Biology, Gender and Family
Amy Richards: I struggle with this a lot, my relationship with my family. I don’t know my father. My mother left my father two months before I was born and I’ve never known him. It’s always very odd for me to even describe this man as my father because I don’t know him. People will ask me all the time – do you have siblings? I found out that I have this half-brother, I guess. I found out that my father kidnapped him.
The point is that I have, my whole life, been forced to define my relationship with this man because of biology. And I think, if we look back into feminism’s history, we see that feminism, as well as other social justice movements, have done a really good job of expanding our definitions of family. Step-parents are parents too. Adopted children are children too. We can have half-sisters. We can even have extended family that’s still family. But the one thing that we have not done is to extricate biology from family. We have not said that just because we’re biologically related, we’re not family.
I think that that is the challenge that we have before us, as feminists and I think more specifically, as third wave feminists. And I know that I personally have been trying to find a way to radicalize this in my life, and I don’t have a good answer except for coming up with creative ways of saying “He’s my donor, not my Dad.”
I spent my life thinking I was a minority, and can see now that in fact my family situation, which is not nuclear, is actually more like the majority.
I know that in my instance it would have been the worst thing had Bush regulated my parents to stay married. My mother was a classic welfare mom. She would have been forced to be married. I would have been the kidnapped one, maybe. And so, I hope that we can leave here both energized and politicized about this issue. But I think that in order to do that, we all have to start from a very personal place and so that’s why I started from a personal place. And I think you’ll see from each of our panelists, their work starts in that place.
Since I’ve started with this concept of removing biology from family, I want to address Noelle specifically. One of the things Noelle said to me when we met a couple of months ago was that her father, though now a woman, is her father. And so, Noelle, if you could talk about that relationship in your family? The family you were raised in, I should say.
Noelle Howey: Sure. My family was actually sort of typical and nuclear. Typical as I was growing up, I guess, based on your stereotypical notions of suburban, white, middle-class family. Father goes out, does work. Mother stays home, doesn’t do traditional forms of work for money.
And then everything blew up when I was 14 because that’s when I found out that my father was a cross dresser, and later he actually came out again as a transgendered person. Meaning that she wanted to live full time as a woman and transition into that gender, live full time as that gender. Change her name; change everything.
Eventually her anatomy would become one on a very long list of changes. And what’s been an interesting thing that’s happened through this entire journey – and it’s been a really long one because I’m 30 now, so it’s been about 16 years since my dad came out – is that I don’t think we really had, even though my mother professed to be a feminist, a feminist family exactly until my dad came out.
It strangely put us all on the same playing field. My dad started dealing with the same sort of discrimination and assumptions that my mother had dealt with her whole life, and they weirdly started finding things in common. And my father started realizing certain ways that he – pardon my shift between pronouns, it’s like an art form. Before my father transitioned, I used “he.” Afterwards I used “she” most of the time. Anyway. My father realized that he had benefited enormously from being a man and was used to cutting people off in mid-sentence and being this take-no-nonsense business guy.
And so, right after the transition, he kept doing that as a woman. And people were like – “You’re a bitch!” People freaked out. They said, “You can’t act like that.” And suddenly her earnings started shooting down massively until she was making below the poverty level. Somebody who had been very highly compensated as a man. So that weirdly put us all in the same place where we were all dealing with gender issues: I was in college dealing with finding my feminism. My mother was dealing with being on her own for the first time, with being in the working world and trying to get ahead and running into problems getting promoted. And my father was coming down off of this high that he had had as a man, and was dealing with all these things for the first time. And so, it brought us together.
What has been interesting in the years ever since, is that people – especially people in the transgender community – constantly question why I still call my father, my father. Why I haven’t shifted to mother, because that’s really common in the transgender community. But why must “father” and “mother” be switched? As though the meaning of “father” or the meaning of the term “mother” are implicit with whatever anatomical parts or whatever gender identity you have; that there is no greater meaning.
And then of course, the next logical question people ask me is – what does it mean? And I’m like – I’m not sure. And it’s true. I’m really not. I don’t know why my father feels more fatherly to me than motherly, given the fact that she’s a woman now. Or why everything we’re taught to think of as fatherly is oftentimes male. I actually looked up books about fatherhood in the library when I was working on one of my books. Most of them are actually about manhood. It says Essays on Fatherhood and it’s all about being a guy. I mean, it could have just been Essays on My Manhood. So it’s weird when you separate one from the other, which in my case, you have to. It’s not academic. It’s my life. How does this person keep being my father? I’m not really sure.
All I know is that she does not feel like my mother. And that “mother” to me has a certain connotation and it defines a certain relationship in my life that I’m not willing to relinquish that place. And in turn, I’m not willing to say I don’t have a father. Because biologically speaking – and here we go back to biology – I do. The original sperm was from my dad at the time. It’s kind of a weird conundrum.
AR: I think it’s interesting because to me, not having a father, the father’s role was just an economic one in my association. Jennifer and I wrote a piece one time about our fathers or lack thereof. Her father was the father I wanted because he was a doctor. I would fantasize about my father, but what I fantasized about wasn’t who this person was and the relationship that I would have to him emotionally. It was a financial relationship that I was looking for. Because the only thing that seemed to distinguish me from friends of mine who had fathers seemed to be the economic thing. But now that your father’s financial situation has dipped, it almost sounds like that’s not even the role.
NH: Yeah, at the current time, yeah.
Religious Tradition and Family
AR: As Jennifer said in her introduction, Noelle is one of the two panelists who is now engaged in raising her own family. I think that all of us think about that – what we’re going to do differently or how we’re going to challenge what we experienced.
The other panelist in that role is Leora. Leora was raised in a traditional Jewish home and went to orthodox schools. And she herself is raising her children in a Jewish household. I’m sure that there is some sort of conflict that comes – that’s presumptuous on my part, but I know that feminism has always had a tense relationship with organized religion.
How can we promote freedom and liberty yet at the same time follow something that is more hierarchical and laid out for us?
Leora Tanenbaum: I actually don’t see so much of a conflict between my feminism and my Jewish observance because I reject the gender inequalities within Judaism without rejecting Judaism.
There are so many different ways you can practice Judaism and different ways to interpret it. Judaism is more than a religion dictated by a supposed supernatural being who says you can’t do this, and you have to do this. There are so many other ways to look at it.
It’s a rich association with a people, with a history, with a land. And so there are many different ways to interpret what it means to be Jewish. And I know you all know that, of course. But to say that there is necessarily a conflict between feminism and Judaism – it depends on how you’re approaching Judaism.
And the parts of Judaism that I find sexist, I just don’t practice those parts. Or I try to reform them. So I don’t really actually see a conflict in my day-to-day life.
I should add, though, that I’m privileged to have benefited from a very, very strong Judaic education – from kindergarten, all the way up through 12th grade – that gives me a certain power and confidence and mastery over Judaic things in that I feel entitled to pick and choose. Whereas somebody who may lack that background and that confidence will probably take more of an all-or-nothing approach, which is the more common thing around the world actually. I just wanted to say that parenthetically.
Growing up, my family – I don’t know whether to characterize it as feminist or not. My mom was the breadwinner. My mom is a physician and my dad, who is now retired, was a schoolteacher. So my mom made a lot more money than my dad. And yet, she was responsible for all the cooking and cleaning and domestic chores. So it didn’t really seem like a feminist arrangement. My mom didn’t identify as a feminist, at least not in those years when I was growing up.
We were a traditional Jewish family. According to traditional Judaism, a woman’s role is pretty much to be a mother and to be involved in the domestic sphere. There was no inconsistency there.
Amy, tell me exactly again where I should be going? There are so many directions I could go.
