Chaz Bono on Dancing With The Stars controversey

I am SO glad you brought this up!  I was just talking to my sister about this over break, and I got a bit of a reality check on how out-there/abstract/liberal/insane some of the ideas we banter around in class seem to people outside of academia.  Over break I visited my sister in Clarkesville, Tennessee, a very military-heavy town due to its close proximity to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  Her area is very conservative by my standards (I will be generalizing a lot in this post, I realize that.)  Every time I visit, I am always startled at how racially segregated social life is,  and how gender is overtly enforced and enacted (I was told TrueBlood, knitting, dancing, and a number of other things were for homosexuals, and I was a bit weirded out when all the women in the house congregated in the kitchen while the men watched football and drank beer.)  Anyhow, we were watching Dancing with the Stars one night on TV, and Chaz came on.  At this point my sister pointed out that Chaz is trans, to which her boyfriend wrinkled his nose and asked why he was on television.  Minutes before, when he had not known Chaz’s gender status, he had had no problem with the show (aside from the fact that there was a gay guy on from Queer Eye).  My sister also started asking me questions about gender reassignment.  She seemed to expect me to be an expert on the subject since she knows I take a lot of gender/sexuality courses and I’m one of those damn liberals.

This whole situation brought me back to ground a bit with respect to some of the things we have been talking about in class.  Though a lot of what we talk about in class makes so much sense when we discuss it, how can something as complicated as the deconstruction of sexed, gendered, raced, and (dis)abled bodies be enacted in reality?  How do we explain such things to someone whose religion, experience, and/or life views are so different?  In the situation, I was being called on as a representative of liberals/feminists/gay rights advocates generally, so I knew whatever I said would be taken as a pretty broad representation (just as I was taking their views to be a representative of general social conservatism.)  I wanted so badly to give them gender/sexuality reality check, but I didn’t even know where to start.  How do you explain the problems with discriminating against a trans man on television, or even the problems with gender as a social category in general, to someone who uses faggot in everyday speech?  I thought about using what we had read in evolution’s rainbow, to rely on the hegemony of “scientific evidence” to get my point across, but I wasn’t sure if religious beliefs would supersede science’s authority, and I was also uncomfortable commandeering a hegemony I personally find so problematic.  I still not sure how I could have broached the subject in a productive manner, yet I am also not comfortable with the idea of just saying nothing. So I guess the question I have is, how can conversations such as this occur between individuals with such different perspectives?  Is it possible to have a productive discussion in this context?  Can two such different perspectives be diffracted with one another to produce new possibilities and perspectives, or are they doomed to cancel, conflict, and get plain ugly?