The reluctance of some schools to provide protection and support for LGBTQ students can be seen as a relic of ancient thinking based on simple categories of gender and sex and the norms of behaviour associated with them.
Simplifying the identities and behaviour of human beings makes them easier to control and empowers those who would control them. For instance, it is easier to get men to fight if fighting is seen as "natural" to their gender and differentiates them from the other gender. The old maxim "boys will be boys" is a familiar fragment of that strategy and premise. Imposing a standard of beauty on women and seeing them as helpless and incompetent has been part of the schema.
The forum moderator who criticized a female St. Albert city councillor’s wardrobe and body configuration excused his behaviour on the ground he was tired and unaware. This is exactly the point. It is almost automatic for some to think in these archaic and misguided ways.
Women have always been competent in every field, in spite of their uniqueness in bearing children, but male dominance and prejudice have obscured this fact. Her own students tore the brilliant astronomer Hypatia to pieces in first-century Alexandria because she "dared" to instruct men. But marginalizing women is also a type of violence and even in these "enlightened" times women are paid on a different scale than men for work of equal value, and even for the very same work.
The system of which we are so proud has been based on outright lies concerning sexual identity and behaviour and we should be thankful to the LBGTQ community for their courage in disclosing this fact. Violence and endless fighting for more and more money and power, and competition to the death is no more natural and inevitable to men than it is to women and other genders.
Most of the modern world now accepts the concept of LBGTQ. This might be the insight that leads to a different way of thinking, and it is long time overdue.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
