One of the reasons white suburbanites in the segregated suburbs get a rush of fear when they see a handful of black people in their neighborhood is guilt. "They must hate us, they must be bent on revenge and inclined to do violence, because I sure would be if the things we've done to them had been done to me".

Oppressor guilt of this sort is of very dubious benefit to the oppressed. Yes, it's possible that such guilt motivates people to try to be more fair, to set aside their prejudices, some of the time, but what I've observed is that the fear of retaliation gets expressed as a doubling down of oppressive reactionary tactics. The white suburbanites vote for "law and order" politicians and ask for police protection, and the police doing the protecting then do the things that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, stopping people for the infraction of Driving While Black and interacting with them as active threats to the community.

It should not come as a major surprise that right-wing conservative politicians ride the wave of these kinds of fears, identifying an out-group as the Culprits who are to blame for things not being the way they should be. Jews, the natives, Catholics, immigrants, the insane, gay people, atheists, someone who is already a marginalized people who can be pointed to as the epitome of what's wrong with today's society, some group that we can blame. This kind of appeal resonates with fearful oppressors whose oppressor guilt makes them fantasize a horrible day of vengeance that they need to be protected from. If those scary people can be branded a menace, we can hate them with justification and feel less guilty as we trod them down.

But it's not just the conservatives, surprisingly enough. The left is also really really fond of the idea of having a culprit to blame. They use a different model, of course: rather than identifying a powerless outgroup, they target the most privileged and powerful. Rich white heterosexual able-bodied men. Now, faced with the choice of designating already-marginalized members of an out-group as the perpetrators or instead designating the rich straight white guys, it seems compellingly clear that the conservative folks are doing a much more horrible moral wrong in their choice of a social scapegoat.

But that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. What's more interesting, I think, is a closer exam of the left's designation of Culprits. Let's go there. Instead of preaching to the proverbial choir about the evil wrongness of the conservative right in blaming powerless out-groups for the ills of society, I'll perhaps be able to challenge you a bit, are you game?

You know the drill: those privileged straight cis white guys are the culprits because they are the oppressors; oppression benefits them, right? They have power, so if they wanted things to be any different, things would be different, and they aren't, so it's totally their fault that things are unfair and unequal, yes? And since they won't change things without pressure, we just have to light the fires and then hold their damn feet to the fire, ain't that so? They bloody well are the culprits, then, aren't they?

Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).

I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you're only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you're essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn't you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. You didn't choose that anyway, did you?

Let's look at your choice. You're saying you see more benefit to living as equals, that it would be more to your personal advantage to live in a world that didn't have oppression in it. I am in complete and utter agreement with you.

Well, unless you think rich white cis able-bodied guys are biologically different in their brains or something, you just realized that they don't benefit from oppression. Let me say that again for emphasis: rich white privileged cisgender English-speaking able-bodied male folks, the folks with the greatest possible number of privileges imaginable in our social system, do not benefit from oppression. Oh, they benefit from being in their social location and not a far more marginalized social location, sure, no doubt about that, but they are not better off than they would be if they lived in a world that didn't have oppresion. You said the latter was preferable to you. Extend that to them, the awareness that it would be preferable to them, too.

It is important to understand that our social system works a lot like a Parker Brothers© Monopoly™ game: the winner of the game isn't winning the game because of being a horrible selfish person, but because the rules of the game reward being a selfish person who bankrupts all the other players on the board, and even if everyone tried to play nice and be less competitive while playing Monopoly, the game still rewards the most competitive person who acts in that fashion. It's the rules of the game. Not the personality characteristics of the players, but the rules of the game.

I will not at this point elaborate on why and how we have ended up playing a social game in which competing to marginalize other people while concentrating advantage into our own hands happens to be the objective, but we have.


This is a blog about being genderqueer. The relevance of all this is that oppressor guilt is not our friend; straight cisgender people are not our enemy, nor should our communication with them be geared towards shaming them and holding them personally responsible for our situation. Most of them don't understand what we have to go through, except to the extent that we explain it and they choose to listen. Even then they may not get it. And it may threaten them, threaten their existing ways of understanding sexuality and gender and so on. They're going to ask dense and annoying questions. Often. Their fears will drive them to distort what we've said and twist its implications into ridiculous interpretations. It's going to continue to piss us off.

But honestly, I don't think they dreamed all this up one day in the primordial paleolithic Boys' Bathroom and then imposed it on us. They don't have to put up with what we have to put up with (and I myself don't have to put up with some of the stuff that many of you do, to be honest), but although the suffering of marginalized people is worse, I think we need to move beyond the simplistic temptation of designating a culprit. Ignorance is enough of an enemy.

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During my senior year of high school, my after-school job was to sweep up the floors and empty the trash cans at an auto repair shop.

I was theoretically destined to have a different and more privileged life than these auto mechanics I saw everyday. I was going to attend college, getting an ROTC scholarship to defray the tuition and dorm costs, then go on to graduate school and get an advanced degree and live my life as a professional or as an academic.

But as the end of high school approached, I found myself envying the auto mechanics and not feeling so good about the path I was to follow. I would continue to be dependent on my parents financially for a long time to come, bringing in no reagular income of my own any time in the foreseeable future. I would be spending many more years of my life trying to earn the good grades and approval of people in a hierarchy above me into which I would be seeking to rise. Those Air Force instructors would be superior to me in a military arrangement, the university would be my landlord, I'd have professors to please and impress, and I might have dormitory RAs and such folks to deal with as well.

Day after day I saw the auto mechanics in the space where they worked, as they wrapped up their day. They all worked for Dave, the shop owner (except for Dave himself, of course), but to a man they behaved as if they could effortlessly secure a similar job turning wrenches in some other shop, and his behavior towards them was easy and friendly and non-bossy. (He was that way towards me too, for that matter, and I appreciated it. My previous after-school job had been at a pharmacy where I'd been yelled at and belittled constantly in a boss-to-peon-employee way, and I'd hated it).

I had the feeling the guys were well-founded in their confidence: they seemed good at what they did, and every adult in town had a car and had to take it somewhere to get maintained and fixed. All of them, Dave and his crew, had a discernable pride in their skills and they projected a strong sense of "Nobody tells me what to do". They didn't take shit from anyone, didn't need to suck it up. After an honest day's work fixing folks' cars, they popped open beers and lit up a joint or two and sprawled on comfortable sofas, turned on some tunes, and we all hung out for another half hour or more relaxing and chatting before heading home.

The homes they headed to weren't luxurious palaces but they had comfortable friendly pads to which they could bring women if single, or which they shared with their wives if they were married. Theirs was a masculinity composed of self-determination and the comfortable sense of being people who contributed a skill that other folks needed and would pay for. Women apparently found them sexy for who they were and how they were.

When I looked down my own road, I was doing so with virginal eyes; I had not had a very successful dating life thus far. What people kept telling me was that I would acquire social status and hence desirability by eventually getting those advanced credentials from the university environment, and then obtaining one of the high-status positions that would be available to me as a consequence — that would make me an attractive prospect for women. My mind sourly translated: I spend years getting a professional education so I can get money and status and then maybe I can meet a security-seeking woman who will let me do it to her.

If you see what I mean, it was not an image of masculinity that had much inherent appeal. The auto mechanics seemed able to present as sexy on the basis of who and how they were in the world, including their confidence and their attitude of doing as they wanted to do and not letting anyone push them around. I was being offered a competing model in which any sexiness I ever obtained had nothing to do with who and how I was as a person, as I saw it, but more like a perk for doing as I was told, the chance to be with women who would admire my social status and my wealth, but that had nothing to do with me as a person, see?



I was counterculturally-minded and didn't care about wealth and social status, and I really liked the idea of having a skill, like a craftsman of old, able to ply my trade in virtually any town I chose to plop down in. And it looked like I could get there a whole lot faster than the 8+ years of college education on the path I was expected to walk. I jumped ship, I bailed on the college path and went to Vo-Tech school to learn to be an auto mechanic. I received the training and then held jobs in auto shops for a couple of years before reluctantly deciding that without better skills and further training I wasn't going to reach the point of being self-supporting.

So the auto mechanics thing didn't exactly pan out as hoped for, but neither did my subsequent attempt at being a college student in 1979-1980, so in the early 1980s, with only a high school diploma to my name, I put in some time as a manual laborer in a variety of settings in the western US where a temporary oil-boom economy made jobs readily available.

So I had a few years of being, and being among, the guys of the social and economic class I'd aspired to, as well as the one a notch or two below. I didn't fit in. I found things not to like about them and their culture and attitudes, and they likewise found things they didn't like about me and mine. Many people would attribute that to class cultural differences, and there's probably some truth to that, but it's not how I experienced it.


I worked as a roughneck on an oil rig for a couple of days and was remonstrated, "You don't slam the coupling closed with a bang like you're supposed to. Don't just close it to where it latches, do it like this!" At first I thought there was something mechanical that happened if you slam it, or that the sound was an important cue to the other workers or something — nope, they just got something out of things banging and from the crew enthusiastically slamming things around.

Working with the hardbander — the welder who joined the lengths of drilling pipe — was easier at first but then he became unfriendly because I didn't reciprocate with the bragging about the chicks in town and what he would do to them.

I liked working on the tree cutting team, working the chain saw and feeding the chipper, cutting the new road to the drilling site. That time it was me who was resenting the attitude of my coworkers. Foreman asked us to unload a truckful of scrap metal parts and then come back for a new assignment, and the other guys wanted to go at it slow and lazy, picking up one metal piece at a time and walking to the edge of the truck bed and pausing and then tossing it onto the pile, then making some joking remark, eating up the time. I figured the foreman would be seriously pissed at us all when he saw how little we'd gotten done, and I was right, but they wouldn't listen or didn't care at the time, and they were affronted that I'd stand against what the rest of them wanted to do.

The surveying crew seemed nice enough until the lead surveyor began scowling at me and saying dismissive things. Finally told me I had an attitude problem. The rest of the crew was always grinning and joking, and because I was all serious and stood around like I had a stick up my butt, he felt I thought I was better than him and he didn't care for it.

Intertwined with other issues, a lot of it had to do with maleness and masculinity. It was sometimes overt and sometimes subtle but it was always there. I had gotten myself into an all-male environment. There was no reason women could not have done these jobs, and been hired to do these jobs, but there weren't any there. If I'd been a college student, or a professional in one of the fields dependent on an advanced degree, it would not have been an all-male environment, but this was. For the first prolonged period in my life I was pretty much exclusively in the company of guys.

I'd craved the freedom and the proud sense of "No one bosses me around and tells me what to do", the self-determination of economic independence, but now I found myself immersed in a hostility towards anything reeking of "sissy". I was now in a noisy crude and coarse performance for which I wasn't very well cast.


I'd also craved what I perceived to be their model of sexiness and desirability, but among these guys I ran into the attitude that guys always pay for it: "You can get a whore, or you can be single and take girls out and you pay for the date, or you can get married and you bring home a paycheck, but if you want that pussy, you gotta pay for it somehow". That didn't sound any better than the white-collar educated-track version. I wanted an equal relationship, starting with being equally desirable.


Gender does map onto class in interesting ways. It's a trope, a cliché: Bogart and Hepburn on The African Queen, her with her tart crispness and him with his coarser working-class modalities. Men have maleness in a patriarchal world, and can embrace the sloppy informality of the working class, but women are expected to hold themselves up to a standard lest any sloppiness be associated with sluttiness. There's a gender dichotomy around good and bad: for males, good is passive, the absence of assertively and rebelliously doing bad things, whereas bad is active. For girls it's constructed the other way around, where bad is passive, a weak failure to impose discipline upon yourself, a state of being carried along to perdition, while good is that active state of straightening one's backbone and displaying the starch of one's character.

The guys' complaint about me was the same as their complaint about women: that I acted like I thought I was too good for them. They recognized the overlap and directly said so: I needed to act like a man, I was acting like I was pussywhipped, I seemed faggy, I wasn't a regular guy. I'd been targeted for similar comments while I was growing up, but in opting for a blue-collar environment it seemed like I'd made the proverbial jump from frying pan to fire.

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Always Love Lucy Theatre

I had enthusiastic anticipations for this show--the advance press on it said it had been rewritten to spotlight issues pertaining to transgender people, and, more specifically, that the character of Eliza Dolittle was being recast as a female to male transgender person. Female to male experience is far less often depicted, so I was really looking forward to the show.

The advance press also noted that this had been accomplished "with almost no changes to the original script".

The performance I saw did indeed match my recollection of Shaw's original dialogue for the most part. Indeed, this version of Pygmalion was pretty close to what you would get if you simply did a cut and paste job on Shaw's classic text, substituting pronouns (replacing "her" with "him") and shoehorning in a couple extra lines of Eliza's dialogue to explain that she wanted to become a gentleman in order to be accorded full dignity and respect and not be beneath Higgins and his friend Pickering, as she perceived his housekeeper to be.

My overall reaction was disappointment: it doesn't work. The original dialogs between Eliza Dolittle and Henry Higgins sheds no meaningful light on gender issues, nor, without far more substantial additional elaborations and modifications, do they provide any kind of situational platform for producer Saima Huq, director Anthony Pound, or the cast to do so. And, reciprocally, modifying Eliza Dolittle's transformative journey so that she is becoming a gentleman rather than becoming a lady fails to show us many new aspects of Shaw's play, either.

Pygmalion in its classic form is about class and the question of presentation— to what extent is our identity merely a matter of how we present ourselves? That's practically a hand-calligraphied invitation to explore that same question as it applies to gender identity, but the personnel who crafted this variant did not RSVP to that invitation; they didn't go there. A playwright considering such issues might choose to assert the absence of any real differences between gendered experiences aside from projected expectations, or might instead choose to use the play to outline the large differences in gendered behavior that were solidly in place during the timeframe depicted, but in this case opted to do neither.

The original Pygmalion is also at its core a tale of developing sexual tension: a lady is an appropriate object of interest for a gentleman of Professor Higgins' class, and the immediate consequence of transforming Eliza Dolittle into a lady is that he finds himself attracted to her, possessive of her, in ways he had not anticipated. The modified Pygmalion had the opportunity here, once again, to play with sexual orientation as well as gender, but in failing to tease out some interesting new tensions or observations it instead left us with a dissonant confusing patch of dialog and interaction in which Higgins is neither fascinated with the man that Eliza has become nor with the woman who underlies the performance as man, and instead utters the original unmodified Shaw lines in a context where they illuminate no new truths and in fact make no sense.

We do at least see Shaw's gendered assumptions exposed, if not neatly skewered, in Higgins' protective behavior and in Dolittle's insistences that Higgins should take responsibility for Dolittle's situation. He has transformed her, but if he has no personal interest in her, what will become of her/him? In this, we see the fingerprints of Shaw's projection onto women of his assumptions about women's vulnerability and need of care. Indeed, the play comes across as willfully blind to the social currency of being (perceived as) male and the opportunities for employment and independent social success that would derive from those, especially with the added benefit of gentlemanly manners and diction. We're treated to Dolittle's tearful complaints that she has nowhere to go and fewer options than she'd had as a woman selling flowers in the streets of London.

Several things are extremely noisy by their absence: Eliza Dolittle at no point expresses any desire to be a man aside from the additional socioeconomic gains she'd get by going above and beyong merely becoming a lady to become a gentleman instead. Higgins teaches Dolittle how to modify her speech but at no point is she given any instruction in the gendered attributes of gentlemanly behavior. Placed in a social setting to try her wings and test her progress, she is criticized for her choices of topics but not spoken to about appropriate conversation for a male in mixed company or, for that matter, for a male among other men.

By default, the play fails to address any issues particularly pertinent to transgender people in part because it fails, on the surface, to contain any transgender people. Eliza Dolittle is a woman in drag, no more a transgender individual than Dustin Hoffman was in Tootsie.

Gender is not class. Grafting gender into an otherwise unmodified play about class and expecting anything meaningful to be revealed is quaint, but Marx and Engels did that 120 years ago and we've had both feminism and gender theory to draw upon since then.

My opinions on the failure of the this version of Pygmalion to deliver on its stated promise notwithstanding, I saw a well-acted performance of Shaw's Pygmalion (nearly intact despite the inserted gender oddity):

Christopher Romero Wilson does Henry Higgins as a willfully clueless social maladroit with a genius for phonics, a geek of the first order with the social awkwardnesses that often plague the single-minded. He's irate, temperamental, and uninclined to be considerate of others. If Wilson tends to sing Higgins all on a single note, it is fair to point out that Shaw wrote him that way.

Pickering is performed with warmth and quiet dignity by David Burfoot. He exudes calmness and kindness that helps anchor an otherwise frictitious bunch of characters. Burfoot conjures up a solid Pickering with nuances and small gestures and tone of voice.

Eliza Dolittle, aka Elijah Dolittle, is rendered for us by producer Saima Huq, whose convincing versatility in speech diction and rhythm as well as her adept gender fluidity onstage were unable to quite compensate for the problems inherent in the insufficiently changed dialog.

Eliza's dad Alfred Dolittle is a character written to steal the show out from under the other performers if the actor is so inclined, and without stepping far beyond an understated confident portrayal, Tony White obliges in this regard. His Alfred is a quite believable rogue and social egalitarian with aplomb and deadpan humor.

Henry's long-suffering mom Mrs Higgins is acted by Bette Shifman, who pivots from exasperation with Henry to a friendlier interaction with Pickering and, later, with Eliza and Alfred. Shifman lets her character grow in the role, warming up to the people she becomes involved with.

The Eynsford-Hill trio—the matriarch (Nikki Chawla), termagant daughter Clara (Sabrina Zara) and situationally maladroit son Freddy (Harsh Lochan) are delivered as cameo or caricature characters, the onstage time being limited to that, and are delivered effectively by these actors.

Also in small roles in the play were Vincent Bivona multicast as Neppomuck and Bystander and Kristi Cini doing Mrs Pearce, the Parlormaid, and the Hostess.

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