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Guest Editorial
Jane Edwards
Centre for Work + Life, University of South Australia
Damien W Riggs
School of Psychology, University of Adelaide; National Convenor, Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Interest Group, APS
Article Text
Whilst lesbian women, gay men, and bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people are typically excluded from normative forms of social order, we continue to create our own forms of inclusive communities. These intersections of exclusion and inclusion often result in complex health issues for LGBTIQ communities. The papers in this special edition comment on aspects of non-heterosexual's negotiation of key elements of normative social orders as they play out in relation to families, community and citizenship. Despite the diversity of topics covered, in diverse contexts, some common themes link several papers. Specifically, the somewhat paradoxical relationship of many people of diverse gender and sexual identities to the law and medicine features in a number of articles. While not always framed explicitly in these terms, many papers are concerned with the efforts of LGBTIQ populations to exercise the rights of sexual citizenship. The concept of risk runs through several papers; the exercise of non-heterosexual citizenship continues to incite some lamentably-familiar fears about the 'danger' posed by LGBTIQ populations to the social fabric. And finally, many of the papers highlight the contestations that occur within LGBTIQ communities in regard to the development of new forms of order.
Many of the papers in this issue of Health Sociology Review (ISBN 978-1-921348-03-7) point to the ambivalent relationship that exists between LGBTIQ populations, on the one hand, and the institutions of law and medicine, on the other. Non-heterosexual people frequently need medical knowledge if they are to exercise fundamental aspects of citizenship; to have a family, or to have their preferred gender identity legally recognised. For example, access to assisted reproductive technology (ART), or services related to gender reassignment, may be required. Yet use of medical knowledge and technology is not an unalloyed good for many of these consumers. Dempsey's paper demonstrates that while medicine and the law may facilitate lesbian's capacity to create families, it may be achieved in ways that heighten the construction of such families as exceptions to the rule of heterosexual parenting, rather than as legitimate families in their own right. Dempsey describes the success of a campaign to decriminalise self-insemination by lesbians and to increase their access to clinical ART services. However, as Dempsey suggests, this success was achieved by shoring up a number of stereotypes about lesbians. By framing the issue as one of treatment of so-called 'impaired' fertility, the dominant discourse reinforced heterosexist norms. By contrast, eligibility could have been construed as a 'service' rather than as a 'treatment', as Dempsey argues. Her paper shows that while political gains were made, they were achieved on grounds that buttressed a heteronormative order and vivified some longstanding stereotypes about the impaired capacity for rational and responsible behaviour by lesbians and gay men. The science and technology of medicine-sought and utilised by non-heterosexual and non-gender normative people is not a value-free body of knowledge and set of technologies. It can provide 'instrumental' benefits to non-heterosexual populations, while simultaneously perpetuating harmful stereotypes about them. Likewise, there is not a single perspective among lesbian, bisexual and queer women about law reform, as Dempsey demonstrates. Thus statements about 'law' or 'medicine' may gloss over the way in which non-heterosexual and non-gender normative people may stand in different relationships to these institutions and may evaluate them differently.
Similarly, papers by Factor and Rothblum on the experience of transgender individuals in North America, and Couch et al, on the experience of their Australian and New Zealand counterparts, also reveal the complex ways in which the law and medicine aid and restrict people. Despite the banishment of 'homosexuality' from the psychiatric lexicon, 'gender identity disorder' remains a diagnostic category; a problematic fact in itself. Factor and Rothblum suggest that medical discourse entrenches a binary understanding of gender and gender identity as either male or female. Medicine, in a Foucauldian sense, can be seen as creating the objects of its own discourse. The law, likewise, upholds a dualistic view of the world in which one is either male or female, despite the clear evidence that this gendered bifurcation is not an accurate reflection of reality. Couch et al's paper, along with Factor's and Rothblum's, reveals the way in which the male-female binary thwarts, or unnecessarily complicates, the citizenship rights of transgendered individuals. The findings of Couch et al are an important demonstration of the way in which dependence on the legal 'recognition' of the identity of transgendered people can make the exercise of their rights as citizens extremely difficult in wide-ranging ways. Both papers provide much-needed insight into the ways in which the intersection of the law and medicine both benefit and harm members of transgendered communities. Both also point to the need for transgendered people themselves to be able to define their experience and, in so doing, shape the medical and legal discourses that surround them.
These two papers also point to a third element that can profoundly influence transgendered people's capacity to experience the rights of citizenship; financial resources. Factor and Rothblum point out that many state jurisdictions in North America - as is the case in Australia - demand gender reassignment surgery as a condition for legal recognition of changed gender. This demand persists despite the high financial cost, prohibitive for many individuals. Entitlements to the rights of citizenship are, for some individuals, restricted to those with the wherewithal to buy them; a human rights issue that surely needs to be given greater prominence.
The notion of 'risk' also threads its way through several of the papers in this issue. Dempsey points out that the arguments for extending the eligibility criteria for ART to lesbians hinged on 'harm minimization', which rested on an implicit premise about the untrustworthiness of lesbians. Risk also permeates the material analysed in Ripper's paper. Popular discourse, as Ripper demonstrates, suggests that allowing the identity of sperm donors to be known creates risks for them. Such men are construed as the potential victims of women seeking maintenance or children seeking inheritance 'rights'; altruistic men may later be subject to financial claims portrayed as having dubious legitimacy. Lesbian women who use donor sperm are constructed as particular risks to donor males; they are stereotypically depicted as refusing these men access to the children they helped conceive, thus also thwarting children's fundamental 'right' to know their biological fathers. The media's framing of this issue makes men's risk inescapable; either unwanted paternal demands will be made of them, or their 'legitimate' right to know their children will be denied. Sperm donation apparently poses an unavoidable risk to men; whatever the outcome, they end by being victims of the process. Ripper's material suggests that men are depicted as exercising beneficent and responsible sexual citizenship, while women - especially lesbians - are portrayed as irresponsible and menacing.
Ripper also reveals, however, that potential sperm donors are not a homogenous population. Of the men registered on the Australian Sperm Donor Registry, an overwhelming percentage of gay men wanted contact with children conceived through their donations, while only a minority of heterosexual men registered wanted contact with children they fathered. Two different populations of men seek to donate sperm, with differing motivations, and the frenzied media proclamation of a 'sperm-drought' masks these important distinctions. The media concentration on men seeking to minimize their risk of being identified as a parent contrasts with another group of men who seek contact and involvement with the children they father. Arguably, it is gay men who are seeking to exercise responsible sexual citizenship in this context. It is regrettable, though probably not surprising, that the media chooses to ignore this group of donors.
The paper by Riggs takes up where Ripper ends, by exploring the consequences for gay men who donor sperm to lesbians but then encounter disappointment over their role in the children's lives. Failure to clarify their role in advance can lead to distress for both the men involved, lesbian parents and the children themselves. Riggs illuminates the presence of male privilege in these scenarios and the way gay men, resentful at a perception that they have been used as a 'means to an end', frequently call on conservative, patriarchal discourses invoking the spectre of male redundancy, the putative need and right for children to know their biological fathers, as well as the well-worn refrain of 'selfish', 'man-hating' lesbians. While Riggs does not discuss his material in terms of 'risk', it is clear that, in the minds of some men, involvement with lesbian parents is a risky enterprise. It is ironic that gay men's responses in this regard may fortify heterosexist definitions of 'the family'. In a further irony, it may also mean that gay men are not the ‘safe option' they once might have been considered to be by lesbians seeking to have children. The current legal emphasis on 'father's rights' can undermine the capacity of lesbians to feel safe in facilitating men's interaction with children without fearing that they may face legal threats from male centred definitions of family. Findings such as these demonstrate the multiple challenges to creating new forms of 'order' within LGBTIQ communities, and that the simplistic binary of supposedly normative heterosexuality and transgressive homosexuality plays out in complex ways in the relationships between members of LGBTIQ communities.
Media discussion of the use of reproductive technology in the creation of families underscores the 'naturalness' and moral superiority of the heterosexual family, as Crabb and Augoustinos point out. They suggest that genetic discourse shores up a definition of the family as a naturally occurring heterosexual institution. The technical, ostensibly value-free knowledge of genetics is, in fact, shot through with social concerns and cultural values. Genetics is increasingly gaining something of a 'master-narrative' status with its insistence that it can explain human identity, biology and behaviour; given this, it abrogates for itself an imprimatur to define what is ‘natural' and 'normal'. A shared genetic history is pronounced to be the basis of family relationships. However, the emphasis on shared genetic history is still positioned within a discourse that asserts the superiority of heterosexuality. Genes, it seems, need to find their true home in a heterosexual family. While media accounts accord heterosexual relationships not based on genetic ties less status than those that are, the families created by lesbians are the subject of special revilement. As such, and as Crabb and Augoustinos suggest, there is a hierarchy of family types depicted in the media; heterosexual families with a shared genetic history are clearly at the apex, while those created by lesbians and gay men are a virtual sub-stratum; they exist as a residual category, invoked by the media as emblematic of the genetic and, therefore, social chaos that will result from leaving the heterosexual straight and narrow. All of the papers in this issue that centre upon families demonstrate the energetic and creative agency used by non-heterosexual people to create families for themselves, while simultaneously revealing what a fraught process it is and how law, medicine and the media can complicate, as much as ameliorate, the process.
Adoptive non-heterosexual families have thus far received little attention in scholarship on queer parenting; a deficit redressed in the paper by Ross et al. They suggest that this has partly been the product of the emphasis upon proving that LGBTIQ people are fit parents who produce psychologically healthy children, which has largely precluded the development of a space in which non-heterosexual parents can articulate the turmoil they may experience as part of the adoption process. This hardship is perfectly admissible for heterosexual parents, as evidenced by the existence of adoption support groups. Indeed, Ross et al report that homophobia and heterosexism haunt the process of adoption, at great psychological and emotional cost to these parents. While same-sex adoption is legal in Canada, it does not stop the pernicious consequences of the imposition of negative stereotypes on queer and lesbian women seeking to enact their legal rights. Further, as Ross et al observe, if white, middleclass women encounter distress in navigating the adoption process, how much harder is it for lesbian and queer women who do not occupy these privileged subject positions, and further still, what of the experiences and identities of those children who are adopted from so-called 'third world countries' into the overdeveloped West? Moreover, they point to the need to consider how issues of race, ethnicity and minority sexuality intersect to privilege some forms of family formation over others, even in non-heterosexual contexts.
Heath's and Mulligan's paper is a departure from the others in this issue, due to its focus on the influence of community for lesbian, bisexual and queer women. As such, it is welcome for a number of reasons. The first is that it takes as its focus the notion of thriving in the lives of lesbian and bisexual women; an emphasis that, unfortunately, is rare enough to be noteworthy. 'Community' for these groups of women can be a useful buffer against stigmatization, discrimination and marginalization and a space in which they find affirmation. After decades of much-needed scholarship documenting the hardship of non-heterosexual women's lives, it is a refreshing counterpoint to read accounts of women who happily place 'thriving' and 'lesbian' or 'bisexual' in the same sentence. Nevertheless, this paper provides a necessary corrective to the 'community is good' moniker by pointing to the potential harm it can pose for women. Community norms centred on adherence to feminism, judgements about appearance, as well as 'appropriate' sexual behaviour, can leave some women feeling ill-at-ease, constrained and judged by the peers to whom they turn for acceptance and affirmation. Bisexual women (an-often ignored population) in particular report feeling unwelcomed, if not judged, by lesbian communities. It suggests that despite well over a decade of queer theory and activism, identity can be policed in punitive ways by particular communities. Heath's and Mulligan's paper points to the Janus face of community and the need to judiciously assess its impacts on women's lives.
This collection of papers provides an interesting snapshot of, and commentary on, the lives of contemporary LGBTIQ people and the way we create family and community, as well as our attempts to exercise citizenship rights. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that none of the articles in this edition give voice to the experience of intersex individuals. Moreover, this group of papers primarily documents the experience of white non-heterosexual and non-gender normative people who, for the most part, are middleclass. Despite an explicit request in the call for papers for contributions from people who feel themselves marginalised within LGBTIQ communities, we are aware that this collection did not manage to meet this goal. People who are intersex, or who do not identify as members of the white middleclasses, may have profoundly different experiences of 'family', 'community' or 'citizenship', than those of white, middleclass non-heterosexuals. Notwithstanding this qualification, our thanks go to the authors included here for providing the exciting and topical analyses contained in this issue. We are also pleased to take this opportunity to thank the many people who reviewed papers for this edition.
Jane Edwards, Damien W Riggs
University of South Australia University of Adelaide
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