In the Life: Ep. 1406, "American Gender"

this month on in the Life Next we present ett Moran the cultural divide when I walked down the street by myself I'm not red as queer spreading a new kind of Faith take away this hair that's jacked up to Jesus and I'm just a bingo gal from Minnesota and setting the medical community straight genitals that look different are okay they just look different all this and Harvey on America's gay in lesbian news magazine in the life in the life is funded in part by the H van amaran Foundation additional support provided by the Ford Foundation the Overbrook Foundation the bride foundation and these Thunders and the annual support of in the Life members like you I made up my mind my mind it's time for me to shine this moment ising yeah the causes of homophobia are complex and as difficult to understand as the actions they Inspire tonight in the Life tries to untangle one facet of this complicated web gender I'm rup Paul and who better to walk you through this episode of American gender looking at how do I look how our culture defines it there is such a thing as gender and it's not the same as sex how we bend it hot dog we've got a weer how they regulate it I don't like looking at that how's that how do I look how do I feel in a culture where most women take home only 75 cents and women of color just under 68 cents for every male dollar earned gender has profound impact on how we live particularly where it intersects with race ethnicity class and ability the problem is further Complicated by the reality that most people just don't fit comfortably in the binary system of male and female but there's long been a push to broaden the definitions of gender not simply as a matter of ideological principle but because gender roles have historically changed to accommodate the needs of society in binary culture we look at some big shifts in what the next generation is doing to push our thinking even further before industrialization everyone and a whole family worked together what industrialism did is it pulled men out of of their houses to factories or to other kind of workplaces and left women at home but that's only the theory they were doing industrial work at home for wages while they were supposedly taking care of their homes and kids Hello meylan 6 everyone suffers from Wars but ironically Sometimes women benefit because the guys go away the uh somewhat hidden truth about the World War II jobs is that they were very hard they were really dirty there were a lot of industrial accidents and women loved them the government played a very active role in managing the labor force uh starting in around 1940 they were propagandizing all over the place about how women could work and still be quote feminine could be good wives after the war they reversed it and they and started a large propaganda campaign about how mothers belong at home gender then gets used as a club with which to beat people the main heterosexual privilege that women have is the fact that they're attached to men who earn bigger salaries but the relationship between gender and sexuality and the economics of both took a new turn in the second wave of the women's movement when I came out in the mid '70s it certainly made me question my gender suitability here she is she is single and funloving and as the movement shaped a single identity woman with a capital W gay identity complicated femininity I worried about whether I was feminine enough knowing I was attracted to girls and being a tomboy uh and that scared me enough that it kept me from coming out it kept me from feeling good about myself for a very long time there had always been a conservative edge of the women's movement that was extremely frightened of the homosexuality issue for fear that the women's movement would lose its respectability if it was associated with what Betty fan called the lavender Menace um I think actually that was always a a very minority position I think that the masses of people in the women's movement were really quite open to challenging and thinking about sex and gender in different ways probably the single most important message of second way feminism was that there is such a thing as gender and it's not the same as sex and today's activists are charging forward in this belief I like to say that there are many genders it's the way we as individuals are socialized and how we adapt for some folks it's how they get up in the morning and the clothes they pick out to the people people that they um desire and want to date to the way they hold their cup or their pen to folks um then also thinking about um anything from hormones or surgery to people thinking about um you know how that impacts their sexuality I always felt this sort of sense of like I didn't quite know what being a woman you know an American woman met I was born here but my my parents being immigrants were really sort of Outsiders in a lot of ways I remember there were all these rituals that these girls in my school would do around makeup and hair and shaving and I remember feeling very awkward and uncomfortable and like I didn't know what I was doing my mother uh who I think of because of her strength and her real Independence I think of her as a fem um but she certainly wasn't someone who was going to teach me these things about what it meant to be a girl I went to a college where there were a lot of white mostly middle class dkes and everyone had the same sort of short buzzcut and baggy pants and shirt look I cut off all my hair I did the whole androgyny drag thing I was miserable and I felt like I was in drag you try and T aam who is like a a fem feminist not to be fem and feel like this is her political expression to be F and to be lesbian and be all that she is you know try you try and tell her you know it's not going to happen there's always the suspicion that a fem isn't really queer um because look how feminine they are and everything feminine is not radical right but fem that is like the most freeing thing for folks to finally have some way to say like this is my expression and I get it I've had experiences with people who've said things to me like free yourself from your enslavement and and sort of coaching it as a joke but you knew that there I knew that there was an edge underneath that was like you're a dupe of the gender system every social movement has this danger of getting into this hardened kind of orthodoxies right line and forgetting uh the sort of let a thousand flowers bloom um approach my father raised me in a way that I could do anything that I wanted to do even though like I was forced to wear Philly dresses and I had pancakes he raised me to be very independent and still values that but I don't think Society on a whole thinks that way a lot about girls and women I think it's hard for people to conceive of fem without Butch because let's face it when I walk down the street by myself I'm not red as queer and I know that you know unless I was wearing something that would would signify that um but when I'm walking down the street with a Butch who's my lover then I'm read as queer so I think that that's why fam often gets discussed in relation to Butch and it frustrates me because I'm just as queer even if I may not be read as such whether I'm with a butch or someone Butch identified or by myself people who are not seen on top because they don't fit those categories on like race and class and age and um gender identity like need to fight as much like within the LGBT community as we do on other levels you know outside of the LGBT community things that are masculine are assigned much more value than things that are feminine and that's true in the queer Community too um in many segments I mean it it might get played out differently depending on different things but that um F's not worth talking about as an identity by itself when it has a really rich you know history I'm like one of many and there are many people out there who do F very differently than me I would dare say that gender is the most powerful social cultural pressure there is so I really identify as a Butch [ __ ] um which brings up a lot of issues when I started to feel you know like more comfortable and being butch I started to find myself more attracted to men and it scared me so much because I'm just like what does this mean like even like thinking about like how I'm going to talk about this with my family is going to be really difficult because the language that I have for it is in English and I don't have this language in Spanish like to my family I'm a lesbian and I'm fine with being a lesbian to my family or like I'm gay you know like and that's fine because that's the only word I could come up with to like Express who I am and that they understand how young little children are when they know that they're either a girl or a boy uh it takes much longer to learn what race you are and what class you are it's going to be hard to break that down it's very very rided and it straight jackets everyone but College students like Everett Moran are putting a new spin on an old tradition every year Vanderbilt for homecoming elects Mr Vanderbilt and Miss Vanderbuilt and together they are the perfect heterosexual couple they are a king and queen a royal couple King and Queens are usually married they are a couple together so when we have a king and queen as the top representative of the senior class they are a heterosexual couple it is an assumption of heterosexuality homecoming is pretty important here at Vanderbilt um the Traditions are the same as they were you know 10 20 years ago when I stand on a football field at a homecoming event in a dress as a man I'm not only threatening heterosexual power but I'm also threatening male power next we present ett Moran from Midland Texas I arrived at the football stadium in a very tasteful Empire waisted black cocktail dress then we all just walked out in a line stood out on the field presented as the homecoming Court to the entire community um and then they announced king and queen I'm an officer for the undergraduate glbt group here at Vanderbilt and we came together a few weeks before nominations were du the officers and discussed what we wanted to do um and I proposed that we present it to our membership and see if they wanted to nominate anybody for king and queen and then if they wanted to play with gender a little bit and nominate a boy for a queen and a girl for King there wasn't any like opposition during the time of the voting and the judging process from anybody it was when he made made the top five or actually was the top six this year that was when all the letters started rolling into the Hustler and the opposition came up a lot of people don't understand gender stereotypes gender roles they don't understand heterosexism they don't understand homophobia they don't even understand homosexuality for that I think we stayed within the traditions and I don't think that we disgrace the campus at all I think different times call for different needs and you know times are changing Vanderbilt is not the first campus to have a male queen candidate you can blur the line between what's man and woman male and female by by playing with that just a little bit and that was one of the big reasons why I chose to do this because that boundary needs to be pushed especially at a place like Vanderbilt people did vote for Everett and that's why he did make you know the top six after that student body voted for him and I feel like I think that it generated a lot of conversation I think that it's something that was very positive for the Vanderbilt campus I think that a lot of students learned a lot from it and were forced to talk about issues that might make them uncomfortable sometimes what gets lost in the conversation is that um only the only people that play with their gender are people who identify as trans you know as someone who identifies as transexual and you know I I have a very healthy respect for the binary of the understanding of sex male female at the same time very clear that you know I'm not trying to use it in an oppressive way I'm not trying to like check it off I'm not disvalues on the basis of what it was like of butchness or the androgyny of In the period of Time of My Life the androgyny wasn't necessarily an identity of mine but that's how I looked and people spent more time trying to figure out who I was than sort of like hi my name is immani someone once recently asked me how long I've been transgendered and I simply replied well all my life many people in the transgender Community do not undergo a linear transition from one to the other many don't undergo a medical transition um I had an entirely non-medical transition gender has been medicalized but I don't believe that I have a gender identity disorder I think it's society that has a gender identity disorder cutting your nails growing your hair wearing certain colors all are gendered within our society we're going to open up the diagnostic and statistic Manual of mental disorders the DSM four this is what characterizes g a persistent discomfort with his or her sex or sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex okay perfect you did great you get it we're crazy here's another copy of the DSM 4 and what I'd like you to do is open that up marked with the bookmark with some sandpaper on it and I'd like for you to give this a try I you want to like dismantle it or or mess it up you know make it messy well done I understand it when once you make a messy it becomes interesting and you can sort of have a conversation about it Round of Applause for our volunteer yeah undoubtedly a lot of confusion and conflict will come out of it but I personally like confusion and conflict and working through that to figure out like what the hell is the underlying force of this you know part of what true gender uh gender Liberation looks like is the ability to be free from the expectation of a fixed gender identity when people see representations that don't fit within that they're confused because that's all they've been fed their entire lives that's what they see as normal that's what they see as appropriate that's what they see as American Advanced industrial societies have evolved economically to the point where the rigid gender roles of the 19th and early 20th centuries have become Obsolete and indeed an impediment to market capitalism in the 21st century in the 19th century or you know the first half of the 20th century no one would have understood people are not born destined to live out a certain kind of life in the social division of labor so much of our society is built upon this idea of production and profit and getting ahead the same way that I don't say oh lesbian and gay men somehow created transphobia you know I don't think I don't look at white people as creating racism I look it as systematic and in fact it belittles racism when it's some individual thing no this is a system for there to be like a white man and for them to call black men boys and black women girls like that that's like part of like the foundation that this country was brought up on this is a a case in which I think the gender and the racial meanings are organized into a really Universal kind of class domination meaning that boy or girl are always what you call the people who you are dominating uh in class terms we need to be respectful and we need to be um inclusive all the various forms of expression in our community because this is how we're oppressed in Greater Society we' driven to Los Angeles to play in this tournament and Perry T Jones who was the zar of Southern California tennis said that oh little girl you can't be in the photo because you don't have a tennis dress that was the first day in my life I'd ever even seen a tennis dress my mother made me these white shorts but I didn't realize they had tennis dresses or tennis skirts I promised myself I'd change things if I could as time would go would go on hi I'm Billy Jean King and you're watching in the life we may not always consider how much our world is regulated by fixed gender Concepts but one example is how the FCC is working toward eradicating indecency the guidelines are widely subject to interpretation and when these policies are applied to trans people Regulators usually take a black and white approach as in the Life visited with filmmaker Emily Goldberg to discuss her film Venus of Mars concerns were raised about showing Venus's minimally concealed breasts by parties who referred to Venus's chest as male breasts and while the FCC does doesn't specifically regulate even fully exposed male breast Venus's gender identity complicated the process in the end an amicable compromise resulted in black bars covering the breast in question but the incident left us thinking that what often gets overshadowed when we try to define gender are the everyday stories of LGBT people who don't fit in the binary world I met Venus when she was still Steve and I'd seen him perform with this rock band and I was just absolutely blown away I was like this is David Bowie you know incarnate let's see All the Pretty Horses with transvesti lead vocalist yeah transvest take a look at those and then a few years later I knock on the door and there's Steve with breast you know I'm wearing a low cut vinyl bra and I said can we have lunch I scare transgender people they get uncomfortable around me I'm creepy I'm scary CU I was just curious about this really dramatic transition um in someone that I knew but didn't know very well and so so that's sort of how how it began I don't really think of myself as either male or female medically I'm in between I didn't know that I would feel comfortable at this point I thought I would probably eventually go all the way with surgical change but I found a strength and a uniqueness being in between Lia Kitty I feel it I don't think people up here realize that there's more out there than than sweatpants and flannel shirts and the Vikings we need people like this in Delo we need an Awakening I think I think they're very very very talented but they're uh guys dressed as chicks and I don't like looking at that how's that it's so easy for people to categorize people and say well I don't understand you you're weird Venus lives in the midwest it's really important probably more important for Venus and the band to be playing places where they don't see transgendered people you look at this incredible Glam fetish band and you think oh my God he must be partying every night and he must be you know living in a dungeon or something but you know he's he's married he's got a totally normal life I watch him play with his cats and work in his garden his wife's an English Professor if you take the transgender piece out of it it's Azie and Harriet when I found out that Steve was still married um I was I was absolutely fascinated by you know how does a couple negotiate that kind of dramatic gender identity change within a relationship huh huh huh huh about a year and a half or so after we got married I guess the honeymoon period was over he was getting progressively crankier and crankier and I didn't know why I was really going through this period of identity crisis I had to decide what I was going to do we just couldn't deal with having the marriage dissolved and so that's when I told Lynette I told her that I wanted to be female that I was transexual what I wanted to do was to show that these people are not so different and as time went on I realized it was a film about any long-term relationship you're bad you're really bad there are things about him that I that I discovered that I didn't know before that make me love him more you know um and I just it's hard to imagine starting over with somebody else it really is finding somebody else like him and even the parts that drive me nuts are are things that I love about him and I I would probably seek out in someone else very much like him and so it's like what's the point might as well work on this both Venus and Lynette have said to me it was almost like therapy for them making this film and being able to talk to me about what they what they've been through most couples don't survive most couples fall apart it's a hard journey it's a real hard road to go down it's hard for one person to go down it it's hard when a second person feels like they're getting dragged along without a choice do you think Lynette is exceptional in you know in her ability to understand and work through all this with you yeah I do there have been a lot of documentaries done about about people changing gender and what made this difference different was it was about how does that impact a a marriage and the other thing that was different about it too is that is that Venus wasn't having a sex change you know she's in between and she's staying in between maybe in part to preserve her relationship sometimes I worry about that is he not being true to himself you know that sort of thing but he says no he says that this is the road he would have ended up with anyway so I have to believe that but again that's another thing that you you really don't know until you've gone through the test of time I wish that it wouldn't be such an issue for me I wish that it wasn't something that made Lynette feel like she was being dragged along something unknown and scary I think that we have dealt with it better than I could have dreamed but it's not perfect I mean ideally i' I'd like for people to walk away from this with a deeper understanding of what it is to be human and that it's not we're not as different from each other as as we think we are there's all the you know the complications of you know marriage relationship blah blah blah but when it comes right down to it it's we're all just part of this human struggle and that that's what I want people to take away from it I've been in Show Business for 22 years and uh after 11 years of doing shows and clubs All Over America I uh hit the big time nothing like that had ever happened in this country or in the world before and it was it was a blessing it makes you sort of long for those days again uh given the current political climate we're in I mean we're basically living in the 50s right now now could could a RuPaul happen in today's climate I'm not so sure when I was growing up I had Sher I had David Bowie I had Dina Ross among so many others so many other sort of really out of the-box performers most of the people you see out there today are you know homogenized packaged prepackaged it's all there I thought you know what I really need to be out there invisible for young kids not just young gay kids but just young kids to see that there are other colors in the crayon box to use hi I'm rup Paul and you're watching in the Life drag performers have long played with the concept of gender moving comfortably along the spectrum of possibilities that have entertained and enlightened the masses for one midwesterner the art of old school drag has even helped transcend the cultural divide between church and gays Miss Richfield is is a self-defined throwback to simpler times but as you'll see she's a complicated character with a wit and style all her own a beauty pageant winner from Minnesota she's an active church member lives in a trailer park and is a self-proclaimed minister of beauty and through Beauty she's bringing the best of Minnesota to the masses created by Russ King Miss Richfield 1981 is a lively character with a story all her own every night I see you all walking by walking by you your hand so close I grew up in a home of four boys I was the youngest and it was a very conservative Christian home my parents they were very strict with us we didn't dance we didn't go to movies we didn't play cards so my knowledge of pop culture is very limited I never really wanted to be a woman that was never the case it's the way you look you look at me and it's all the only one I see is very I think Miss Richfield 1981 is a throwback to a more traditional sense of drag I don't wear any boobs I don't wear hips and so there's no illusion there um I don't wear a girdle and so it's a very much more natural it's an obviously a guy in a dress thank you everyone thank you so much and welcome welc to our lovely program here there's also a sense of appreciation for what Miss Richfield is and that's the gloves that match the shoes and the handbag and sometimes a hat and uh all of those details all the things that women don't have to deal with today Miss Richfield is a woman who I for to as a gal who has clawed her way to the middle I was there in oxburg park and there was 11 contestants that year and 1981 was a very big year for beauty and uh there's another gal right in front of me Trudy olssen who was kind of one of our uh bigger gals and she was twirling three flaming batons lost control took out the whole front row of contestants in a terrible fire oh I don't know if you've seen Taff at a burn but uh badly I was the only gal to stop drop and roll because when you live in a trailer you know what to do in case of fire you're not getting out of a window that's big you know what I'm saying and uh there was only one contestant left that's right yours truly it only took the judges about oh 15 20 minutes to deliberate and uh then they gave me my beautiful Sash and my lovely Tiara and uh the power lawnmower I want to just take a few moments and play you uh something that I played that day uh for the pat also extremely narcissistic extremely self-involved not realizing that um I think is what makes her so Charming they like my my home style sense of of life my practicality I mean really when you think about it uh you take away my fabulous gowns uh my beautiful eyewear my my Broadway sound that takes the house down every night take away this hair that's jacked up to Jesus and I'm just a bingo gal from Minnesota just a simple gal and are you single uh tonight I am for you miss Rich call the next number g53 B6 call the next number g57 wait a minute no no you have a big over there G 57 yes 53 uh-huh 46 you're kidding as we stay at the BFW in Richfield hot dog we've got a Wier at miss richfield's church members constantly raise money to send her on trips she believes they're sending her off to share her Ministry with the world what she doesn't notice is that they always give her a one-way ticket e forh towai Miss Richfield represents a speak that women generally don't use anymore a sort of way of insulting you but phrasing it as a compliment stand up the humidity isn't it I mean honestly honestly this frosted look is coming back I mean it if any of you girls have that 80s sort of frosted look like she's got going uh hang on to it why I know that's what I say why why why I have mine done I know um she represents a throwback to the past that's simpler and sort of an underdog characteristic that makes people want to get behind her and help her out Miss Richfield is the embodiment of everything that Minnesota tries to keep under that Minnesota nice Sky Miss rich is the best because she can break down any kind of stereotype how many cities in the United States have a mayor that would come to a fun thing like this and sing with a gal like me my boring 9 to-5 job as mayor of Minneapolis but my real job is to be the um spear carrier for Miss richfield's little Carnival that she does throughout the City of Minneapolis for decades treating inex children was a matter of surgically altering genitalia to normalize the child's gender one measure of successful gender reassignment is a consummated sexual relationship with a member of the opposite sex when the child reaches adulthood and some argue that this is the place where genderphobia clearly intersects with homophobia now there's a growing movement to shift gender identity out of the hands of medical professionals and back to the individuals who will ultimately live with the choices made in their name tonight inside Size Matters we'll visit with some people behind this movement when she was born we thought we had a board we brought her home 5 days later we found out that she wasn't a boy she was a little girl these like gangs of medical residents who would come into my room and like turned the light on in the middle of the night and forced my LS apart I cried I asked them if they were crazy they cut my clitoris off of me it was amputated from me these are the personal stories from people whose lives have been affected by something that is little known and rarely discussed my mother didn't think she had a choice you know she was told that without it I would be a miserable unhappy person possibly be a lesbian possibly have gender identity issues and it needed to be done the stories of people affected by a condition called intersex intersect very briefly and very simply is just a variation of chromosome or genital differences that don't match what Society in medicine called standard male and female as I was born with something called congenital adrenal hyperplasia which is a form of intersect I was born with an enlarged clitoris it was uh it was quite enlarged actually it was about 3 cm long at Birth they like I said they didn't know if I was a boy or a girl once they determined that I was a girl because I had a uterus and overr I was then scheduled for what they call feminizing surgery and at the age of 3 months I underwent a full [ __ ] clitorectomy in my medical records it says that the clitoris was amputated to the nub an intersex person in a way it's a kind of New Concept that derives from an older idea of a hermaphrodite that is someone who is a mixture of male and female tissue uh how you define interex or how you Define hermaphrodite has been the subject of medical religious and legal debate for centuries it originally was used in the late 1800s to refer to bisexual people then it moved into referring to people who had gender identity issues and finally in about probably the 1960s to 1970s it began to be used for people born with what was commonly called before then hermaphroditism the problem with the word hermaphrodite is people think about hermaphrodites from Greek mythology and they think that it means people are born with two full sets of genitals and that can't happen that's biologically impossible the other issue with hermaphrodite is it's also it's quaint and it's Victorian and it just doesn't really represent very well the most common intersex disorder that we see is congenital adrenal hyperplasia uh that one uh is makes up about 60% of the intercase interex disorders and uh they occur worldwide about 1 15,000 births in the United States it's probably closer to 130,000 so if you're looking for an absolute number it's hard to give a specific number but probably somewhere in the range of 150 to 300 cases in the United States a year of intersex disorders there are some types of intersex conditions that are not obvious at Birth so and may not get discovered until puberty so when you start to include all of those numbers in there it could be as high as 1 in 500 and I have actually seen some numbers by some experts who I respect who will say it's even as high as 1 in 250 traditionally the medical community refer to intersex people as a social emergency rushing babies born with ambiguous genitalia into surgery to fix the child the idea of doing surgery on children infants who are born interex uh began to develop in the 1940s as it also became technologically possible which it wasn't earlier in the 1950s it was inconceivable that a mother could bond well to an XX child who had a very enlarged clitoris one so large that had actually looked like a penis the argument was that this was a mental health crisis uh for the parent and therefore for the infant the parents this the parents are scared the parents are traumatized what will the parents tell their friends and neighbors it's all about the parents and the child gets forgotten about so we're fixing the child we're changing the child we're surgically altering the child to make the parents happy and there's something wrong with that equation it was a belief that uh they would be better off if um we could identify a different a specific male or female role and this included even um trying to keep the information from the patient as they got older um and this really was prevalent for almost 20 years and often doctors would assign a sex to the child based solely on the size of their genitalia you know there's actual measurements at Birth you know that a that a penis must be a certain size at Birth stretched to qualify to be a healthily a normally developed penis and that's about 2 and 1/2 cm it's the same thing for E clitoris if a clitoris is larger than about .9 CM at Birth medically on the most basic term is considered to fall outside of standard female they will do periodically sex reassignment surgeries on boys born with something called micropenis and they presume that the child will be happier as a girl rather than being a male with a small penis you know our society places a lot of value on the size of a man's penis which is very very sad when we have a boy born with a hugely enlarged penis and some boys are born with really really big penises we don't cut those down in size whereas if it's a woman with a big clitoris it's like oh my gosh we can't have that we can't have a girl running around with a big [ __ ] she might be a lesbian or she might have gender identity disorders as intersex people mature their lives can be filled with secrecy shame and unanswered questions well what makes us male or female is it our genitals is it our chromosomes is it our gender identity is it the way you perceive our my gender identity who's to say as Betsy searches for answers she now runs an online support group called bodies like ours and it's her Outreach that has made differences in people's lives people like Lisa my daughter Samantha she has a big wish on Italia um due to congenital adrenal hypoplasia which is a disease that she was born with um when she was born we thought we had a boy we brought her home 5 days later we found out that she wasn't a boy she was a girl Lisa's doctor advised her against early surgery as is the emerging medical Trend and of course at that time I was you're crazy I'm having surgery there's no way around it you know I wanted um my daughter to have the best life that she could possibly have and at that time cuz I wasn't educated enough I thought that that was why the only way she could have a good life right after birth um the clitoris uh may actually be more engorged than it will be in 3 months so you know clearly waiting several months to see exactly what the actual cliteral size will be is probably important to do um and it may not be as big an issue as it appears in that newborn period I was lucky enough to have God tell me hey wait a minute you better slow down and take a good look because you know she I would have made the wrong decision if I didn't see a program like this I mean people don't know they don't they they don't know at least some of the parents I've encountered who refused to have surgery on their infants did it for religious reasons they basically said God gave me a baby that looked like this and who am I to argue with God about it so and um so you don't have to be sort of liberal about sex and sexuality necessarily to say go slow on surgery the intersex movement is only about 10 years old I mean we are still pre-stonewall in our activism and in our awareness as to where we're going with this but because there's a lot of marginalization within the quer movement the LGBT movement there is that marginalization there is that shame we have looked at them and as that model to help us through this you know somebody who has only experienced the stigmatization of being homosexual homosexual in this society that seems to hate us so much can understand what it's like to have your body physically changed for the same reason my child has undergone four genital surgeries to try to make her genitals look cosmetically female as a mother I wanted my daughter to look normal to fit right in as advocates argue for better research and more autonomy intersect groups have captured the ear of the medical community when doctors decided that she should be brought up as a girl their reason being that surgery to make her into a girl was easier to do than to change her into a boy in the spring of 2004 the city of San Francisco and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission heard the first ever governmental public hearing about interex issues these babies were given no choice to keep what God gave them on that night in May several people with interex conditions showed up and they testified before the Human Rights Commission my child has tried to commit suicide twice in her 10 little years because she says she hates her body she constantly asks me why they did the surgery parents showed up as well Scholars and medical ethesis showed up as well the overwhelming theme that was repeated Time After Time After Time during that evening that public hearing was how damag in the current medical protocol and the current medical State of Affairs is she has articulated it to me this way quote they thought I was no good mom they scarred me up as a result of that public hearing the Human Rights Commission and the interex task force of the Human Rights Commission in San Francisco has been preparing a report that will include medical findings social findings ethical findings as well as recommendations in all three of those if this report is adopted and hopefully it will be adopted by the time This Ss the impact that this report will have on the current state of affairs for intersex treatment in the United States is going to be dramatic who has the right to do that to anybody else's body mother father anybody who has that right to make that choice and even if there's a 2% chance that something bad can happen from a cosmetic surgery why wouldn't you just raise your children to be confident and to be proud of who they are and to be proud of their body if we send the signal that it's okay to be ashamed of who you are because other people say so then what kind of adults are they going to be parents and relatives really need to take a a deep breath and and um have the courage to to see what it is in in their own psyches that they're so afraid of that they can't accept their children's dreams for what whatever they are children are so precious you don't want to write them off just because they don't end up being what you need them to be so I would just say you know just keep searching and and and and pray for the Deliverance of your family if they're unaccepting because it must be very painful for them to be who they are cuz losing a child is the worst thing you could possibly do hi I'm Susan sandon and you're watching in the life and finally tonight Broadway icon and regular in the Life commentator Harvey Farin looks at the new face of a Broadway classic H geez are we ready getting all worked up oh forget it it's been more than 20 years since Jerry Herman and I sat down and wrote the musical laajo hard to believe take a look every day of those years can be seen in this face but more importantly take a look around the show's new Broadway Revival and see a history lesson of where we were and where we came from the idea of producing a musical with a homosexual theme took some balls back in 1982 after all the movie Lage on which we were basing it only gross $2 million in the US now we were going to spend $6 million to put it up as a musical also a musical with a gay theme had never been attempted even Tor song Trilogy was just a downtown hit when we started writing Lage so it wasn't like we could measure anything from that politically it was Reagan's first term but we would was still basking in our trouncing of Anita Bryant and those religious extremists cats was the biggest thing ever to hit Broadway and AIDS was just showing its murderous face Gay Liberation was a legitimate movement but no one had thanked a lover on a national award show yet of course all of the usual Broadway pundits found the idea of Lage to be Charming but then again throw a weapon of mass destruction into a room of Broadway pundits and you won't hit a heterosexual still caution was the word of the day we have to be sensitive to our audience was the motto from the director and producers and to that end there was a lot of apologizing for being gay in that original production nothing dishonest mind you but tiptoeing and bowing to the heterosexual majority of ticket buyers that would seem silly to do these days for instance what was supposed to be a chorus of 12 drag queens included two biological women oh we said it was a gimmick come see if you can guess who which ones are the real girls but truthfully we were giving the straight guys an excuse just in case they were attracted to someone they saw on stage this way they could always claim it was one of the girls who inspired their excitement happily today all of the girls are boys and it just feels so much more honest and celebratory and exciting and uh by the way in the first production it took the boys a little while to get used to dancing around in heels first day of rehearsal for this new generation uh they took to their pump like flamingos to feathers after all many of these young men had seen Lage when they were kids and dreamt of one day being up on that stage in a production of the show for some this is a dream come true and I think the audience can feel that when first casting the lead characters a gay couple that had been together for decades we ran into quite a few performers who didn't want to play homosexual and in fact ended up casting two no doubt about it heterosexuals in the parts at the time I begged our director to cast the rolls gay I said you may have the most brilliant 20-year-old actress in the world she simply can't play a grandmother there are things life has simply yet to teach her I was called a fool and told to keep quiet a good actor is a good actor and gay or straight doesn't matter well years into the run a gay actor finally took over one of those roles on his opening night our director phoned me to say a gay man is now playing the role and you were right it makes a huge difference this time around the most interesting story I can tell you is when we offered one of the roles to a fabulously talented Broadway leading man whom almost everyone knows is gay he turned it down in a very Frank discussion he said Harvey you're asking me to stand up on a stage and show the parts of myself that I have spent a lifetime trying to cover up I can't do that I was amazed but not surprised another huge difference is the amount of physical contact the two Leading Men have in the original production they linked arms to dance together and I believe kissed on the cheek once currently our Leading Men relate physically on par with any heterosexual couple that have been married 20 years there is normal physical affection as well as the Broadway staple lip lock as the curtain Falls politically I must report this little change the plot concerns a homophobic politician who can't imagine that a gay relation ship can have the same legitimacy as a straight one considering the current climate of anti-gay marriage sentiment I certainly didn't have to bring those elements up to date even the fictional name of the party sounds as if fashion today the TFM the tradition family and morality party I would say some things never change but that's not true all things change constantly the problem is most people don't as for changes in those other circumstances on the downside 20 years later AIDS is still a fact of life on the upside nowadays when someone thanks a same-sex partner on an award show no one even notices well no matter the circumstance laao broke box office records back in the 80s and brought visibility and verifiability to our existence even if just to a minuscule portion of the gay population it rallied some pride it changed some Minds it touched many hearts and it opened doors for dozens of others to walk through I would be exceedingly proud if this revival did the same for a new generation I'm rup Paul and for all of us at in the Life thanks for watching and we will see you next month e e in the life is funded in part by the H van amaran Foundation additional support provided by the Ford Foundation the Overbrook Foundation The Pride foundation and these funders and the annual support of in the Life members like you