May 2011

Still a Virgin? Bi and Trans Can Help YOU!

Bisexual Erotica 8th Century Japan

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español Once you admit to yourself that you and everybody else in the world is “queer,” you have to confront the question of how the human race will continue if everyone is either L, G, B, or T. And this raises the question of how “straight people” can or should contribute to a modern, sex-rad society.

Of course, some people will immediately think, “If there are no straights, there will be no kids.” Well,  that thought is a symptom of the famous disorder of thinking called “bisexual erasure.” Oh, yes, bisexuals reproduce all the time, like rabbits. It is their nature. Try and stop them. And their kids are going to be kinky, too.

But this isn’t about reproduction. The LGBT community can easily repopulate the world with nice people if the assholes suddenly go missing. But this isn’t about the assholes, either. So who’s left? Isn’t the world divided into two great camps, the LGBT and the assholes?

I have heard rumors that there are a lot of non-LGBT people who aren’t assholes. While I know that if these nice non-LGBT people thought about it much, they would realize they are really LGBT too, I accept them in fellowship as our “allies,” our “fellow travelers.” But they seem to be capable of so much more if they would learn our ways and join our joy.

If you think about it, an absolutely straight M/F couple is composed of two homosexual virgins, just as an absolutely gay M/M or F/F couple is composed of two heterosexual virgins. Our society has its virgins of many types, depending on market conditions.

Bisexuals, by comparison, are not generally virgins of any obvious type. Their basic virginities have all been properly addressed and remediated. They no longer limit their affections to but one half of humanity. All are fair game. All who will come may come, come who may. Right away it seems the bi’s must be the salvation of humanity, showing the way to cure sex and gender exclusivity in the vast community of virgins.

So, although the “straight assholes” are useless to humanity, our virginal friends of each sex and each orientation, including all those “straight allies” can help us reinvent the world as we help them reinvent their erotic range and sensibility.

But we also all really “know better.” It isn’t really a matter of either/or, even though almost everything in our cultural legacy works that way. We are all really trans on a whole range of dimensions—that is, our erotic and personal selves may be defined by fixed or changing, focused or inclusive characteristics—and nothing requires that we limit our expression or experience to any particular range of sex, sexual orientation, social affinity, gender identity, gender expression, or gender orientation, etc. The better we understand these dimensions in ourselves, the better we are able to understand and love our fellows.

The Transgender community breaks free from the assumed cisnormative roles of Bisexuality. The very concept of transgender refutes the idea that the bisexual experience can ever be erotically complete. Sad to say, cisnormative bisexuals are just another kind of virgin, needing to be healed. They are virgins to the amazing world of the transnormative experience.

I can imagine a future society in which the marked dichotomy in the pubertal development of secondary sexual characteristics (characteristics not essential to the reproductive function, now obsolete in an era able to technologically control such biological signaling) is viewed as a hereditary developmental disorder that penetrates almost the entire human species.

While social and natural selection may drive our species towards a dichotomous androgyny, there is no reason interim technological adaptations cannot also be used. For example, if adolescents of either sex were to receive supplementary hormones appropriate to their gender deficiency, many of the problems of natural breast development (in xy persons) or natural penis development (in xx persons) seen later in life would be greatly relieved.

Physicians already regularly administer GnRH blockers and trans-hormones to adolescents who plan to fully transition. Why should such therapy be denied the rest who will surely desire the androgynous results of trans-hormone therapy as their experiences of love grow and they come to embrace the full spectrum of joy available to them?

In the library you will find my paper Why We Are All Transgender, which explores the reasons we understand that the general transgender identity is actually the destined endpoint of human sociosexual evolution.

—Dan Massey

 

 

What lies in our power — Kushaba Moses Mworeko

A few days ago I was watching CBS’s “Criminal Minds” and the show ended with this quote, “What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do,” which I remember from reading Aristotle’s writings.

It reminded me also of what most people have been asking me over the last 17 months: Moses, what do you intend to do? I have not been answering this question well because of the uncertainty surrounding my future.

Being in limbo for over a year has taught me a lot. My patience, assertiveness, and aggressiveness were all put to the test. These are qualities that all human rights activists and defenders have to have. You can’t wake up one day and go to Capitol Hill and tell them what you want and get it, no, no, there are procedures, there are bureaucracies, there are many stakeholders who have to be involved to help advance the cause by recognizing its legitimacy. Yes, we have what we believe in, and the fundamental human rights that we cannot be denied, so we have to keep fighting until…

Now the limbo part is over for me, and the threat to my own personhood has ended. After 17 months I have finally qualified for U.S. asylum and the ability to work in this country. At last, the fight, my fight, is restarted in earnest.

What next?

One goal has been with me since my teen years — reaching out to disadvantaged people, restoring them to their normal life functioning. This is what I have always wanted to do and it’s what I want to do and I will do it. It lies in my power.

Today, I can see with renewed clarity where I am going, that I will do whatever I can, for the sky is the limit.

May I humbly say thank you to all of you who have touched me and held my hand through these past tough 17 months. Thank you for being my friend.

–Kushaba Moses Mworeko

Editor’s Note: Moses is a frequent contributor to VenusPlusX and edits our Global Sexual Freedom Annotated Bibliography. He is also featured this week in Metro Weekly.

 

Meek, Arise! Defeat the Bullies!

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español More clearly than at any other time in our past, the underlying mechanisms of oppression by which our cultures maintain the status quo are coming into sharp relief. These mechanisms divide the public interest into warring groups, easy to suborn and emasculate through political manipulation. For far too long the attention of the people, whom religion, government, and commerce exist only to serve, has been manipulated and diverted into hatred of their fellows rather than love and respect for individual autonomy. The collective folly and false presentations of reality presented by religion, government, and commerce instead force each of us to compete for resources and privileges of life because they are deliberately kept in extreme scarcity by artificial systems of ownership and distribution designed to support oppression.

Finally, the pretentions to love, truth, and public service are progressively falling away from human delusions of religion, government, and commerce. This is exposing the vicious zombie program that soullessly drives forward a cruel and uncaring social fate selected by bullies for personal and collective advantage over their fellow humans. We see exposed the naked foundations of human oppression. And they begin with sexual repression, culturally forced on infants the day they are born and never relaxed afterwards. And the brutality of this completely failed cultural system perpetuates itself as one generation insists that the next adopt its obscene and failed ideas and ideals.

Today the meek can see that their entire lives and life expression are being dominated and shaped by uncaring bullies, who have conspired to seize control of all human rights and liberties, denying the most basic needs to everyone who dare challenge the selfish execution of their desires against the whole of human welfare and progress.

by Khannea Suntzu

The time is at hand to end the bullying. The time is at hand to turn your back on the demands of a false and failed culture that would control your every desire, including the most basic forms of sex and gender freedom. The time is at hand to recognize the falsity of all religious myth, of all government hallucinations of moral purpose, and of all greed-based commerce. Those who would practice such bullying must be forced from society and isolated in their own personal world of delusion, never to abuse the trust of the meek again. The systems they have erected for their power and enrichment must be disassembled and reformed to the purposes of humanity or allowed to rot and decay in their own purposelessness.

Today the bullies have become well-organized and open in the expression of their desire to fully enslave the rest of humanity. The public statements of religious, governmental, and commercial leaders continually disclose their greed and cynicism, free at last from false assertions of selflessness or service that have surrounded them for millennia. Now they admit their purposes, even flaunt them inhumanely, so no intelligent person can fail to realize a personal responsibility to end the bullying forever and the bullies’ processes of persecution of the meek.

We outnumber them by the billions and there is absolutely nothing they can do if we all refuse to play their evil games. The bullies will try to use the meek who have bought into the system of oppression to force the disenfranchised to participate in this system that is unfair to their interests. The bullies will, as usual, try to do this with military and police force. Many members of these forces are not bullies but are themselves among the most oppressed by the bullies. When they come to understand the reality of their oppression they will refuse to continue to play the vile roles for which the bullies have so long exploited their fears.

Put another way, if you let some asshole dictate to you how to express your most basic sexual/gender character by legally limiting or guilting your behavior, you have enslaved yourself by giving them control over every less important thing you might think or want to do. You have denied your most central aspect of being in submitting to their ignorant or cynical delusion.

Defeat the bullies and you bring to an end the oppressive culture we have known and endured all our lives. We can replace it with a far better world in which all work together in diverse ways to accomplish common goods for the benefit of all, not just a few worthless bullies. The resulting rewards to humanity as all move forward in unity are beyond human experience and human imagination. Meek, arise!

–Dan Massey

 

 

Columbia’s Basic Concepts

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español There are a few basic ideals that Columbia seeks to explain to humanity in order that weaknesses in evolved human social models may be corrected by overlaying the necessary forces of destiny on factors affecting human social evolution. These concepts are fundamental to all of our work and help us understand and explain how it is that things have come to be as they are and how humanity can escape from the fundamental constraints that interfere with all human progress.

  1. the universe is populated and has an organized government, one branch of which is responsible for the conditions of prior mismanagement present on this planet and ongoing efforts to expedite their remediation.
  2. there is a simple supreme law of behavior that defines for each individual how they may best contribute to the expression of love and the healing of evil for their fellows.
  3. the human concept and phenomenon of transgender is the emerging direct experience of cosmic joy and play in human social and recreational activities.

First, we are in no way alone in the universe. Not only is our galaxy necessarily populated by beings much like ourselves in different stages of social development, but the large-scale operation of the affairs of the peoples of that galaxy is necessarily coordinated by some sort of cosmic government that deals with human affairs on a scale that no single people can address themselves.

In this and many other comments on this blog we will speak of something as “necessary.” By this we mean that some aspect of destiny cannot be fulfilled unless it is true. This form of argument in terms of potentialities rather than actualities belongs to the world of “modal logic,” especially developed by the great logician Kurt Goedel. In the paragraph above, we basically mean, “Why the hell would you think the universe isn’t populated? If it could happen here it must have happened all over the place. Don’t be a heliocentic homocentric fool.” As for the government, it basically comes down to, “Considering the human propensity to invent rules of living for everybody, how can you imagine an entire galaxy wouldn’t develop systems of administration and adjudication? Just because you can’t imagine what the issues would be for a group of planets separated by light-years, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Your imagination isn’t that great.” Grow some humility, monkey-son.

Second, there is a supreme law of behavior that determines what actions of each person contribute to the individual’s development as a loving person and make a permanent impact on the expression of love in the universe. We state them here and will return to their explanation in a later blog:

  • Become Love
  • Live Truth
  • Do Good
  • Make Beauty

We do not say “tell the truth,” although a decision to do so might be entirely correct. To us, truth is not just words, but the direction in which our will shapes our actions of love to achieve good and beauty as results. Thus, we say “live truth,” because, to us, truth is a living reality. Similarly, we say “make beauty,” not “seek beauty,” though the latter may be entirely appropriate in a given situation. In each case, the prescribed action is particular to the supreme value being enacted.

Third, except for areas in which biological reproduction is employed for the creation of new human personalities, all transcendent beings exist in state one might call intergender or omnigender; however, since such beings have no need for sex for reproduction, but are widely exploring all forms of gender expression and behaviors provided by their transphysical bodies, the term “transgender” will be used in these blogs,in the sense of omnigender or intergender. We see the transgender phenomenon as increasingly manifest in human society to stem from the natural human responsiveness to the true transgender nature of the developing human personality. You will find an initial exploration of these ideas in my paper Why We Are All Transgender.

–Dan Massey

 

No call for celebration – Kushaba Moses Mworeko

Editor’s note: Moses has this month received official notice that he has qualified for U.S. asylum, finally. He will post something trying to capture his personal joy soon, but here republished is his post from April when the Ugandan bill was again in flux, showing how important it is to be thinking globally about human rights. Also see Will O’Bryan’s spotlight on Moses today in Metro Weekly and visit Moses’ Global Sexual Freedom Annotated Bibliography in our Library for more information.

 

Even as Uganda’s government shows it might shelve its “kill the gays” bill, there can be no call for celebration.

 

 

 

 

 

The country’s reluctance to move forward is due to the international pressure it has experienced since the bill’s inception and how the country’s image has been tarnished. I can imagine now the millions of dollars it has lost in tourism and other areas because of being referred to as “the world’s worst place to be gay,” collateral damage as one blogger put it.

But more is to be done. It is paramount for the world to know about ther repressive legislation in Parliament now and or already the law in Uganda, such as The Sexual Offences Bill, The Pornography Bill, The HIV AIDS Bill, and The Marriage Bill which prohibits same-sex marriage or cohabitation, and its entire Penal Code is rife with infringements on several basic human rights such as the right to Privacy.

In Ugandan society, the mere introduction of this “kill the gays” bill has actually created a new trigger on how to treat lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people (LGBTI). Since the government has strongly and consistently said that it is illegal for people to be LGBTI, then this gives citizens a strong backup to punish them, feeling they are acting within the constitution’s jurisdiction. This is evident in the case of leading gay activist David Kato’s brutal murder and other murder attempts against his associates. This week alone, the notorious rag sheet in Uganda Rolling Stone, reported two incidents of mob justice against gay men alleging they were killed because one stole a necklace and the other a motorcycle. Now that people believe that homosexuality is the worst of sins, then one can imagine what is likely to happen to LGBTI people. I can imagine a scenario where a gay person is lynched by the community while their family members watch in despair.

Mob Justice Increases as Court Backlogs Escalate by Joshua Kyalimpa covers the supreme court’s order to the media houses in Uganda to cease publishing LGBTI names in newspapers. This brings a temporary sense of relief to the LGBTI community but the actual result is that this has encouraged more mob justice since society seems to think that even if these homosexuals are reported, the courts will not do anything, so the community would rather punish them than report them to the authorities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bad seed has been sown by religious extremists and its consequences are now spreading like bush fire across the world. Even in countries where homosexuality has not been talked about, the governments are now pushing for bills that will criminalize the act. This is scary politics. We have a great deal of work to be done. We have to double our efforts like never before.

Frank Mugisha is a leading Ugandan LGBTI activist on the front lines, currently serving as the Executive Director of SMUG, Sexual Minorities of Uganda, believes it one thing for government to stop the bill but without creating laws on hate crimes, there are many dangers we are still faced with. “This is simply government saying let us not talk about homosexuality in Uganda, but we want government to be clear and create laws on hate crimes against LGBT people and also to decriminalize homosexuality.”

Mugisha extended his gratitude to all who fought for the Bill to be stopped. “We appreciate so much our efforts and our partners’ both nationally and internationally in stopping the bill.”

The Ugandan Penal Code criminalizes homosexuality with a life sentence for consensual sex between adults of the same gender. “We need to pay attention to what will happen to the Sexual Offences Bill (SOB) as much as we paid attention to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” Ugandan activist Val Kalende said.

“We are waiting to see what comes out of the SOB and yes it is a bill to worry about as it could carry clauses from the Anti Homosexuality Bill,” warned Mugisha. He highlighted that the next steps will be to continue with their advocacy, not allow any form of discrimination against LGBTI people, and to “make sure that we have equal rights like any Ugandan.”

Working with Team COLUMBIA at venusplusx.org, we have kept updated a Global Sexual Freedom Annotated Bibliography to keep activist and advocates informed and inspired to help bring about laws and protections for persecuted sexual minorities all over the world.

KMM