approx) "I teach teenagers and I wonder if you have any views on whether people are destined to turn out the way they do or whether they have a choice". And I asked "What difference would it make to you to have the answer to that?" And ze said "None, it's a purely academic question, but I think they don't have much choice".

Why are people so interested in talking about things that don't make any difference?!!! know what I mean??

Then someone said: I don't think that sexual orientation is genetic but maybe masculinity and femininity is the part that's genetic, what do you think of that.

This is somewhere I think I took a bit of a wrong turn in the answering. Because I think what would have worked is if I'd asked them to get specific about what they were calling "masculinity" and "femininity" (like, examples) and deconstructed it a bit that way. But I didn't think of that at the time, I just said a thing about how masculinity and femininity are ideas made up by human beings. But I knew even as I was saying it that what I meant wasn't communicating to the room in general. I could see on some people's faces that they were going "Naaaaah, of course there are such things, what's ze on about?"

Even though I'd already spoken about reality vs language right at the beginning, how I apprehend the world on an average day is so "not a normal way to think" that generally only people who've already grappled with the nature of reality for themselves elsewhere (e.g. in a philosophy degree or queer studies) go "yeah I know what you mean" when I go off on my own trains of thought about this stuff - normally I have to translate :-)

So then this other person (who I strongly suspect had not done a philosophy degree or any queer studies or anything like that <grin>) asks the next question, which wasn't a question. I can't remember it word for word but the gist of zeir accusation was that I "wanted to deny the existence" of masculinity and femininity because I "wasn't masculine or feminine". And I was like <metaphorical head in hands> where do I start??! No, the ground on which I am problematizing the existence of masculinity and femininity is this ontological point about their constructedness, which is independent of the specifics of my experience of gender!! But you don't have a clue what I'm talking about there, so of course you're not going to believe me! <haha>

I did interact with em a bit about what I mean, and maybe some other people got something from what I was saying, but it was really clear that ze remained 100% unconvinced. Ze accused me of being defensive. (Read: I've diagnosed you and you won't accept my diagnosis.) I was speculating afterwards about how much of that was pure not-understanding and how much of it might have been that at some level ze was happy to find some reason to discount me and all this weirdo unsettling stuff I was saying.

Then I also had a run-in with the person sitting next to em, who came out with the classic line, "Women are there to have babies". Er, WHAT!!!!!! Guess the gender of the person who said that - yes it was a bloke, quelle surprise. This too provoked a medium amount of uproar.

It's not that he was saying that as a political position, mind you. It was a thoughtless way of saying something that would have been better put "[biological] men can't have babies".

Then he was going "I didn't mean that" and the one who'd already written me off leapt to his defence with "He didn't mean that!" By this point I was definitely getting a bit pointy and argumentative and I'm sure another time I would handle a similar thing more graciously and powerfully. But I just wouldn't "let em off" - I was being like "That's what you said, you said it".

It's interesting, I think part of what was going on for me there was a "hot button" of mine that I hadn't really distinguished before. And it's something like, people who refuse to own the power of their language. Yeah. Must remember that and think about it.

Then the original "write-me-off" person poked what is as far as I'm aware my number one wind-up button, because I said (meaning something not very spelt out, which again ze probably didn't get) "I'm listening to the words, because I love language". And ze flipped back "No, you don't love language, you love semantics". Right mate, you just called me a liar. I would say it's generally quite hard to offend me but that is an almost failsafe method.

I think probably what ze meant was something like ze experienced me as nitpicking (even though in my world there is a fundamental and unmistakable discontinuity between the two assertions "Women are there to have babies" and "Men can't have babies"). But what ze said was "you don't love language". Which obviously is a statement that ze had absolutely no authority or evidence to make. So I'm still somewhat fuming about the utter disrespect of that one, and planning my comeback for next time anyone does that in my space :-)

What I was thinking of when I said "I was listening to the words" was this:
<quote>
Most people in the U.S. do not actually hear the sequence of words and the intonation pattern of what they, or other people, say. They are only aware of the pictures, feelings and internal dialogue that they have in response to what they hear. Very few people are able to repeat back, in the same intonation, what you say to them. We hear people literally. We do not add anything or subtract anything from what they say. That is a rare human experience, and for a long time we didn't realize that: we thought everybody heard words.
</quote>
- Richard Bandler & John Grinder, 'Frogs into princes'

I was and am quite fascinated by this because, like the authors of it, I do hear the words people use, and for a long time I too thought that everyone did. But this explained all those times when people would say only moments after I'd spoken, "You know when you said X?", X being some vague paraphrase which I know perfectly well is not what came out of my mouth. (I can't say if it's "most" people in the UK but certainly many.)

So, all in all, an absolutely fascinating evening, if somewhat of a "baptism of fire". Loads of food for thought there and lots of ideas for things to do differently another time.