“This is a great move from a world leader,” says a pundit on Fox News in the USA about the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s comment that “we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be – they can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense,” which got massive applause at the Conservative Party Conference.
Does our PM have no idea of the difference between biological sex and gender identity? Has he never met feminine men, never met masculine women? They were so common in the early 20th century that songs were written about them. Sunak is of Hindu heritage, so I cannot believe he doesn’t know about the rich history of 3rd-gender people in Indian culture – which of course the British tried to eradicate in the 19th century by imposing this same old belief in the binary, and calling those who experienced life differently sinners, criminals or sick.
The encouragement of transphobia from our politicians is equal to the vile things they used to say about gay people. (Margaret Thatcher said ‘people are being told they have an inalienable right to be gay’ and brought in Section 28 to stop that). They failed to suppress gays, so they tried to buy us off with equal marriage, to make us look more like heteronorms. But queerness is a force of nature and will always find its way out! If only our politicians were educated enough and spiritually aware enough to realise that and just let us be.
Ancient cultures had a more holistic view of life. Malidoma Some of the Dagara Tribe in west Africa taught that for them it is completely natural that a person’s inner gender might not match their physical form. They, like indigenous, earth-honouring, people the world over, have long honoured the in-between people as having specific roles in the community, especially as channels of healing and wisdom, because their gender-fluidity was seen to give them connection to the spirit worlds.
The ancient pagan cultures of Europe also saw gay sex and gender fluidity as having sacred potential – no laws were enacted against these things until the late Roman Empire under Christian rulers, who set the example copied later by European monarchs of legislating against ‘sodomy’, uniting the religious codes with criminal laws. Note that their motives may not have been entirely spiritual – Plato recorded back in the 4th century BCE that love between men –
“is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which male-male love is particularly apt to produce.”
Homophobic laws have been used from the late Roman Empire onwards to attack political opponents, restrict the liberty of the general population and suppress the creative spirit of queer people. In 390 a law attacked “the poison of shameful effeminacy”. In 438 this was expanded to call for all who engaged in gay sex to die “in avenging flames in the sight of the people.” Emperor Justinian’s law code of the 530s blamed same sex love for ‘famines, earthquakes and pestilence.’ For centuries, the justification for punishing same sex relations was that they are ‘against nature’ – a complete lie from the start. (Science has now demonstrated how common queer behaviours are in nature, and in fact Aristotle had already written about such things in ancient times.)
In both medieval and modern times there are many examples of the ‘against nature’ argument (which was expounded firstly by homophobic preachers) becoming the basis for secular laws. In Spanish Castile Christian King Alfonso X issued a law in 1255 that stated:
“…when a man lusts after another to sin with him against nature, we order that whoever commits such a sin shall both of them, as soon as it has been discovered, be castrated before all the people, and, after 3 days, shall be suspended by the legs until they die, and shall never be taken down.”
Two centuries later another Spanish edict declared : “Because the penalties hitherto established are not sufficient to castigate and extirpate totally… such an abominable crime… we order and command that any person of whatever rank, condition, pre-eminence, or dignity who commits the abominable crime against nature, being convicted by that means which according to the law is sufficient to prove the crime of heresy or lese majeste [ie treason] shall be burned in flames of fire.”
In C18 England, William Blackstones’ Legal Commentaries invoked the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah to justify its plea for fierce punishment of the crime ‘not fit to be named’ – “peccatum illud horrible, inter christianos non nominandum.” He called for “laws to rise, the law to be armed with the sword of revenge, so that the infamous, who are, or who will be, of the thing, may be subjected to exquisite punishments” (ie death).
He wrote :”… we have a signal instance, long before the Jewish dispensation, by the destruction of two cities by fire from heaven: so that this is an universal, not merely a provincial, precept…. this offence (being in the times of popery only subject to ecclesiastical censures) was made single felony by the statute 25 Hen. VIII. c. 6. and felony without benefit of clergy by statute 5 Eliz. c. 17. And the rule of law herein is, that, if both are arrived at years of discretion, agentes et consentientes pari poena plectantus [i.e., both the active and the passive partner are equally subject to the same punishment]” Blackstone’s Commentaries 1769 Chapter 15
I could give many more examples, but the point is that –
In Africa today these arguments are still used to target and make scapegoats of homosexual minorities. In the West, where views have liberalised, we can see this behaviour for what it is – yet our politicians continue to indulge the exact same behaviour in relation to trans people.
RISHI SUNAK YOU ARE A DISGRACE
rainbow messenger 