What am I marching for? I’m marching for a childhood that knew the scent of milkweed and the feeling of caterpillars crawling on my hands. I’m marching for the silent moment when a chrysalis turns from green to black-and-orange. I’m marching for a world where you can hear the flutter of a butterfly’s wings as it tests its wings  against the air.

What am I marching for? I’m marching for clear, babbling streams, teeming with clams that retreat into the sand under curious, clumsy feet. I’m marching for my mother, my brother and I finding animal skulls and owl pellets in the woods. I’m marching for the family that found themselves together in our grandparents’ back yard, whistling to birds and watching fox kits peek out from under barns.

What am I marching for? I’m marching for my sister. I’m marching for a girl born with a rare mutation, a one-in-a-million baby riddled with benign tumors. I’m marching because walking causes her pain. I’m marching because my sister lives in pain, with tumors pinching, pulling, straining her nerves. I’m marching because she was dealt a bad genetic hand, one that robs her hearing, cuts her mobility, drains her stamina. I march for kids like my sister–disabled, disadvantaged, invisible–because there aren’t enough of them to make their disease profitable. I march because any one of us could have been such a child, any of us could have such a child.

What am I marching for? I’m marching for my valley. I’m marching for a place teeming with two million people, scarred by 21 Superfund sites and untold places of environmental contamination. I’m marching because we live next to toxic waste, the legacy of decades of under-regulated industry. I march because we have to live here after they move on. I’m marching for the village of Nassau in New York, where water is brought in on trucks, the groundwater is polluted, and  a toxic lake is held back from the Hudson by a decaying dam. I’m marching because this is our legacy; I’m marching so this doesn’t become our future.

What am I marching for? I’m marching for friends I never made. I’m marching because the last time the political class decided to ignore science and health funding a generation of gay men was devastated. I march for the tens of millions who died worldwide. I’m marching because I was told I couldn’t be gay at a university that was funded, in part, by grants written in blood, written with the deaths of queer folk like me. I’m marching because our deaths haven’t yet bought us a place at the scientific table. I’m marching because many of those people live on–neglected, isolated and ignored. I’m marching because people are still dying. I’m marching because I can’t wait for the current president’s Gay Best Friend to die in a climate change-attributed “extreme weather event” or of a new plague. I march because I can’t wait for people who are comfortable and happy to notice our pain. I march because I don’t want us to wait until it’s too late.

I know not everybody is able to march. I know not everybody wants to. I know that the March for Science has (rightly)lost the trust of many in the #marginsci community. I march in the hope that you’ll do things other than march, that we together will fill the voice mails of our politicians, that we’ll flood their inboxes digital and physical, that we’ll make town halls loud and angry. I march hoping to see you at other marches, to work with you in other places. I march because as imperfect as the march is I’ve met good, caring, badass people at my local march and I can’t let them down.

If you have a reason to march I hope to see you there. If I don’t, here’s hoping that I see you at the next one.

The March for Science is on April 22nd in 400+ cities worldwide. You can find your local march here. A version of this piece was published on Medium.

My perspective, as a person with both a science education and lived experience in the LGBTQIA community, is that a heterosexual cisgender state is not a genetic default that is overridden by the expression of a single or multiple gay gene(s). Sexual attraction, romantic attraction, gender identity, or lack thereof, are complex traits that for the perceivable majority of the population shake out along a small stretch of a spectrum of genetic possibilities.

Giorgi Chaladze used a mathematical model to explore mechanisms of inheritance that might explain straight parents birthing gay boys in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2016. Chaladze looks at the X-linked inheritance model to explain the paradox of inherited homosexuality in men with a single X and a single Y chromosome. When there is a variation in a gene on the X chromosome, women may express a more commonly expressed version gene on their second (or rarely third) X chromosome and not be affected by the varied gene, but men are stuck with it, for better or worse. Women can have varied genes for the same trait on all copies of their X chromosome, but this is statistically less likely to occur. This inheritance model is used to explain red-green color blindness, which occurs far more frequently in XY men.

If this model also explains XY male homosexuality, one interpretation is that XX female homosexuality occurs far less frequently. Multiple surveys, censuses, and academic studies have found that is not true. Chaladze’s models also do not support an X-linked mechanism for gay inheritance alone. Men would also have to be carriers for the trait, in other words have the gay gene, but not be gay and then reproduce, in                          order to bring necessary statistical power to the model. I think trying to untangle questions about a single                      mechanism illuminates the larger LGBTQIA identity inheritance puzzle and encourages us to look for a                          few more pieces.

Original Article:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-016-0742-2

How many Americans are Gay:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/07/15/what-percentage-of-the-u-s-population-is-gay-lesbian-or-bisexual/?utm_term=.04bd90b87360

Part 1:

Born and Made to Live this Way, Part One: “Baby We Were Born this Way”

Part 2:

Born and Made to Live this Way, Part Two: The Insanity Plea

Rajkumar writes about a wide breath of mental illnesses using perspectives from population and genetic data and literature reviews. His literature review article attempting to connect GD to schizophrenia via common sources of altered neurobiology, including Toxoplasma infection, published in Schizophrenia Research and Treatment has thousands of views, but only one citation. The paper made an initial splash of interest as Toxoplasma’s potential to manipulate host behaviors is a hot topic both in the field and in pop science (maybe you’ve heard of rats that don’t avoid cats). Interest in citing the paper is definitely muted by its source, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, whose journals have appeared on Professor/Librarian Jeffery Beall’s controversial predatory journal list. However, I believe, the content of the paper would be rejected by the scientific community even if it managed to get published in a high impact factor journal.

This file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the UK LGBT Archive as part of the LGBT Free Media Collective coordinated by Wikimedia LGBT and WikiQueer

Every single stated aim of the paper is not met. First, the article aims to review previous literature showing schizophrenia occurs at a higher rate in the GD population than the general population. The previous literature doesn’t show this, but does show an elevated risk for a wide variety of mental illnesses, which has already been established as a symptom of living in a marginalized minority. The studies that do show increased levels of schizophrenia in the GD population have already been critiqued on statistical grounds for either how the data was collected or how large the population under study was.

Next the paper seeks to review previous literature showing schizophrenia patients exhibit GD symptoms and GD patients exhibit schizophrenia symptoms. Fortunately, “disturbed sense of gender identity” among schizophrenia patients is not a reflection on the experiences of GD patients. Many biological conditions have overlapping symptoms, but it does not logically follow that the origin of the conditions are the same without supporting evidence. Likewise, the reported decrease of symptoms of general mental illness among GD patients seeking hormone therapy tells us little about schizophrenia in GD patients.

Before making recommendations to further explore the common background of GD and schizophrenia, the paper delves into neurobiology possibly shared by both. To be brief, Rajkumar names a variety of circumstances under the umbrella of abnormal neurobiology that have been investigated as factors in a number of conditions and calls it a day: autism spectrum disorders, Toxoplasma infections, early childhood adversity, reduced dopamine, etc.

Let us say that this paper is completely correct and future research goes on to show there are neurodevelopmental conditions that can either manifest as GD or Schizophernia or both. Would that humanize GD and galvanize support for transgender civil rights under the banner that gender varying people deserve the same respect as people who are mentally ill? Granted mental illness is widely stigmatized, our laws are designed to protect sick people, even if they are not carried out that way, and our laws are not designed to protect the transgender community.

Toxoplasma and behavior:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fatal-attraction/

Publishing dilemmas:

http://www.nature.com/news/investigating-journals-the-dark-side-of-publishing-1.12666

Gender Dysphoria in the DSM:

http://www.dsm5.org/documents/gender%20dysphoria%20fact%20sheet.pdf

Original article:

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/schizort/2014/463757/

Born and Made to Live this Way, Part One: “Baby We Were Born this Way”

The person coming out explains that they would never choose to be LGBTQIA, but it is completely outside of their control, they were born this way. They might start talking about gay genes, hormones in the womb, or some other biological phenomenon that bestowed their gayness upon them. Sometimes these clarifications place blame on self-flagellating parents who provided the wrong environment or genetic material and must cope with knowing they cursed their children with a wretched life. The focus on nature pops up in civil rights fights as well. As if the morality surrounding LGBTQIA lives would allow for persecution of LGBTQIA people if they choose their existence, but since they didn’t, they need protections.

As positive LGBTQIA visibility increases and self-loathing becomes less central to LGBTQIA identities (in my corner of U.S. culture anyway), will we see a shift away from caring about how we biologically ended up this way inside and outside of the communities? Will those outside the communities insist on knowing even if LGBTQIA cultures and needed medical care moves on? Homosexuality and gender and sex disorder research isn’t new. While ill-willed intents are abound in this area of research, the aim was often alleviating LGBTQIA people of the burden of living outside the sexuality, gender, sex, etc. binaries or off the center of the known bell curve or normalizing the experience through understanding. During the dawn of the genomics era it made sense to look for that rainbow bit of genetic material since we were aiming to map function to every molecule of the human genome, with or without media fascination.

When I started asking about why we learn about the bodies and brains of LGBTQIA people and wanted to learn more I started simple. I typed, “homosexual genes” into the U.S. National Library of Medicine database, PubMed. I hope you come back to read more about some of the fantastic articles that came up (or search yourself at www.pubmed.gov). Today, I want to touch on a human interest piece on interactions between a researcher and the community his research serves.

In May of 2016, Sara Reardon reported on the work of Dr. Eric Vilain for Nature. Dr. Vilain is a pediatric geneticist who is a world expert on genetic determinants of disorders of sex development (DSDs). During his training in the 80’s he operated on numerous babies within the 1-2% born with intermediate genitalia, as a standard practice of care that continues to this day. Dr. Vilain explains that doctors believed that abnormal genitals were incompatible with a functional life to the extent that premature babies with micropenises were allowed to die. Today, his research has brought him to working closely with intersex advocacy groups for better medical treatment.

In 2011 Dr. Vilain established a long needed longitudinal study on psychological and medical well-being of children with DSDs. He has built a positive reputation with the community by trying to get the term hermaphrodite out of medical vocabulary and communicating with other doctors about the harms of incorrectly assigning gender at birth versus allowing children to live with intermediate genitals. However, he is still controversial in the intersex community for not condemning other doctors who perform sex-assignment surgeries on infants with DSDs and has lost activists and ethicists working on his longitudinal study. Factors in this rift between medicine, researchers, and the community include strong wishes of parents and infants who cannot speak for themselves. Vilain has said he’s committed to producing data and evidence and tries to listen to the community. The community, understandably, does not feel it is sufficiently consulted.

Original Article:

http://www.nature.com/news/the-spectrum-of-sex-development-eric-vilain-and-the-intersex-controversy-1.19873#auth-1

Explore Pubmed:

www.pubmed.gov

Born and Made to Live this Way, Part Two: The Insanity Plea

Yes?

We thought so.

We knew so.

Here’s the skinny:

The gig requires with some commitment and provides zero monetary pay, but what it lacks in generating coin is made up for with friendship and love! And glitter! So what are we looking for?

At a minimum, applicants should self-identify as queer (by which we mean any non-normative sex, gender, or sexuality) and be knowledgeable about feminism and LGBT social movements. While we have room for many people and all applications will be considered, we want to especially encourage applications from people of color, trans*, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual folks. While Skepchick as a network centers around feminism, critical thinking, and science, and we certainly value contributions along those lines at Queereka, we’re also open to all kinds of queer writing that’s not only focused on those areas, such as on popular culture, art, history, philosophy, technology, media, travel, just to name a few.

Some further details:

• You should be able to write clearly and concisely
• A sense of humor is a must (especially on lighthearted posts, though sarcasm certainly has its rightful place in more serious discussions)
• You need to be able to handle an increased e-mail load (it comes from other writers as well as readers)
• You gotta be prepared for the occasional assholes that appear from time to time, though we do not hesitate to smack them down
• You should be able to commit to posting a minimum of at least once every 1-2 weeks

Are you still interested? Great! Here’s how to apply:

• Fill out the Help Wanted contact form
• Tell us a little bit about yourself, including how you identify (e.g., genderqueer, transgender, bisexual, etc.) and your relevant interests.
• What sorts of issues would you like to write about?
• A link to any writing samples is definitely helpful, but not required.

If you don’t fit these criteria but think you know someone who does, please send them our way!

“How long until you get out?” you ask.

“Two months,” he replies, “My husband and I are escaping to Florida.”

When you break the hug you find he has slipped several gift cards into your back pocket.

Pack the last of your things in the car until you can’t see out the rear window.

Say goodbye to your hosts, Jay and Fran. Jay will be smoking in the garden, his eternal project to carve out an Eden in Troy, NY. He’ll hug you, his wiry beard scratching your face. The smell of cigarettes will remind you of, in order, a childhood spent on a tobacco farm and a red, blinking light in the hallway of your paternal grandparents’ house.

Fran will be on Tumblr or Facebook in the living room. You’ll be crushed in his bear hug. You’ll have to tap out, or Jay will have to break his not-quite-husband’s grip on you.

Bid a mental farewell to the library room and its “reading bed” you’ve been sleeping in. Bye coffee table books of architecture porn. Bye histories of gay liberation. Bye cartoon porn and actual porn.

Get in the car for your last appointment with Albany’s most trustworthy mechanics. Weeks ago, when your stepfather heard that the AC in your car died, he said, “No son of mine is driving across Nevada without AC.” You latched onto ‘son of mine’ like a barnacle on a whale.

Wait for the mechanics to finish in a cafe with your friend Izzy. Be liberal with your love. Chat in your secret language. Get lost in her tall, Norwegian hugs.

Receive prophetic advice during a chance run-in with an old professor of yours. Take notes as he smiles wryly from under his beret.

Drive north in your car north through summer rains. Try to outrun them. Fail. See rainbows instead. In your hunger stop for fast food and wonder what “Probably Non-Dairy Creamer” means. You’ll see it on one of those little, plastic coffee creamers. The mystery will haunt you forever.

As you pass your most remote friend’s home, feel the psychic strain of departure for the first time. Wonder if you’ll see any of them again.

Drive through Seneca country as the sun hangs low. New York’s vineyards will huddle in shadows against the hills. As you pass Lake Erie, the setting sun will color it in fire and electroplated steel. The stars will come out over Pennsylvania but you won’t see them. The road is demanding of attention.

You’ll barely notice when you reach Ohio. Cleveland will roar out of the night in a riot of color-shifting LEDs on the capitol dome. Disappear into the suburbs; fumble for the hidden key at your first roomshare. Scare the dog.  Sit awkwardly in the living room as your hosts return from work. Introduce yourself. Have Chinese food. Play with the dogs over a Civil War documentary. Sleep under the gaze of Cherry Garcia in a converted home office.

Laying down you’ll realize you forgot to lock the door. There is no lock. You won’t sleep. You will lie awake waiting for a stranger with blood-shot eyes to come around the corner. You will hear the echoes of your ex’s voice in the walls. Remind yourself… Remind yourself that you’re two states away now. Remind yourself that you’re safe.

In the morning, find a greasy spoon and pay five dollars for a breakfast special. Feign surprise when it’s exactly what you’d expect for five dollars in Cleveland. Drive through rolling farmland. If you’re confused about whether you’re in Indiana or Ohio, look at the roads, listen. If they rumble like a mound of purring kittens and look like they might be made of sadness, it’s Indiana. Most other roads will look normal.

Get to Illinois. Notice the shift in topography as the land gets flat and marshy. Feel the genre of the road shift as industry, giant powerlines grow up around you.

This is noir country.

Stop in Chicago. Your GPS will fail in the tall buildings and layered highway overpasses. You will disappear underground. Find parking. Step outside. Wait for your local friend appear. He will be late. The train will be late. It won’t matter. You need to see each other.

Wander the gardens for two hours, get caught by sudden rain. Take shelter in an art deco, public meditation center. Meet your friend. Get bratwurst. Discover that knowing someone online is different than in person. Body language, physicality, voice and eyes won’t conform to expectations.  Online he is the hammer of justice, calling the parents of wayward, racist, teenage harassers. You are a scary editor. Here. Now. You’ll be two weirdos, standing at the tip of the Chicago skyline, the city in miniature.

Get in your car and get stuck in rush hour. Chicago rush hour never ends. When you escape the clog, you’ll drive through the darkness, over flat plains. Note the distant thunderstorms. Feel a tinge of dread. Wonder if the lightning strikes are omens.

Cross the Mississippi at night. It will be anticlimactic. Pull into Iowa City at 9 pm. Scare your roomshare with your sudden, disheveled appearance. Your phone will be dead. You will be dead. You two will not connect over your shared research careers. She will disappear to her boyfriend’s house. You will not blame her.

In the darkness of the finished basement, surrounded by decorative throws, you will feel exposed. The internet will not work. There will be nothing to distract you from your thoughts. You watch as your phone blinks. Charging. Charging. You hope nobody knows where you are.

In the morning, have a languid breakfast at a cafe. Spear fresh fruit with your fork. Find Kurt Vonnegut’s old house. Forget that it’s not a landmark, that it is someone’s home, until an old man emerges, confused, as you take a selfie. Get back in the car to get lost among the rolling hills.

You’ll know you hit Nebraska because of Omaha. Barring that, you’ll know because of the flatness. It will go on forever. Accelerate to 80 miles an hour, then 90. Pass through invisible clouds of stench wafting from factory farms. Try not to look at the forlorn pigs. Stop at a gas station.

The attendant will be in charge of the tchotchke store, selling Virgin Mary’s and doilies, selling fried chicken, managing the Dairy Queen. They will be out of fried chicken. You will know by the hand-written napkin signs over each menu item. The attendant will look at you and say, “Keep driving, New York.”

She will say, “Nebraska is where the idiots run free.” She will point to a man in the corner and tell you he tried to rob her with an empty gun. You will fill your tank and go, with a toothpaste-flavored Blizzard in your hands. An old man will stare at you as you leave. He will glare until you pull away, until he disappears in a dumpster, only to re-emerge to feed a pack of dogs handfuls of rancid chicken.

You will drive into the night. Turn off the highway and get into Colorado. You will have an appointment to keep with Lupe. She is a former ESL teacher who moved to a tiny, nowhere town of less than 150 to build her dream bed and breakfast. She had nothing but her savings, and access to a hoarder’s stash of grandma-floral furniture. She will greet you and tell you all of this, unprompted along with information about the pot dispensary, about free towels, about the old bank vault she’s turning into a lover’s suite and the bar.

You’ll walk across the street to the bar. It will be filled with Bronco’s paraphernalia. There will be Coors and Coors Lite. You will drink 40 ounces of Coors, with salt, for 3 dollars. For an extra dollar you could have mixed in tomato juice. While you drink you will be the only non-local. You will stick out, disheveled, pony-tailed, tired-eyed. A local will ask you why you are here. You will say you’re passing through to CA, to help with drought. She will give you a look, “There is no helping drought.” You don’t know this yet but in time her words will become prophetic.

You’ll cross the street, unnerved, under a full moon. There are no street lights. Everything is lit in silver. You’ll thank the God you don’t believe in that there are no cars here.

In the morning two kids, the only two kids, will tell you conspiratorially that they and Lupe are trying to get the BnB on Hotel Hell. “We need reality-show money,” they will say. “It’s the only way to fix up this dump.”

You’ll enter Wyoming. It is at once exotic and nostalgic. Your grandfather’s westerns were shot here. You recognize the outcroppings, the hills. Elk Mountain will loom over you, a giant thumb’s up over the plains. Medicine Bow Ridge clutches the only trees for hundreds of miles. You get to Cheyenne. You will eat at a Benjamin Franklin-themed steakhouse during old-person hour. You will get the “Poor Richard Special” from a waitress who knows you’re not from here. At this point you will feel like you’re not from anywhere.

You will pass the burned-out carcass of a semi-trailer on the highway.

You will pass The American Inn, a truck stop chain advertising marble bathrooms and apple pie a-la-mode. Suburbia, airlifted into the blonde, high plains.

You will hit the mountains, Utah. The highway will fly through the air like a Mormon prayer. You’ll weave through the pass and understand why the pioneers stopped here. Salt Lake City will sit, welcoming you. Billboards will try to save your soul. You will make your way to your next roomshare and crash with a pair of hippies raising a kid. She wants to be an audio engineer. He wants to be an ecologist. They will point you to the only brewpub in the city where you will feast on poutine and have an awkward conversation with a stoic German woman.

Toss restlessly on the synthetic, purple comforter. There will be scratching at the door. In your half awake state the noise is loud, like untrimmed fingernails scrabbling in the walls. You get up, put pants on and open the door. You’ll discover a kitten with moonlit eyes and a criminal mask, her tail twitching furiously in the night.

While you’re here, make sure to explore the Mormon Temple Square. Wear your gayest tank top and stride through the open wrought-iron gates covered in cross motif. Wander the Temple Square Gardens as giant tour groups led by polyglottal guides introduce international converts to the faith of Joseph Smith. Notice that the Temple itself is set above the flag of Utah, the American flag. Here, church trumps state.

Eat artisanal porridge.

Drive to the Great Salt Lake. Notice that it’s retreated a mile from the shore. The attendant will explain that it hasn’t rained for twelve years. In this moment she will be 16. She was four the last time it rained.

On the Salt Flats you should accelerate to 100 miles an hour. Your Civic will complain. Slow down and stop at a rest stop. An island in the salt fields. Try to imagine the terror of this place. No grass, no water, just heat and sun for miles.

Nevada will announce itself with hookers and blackjack. It perches on the border, luring the religious, converting them into holy rollers. Nevada will be a mystery to you. Towns will pass by, hunched over the Humboldt River. Prisons will pass by, built into the desert hills. Your eyes will sting as you head west, smoke from the California wildfires. There will be rain in the desert and small birds bathing in the puddles.

When you reach Reno you will remember the gift cards, Olive Garden. You’ll navigate to the nearest one, eyes still stinging from wildfire smoke drifting over the Sierras, and take a seat at the bar. The bartending waitress will be friendly. You’ll joke about family. You’ll order something that would make grandfather Mario rise from his grave like a marabbecca from a well. There will be a special cheesecake in honor of Thanksgiving that you will take to go. Blow the remaining balance on a 50% tip and smile as you depart.

Arrive in Tahoe to a barking dog, redwood trees and the dark of night. The stars will be invisible under the canopy. Enlist the help of a friendly neighbor to wrangle the dog. Sneak upstairs to your room and crash between the attic eaves.

When you close your eyes you’ll see him.

In the morning you’ll discover that you’re homeless, that your erstwhile roommates wrote you off the lease.

Drive to a parking lot on the lake and hike two miles to a nude beach. Throw yourself into the cold water. Baptise your frustration. Wash yourself clean of your past. Miss a few spots.

Climb back into the mountains and smoke. The traffic will get worse the closer you get to Sacramento. The highway will braid and cloverleaf, like a mad boatswain’s experiment in knots. When you reach the Bay, you’ll discover that there is no relief, the traffic only gets worse.

Roar into the golden hills of Marin. Dodge the black BMWs that don’t signal, the Teslas that sneak on silent engines. Hide out with your cousins in San Rafael for a week. Hide in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains for a month. Hide in the congestion. Hide in your work.

In time you will realize that you never escaped the East Coast. In a way, you never will. You will learn that you are your memories. You will discover that work, a new social scene don’t stop flashbacks. No matter how many symbolic, pseudo-baptismal gestures you make, throwing yourself into the Pacific, throwing yourself into Lake Tahoe, throwing yourself into creeks and swimming holes in the mountains, that you can’t wash away memory. Eventually, it won’t matter. Eventually, your wounds will merely ache.

Eventually.

Everything has its price, of course, and the price turned out to be higher than my enthusiasm and my labor: the price was my dignity. I don’t know if it was arrogant to think my enthusiasm could overcome low income and a lack of training and support. I don’t know if I made a difference in this city.

AmeriCorps is a federally-funded program of national community service. Volunteers are stipend-supported so that they can focus on engaging with the community without worrying about starvation or eviction. Every AmeriCorps program works a little differently. Some are roving bands of disaster relief workers, going from epicenter to epicenter. Other programs are focused on things like caring for the elderly or teaching kids to read. I met one team in the California Conservation Corps that was stationed in an abandoned prison. Their point-person told me they rose with the dawn for group exercise and spent most of their time building trails in remote areas.

My program was based out of an environmental nonprofit. They’re “urban forestry” focused, promoting tree-planting, green spaces and ecological restoration in the suburban-urban sprawl of the Santa Clara Valley. We rose before dawn to prepare sites for volunteers, digging in clay, breaking rocks and compacted, urban soil with pick-mattocks. We dug trenches along biomedians. We converted lawns into xeriscape. At the height of the drought we urged the public to stop watering lawns, to deep-root water their trees, to plant for the future.

Thanks in no small part to my “hella sick” (California has infected me) Queereka blogging credentials and Twitter-fu, whenever I wasn’t planting trees or taking care of trees I was glued to a keyboard, writing up blog posts on botany or reaching out to allied organizations. I felt our impact grow under my watch. I saw followers come in. I saw the community begin to pay attention. A couple of times my posts went pseudo-viral and broke traffic records for the website. I arranged a Twitter AMA for our CEO and got her hundreds of thousands of views. All of this I am proud of, all of this felt good. This was the first positive reinforcement I’d had for my writing outside Queereka or my pen-name weird fiction.

Pride. It’s this pride in my work that has made the rest of this so difficult.

AmeriCorps doesn’t pay very much. We, the mostly young, mostly college-educated volunteers, are sustained on government handouts for the poor, SNAP, MediCare, and a taxable stipend of $16,000 a year. In California $16,000 a year for full-time amounts to a little less than eight dollars an hour. That’s two dollars below the state minimum wage of ten dollars an hour. That’s troubling, too, for someone living in San Jose. The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates a local living wage of $14.25/hr. Our program was among the higher-compensated too; I’ve heard figures as low as $900 a month, poverty-level compensation for this area. Health insurance offered to AmeriCorps members doesn’t comply with the Affordable Care Act.

What’s worse, we are not considered employees. We are stipended volunteers with little, if any, legal protections. Compounding this problem is a general lack of understanding of who or what AmeriCorps is, leading to fun situations like fines, fees and tickets for things like vehicle registration and failing change drivers’ licenses for what amounts to a temp job, or losing insurance coverage. I have no doubt that with worse bosses this situation would have been entirely untenable.

This situation is ripe for abuse and burnout. Poverty is hard enough without workplace protections. As a liminal, temporary workforce, AmeriCorps members are pushed beyond normal workplace expectations. We lost managers in our program. Our teams were left to manage themselves or given to managers who were overtaxed from other teams. One team was literally turned into landscapers for rich, elderly people. We couldn’t convert the lawns of the poor because they often didn’t own their own homes. My team was unsupported by the organization’s budget or grants. We were supposed to provide care and maintenance to the trees we planted. Instead we fielded angry phone calls from residents we couldn’t help. I never saw anybody from the CNCS, the oversight entity that is supposed to monitor nonprofits that use AmeriCorps volunteers.

My “class” of volunteers was not the demographic envisioned by the government, i.e., local people giving back, energizing their communities. We were mostly white. Mostly middle class. Very few of the people I met during AmeriCorps were local; the vast majority came from out of state just after college. Everybody had family support or worked second jobs. The locals lived with family, the out-of-staters relied on parents or savings bonds for first-month’s + last month’s rent + deposits on apartments. All of this impacts the mission. How do you build capacity, how do you engage the community, when there are no locals, when project sites are just project sites and not future picnic sites, places to bring your kids as they grow up? I can only imagine how bad it is in some AmeriCorps programs.

Teach for America, an AmeriCorps program, parachutes similar groups of white, affluent people into underserved schools to “save” them from under performance, churning through them at a 50-80% burnout rate. It’s not surprising. They get a couple weeks of training and are expected to turn failing, underfunded schools into something from “Stand and Deliver”. TFA maintained these positions through exclusive contracts keeping qualified teachers out. FEMA saw a budget slash in 2013 and began aggressively using low-paid, untrained AmeriCorps members as first responders to things like hurricanes. AmeriCorps has many diverse programs so it’s difficult to assess what’s happening in each one. We know that provides volunteers to prisoner re-entry programs, environmental stewardship programs, elderly care, literacy, among other things. All of these things are skilled labor, all of these things are probably performed by undercompensated youths.

During a recent project I was speaking to a supervisor about the imminent end of my term, how much I regretted that I wouldn’t be continuing the blog or social media outreach. I wanted the educational stuff to continue, to grow, to expand. She looked me dead in the eye and said “Well, you could just continue to volunteer on your own time.” I was devastated. Each post took me 16 hours to produce, including researching, writing, promotion, sourcing images, formatting and copy-editing. I was an editorial staff of one. I’d grown a follower base. I’d reached thousands of people. I’d gotten subscribers. I was barely functioning on the stipend and was being asked to work for free. A couple weeks later I was cornered by the CEO of the organization and told, “If you’re really passionate about this you need to write up a proposal so we can hire somebody part time, maybe ten hours a week, to do your job”.

How about no?

This, more than anything, illustrates to me the biggest problem with AmeriCorps. This program, this system, incentivizes the conversion of entry-level positions to volunteer positions. It promotes the recruitment of young, debt-ridden, middle-class college grads at the expense of local residents. It reflects badly on the nonprofit sector, employing a bunch of temporary, low-paid grunts in direct opposition to social justice objectives. I ask, what person from a low-income background could afford to do AmeriCorps? What family support could they reasonably expect? Where else but the nonprofit sector would we pump untrained enthusiasts and expect them to make a difference? What if we had done this to the auto industry or real estate or banking?

The whole scenario reminds me of PhD stipends: low pay, long hours, stress, no workplace protections, the ethos of the work being its own sake, the talk of mission, the over-recruitment from middle class whites, the stress and burnout. Both AmeriCorps and graduate school teach young people that their labor is not valued, warping what labor means. Both AmeriCorps and grad school are in labor limbos, regarded as work and not work. Both prompt confused stares from family, friends and strangers who do not understand what you’re talking about. The one advantage AmeriCorps has is that it’s temporary.

What to do about this? I’d argue that AmeriCorps needs to ditch the “service” and “volunteer” rhetoric altogether and become a jobs program for new graduates. The stipends need to be raised to local living wage standards and their healthcare must be re-tooled to comply with the ACA. We have a model for this in the Depression-era parent of AmeriCorps, the Civilian Conservation Corps, a jobs program that served the public good. Our first state and national parks were built by the CCC. The people involved were fairly compensated for their time and labor. It was so popular and successful that it provided the model for many state conservation corps, a rare example of Federally-inspired state policy. One of the reasons this worked was because it was thought of as a real jobs program, not service. It reflected the needs and the ethos of the time.

AmeriCorps, beholden to a hostile Congress, struggling to define what “service” is hasn’t reached its intended size of one million members and has failed to breach into the national consciousness.  It peaked in the Bush administration with 88,000 volunteers annually. Obama has tried to push it to 270,000 only to run into stiff opposition. I’m not sure I want these efforts to succeed. I’m not sure the answer to my generation’s 10-11% unemployment rate and 44% underemployment rate is 270,000 new $13,000/year temporary service positions.  I’m not convinced it’s a good thing for nonprofits to churn through AmeriCorps members like the fast food industry burns through workers. If AmeriCorps is to live up to its promise of community service it can’t continue to operate in this way. It needs to compensate its members fairly, at least the prevailing minimum wage. It needs to offer the same workplace protections as a real job. It needs to be as high profile as possible so that Americans understand what it is and how it serves their communities. In other words, AmeriCorps needs to emulate the CCC. We’ve done this before. We need to do it again.

Feminists can further agree that men have some sort of systemic advantage that grants them economic and political – social – dominance. There are many different attempts to account for this advantage, such as the currently-in-vogue theory of privilege. Non-feminists who admit to this advantage have a similar variety of differing accounts, ranging from biology to religion or theories of cosmic balance.

Taking a look at the real origins of patriarchy will allow us to demystify the issue by isolating patriarchy at its most elementary. What I mean by “most elementary” here is the underlying logic that is at work in all examples of patriarchy. Examples of patriarchy are wildly different, from sexual intercourse to a smile to a photo, but each shares a common denominator, an underlying logical function. Put simply, following this line of thought lets us answer the question, “what is it that makes something an exercise in patriarchy?”

In discussing the origins of patriarchy, I rely on Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, a book by Maria Mies^[1] and by far the best historical analysis of patriarchy and feminism I know of. For reference, the historical, anthropological, and ethnological sources I make use of are all listed in chapter 2 of the book,^[2] which is free and available online. There’s a link below.

Origins of Patriarchy

We begin with the earliest stage of human social development: hunter-gatherer societies. Already there is a division of labor between women and men, which began with biological differences – in summary, some folks could squirt sperm but not milk, while others secreted milk and squeezed out kids. These anatomical differences, however, are significant only because they triggered the development of different social groupings, which related uniquely to themselves, each other, society as a whole, and the external world.^[3] Women were responsible for raising children^[4] and, contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of food production through gathering plant life.^[5][6] Men were hunters, providing supplemental nutrition for the community.^[7]

The disparity in economic production only increased when women invented agriculture.^[8] We can dismiss the myth that men were more technologically advanced than women, though we should take note that men and women developed different technologies:^[9] as the primary economic produces, it makes sense that women invented agriculture, while men, as hunters, learned the making and use of weapons.

Around the time agriculture was invented, another kind of society came about: the pastoral nomads. It was here, with the pastoral nomads, that patriarchy emerged (though this is not to say that agricultural societies were necessarily completely non-patriarchal). This society was based on the domestication of animals, especially the aspect of breeding. Of particular importance was the fact that one male animal can impregnate dozens of females, with the same holding true of humans as well.^[10] Men learned that other people could be subjugated through force of arms, just as weapons were used to domesticate animals.^[11] Thus, women became chattel, and the first slavery came about.

But this kind of pastoralist society presupposes other, truly productive societies.^[12] Think about it: taken by itself, such a society must be in a constant state of civil war, with the men fighting amongst themselves for ownership of the women, until one group or individual emerges as the victor. Thus, along with the first slavery, the first form of warfare emerged: the nomads would attack other societies, especially the wealthy and populous agricultural communities, pillaging them and kidnapping the women. Even the poorest man of a pastoralist community had some hope of owning a woman in this way, thereby achieving wealth. A truly patriarchal mode of production was then possible: a “non-productive, predatory mode of appropriation”.^[13]

The emergence of patriarchy occurred, then, upon the coincidence of the following conditions:

1. The sheer productivity of women’s labor after the invention of agriculture.
2. Men’s monopoly of weaponry, which made slavery possible.^[14]
3. The discovery of domestication, particularly breeding, where men learned that women could be made chattel.

It is the world’s greatest irony that patriarchy was possible only on the basis of women’s technological advancement and productive power – without immense productive power of agricultural society, invented and sustained by women’s work, patriarchy could never have been fully established.^[15]

Debunking the myth of Man-The-Hunter

Man-The-Hunter is really a single myth with a lot of variations, so many different ways of asserting that men gained dominance over women due to some innate advantage: men happened to be more economically productive, or were naturally stronger, smarter, and so on.

The first thing to take note of is that hunter-gatherer societies were not patriarchal, and that, further, men were economically and politically inferior to women.

Man-The-Hunter did not rule over the women of the community by virtue of economic superiority: men contributed significantly less than women to the overall production of the community. Furthermore, hunter-gatherer societies were in fact matristic – “matristic”, not “matriarchal”, since while women tended to hold political authority and families were matrilineal, there is no evidence of women ever exploiting or enslaving the men of their communities.^[16] In point of fact, it was the women, responsible for the daily sustenance, who decided whether to grant the men the provisions necessary for hunting expeditions.^[17]

As we’ve seen, men couldn’t have taken power without the monopoly of weaponry. Men overpowered women not due to innate strength or intelligence, but through force of arms – men possessed all the weapons and all the knowledge of making and using them. This is how men gained dominance from a lower economic and political position. Men did not secure social dominance from natural advantage – they learned to properly leverage a social advantage.

Patriarchy at its most fundamental

Violence, norms, and institutions like slavery are all certainly a part of patriarchy. But the underlying function that determines whether a given instance of violence is an exercise of patriarchy, for example, is what Maria Mies calls “naturalization”: making a free person a natural resource to be exploited.^[18]

Consider the three conditions under which patriarchy emerged: together, they constitute both the means to reduce women to a natural resource and a social context in which there is incentive to do so (wealth, power). The most crucial implication of all of this concerns the close link between patriarchy and production – after all, the most elementary function of patriarchy is the reduction of women to a natural resource to be exploited.

We should be very careful here, however. Following this line of thought, we are obviously in contradiction with those sexists who claim that patriarchy, if acknowledged at all, is solely a political or cultural matter. At the same time, however, we should avoid the trap of misreading naturalization as a purely or primarily economic matter – it concerns “production”, yes, but both economic and cultural production. The emergence of patriarchy required depriving women of their freedom and autonomy, something every bit as cultural and political as economic.

Furthermore, while we can agree with the trend among proponents of social justice that patriarchy is both economic and cultural, it must be stressed that this analysis doesn’t go far enough. The naturalization of women transformed all of society, right down to the most basic division of labor. Patriarchy is therefore not only a matter of “economy” or “culture”, it is the very foundation on which both stand, the dividing line that defines culture and economy.

Implications

Armed with knowledge of naturalization, the elementary mechanism of patriarchy, we can draw a few important conclusions.

First, we should recognize the true scope of patriarchy and feminism. Patriarchy, with its basic division of labor, is the cornerstone of all society. In a very real sense, in patriarchy, women must economically and culturally produce men. This means the obvious things, like cooking, laundry, and raising children, but it also means producing masculine identity – at the dawn of patriarchy, for example, a ‘real’ man was someone who owned women. This of course necessitates a radical conclusion against the prevailing notion that patriarchy is a relic of feudalism, a bygone era: on the contrary, our modern society is just the latest form taken by patriarchy. For the pastoral nomads, women were valued primarily for their ability to breed heirs; in feudalism, women were made to be extensions of the land and the chief means of ruling it (obtaining and maintaining ownership and title of land through marriage); and with the rise of capitalism, women are again breeders, this time primarily of new sources of consumption and labor (people) rather than heirs. Feminism threatens this foundation, the very bedrock of an ancient social constant that has lasted multiple historical epochs – hence the desperate attempts to water it down and the extreme violence of anti-feminist resistance.

The most important implication is perhaps also the most difficult to think. If feminism and patriarchy deserve discussion of what they are beyond a purely cultural affair, the same goes for the concepts of “queer” and “transgender”. Anything LGBTQ is typically thought of as a matter of identity – or, put another way, as a matter of culture. And, just as previously discussed apropos of feminism, it isn’t enough to give consideration to the economic implications of living as a queer or trans person, since these concepts also concern the fundamental social division that grounds all of society. Being queer, for example, isn’t only a matter of economy and culture, it’s not just who you are and what you do: it’s a reconfiguration of the very approach according to which we define the concepts of culture and economy, of who we are and what we do.

In this sense, queer and transgender as concepts are the necessary result of the feminist break. Consider how the gay movement took off as an explicitly political movement only after the wave of women’s suffrage rocked the globe in the early 20th century. And consider that “transgender” as a political concept and definite social category emerged together with the explosion of the gay movement in the latter half of the 20th century, gradually coming into its own as it sort of splintered off. If feminism, the assertion that women are real people and free agents, represents the first crack in the patriarchal edifice, then the explosion of queer and transgender expressions represent new cracks and the widening of old gaps – new methods of articulating that freedom. After all, it isn’t enough to say that women should be free from exploitation: having a stable masculine identity shouldn’t require the exploitation of women. Social division doesn’t have to be naturalizing.

What consequences ensue in the wake of the ever-widening cracks in patriarchy, it’s too early to know. But we do know the scope of feminism and the LGBTQ movement is beyond identity, beyond culture – and it’s breathtaking.

References:

1. Mies, M. (1968). Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd. PDF (backup). All following references come from this source unless otherwise stated. Other things in the book you might be interested in: chapter 1, history of global feminism; chapters 2 and 6, critique of marxism and 20th century Communism; chapter 3, witch burning and colonialism; chapters 4 and 5, neo-colonialism and critique of 20th century capitalism.
2. p. 44-73.
3. p. 49-53. These pages are in large part a critique of Marx and Engels’ works, against which Mies develops her own methodology. Regarding biology, note the following passages:

“…human nature is not a given fact. It evolved in history and cannot be reduced to its biological aspects, but the physiological dimension of this nature is always linked to its social dimension … Men’s/Women’s human nature does not evolve out of biology in a linear, monocausal process, but is the result of the history of women’s/men’s interaction with nature and with each other.” [p. 49]

“The historically developed qualitative difference in the appropriation of the male and female bodily nature has also led to ‘two qualitatively different forms of appropriation of external nature’, that is to qualitatively distinct forms of relations to the objects of appropriation, the objects of sensuous bodily activity (Leukert, 1976: 41).” [p.53]

4. p. 55-56. Works cited: Briffault, 1952; Reed, 1975; Thomson, 1965.
5. p. 55: evidence of women as gatherers. Works cited: Childe, 1976; Reed, 1975; Bornemann, 1975; Thomson, 1965; Chattopadhyaya, 1973; Ehrenfels, 1941; Briffault, 1952; Sohn-Rethel, 1970.
6. p. 58-59: comparison women’s and men’s food production. Note here that Mies is far from attempting to assign men and women rigid roles, as she explicitly acknowledges that in many cases, both men and women participated in both hunting and gathering. Works cited: Lee and de Vore, 1976, quoted by Fisher, 1979: 48; Martin and Voorhies, 1975: 181; Goodale, 1971: 169; Leacock, 1978; Brown, 1970.
7. p56-58. Works cited: Karve, 1963; Mies, 1980; Dube, 1978.
8. p. 55. Works cited: Childe, 1976; Fisher, 1979; Sohn-Rethel, 1970.
9. p. 61.
10. p.63. Works cited: Fisher, 1979; Sohn-Rethel, 1970.
11. p 63-66. Works cited: Boserup, 1970; Meillassoux, 1974, 1975. See also p. 61-62 – works cited: Meillassoux 1975; Bornemann, 1975; Turnbuil, 1961; Fisher, 1979: 53.
12. p. 63.
13. p. 66. See also p. 65: “… the predatory mode of production of men, based on the monopoly of arms, could become ‘productive’ only when some other, mostly female, production economies existed, which could be raided. It can be characterised as non-productive production.”
14. p. 64-65.
15. p. 58. See the section titled “Female Productivity as the Precondition of Male Productivity”.
16. p. 72. See footnote 4. Works cited: Bornemann, 1975.
17. p. 59.
18. p. 66. Mies defines the term “naturalization” on this page without explicitly stating the word, which she begins using in the next section and continues to use throughout the rest of the book.
19.
20.
Re ‘matristic’: page 72, footnote 4, cite Bornemann, 1975

Bibliography:

For a complete bibliography of the works cited by Mies, see the bibliography section, which begins on page 236.