 So I'd like to welcome everybody. I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and I'd like to welcome you to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, men and feminism. Finally, we have men and feminism panel. This is delightful. For four years, I have introduced speakers to our panel discussions and lectures, and I've prefaced it with the following description of the center. In addition to being an exhibition space dedicated to feminist art, the center's mission is to raise awareness of women's contributions in all fields, in all ways, to our cultural, political, and social landscapes. And today, I am dissolving boundaries, and I'm breaking new ground. I like tilling the soil. And this is part one of what will be a new series called Transcending Gender Celebrate All Hold Back None. And our second, our part two, is going to be in October, and you'll hear more about it or keep your eyes peeled for information about it from museums, information places. Today's panel, Men and Feminism, really gave me an opportunity to pause and to think about language. And that I feel it's time to bring everybody out of the 20th century feminism into a modern world, feminism, into the 21st century. We're witnessing that feminists in 2011, and I dare say they were in 1970, but are modern, sexy, feisty, of all ages, and are men and women. And I think that was true then, but somehow our collective memory has been skewed. So I'm making it my mission in this year of 2011 to introduce or reintroduce again, all of the feminists in our midst, and all of the things that they hold true, and all the things that they believe in, and all the ways that they are. Sizes, shapes, colors, genders. I was also thinking about patron of the arts. People sometimes say I'm a patron of the art, and I say, no, no, no, I'm a matron of the art. Arts, if I'm anything, I don't really know, consider myself that either. But if anything, I'm a matron of the art. And I'm taking back the words the same way we've talked about for so long, taking back the nights. And I started thinking about what about feminism? Does feminism and feminism work? Maybe not. Mennonite? Oh, yeah, well, that's a whole other thing. My good friend and excellent feminist historian, Deborah Schultz, to my left is formally going to introduce her panel author commentator to her left, and my good friend Craig Barnes, to his left sociologist, Timothy Diamond, and a professor of political science, Paisley Curra, at the end. Deborah Schultz is a historian and the author of Going South Jewish Women in Civil Rights Movement. She started a woman studies program in her high school and has been devoted to building feminist knowledge network since then. She's founder of the Soros Foundation's International Women's Program and serve for 10 years as its director of programs. She has taught history and women's study at the New School, Rutgers University, and LaGuardia Community College, and was a CUNY graduate center writing fellow this past academic year. She is working on a book about European Roma or Gypsy women activists, part of her long standing interest in anti-racist activism and intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and memory. So I'm delighted that we have our men and feminism. And please help me in welcoming our panel and Deborah Schultz. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, and everybody for coming. I want to thank Rebecca Taffel and the museum staff for helping to make this possible and for your enthusiasm. I think this is the very beginning of a very long and provocative discussion, and I'm honored to be here with this group of friends and colleagues to start it off. But I'd actually like to start my remarks by invoking someone who's not here, but who is one of my mentors, 93-year-old Dr. Mariam Chamberlain, who's the founder of the National Council for Research on Women, which we were just talking about. And I remember Mariam always saying, feminism isn't going to work unless men get involved. And in my 20s, I found that extremely annoying. I thought, oh, she's so reactionary, I can't stand it. And I was, you know, as a feminist purist, I thought that women's studies and women's activism should focus on women for obvious reasons and not use men to make the field seem more respectable. You know, we were at a stage where we needed to compensate, and obviously we still need to compensate for the lack of visibility of women's achievements, concerns, and perspectives. But we are in a different moment and a more complicated moment, as I think our panel will reveal. Times definitely have changed. Definitions have changed. Language has changed. But I don't want to get too complicated. I want this discussion to have a lot of dimension. So let's just step back with a few basic concepts and then we will begin. The men sitting here before you have used research on women and gender to provide startlingly original viewpoints on important social questions. The field of women's studies, which had two programs in the U.S. in 1970, has now grown to 652 programs in the U.S. In 2006, 90,000 undergraduates enrolled in women's studies classes. But now women's studies has expanded conceptually to become women's and gender studies. There's men's studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer studies, and transgender studies. But whatever we call it, feminism has changed the way we all think. We invited the panelists here today not so much to valorize them as male feminists, a term that they may or may not identify with or may perhaps detest, as you may hear, but to explore the influence of feminism on their work as scholars and activists and in their personal lives. Simone de Beauvoir said one is not born, but made a woman. Her insight evolved into what scholars today call the social construction of gender. And that means essentially that different societies create different normative interpretations of what being male or female is and based on those interpretations accord rights and privileges. This varies over times, across culture, and as Paisley said in a very succinct way that I liked, sex changes. So I think that says it all, but we'll talk a lot more about that. The changes have systemic consequences as we will explore in our discussion, and we're fortunate to have three people coming from very different perspectives to enter into the discussion with us. Craig Barnes argues that the historic transition from matriarchy to patriarchy in the second millennium BCE ushered in a threatening violent change in value systems. Tim Diamond demonstrates how women's traditional role as caregivers is economically exploited in the multi-billion dollar nursing home industry. Through his work on transgender rights, Paisley Kara shows how the state controls definitions of gender, who gets known as a man or a woman with all those rights and privileges. Before I introduce the panelists more fully, I just want to give you a sense of how our time will be spent. Each speaker will spend about 15 minutes talking about their work and experiences. Then depending on what time it is, I may ask a question or two, or perhaps the panelists will ask a question or two of each other, and then we're going to open it up to you for questions and discussion. So I think we'll have plenty of time for that. Okay. Craig Barnes is our first speaker, an award-winning author, commentator, and playwright. His books include In Search of the Lost Feminine, A Study of Women-Centered Cultures Before Patriarchy. He's the author of a trilogy of plays examining the conflict between passion and power in the life of my personal favorite, Queen Elizabeth I. He's been a newspaper columnist, a radio commentator, a women's rights lawyer, negotiator on issues of nuclear weapons, on ethnic cleansing in civil society. Just a few achievements in your life. Currently the host of Our Times with Craig Barnes, a weekly radio program on public affairs heard in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His most significant achievement, according to Craig, is being married to his wife, Mikayla, for 53 years, having four children and 11 grandchildren. Dr. Timothy Diamond, sociologist, has most recently been visiting chair in gerontology at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. He has also taught and held visiting scholar positions at Northwestern University, Cal State LA, Rutgers University, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto. His book Making Gray Gold, Narratives of Nursing Home Care, received Book of the Year awards from the American Sociological Association and the American Humanist Association. To write the book, Dr. Diamond got certified and worked as a nursing assistant in three nursing homes. He is currently writing a book entitled Talking About Health Insurance, rereading and rewriting the right to medical care. And he recently confessed that he spends an hour a day reading our 1,200 page healthcare reform bill. I'm grateful that he is, because we are not, I guess. Dr. Paisley Cara is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College. His research and teaching interests include sexuality and gender studies, queer legal theory, contemporary political and social theory, biopolitics, and the intriguing surveillance studies. Cara is co-editor of the award-winning Transgender Rights, the first comprehensive book on the Transgender Civil Rights Movement. He co-edited Corpus, an interdisciplinary reader on bodies and knowledge, coming out in June. His current book project, The United States of Gender, coming out this year with NYU Press, looks at contradictions in state definitions of sex. Cara has served as the coordinator of the Brooklyn College Women's Studies Program and as the executive director of CUNY's Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies. His activism includes service as a founding member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute, a board member of Global Action for Trans Equality, a new international human rights organization, and as an expert with numerous New York City agencies and think tanks. He lives in Brooklyn in Crown Heights, just a few blocks from here, with his wife and three daughters who are, are they all here? So that is our panel, we're really fortunate to have such a diverse and exciting panel, so please let, help me welcome them again. And we're going to ask Craig to start with his comments. It is, it is a great pleasure to be here at this remarkable center and I come here with great respect for, and admiration not only for the center but for Elizabeth Sackler, who, and the work and to be invited to participate in that work and the emergence of these studies of the blending of gender. I must say, however, Liz, you said that the new 20, 21st century feminists would be modern, sexy and feisty. I would like to be that, but I don't feel quite like that. I put that description, so I have to, yeah, okay. My interest in this place and in this subject is historical, sociological, legal, political and personal, other than that, not too much. But let me begin with the personal. I've been married to the same woman for 53 years. Through these years we have suffered together through career changes, absences, enthusiasm and disappointment about our children and our relatives and even about each other. Through defeats and some victories in the public arena, health crises and the amazement of getting older. I have especially not planned to get older. Through all this, had I not been able to lie back in the darkness on the pillow and wonder out loud who I am, what I am doing here and what hope is there for humankind. Had I not the sympathetic ear and response from my wife Makayla that sometimes included Buddhist writing, sometimes poetry, sometimes sadness and sometimes just holding my hand. I do not think I would have written any books or political commentaries or successfully tried any lawsuits. I would have lacked the courage. The feminine presence in my male life has literally been a lifesaver. Through the last 3,500 years, patriarchal society has attempted to relegate this presence that I've enjoyed, to the back rooms, to the brothel, to a legal footnote. And whenever any female attempted to cry out that we are people here, the patriarchy has been equally apt to burn her as to praise her. This is not just too bad, this has been a tragedy for millions of women and for civilization. Kings whose women were chattel, sex slaves or property conduits never had the intellectual and moral companionship that I and other men have increasingly enjoyed during this last 200 years. Kings and popes made war out of stupidity that any genuine pillow exchange might have talked them out of. They sought gold instead of spiritual wholeness and because no quiet voice spoke for everything on earth that is of value that is not gold. They burned and pillaged, raped and plundered without hesitation because their image of the divine was out there somewhere and not holding hands in bed or talking and thinking and crying out loud. I am interested in this subject because I am human and I lament the loss of influence emotionally, spiritually, intellectually and playfully that the other half of humanity could have contributed in larger measure had the patriarchy not decided that property was more important than the pursuit of happiness. I choose that phrase advisedly. I am a patriot in the sense of the Declaration of 1776 because I do not believe that the pursuit of happiness or wholeness or peace or prosperity can be achieved without masculine and feminine walking down the road together hand in hand. Any civilization that excludes from active participation one half of its membership is like a man walking down the road hopping on one foot. So that is my personal part. The political part is that when the feminine is fully actualized we are talking about a revolution in consciousness. This is a revolution that has only half begun. It has started. There were women in the square in Tahrir, in Tahrir Square in Cairo. There are women pruning apple trees in Afghanistan and raising stronger chickens in those villages, gaining approval from their husbands. And there are women making a difference in this country like Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem and Elizabeth Sackler. And I would add Dana Patrick. Coming in on the plane in the JFK yesterday the pilot announced herself as Christine. Yes, this is where we are going. But the revolutionary difference of which I speak, the change in consciousness is perhaps revealed most vividly by materials from an unexpected source. The evidence of a possibility of a different consciousness comes from under the ashes of the island of Santorini in the eastern Aegean. In the last 50 years archaeologists have discovered extensive materials from a civilization that ended when the volcano in Santorini blew up in 1500 BCE. The ashes revealed frescoes, seal rings, pots and figurines, moldings and carvings that are the remnants of a civilization that existed before it was overthrown in about 1220 BCE. That civilization today called Minoan by the Greeks after King Minos, a most unfortunate and inapposite naming, was unknown to any great philosopher in history, beginning with Plato and Aristotle. It was not known to Cicero or Plutarch, to Augustine or Aquinas, to Kant or Hume or Gibbon or even to Nietzsche. It was not known to any of the historians whom you and I relied upon as our basic education. It was not known because it was buried under those ashes and they began to be dug up until about 1920. On Santorini, the panels of flowers in blue and red, ochres and orange, the graceful kissing, swallows and vivid partridges, the joyous monkeys gathering crocuses were not known until the ash was uncovered as late as the 1960s. It is for the most part still not steadied nor widely reported even today. My exposure to and then steady of this archeology began after a judge in Denver in a federal district court would not allow into his courtroom the evidence of historic discrimination against women. I was counsel for Denver's nurses in a wage case. The federal judge would not allow into evidence the historic suppression of wages caused by the fact that the early nurses were nuns. They worked for nothing, of course. He would not allow evidence of Florence Nightingale's long travails or the witch burnings in the 14th century, not in my court. You're not giving that history to me. He assumed that women were paid less because they were worth less and they were worth less because they interrupted their careers to become mothers. He ruled for the city. Years after that trial was over and the Supreme Court of the United States had refused to hear that case, I began to search for the sources of that judge's complacency. It was complacency. He didn't want to hear about the witch burnings. He represented the majority opinion in the culture in which I lived. Where could that willingness to pay graduate nurses less than tree trimmers have come from? In the Eastern Aegean, I began to find the pots and figurines, the seal rings and frescoes, which cumulatively by the hundreds and then by the thousands honored the feminine. Put women at the center, celebrated ecstasy and sensuality, color and dance and grace. It was clear that in one culture, at one time, the feminine had not been disparaged. We called it when I was growing up in Little Three Room Country School in Colorado, prehistory. But in prehistory, for a thousand years, women were celebrated at the center. When I say celebrated at the center, that's literally true. They were at the center of frescoes and carved out on seal rings. And the men were shown bringing gifts to them of oil and wine. I don't say women were in charge or matriarchs. I don't know about matriarchy. The evidence doesn't say who's given the orders. But that they are at the center of these frescoes. That they are presiding in funeral celebrations or at the top in naval reviews is undeniably true. It's not made up by a feminist. It's because that's where it is on the wall panel. They are at the center. And that is sufficient to suggest a different kind of consciousness. Men bringing gifts to women all over this material for a thousand years. Then when I began to compare the values represented by this civilization with Greek mythology, with the earliest Greek literature Homer and Hesiod, the first two Greek poets in the eighth century, I would see then the rejection of these values that were on the frescoes that were newly being dug up. You could see systematically the rejection of those values being represented by Greek mythology. Sirens, think of it. Sirens, Medea, Medusa, the Gorgon who will turn a man to stone as she looks in the eye. The Sphinx that will eat you alive if you don't answer her riddles correctly. Silla and Charybdis. Charybdis who will suck you down. Those are all female images. And they all come from that early 800 years after the decline of the Noan culture and after the earthquake. They were accumulated and written down and then relied upon in the writing of the Dominicans in the 14th century in Malleus Maleficarum, the hammer of witches, which was used as a justification by the popes and the church for the burning of witches. Those mythologies had come down already by then for 1500 years. Jason and Oedipath myths begin with men left on the hillside because we didn't need men so badly before this change. And after that women are left on the hillside and the reason the boys are central is because they are the ones through whom patriarchy must be passed. Taming of women's breeding was foundational to patriarchy because if women were not demonized and sequestered, if they were not characterized as shrews like Hera or having the morals of a bitch like Pandora, literally he says, they sleep around like a bitch. The morals of a bitch like Pandora, 8th century BCE. Or as witches like Medea, or as the many headed like the Hydra, or slimy like a Kidna, they would not willingly retire if they were not characterized in this way. They would not willingly retire to the back rooms where they would be sequestered, and they would not come from the altars and the frescoes of the Minoan culture before them. The Greeks, and for that matter the earliest Hebrew patriarchs, had to demonize women to get control of the descent of property. Women had to be tamed like horses to make sure that property stayed in control of a known father. The first words, the first revolution in consciousness, in which women were at the center and seal rings and celebrated in hundreds of ways, had to be translated into pots that show Amazon women being murdered by Heracles and Achilles, and stories that tell of the transport of Helen to Troy as a flaw, and it was a flaw because she had decided who she would marry. The stories of Homer and Hesiod about Odysseus murdering all the suitors, not just the bad ones, but all the suitors, and the eleven serving girls, because as Homer said, the eleven serving girls had served Aphrodite. He murders them heinously, and when I'm in the fifth grade in a little country school in rural Colorado, I read of the murder of the serving girls and think, well that's just cultural. It's murder, and it becomes the foundation for the Western cultural tradition. Therefore, if it lasted for a thousand years, from 2500 BCE to 1500 BCE, it is not possible for us to say that humans are genetically incapable of recognizing women and women at the center. Genetically, a thousand years is not an aberration. If it is not therefore genetically impossible to follow another code than the Greeks and early biblical society, then the Sackler Center and the revolution of consciousness that began 200 years ago and the times we are living through right now bring back the promise of an emerging new 21st century consciousness. And that consciousness would be the willingness to treat life as if it mattered and civility as more the mark of civilization than domination. And all in all to honor the creative, the generative capacity that is symbolized in the word feminine, but is actually in every one of us. To honor life, to honor the wind and the rain and cycles of the seasons, to see time as precious and to care for those among us who are life-givers as the most sacred of all will be the mark of the new order. And this conversation here today is a part of that emergence. This one and the other entries in the program in Elizabeth Sackler's series. It's fantastic at this time and place in the United States in 2011 when feminist insights and actions are needed to be more than ever. I shy away from the term man feminist or male feminist or feminist man. Preferring the phrase feminist trained for a couple of reasons. One of which it reflects my own personal and professional life, the privilege of having been trained by feminist professors and friends. All through my life. My comments are meant to express gratitude to those feminists who have brought me here this afternoon. But also we can have some fun with the term training. Whether a man can be a feminist is an open question, at least riddled with lots of contradictions. Whether he can shake off his misogyny and patriarchy and runs through his blood and bones is doubtful. Or even if he has, he's still a part of that species, maybe subspecies called men, does seem to be making a ruin of things. But every once in a while a well trained man can come in handy. I think everybody might agree with that, I'm not sure, but once in a while you can think of instances perhaps. That training came to me very early as a boy. When growing up in a matriarchal family, working mother to older sisters, father died young, I came face to face for ten years every day with the dishes. That was my job, even if some of my boyfriends sometimes made fun of me. It may have been the most valuable feminist lesson I ever learned. At least by the time I read Marilyn French's The Women's Room, I was able to resonate with the way she closes off one of her chapters. And still there are the dishes. So come the revolution, I will call upon these earliest feminist skills to get right to work, back in the kitchen. Wondering what it would be like if men did the dishes of the world. Later I went on to study sociology at a time when the second wave was cresting. In the 1970s, early 80s, explosive ideas and ways of thinking were everywhere. Dorothy Smith, one of my professors, said the women's movement didn't have a language. We had to invent one. So on this theme of language, I did my dissertation research playing the game of charades. They gave me a PhD for playing charades at Ohio State. With the support of a lot of feminist friends, I played hundreds and hundreds of games of charades. I still do. And have found some patterns of how women and men, not being categorical, trying not to be, but act out certain words differently. Two quick examples might be tender. From tender as the night. And what do women do for tender? Well, lots of different things, but tender. Tender, touch, kiss, baby. Right, tender, images of tender is the night, the movie. And men do those, too. But men call on other imagers. Sometimes very rarely women call upon tender as pain. Oh, my pain, my sore. Or men will call up tenderizing meat. Just, you know, a second, not a determined thing, but different repertoires of imagery, different lived experiences with what are sometimes mistakenly called, you know, common language, different worlds. One more example, God. And God created woman. It's the movie I've used over the years, and it's a stitch. When one sees women almost all the time, not always, but most of the time, praying. In a variety of ways, of course. Prayer might be, you know, the different ways that women have of acknowledging the deity and men, too. Prayer. It's just that men frequently have a different repertoire of images to draw upon to act out the word, which is to say, men become God. This kind of thing, right? So, it's a lot of fun. And good theater. Maybe a little old fashioned now for how we've come to think, but there it was. And it's great fun still. After a few years of teaching, however, after that dissertation, a new directive for me seemed to congeal, that to engage in feminist practice, a man needs to do something that women do. That I couldn't just go on continuing to be feminist sort of from the neck up. Many feminists were telling me, like the niece in Uncle Vanya in the play, it doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't even matter what you say. It matters what you do. So, I thought about it and thought about it for a while. And off I went eventually to become a nursing assistant and to work in nursing homes, which I did for about three years in Chicago, when the dinner party was just getting mobilized. It was so exciting then as it is now. Amazing. And so, by this time too, it would be the mid 80s, the feminist methods that we were learning were not just anymore about women as the end product of the inquiry, but about the knowledge that is available from the standpoint of certain specific women situated somewhere. We have a turn in standpoint. As for example, with Deborah Schultz's wonderful work Going South, which many of us are familiar with, I'm sure, which is about the civil rights movement from the standpoint of some of the women who put their bodies on the line dedicating to that cause. In this case, it was nursing homes, which I learned, what you learn in nursing homes, that the women and the men who work and live inside have a lot to teach. From nursing assistants, I learned a lot about the wages. For example, it's easy to say, well, they're dirt wages, well, they're dirt wages. They are really dirt wages. In fact, it was one of these moments in a field work where I had to come to grips with my own ignorance, which is to say I had a full-time job, but it wasn't enough. I was in there, but everybody I was meeting was working more than a full-time job. So being a nursing assistant in health care in the United States, a full-time job just doesn't even cut it. Well, it's not news to you, but I had to learn it. And staff, one word, nursing homes, staff. Systematically undernourished. The entire conceptualization of that's what a staff ought to be in a home. It drives me nuts then and now. And hard, complex work, probably the hardest work I did, being a nursing assistant. And the hardest part I think was learned probably through this lens of a term that one of the seasoned instructors told me, well, don't worry about this work out there. What this work is going to take is a lot of mothers whipped. Well, not being a mother, it was an anthropological sort of trip for me. But I learned a lot. Like Mrs. Roberts, you know, turning to me long after I had been formally trained. I'm washing somebody's face and not doing a very good job of it. And she pulls the rag out of my hand and kind of amazed at my aptitude. Turns to me, you ain't had no babies, have you? That's the kind of mothers with wisdom that informs every day, all day of the work. I also learned, of course, in contrast to mother's wit, the rule that if it's not charted, it didn't happen. That's a rule in the book and it ruled on the wall, on the rule, rule, rule. And of course that rule obliterates the hardest parts of the work, the emotional, for example. As regards to residents, I begin the chapter with Mrs. O'Brien. I can't get a little rest around here. I'm coming into the nursing, morning, getting Mrs. O'Brien. Come on, let's go Mrs. O'Brien, time to get up. Seven o'clock, let's go, let's go. Mrs. O'Brien goes up. Why do I have to get up in the morning, work all my life, waiting for retirement. And now I have to get up at seven o'clock in the morning. Why? I thought this was a rest home, she says. She was wrong. Not anymore. Nursing homes, United States, and industry. You know, you're following the labor. I closed that chapter about residents borrowing a phrase from Audrey and Rich. As morning after morning, I would watch the residents sit in the chairs waiting for the elevator, waiting for the breakfast to come. Bib in place, waiting. The poem, Rich's poem, is, a wild patience has taken me this far. I think of them as waiting with their sort of wild patience, practicing patienthood. Actively practicing the skills of silence. Nursing homes, a horribly demented institution that begs for a feminist transformation from the inside. So come the revolution, I will be doing dishes in some nursing home. And fomenting insurrection right there. An area as ripe for revolt as any as I can think of. The last area of research and writing that I would like to share, perhaps invite some stories, is a story based book about health insurance, which I am currently engaged in up there in upstate New York, where I live. And I ponder in awe and mystery the question, why is it that U.S. tax-paying citizens and residents do not have the right to health care? I go round and round on it, literally. I've been all around the states and I've been in hundreds of conversations and I've spent five years in Canada trying to offer an answer. And I haven't got it yet, but I'm getting close, having had many, many talks and analyzing pay stubs and insurance policies and public policies, public programs and newspaper stories. And most of all, language. The language that encases U.S. people, even as we speak about coverage, premiums, deductibles, copays, especially benefits, a word that comes from the Latin for favor or gift. We are caught, as Audre Lorde might have put it, using the master's tools, the master's language. And as she notes, we will not bring down the master's house using the master's language. Rather, we need a whole new language of health care in the United States, I'm suggesting. Just as the second wave needed a whole new language, as Professor Smith told us. And the first wave needed a whole new language as well. So, as I search for a new language for U.S. health care, I am once again privileged to be treading on fertile, even sacred ground back there in central New York. Because then, as I do frequently, I can go back to our foremothers who resided 160 years ago in Seneca Falls and Rochester. And there, I can find words of solace and hope and agitation. There's Susan B. Anthony getting arrested for voting and preaching that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. There, we find Alice Paul getting ready for hunger strikes. And for purposes of critiquing health care benefits, favors. There, we find Lucretia Mott in a letter to an 1850s women's rights convention, declaring that women must not ask as favor, but demand as right that every civil and ecclesiastical obstacle be removed from the way. These foremothers might just hold the promise of our future. For the more we read them, the more we hear a language which is steadily being taken away from us as so many of our freedoms are being dismantled today. There, the declaration of sentiments which they hand out in Seneca Falls is still a wonderful read and extremely relevant to our own predicaments today. Now, there would be another place where a man could come in handy. I think a well-trained man could drive busloads of pilgrims, women and men back to that land of magnificent writings and magnificent museums there in central New York. Unfortunately, relatively untended to these days. When the man could drive the bus, of course, if he offered lunch and do the dishes, that would probably be pretty good too. But driving back to a feminism which was dedicated completely to dethroning unjust authority, the language is absolutely electric. And back to their language, back to a vocabulary that we need for our future, back to a language like Lucretia Motz, not of favors, but of rights. Well, thank you very much. I am really delighted to be here today. And I want to thank Deborah for organizing this event and it's really incredible to be at the Sackler Center where my daughters are running around and they have their favorite, you know, dinner party settings. They argue about every time and change. And it's also fun to be at a place where I can ride my bike to to give a talk. All right, so I need to just talk a little bit about kind of organize my talk around Deborah's questions about my first encounters with feminism. It was when I was an undergraduate in the 80s at a very conservative university in Canada where I grew up where one of the hazing songs that all the freshmen had to sing was called She Loves the Gangbang. That was kind of the atmosphere at the time where I had beginnings of a feminist consciousness. But I really didn't start identifying as a feminist or thinking about feminism until I went to graduate school. I went down to Cornell in the late 80s and early 90s where it was kind of the height of a theoretical feminism that would become one of the pillars of third wave feminism. So intellectually I kind of skipped second wave feminism including like liberal, radical, cultural feminism as an intellectual project. In terms of my activism, you know, I volunteered the women's shelter and all that kind of stuff. But intellectually my feminist experience was really kind of organized around like Judith Butler's texts and stuff like that. So in graduate school I worked with a bunch of folks in the women's studies program which we were working very hard to rename the women in gender studies. Which I think they actually ended up calling it the feminist and gender studies program I think. And so my training was in government which was my official field and also in gender and sexuality studies. And my real interest from that time that continues to the present is like looking at the category of gender and how it has been denaturalized. So looking at how gender in fact is an effect of legal structures, of political institutions, of social arrangements. That it's not in fact a natural given. So a lot of my work kind of challenges the naturalization of gender. So just to kind of describe it briefly what I'm looking at, what I look at is like as Deborah said is that fact that sex changes and how sex changes. So just to be really clear so we can know what I'm talking about. Most people are born, they are given a gender assignment that it goes on their identity documents that they're happy with throughout their life. For a small minority of people they don't recognize themselves in the gender classification they have. So they maybe will change from being men to being women or from being women to being men. Or into kind of third kind of gender, different gender queer kind of categories. So what I look at in my research is like how governments choose to classify sex. And what's really interesting from an academic point of view is how sex changes. So every single agency has the ability to classify someone's sex. And every single level of government judge, government actor can develop their own rules for sex classification. So even just in New York City for example, if you're a homeless person, you could be segregated, or not segregated, that's the wrong word. You could be housed in a facility that matches your gender identity. So if you say I'm a woman, regardless of what you look like, you could be housed in a woman's shelter. But if you got in a fist fight in that shelter and the police arrested you, you would be arrested. And if you're a transgender woman, for example, would be arrested and put in a male, segregated with male prisoners. And if there was a conviction in jail time, you would be segregated with male prisoners upstate somewhere. So that would be an example of some of the kind of contradictions I'm looking at. As one woman who was testified in a New York City council hearing when we were working to pass an amendment to the New York City Human Rights Law that would include transgender people. She testified and she put it this way. I do not suffer from gender dysphoria. I suffer from bureaucratic dysphoria. My ID does not match my appearance. I worry every time I apply for a job, every time I authorize a credit card check, every time I buy a plane ticket, every time I buy a beer at the corner deli. I have changed my name, but my gender continues to be officially and bureaucratically male. So in my work, I look at these contradictions, but not in the usual way of trying to figure out what the best solution is or what's the best way to classify gender and what gender really is. Because after spending like upwards of 20 years thinking about sex and gender, the one thing I know is I have no idea what sex and gender are. I have no idea. I'm totally agnostic. As a political scientist, I'm not so much a science person, but as a political studies person, what I care about is what the state says your sex or your gender is. So what the state backed by the force of law tells you what your gender is. And from that, I look at the contradictions between different classifications of gender. So someone could be male for one government purpose and female for another government purpose. And people are kind of thinking, wow, that's hugely contradictory. What do we do about that? But what I kind of step back and do is kind of see from a larger perspective what those contradictions really are. And maybe even see how they're not contradictions. Because all what government does, it's basically business is to make distinctions between people, between activities, between things. So going 70 miles an hour is one thing and going 50 miles an hour is another thing and that distinction could matter. Or for example, using powdered forms of cocaine would give you one type of drug, a prison sentence, and using crack would give you a longer sentence. Or coming out, you know, landing in a small craft at the beaches of Florida. If you're from Haiti, it leads to one result. If you're from Cuba, it leads to another result. So states, all they do is make contradictions. Making distinctions among people and activities is exactly what states do. And they often seem unfair. But what I'm trying to do is when we look at these contradictions as sex classifications, just not get upset about or not get involved in the very weirdness of the fact that someone could be two different sexes at the same time. Or two different people who seem to have the same histories of body modification could be different sexes because they live in different jurisdictions. But I actually see about like what's the purpose of those different classifications. So I'll just give you an example, a few examples. For example, in the United States, by and large, it's relatively easy for many transgender people to change their sex classification under driver's licenses. It was much easier before 1991, but it's still possible for a lot of transgender people to change their sex classification under driver's license. In the U.S., though, according to most recent case law, it is impossible to be recognized as a different sex for the purposes of marriage. So that contradiction of like, what is that about? And as a political theorist, what I kind of suggest is that states need to know who their citizens are. That's one of the things that governments do is keep track of who's coming where, who's entering the country, who's leaving the country, who you are. When you get a speeding ticket, is your driver's license useful in terms of identifying you, verifying your identity. So state actors want to make it relatively easy for people to change their identity documents for the purpose of recognition. Other things that states do though is states distribute resources. It says who gets what. And for example, the ban on same sex marriage in many states, in most states, is one way that states distribute resources to some groups and not to others. So in this case, it's to straight people who get married, but not to gay people who get married. So in those cases, states won't change people's sex designation because it mixes up, it gets in the way of the way states imagine distributing resources through the family and through kind of biological notions of what it means to be a family. Another more recent example, I've worked on a paper, is what happens at the airport. For transgender people going to the airport now, there's two different transportation security administration programs. One is called secure flight. So you know when you book a flight and then you'll get a call from the airline saying we need you to go and fill out the stuff on the web. You have to give your name, your date of birth, and your gender as it appears on your identity documents. So for some trans people, that's not really going to work because their gender they present in might not look like their identity documents. So it's a little bit of a problem. With the recent introduction of whole body imaging, there's a whole other problem. So secure flight is about identity verification. Let's see who you are. We'll know who you are, we'll know you're not a bad person, i.e., a terrorist. So keeping track of people coming into the country. Whole body imaging, that's where you go through those things and people can see what you would look like with no clothes on. That's about security. That's about seeing like, is that person carrying a bomb? But what happens at airports now is trans people going through those machines are showing to have kind of atypically gendered bodies. Like the person looks like a man they go through, they go through the machine and then it turns out they don't have a penis. And what happens, you think, well, not having a penis is not the same as wearing a bomb, so it should be okay. But in the kind of research I've done on this so far, people are basically being taken off into little rooms and because of someone's atypical gender, bomb squads are called in. There's this kind of total panic and hysteria about someone with an atypical gender going through the machinery. But that would be another example of the contradictions in the system of sex classification where you have the identity verification stuff and the whole body imaging issue. So basically my work is still calling the categories into question, the naturalness of the categories, looking at how gender is used as different resources. And I've tried to take some of what I've learned and do some work in the policy arena, for example, passing the New York City Human Rights Law. Another thing I worked on was trying to get the city of New York to change its policy on birth certificates. Because New York, you think it's kind of like a hip place, but it's actually bureaucratically a little bit behind a lot of other places. The New York City for a long time, if a transgender person wanted to get their birth certificate changed, they would have to have complete surgery, which most people can't afford. And the most the city would do was issue a birth certificate with no gender on it, like there'd be no male or female, which is not very helpful, especially you're dealing with human resources people who know what that means. So I was an outside expert on this advisory committee at the Bureau of Mental Health and Mental Hygiene that came up with a plan to kind of detach the city's policy from one's external genitalia. So it would basically allow people who are born in the city who wanted to change their gender for classification to be able to do so. And it was all going well, the Board of Health was behind us, we had the policy, it's all in place. And then like one of the New York Times reporters being trained for great things was born in the Metro Desk, accidentally went to one boring bureaucratic meeting. And there was a front page story the next day called New York Plans to Make Gender a Personal Choice. So what we heard from the officials we worked with is that Bloomberg read that story and had a panic attack. He says, this is my city, no one talked to me about this, gender is not a personal choice, pull that plan. And so it was pulled and that's just I tell that story, which actually I wrote an article about with my co-author Lisa Jean Morrissey in the back. That story kind of just tells you about how the elasticity of gender is not so elastic when you move into the public realm. And I just want to end with one in terms of the question about male feminism. I don't know if I'm a male feminist. I was born, I was assigned female at birth and I grew up to be a woman and I transitioned when I was in my 30s and I definitely identified as a feminist and I still do. I certainly can say that as a white middle-class man there is such a thing as male privilege. I actually started getting free cups of coffee at the Kennedy Graduate Center. And I was like, really you get free coffee when you transition? I should have done it a lot earlier ago. But I just want to end with sometimes they teach this course at Barnard on transgender studies. And students there are very hip and smart and radical and they just want to work very hard to get rid of every possible gender barrier. Which means, of course, and their eyes is getting rid of Barnard's status as a women's college, like getting rid of women's colleges altogether so that everybody can come. And I want to kind of tell them and teach them that there's a real content to gender discrimination and the answer isn't always to just erase all the gender barriers. Because they're trying to think, how can we get our trans men and friends into college? I say the answer might be to kind of think about what the category of woman is and see what Barnard could do to make sure its doors were open and more welcoming to transgender women. So that's the kind of work I do in my teaching. So anyways, I'll just end it there and thank you very much. When I was a youngster growing up rural, we had horses and pigs and chickens and my brother introduced me to the neighboring people across the wheat field. As Craig is different, he likes to go look for pheasant eggs. So it was that kind of depreciation of the intuition to be interested in color and beauty and some sense in his part that that was a little suspect. And that's what Renee said. I think it is culture wide. And it inhibits us, has always inhibited us from, and the tragedy is for all of this last 3,500 years, it has made it almost impossible or very socially unacceptable for men to step forward with whatever we call that. The tender side or the generous side or the decent side. It's been there, but we haven't become heroes because of it. The mythology about which I spoke, it's quite probable that in the early Minoan culture, eternal life was thought of as the cycles of life. The seed goes in the ground and dies and comes back in the spring. So that the natural order of the universe is the cycles. And so immortality came naturally through death. Death brought life, death was causal for life, not just an accident, it wasn't horrible. And the Greeks changed that and made death terminal and awful and dreadful and the only way you could get eternal life was to become a hero in battle. If you dried heroically and too soon in battle, you could live forever. Well, that changes the template for men ever since, that the only way we could really be somebody and live forever was to grow grand and famous and die too soon. And that carried on to my brother saying he likes to go look for pheasant eggs. I guess I would just say, speaking of brothers, my brother, I think I mentioned my father died when I was young and I was six and my brother put his arm around me. I said, well Tim, we're the men of the family now, no more crying. I said, good, and I haven't cried much since, you know. So there is an oppression of something which is not to say, as Renee would be hilarious in telling us, that there's not rich emotional life in men's lives. Just a very different kind of, what about the emotions in baseball? Are you running around, patting each other on the right and then hugging and kissing and jumping up and down? I would have escaped that kind of, you know, masculinization of what it means to be a man for most of my life. So, and I don't really worry that I don't know if the sports are fixing things, but it is weird this kind of, it's very, from my little general experience, it's very flattening, like talking to people who are fixing your car or something. Everybody's buddy and they're already putting this kind of uniform, like let's just assume we're all equally sexist. I'll chat you up as if you know anything about cars, which I don't. I mean, it's this kind of like economy of like male knowledge that I really don't have any knowledge of. I'm not about to kind of come out as transgender to the car guy, but it is, I do notice there's a certain kind of flattening of difference that happens, but I really can't speak to it too much. That's a wonderful way to end because I really want to thank the panelists and thank all of you for, we can all applaud ourselves and each other. I think this is a very difficult conversation to have, so I really appreciate everybody hanging in there and starting the conversation and I feel very hopeful about where we're going. And thank you for making it possible. Thank you. This is one of the liveliest and really most, I think enlightening in many ways, conversations that we had. I want to thank my panelists, thank Deborah and thank all of you for coming. If you are motivated, excited and happy and pleased that this dialogue is beginning, there are brochures in the back. And I have started a Council for Feminist Arts so that we can all support this center to keep this programming alive. It really will take your participation as well to do that. So thank you for all the nice things that were said about the center. The center loves you and the Brooklyn Museum loves the center. And thank you for coming.