SHOULD THE GAY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT rename itself "The Transgender Rights Movement?" You'd think so, if you believe the recent comments of some of our leaders. For example, openly gay Houston City Councilwoman Annise Parker recently wrote, "Transgender is a much broader term than gay, and encompasses the entire group of gays and lesbians" who by their choice of same-sex mates "transgress" gender boundaries.
Georgia gay leader Cindy Abel also calls gays "gender transgressors." In a recent column she proclaimed, "We're not so different from those whose internal identity doesn't match their exterior bodies."
Since when?
This whole business about gays as "gender transgressors" and not matching our "exterior bodies" calls to mind the long-discredited theories of the early German gay civil rights advocate, Karl Ulrichs. In a well-intentioned effort to help gays in his time, Ulrichs concocted a theory that homosexuals constitute an "intermediate" or "third" sex - not really male or female. He even invented a special name for us: urnings. "That an actual man would feel sexual love for a man is impossible," Ulrichs wrote in 1870. "The urning is not a true man. He is a mixture of man and woman. He is man only in terms of body build." Ulrichs's theory was, of course, completely wrong.
Parker, Abel, and other gender rebels (some of them transgender but most not) often cast their theories as a plea for the "inclusion" of transgender issues in the gay civil rights struggle. However, they are nothing more than the modern-day inheritors of the embarrassing legacy of Ulrichs and his hypothesis about gays as some kind of third sex. Some people must have not been to school in the last century. They are trying to resuscitate the urning.
Our new gender rebels argue that gays transgress at least one boundary expected of them, whether male or female: they have sex with people of the same sex. This one fact, we are told, makes gays natural upstarts against the very idea of defined gender roles. At heart, like Ulrichs, they really don't believe that an "actual man" can love another man. If a man loves another man it must be because he challenges the very concept of manhood itself.
The evidence concerning how we gays see ourselves suggests otherwise. A recent study by psychologist Michael Bailey concluded that gays see themselves in gender-conforming terms and seek gender-conforming traits in prospective mates. Bailey studied the personal ads in gay magazines. Out of 673 personal ads placed by gay men, 98 percent described themselves as masculine or in similar terms. Of 210 ads placed by gay women, 59 percent described themselves as feminine or in similar terms. If Bailey had not counted athletic activities as masculine, an even larger percentage of the gay women's ads described themselves in feminine terms.
Equally frustrating for our gender rebels, Bailey found that 96 percent of gay men and 80 percent of gay women sought partners with gender-conforming traits. Bailey also studied gays who never placed such ads and came to the same conclusions.
None of this is very shocking to those of us who live in the real world, as opposed to the fantasy-land of the gender rebels and their urnings. All of us, gay and straight, exhibit gender-nonconforming behavior at some times and to varying degrees. Are we all gender transgressors by that logic? A single riotous act is not exactly a revolution.
Among gays, moreover, gender nonconformance has historically served the function of signaling to other gays who we are. Gender nonconformance is an observable trait, after all; homosexuality is not. And we have needed to conceal ourselves because of anti-gay prejudice. Gender nonconforming behavior among gays may often be, in that sense, a vestige of the need to "hide" produced by the very homophobia we are supposed to be fighting.
And the fact that some of us occasionally exhibit gender nonconformance no more makes the gay civil rights struggle a "transgender movement" than the fact that some of us have good taste in design makes it an "interior-decorating movement." All such reductionist theories, whether invented by our enemies or by our supposed friends, confine gay life to a particular pattern and thus do us a great disservice. They fuel stereotypes that hurt us - not because being an effeminate man or a butch woman is bad - but because they are stereotypes.
Our gender rebels may retort: "Fine. Gays may not be fighting oppressive patriarchal gender roles, but we ought to start fighting them." That's an interesting but much more radical argument, because it shifts the debate from focusing on what gays are to what gays should be.
Poor souls, our rebels must try to enlist us in a war against gender that few of us believe in, and indeed, one in which most of us appear to be fierce partisans for the other side. It seems that someone, whether from the far right or the far left, is always trying to tell us how to live.
But the gender rebels are entitled to their idiosyncratic strategy for achieving equality. I will leave them to the care of Karl Ulrichs, the "third sex" theory, the mythical urnings, and the other anti-gay stereotypes they hold so dear. We gender patriots have work to do.