GAYS, LESBIANS AND TRANSGENDER

Gays, Lesbians and Transgender Raising Children and They Grown Up Normal

Gays, Lesbians and Transgender Raising Children and They Grown Up Normal

Introduction

In the past few decades, gays, lesbians and transgender has become a topic that increasingly discussed and debated among social theorists. Indeed, sex and desire have become the focus of intense social-theoretical, philosophical and feminist fascination, and it is against this backcloth that social theorists have sought to rethink the constitution and reproduction of sexualities, bodies, pleasures, desires, impulses, sensations and affects. How to think sexuality beyond the constraints of culture is a question that is increasingly crucial to the possibilities of political radicalism today. The cultural prompting for this turn towards sexuality in social theory is not too difficult to discern. In the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and particularly because of the rise of feminism, sexuality has come to be treated as infusing broad-ranging changes taking place in personal and social life. The politics of identity, sexual diversity, postmodern feminism or post-feminism, gay and lesbian identities, the crisis of personal relationships and family life, AIDS, sexual ethics and responsibilities of care, respect and love: these are core aspects of our contemporary sexual dilemmas (Williams, 2003).

Critique of Gender, Sexual Difference and Identity

Although LGBT politics took various shapes and forms in the course of its evolution, the issue of identity politics can be said to be at its most prominent between 1960 and 1980. Without entering into a nuanced debate about identity politics as such, LGBT identity politics can be summarized as follows. It is about treating sexuality and gender as the dominant, core essence of a person's identity. Hence, we talk about gay identity or bisexual identity. LGBT identity politics has been influenced by other identity politics movements from the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. This approach presumes that all homosexual (and for that matter bisexual and transsexual) people experience the same sort of oppression and that sexuality is the most important characteristic for their sense of self (Califia, 2001). This position is often referred to as essentialism—because, of many aspects that create our identity, only one is seen as the most important, essential, to understand a person. LGBT identity politics is thus an essentialist strategy that (overvalues sexuality, placing it above class, race, gender, cultural affiliations, and other categories. This strategy proved at times to be a successful and efficient way of challenging homophobia and discrimination but also has its obvious drawbacks.

Sexual identity was seen as totally confined to the private, unique bedroom life. Any attempt to make homosexuality a matter of public interest done by separating it from any other aspect of identity and normalizing gender expressions according to dominant norms. The move toward conceptualizing homosexuality as the unifying and predominant base of identity, on which a social movement could be built, can be described as strategic essentialism. It was introduced on a large scale at the beginning of the 1970s but took over and dominated lesbian and gay ...