Culture war issues take time and understanding

Some 30 years ago, around a Thanksgiving dinner table, a gentleman in my family stated this opinion: Gay people should not be allowed to be schoolteachers because they wanted to recruit children into their way of life. 

The gentleman was then about 50-ish and had never had more than a superficial acquaintance with anyone he knew to be gay. I knew that accusation was a myth that had been debunked long before.

Then his sister dropped the family bombshell. She revealed to her brother that his nephew was gay. The nephew was a bright young lawyer in his father’s law firm. My relative had had a warm relationship with this nephew since he was a baby. 

The family had chosen to keep this quiet because gay respectability was not yet fully integrated into our national culture. Gay people and their families had been pushing toward full equality but it wasn’t there yet.

 “Gays in the military” was a hot-button issue in the 1992 presidential election. The argument was whether it would be acceptable to let gay men serve. Importantly, though, the controversy had been narrowed to that specific point – military service. It was no longer unthinkable for gays to be openly themselves in society.    

In 1994 the Clinton administration developed a policy for the military called, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It was a way of letting LGBTQ+ people (a term that did not yet exist) serve as long as they were discreet and did nothing to arouse suspicion. The policy lasted only a few years.

This family conversation took place during that period. It was a moment in a transition that had been building for more than a generation. 

The transition for my relative was not gradual at all. He realized quickly that his opinion was outdated and uninformed, and he promptly caught up.

I mention this now because we are in a comparable moment in the debate about transgender identity and especially participation in women’s sports.

During the recent election, one TV commercial on this topic got saturation exposure in New Mexico. The commercial showed a broad-shouldered person who could have been male in a woman’s swimsuit. The commercial claimed it’s not fair for biological males to compete in women’s sports. It went on to state that this threatens to destroy all the rights women have gained over the last 50 years. 

I understood the argument about sports, but it seemed conservatives were trying to expand that narrow issue into a threat to all women’s rights, and I didn’t see the logic in that. 

There have been incidents here in New Mexico involving transgender athletes playing in women’s sport events, including one where the transgender person reportedly knocked another player to the ground. 

The legal question about sports is currently in courts and state legislatures. More than 20 states have passed laws requiring that women’s sports be limited to women who are biological from birth. New Mexico has no law on the topic, so the default is that transgender athletes are allowed to play. The dispute also involves proposals to amend definitions within Title IX, the 50-year-old federal law that led to the movement to provide equal funding for women’s school sports.

Policy regarding transgender athletes might be resolved quickly by the new Republican majority in Congress. But debate about what’s right may continue for some time, and it may lead to a conclusion that has not been found yet.    

LGBTQ+ individuals did not invent their unconventional identities as a way for liberals to offend conservatives or vice versa.    

The issue arose because some people who didn’t fit in our usual categories made an earnest search for their own truth, and they have the right to continue that search. 

Contact Merilee Dannemann through www.triplespacedagain.com.