Identifying with the Oppressor

How can someone as intelligent and well informed as Andrew Sullivan be so thick?

The context is the allegedly politically expedient decision of Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi to drop transgender people from ENDA, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. Defending his support of that expediency, Sullivan writes:

If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don't conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?

You're a gay man, Andrew, and you make a profession of it. To say that you don't primarily identify by "shared victimhood" is disingenuous. You're a victim of orchestrated hatred, contempt, and violence whether you've experienced them or not. But I don't have to scroll far among your posts to find your complaints about your unrecognized marriage, so I'd suggest that you drop the contempt expressed in "victimhood" and own your membership among those who have been severely victimized by homo-hatred and sexism.

I take your point that internalizing victimization can be debilitating, can ultimately magnify the consequences of bigotry when it isn't healthily processed. That isn't always or necessarily the case, however. As I found out when I came out in 1973, owning victimization is also a necessary first step to empowerment. Properly processed it empowers us by helping us to put responsibility where it belongs. It gives us the insight, impetus, and courage to resist and effect great change. That's certainly what the Gay and Lesbian Left has done since Stonewall, your contempt for us notwithstanding.

Bruno Bettelheim, Dachau and Buchenwald survivor and famed child psychologist, named the malady you appear to manifest: Identification with the oppressor. It's a classic if flawed survival adaptation. But straight men are not likely to let you into their club as long as membership is predicated on faithfully playing by the rules of fixed gender roles.

What you don't seem to grasp is that this homo-hatred is a war of sorts, so far an unaccomplished genocide, but on the part of the Right, a wished-for genocide nonetheless--sometimes literal, sometimes psychic. Whether you were shot or not, others in this war have been. If you are one of us, then like it or not, either you share our victimization in solidarity and honor the price we've paid collectively or you trivialize it as "victimhood," dishonor us, and commit a kind of treason. There are consequences for you, which Bettelheim pointed out. There's no middle ground here.

To your second contention, that straight men and women who don't conform to gender role assignments also could claim membership in our group, why, yes, of course. What links us all, transgendered folk, and gays and lesbians, and nonconforming straight men and women, is the phenomenon of sexism: that is, the imposition onto maleness and femaleness of fixed, specific, and hierarchical gender roles. How you come so close to seeing this, but completely miss it, is a mystery. To the extent that a "mannish" straight woman and a "feminine" straight man are ridiculed and taunted, they are united with us as gender-role outlaws. The consequences--or experiences, as you put it--differ by degree but not by kind.

But you risk even your tenuous acceptance by straight, rich, white men of power, and your conservative ideology, if you acknowledge this.