The Trouble With Trans Discourse

My God, I am sick of trans discourse.

I am sick of the toxicity of each subculture of trans ideology toward those who do not share its particular rigid orthodoxy (none of which are adequate anyway). I am sick of the bitter infighting, and I am sick of the calls for unity. I am sick of the holier-than-thou posturing of the language police, and I am sick of the pretensions to bold truth-telling in the face of censorship. I am sick of hearing what's a slur and who needs to lighten up. I am sick of hearing who's a true transsexual, who's a newly-minted queer, who's a gendertrender, who's a quisling shill for the cissupremacy/patriarchy, who deserves necessary medical treatment or basic fucking human respect based on whether or not they agree with your definitions. I am sick of everybody wanting to eradicate everybody else.

I'm sick of radfem ideology. I'm sick of the oversimplification of claiming that, because the social construction of the gender binary as we know it is harmful, gender as such needs to be eradicated. I'm sick of the reduction of sexism to the nakedly biological, as if sexual dimorphism were the entirety of biological sex/gender diversity, as if patriarchy could be exhaustively described by “people who can't get pregnant oppressing people who can get pregnant,” as if its complex matrix of the material and the discursive could be adequately described in terms of uteri alone, as if the Foucauldian soul had never been posited.

I'm sick of truscum ideology. I'm sick of the oversimplification of asserting that being trans is always and necessarily reducible to a medical condition. I'm sick of the implied reification of medical conditions, as if they were eternal, subsistent, and external to the culture that diagnoses them. I'm sick of the binarism, the refusal to treat nonbinary genders as legitimate. I'm sick of the biological reductionism that dovetails exactly with the TERF understanding of sex and gender, differing only in the degree to which they believe trans people should have access to medical care.

I'm sick of genderspecial ideology. I'm sick of the reduction of gender to a feeling, to something that has no overlap with the flesh in which it is manifest, to a garment that can be donned or sloughed with the day's outfit. I'm sick of the holding sacrosanct of potato genders and nounself pronouns, placing them above critique just because someone nebulously “identifies as” them. I'm sick of the disembodiment of gender just as much as I'm sick of the biological reductionism thereof.

I'm sick of appeals to chromosomes or gonads, of claims of “deception” or the knowability of “true sex,” of the kind of biological reductionism that binds me to my birth assignment. I'm sick of born-this-way-ism, of brain sex and prenatal hormone exposure, of the kind of biological reductionism that is nothing but trans apologetics. I'm sick of airy-fairy gendering that erases the body so utterly as to make people believe that medical care is not a necessity for those who require it.

For most of my master's degree, I avoided writing about gender. I was undertaking the coming-out process, and I felt that, in a life where gender (what it is, how you know, what mine is) consumed my every waking thought, my academic work constituted a single blessed corner of relief. I would talk about Derrida and Johannine Christology and new media theory, and I could immerse myself in deep topics where for once, for once in my life, I didn't have to think about gender.

Now, in my doctoral work, engaging with gender seems unavoidable. It's still not my primary interest – I'm more interested in disability and crip theory, Eucharistic theology, and phenomenology – but I can't seem to talk about anything else without also talking about gender.

I fantasize about quitting Tumblr, about shutting down this zombie blog, about leaving trans discourse altogether. I believe in listening more than I talk, and most of the time I suspect that what I have to say is neither interesting nor valuable.

But, my God, anyone should talk who can add a little nuance to the trans wars 2k14 and their relentless, horrifying oversimplifications.

On Reading

I don't think I can overstate the influence Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” has had on me. It (along with chapter one of this book) launched the line of inquiry that led me to my current studies, which makes it basically responsible for both my current life and my foreseeable future.

I'm still wrestling with it, because I am still trying to figure out the concept of authorial intent. Mostly, I think I'm with Barthes: externally established authorial intent is of no account; we have no access to the psychological state of the author as ey was writing; and we should want no such access beyond what we have in the text itself. Ricoeur makes this a little clearer, I think, by distinguishing in speech between the utterer's meaning (what the speaker intends to say) and the utterance meaning (what the sentence in fact says), and explaining that in written discourse we only have access to the latter. What I get from this is that if “what the text says” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But there's an additional layer of complication, which is: is there any such thing as “what the text says”? Texts don't have mouths. They don't say anything unless somebody reads – that is, interprets – them. So I'll refine that accusation: if “what somebody reads in your text” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But is that fair? It's the principle I generally operate on, but it's hard work. If, say, someone calls me out for problematic assumptions in something I wrote, my first instinct is to defend myself by 'splaining, “That's not what I meant!” But I stop. I remind myself that intent is not magic. I remind myself that externally established authorial intent does not matter. I wrote what I wrote, and if even one person reads something problematic there, the problem lies with what I wrote, not with eir reading of it.

But. But.

I also have a belief – a tenuous belief, a belief I am struggling with, a belief to whose demolition I am open, but a belief nonetheless – that anyone can read anything in(to) any text. And is it then fair to hold the author responsible for everything that could be read into eir text?

Anyone can read anything in(to) any text. Does that mean you can take “A Modest Proposal” at face value, ignoring its satirical intent? Does that mean you can reformat “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in”and declare it a short story, rather than a poem? Does that mean you can replace every instance of the word “nunnery” in Hamlet Act III Scene I with “ham sandwich”?

Well... I don't like that phrasing. I don't like telling people what they can and can't do with texts. Of course you can do any of those things. You have a find and replace function in your word processing software. And I take a First Amendment approach to reading texts – I believe you have the right to read any way you want to. I also believe that everyone in the entire world has the right to tell you that your “Get thee to a ham sandwich” reading of Hamlet is utterly ridiculous.

But you know what? You don't have to listen to the entire world. If you find more meaning in “Get thee to a ham sandwich” than in “Get thee to a nunnery”, you can do that to Hamlet. Really. It's called fanfiction.

At its best, fanfiction is a glorious corrective, an enactment of what-might-have-been. “Get thee to a ham sandwich” is a flippant example, but there are countless examples of people rewriting texts that spoke to them, and making them speak better. Star Trek fan who wishes TOS had more women in it? Gender-flip Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Twilight fan unhappy with its total queer erasure? Make a Jakeward slashvid. Rationalist Harry Potter fan? Rewrite the series with a rationalist Harry Stu.

Fanwork is awesome because it blurs or even erases the boundary between reading a text and writing it. There's no clearer demonstration of my belief that all readings are also writings.

However – if all readings are also writings, to what extent can an author be held accountable? Death of the author is a great concept, but in this world of internet discourse that's neither exactly speech or exactly writing, author accountability matters. And comments sections mean that, when it comes to blog posts and tweets and Facebook status updates, we can have access to the utterer's meaning as well as the utterance meaning.

This idea that what we're doing online is a whole new form of discourse still needs a lot of work, and I'm getting pretty excited about doing some of it.

On Writing

Historically, speech has been privileged over writing.

Plato said writing weakens the memory, ruining true reminiscence and true wisdom.

Socrates said writing is static, etiolated, defenseless.

Rousseau blamed writing for isolation, domination, and inequality.

Bergson said writing is dull, empty, dead.

They all thought spoken discourse was the site of real meaning. Speech is the genuine, immediate, meaningful expression of interiority – the true way of bridging the fundamental isolation of one human from another. Writing is exterior, passionless, hopelessly distanciated from both reader and writer.

(I'm cribbing all this from Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, btw, chapter 2: “Speaking and Writing”.)

We're living in an age where the distinction between speech and writing has been thoroughly blurred. (I dedicate all my Facebook chat logs to you, Derrida.) In fact, so much of our “spoken” discourse is now written or in some way recorded – on an almost daily basis I have conversations via text message and Facebook chat, and I don't even remember the last time I used my cell phone to call someone – that maybe it's a whole new category of discourse. People are discussing this, and I hope with a bit of time and effort on JSTOR and at the university library I can find a lot more stuff on the philosophy of internet-age discourse (recommendations are always welcome, friends!).

That said... writing is still my primary mode of discourse.

Writing isn't just the fact of putting words down on page/screen. It's a whole way of thinking. I write when my pen meets the paper and when my fingers strike the keyboard, but I also write when I construct passages of text in my head (whether they wind up actually written down or not).

In writing I can express myself without the impediments of physicality. In writing, no one expects me to decode all the mystifying subtleties of body language and facial expressions, and no one imputes to me implications I did not intend based on such subtleties that I was unknowingly expressing. In writing, no one will call me out for mumbling, or confuse me with an unexpected question, or look at me funny because I missed a social cue.

Writing is something I know. Writing is something I am comfortable with. Writing is something I feel I can control.

In writing I have time to pause, to reflect, to choose the right words. Writing slows me down, forces me to be self-critical – not, of course, that my written discourse is free of error and bullshit; but it's measurably more so than my spoken discourse. In effect, speaking merely voices my thoughts: writing shapes them.

Celebrating Your Favorite Sea Beastie

Happy Narwhalentine's Day, y'all!

NARWHALS!

Things To Read On The Internet

The last few weeks of term sent me a little wild. I hadn't managed my time too well, and I had a huge amount of work to pull off in not very much time. Because I have only two registers of discourse – dry understatement and wild exaggeration – I lamented my plight in grandiose terms, wishing only for some free time in which to sleep and watch TV to my heart's content.

Well, I got what I wished for, and in true Aesop fashion, it's biting me in the ass. I've had two weeks of hols so far, and I'm bored as shit.

I'm spending about half my time with some of the only friends who are still around, and as long as I'm with them – watching NewsRadio and Futurama, playing an assortment of zombie-related games, even doing their damn dishes – I feel okay. But then I go back to my ghostly quiet dorm building, and it gets to me. Part of me wants to laugh maniacally and turn cartwheels naked in the corridors, because I HAVE THE WHOLE PLACE TO MYSELF; part of me wants to just crawl into bed and hibernate until everyone's back, because I have the whole place to myself. This ambivalence is doing strange things to my head, and I'm afraid I might find myself doing something drastic to alleviate the boredom.

So, as always in times of crisis, I turn to my best friend: the internet.

Perhaps you too, dear reader, find that at two AM you are still awake, cursing the ceiling, wondering if that odd noise in the walls is a monster in your walk-in closet or a monster in someone else's walk-in closet, talking out loud to the spider in the corner. If so, may I recommend to you some of my favorite things to read on the internet of late.

Mark Watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Mark Does Stuff began a couple years ago as a little Buzznet community with a simple premise: Mark would read the Twilight books, chapter by chapter, and review them. What none of us knew going in was that the Twilight books would make Mark very, very angry. His reviews were funny, they were furious, and they were heartbreaking, pouring out the bitter memories of his abusive childhood.

Then Mark read Harry Potter, and we learned that the only thing better than angry Mark was squeeing fanperson Mark. Now there's a whole Mark Does Stuff community, based around Mark's chapter-by-chapter reviews of books and episode-by-episode reviews of TV shows. He's done a ton of stuff, including Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, The Hunger Games, His Dark Materials, and A Song of Ice and Fire, but at the moment he's reading Lord of the Rings and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The hook is, he's never been exposed to either and has no idea what he's in for. He makes wild predictions, he makes snap judgments as he goes along, and it's all incredibly entertaining for the fan of this stuff who knows what's in store for him.

Slacktivist's Deconstructions of Left Behind

Actually the whole Slacktiverse blogging community is a goldmine of interesting things to read, but the Left Behind deconstructions are the undisputed highlight. If you're unfamiliar with the Left Behind books, Fred Clark the Slacktivist is happy to explain to you precisely why they are the Worst Books in the World – in excruciating detail. He reads them with a fine-tooth comb, picking apart each agonizing page to demonstrate exactly why these evangelical bestsellers are (in his words) “evil, anti-Christian crap.”

Fred's been at it on a weekly basis for eight years now, and he's only just finished the second book. At this rate, his deconstructions of the full series should keep us entertained through 2067. If he can continue to be as viciously insightful and witty as he has been so far, I'm content to keep reading him for the next half-century. (The best part is, he's spawned some top-notch emulation of the obsessively-detailed-deconstruction format, especially from Ana Mardoll, who's doing a terrific job on both Twilight and Narnia.)

FerretBrain

Don't be fooled by the rather off-putting design. FerretBrain is a hell of a lot of fun. The “Random” button in the sidebar is your best friend. On more than one occasion, I've been up past three in the morning, hitting that button over and over, skipping past the articles that don't interest me (mostly the ones on videogames) and reading with fascination the ones that do. The FB crew review a lot of fantasy novels, but also movies, TV, comic books, theater, and sometimes just whatever is on their desks. The site's selling point is that the reviews are just so damn good. They're detailed, thought-provoking, concerned with combating -isms, unafraid to express very strong opinions, and quite likely to challenge some of your warmest and fuzziest feelings about the things you love.

Some of my very favorite FerretBrain articles:

Harry Potter and the Doctrine of the Calvinists is possibly the crowning achievement of an extensive series of highly critical and really very excellent articles on the most popular books in the world. In fact, why don't you read them all.

Don't They Shine Beautiful? is a very long and absolutely brilliant essay on Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (as filmed by Tim Burton). You'll probably need to be a bit of a musical theater geek to appreciate this one, but if you are it's well worth reading.

It's Not Easy Being Green reviews a book I've never heard of and do not intend to read, and by “reviews” I mean “completely shreds”. Actually any article categorized as “Minority Warrior” or “Fantasy Rape Watch” is likely to be golden.

Gosh, just writing this up has made me feel a lot better. See you sometime in 2012 – assuming I ever manage to extricate myself from TV Tropes...

AlterNet's Ableist Language

Last week I sent AlterNet the following email:

I'm a big fan of Alternet and its sharp analysis of political issues. I really do appreciate the work you do here.

However, I'm troubled by the prevalence of ableist language on this website. Nearly ever article about the GOP seems to be headlined with the word "crazy", "lunatic", or equivalent. Conflating political extremism with mental illness is a trope that does a great disservice to people with mental illnesses, as well as failing to offer any meaningful critique of political extremists (who are often being irrational, greedy, mendacious, hate-mongering, and many other more accurate adjectives than "crazy"). Last year the (now sadly defunct) website FWD (feminists with disabilities) had a great post explaining this: http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/05/28/ableist-word-profile-crazy-to-describe-political-viewpoints-or-positions/

I hope you'll consider eliminating, or at least scaling back, your usage of ableist language in your headlines, because this is a great website but it really does bother me to see an otherwise progressive site perpetuate such a harmful and regressive trope.

Keep up the good work!

I was referring to headlines like Confessions of a GOP Operative Who Left “the Cult”: 3 Things Everyone Must Know About the Lunatic-Filled Republican Party and 6 Crazy, Unconstitutional Laws Right-Wingers Are Blowing Your Money On. Search AlterNet for terms like “crazy” and “lunatic” and you'll see they've been doing this for years. It upsets me, and I finally decided it was past time to bloody well call them out on it.

The only reply I got was a generic thanks-for-your-feedback auto-response, so I don't know if my email was read or taken on board... but the AlterNet front page does not currently bear a single headline using the words “crazy”, “lunatic”, or “insane”.

I intend to keep an eye on this, of course. I imagine others have called out AlterNet on the same issue, and I'll be extremely chuffed if they've changed their policy. If you do see another headline there using ableist language, I urge you to email them about it (feel free to copy-paste all or part of my email).

A Love Letter To Shakesville

Dear Shakesville:

Thank you for being there.

Thank you for being the only truly safe space I've found on the internet. Some protest your comment policy as draconian, but I am profoundly grateful for a place online where I don't have to face down the exhausting hatefulness of humanity's internet commenting practices.

Thank you for your intersectionality. I love that you don't fall prey to the ghettoized activism and intersectionfail of so many other feminist and social justice websites.

Thank you for teaspoons. I love that you combine incisive pop-culture commentary with active ways for people to engage with politics and fight injustice.

Thank you for the Shaxicon. The rich, joyous idiosyncrasies of Shaker language have seeped into my meat-life; the funny looks and the laughter are distributed evenly.

Thank you for your general tone. I don't know how it is that you manage to write so urgently about horrible people doing horrible things and yet still leave me feeling optimistic, but you do.

Thank you, all Shakesville contributors. Thank you Deeky and Misty and Kate and Paul and everyone else who works so hard to make Shakesville the acecakes place it is.

Thank you, Liss. Thank you, and thank you, and thank you again. There will never be enough thank-yous. You are an awesome human being, and I think I could legitimately argue that you are the most important person on the internet. Your sense of humor, your passion, and your uncompromising dedication to justice make you a true inspiration.

I love you, Shakesville. Never change.

"Hitler shud hav finished em"

I wasn't going to write this post.

I was going to write a nice jolly light-hearted piece on my Top Five Films Of 2011 So Far. Maybe I still will.

But I just checked my Facebook news feed, and I saw that my friend S had linked to an article entitled “Israel killed 1,335 Palestinian kids”. One of S's friends, whom I do not know, commented on her link:

“Adolf Hitler shud hav jus finished em”.

S “liked” this comment.

S, I should point out, is not really a friend. We were at school together about twelve years ago, and it's been a decade since we were last on the same continent, let alone saw each other.

But it's still weird to see a sentiment like this coming from somebody I know.

We all know that the anonymity of the internet fosters the worst in people. We've all seen horrible, awful, hateful words on message boards and comment sections. The anonymity of these words makes it almost as easy to dismiss them as it is to write them.

When it's somebody you know, though; when it's somebody you used to play sports with, somebody with whom you once spent a happy afternoon exploring for secret pathways in the backyard – well, that's an altogether different experience.

Many of Israel's actions have been and are appalling, and the West's willingness to let them slide is even more egregious. Much as I loved the time I spent in Israel, whitewashing Israel's atrocities is mendacious and wicked. But... “Hitler shud hav finished em”?

Really, you're going there?

Maybe it's because I'm one of em who Hitler shud hav finished, but it seems to me you can be sickened at the thought of children being murdered without wishing 13 million people dead. In fact, it seems to me that, if you're sickened at the thought of children being murdered, wishing people dead (children included) is an unsustainable contradiction.

Like I said, I know the same sentiment is expressed daily all across the internet. Whoever you are, you can find a community of people online wishing for your death. I know I should be used to it. It's just that this time, it feels more personal.

Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, & Violence Against Women

[Newsgrape.]

On Tuesday, Feministing posted an article “On Charlie Sheen and Chris Brown”, which I think everyone should read. It's a cogent analysis of the role played by racism in the internet and media response to Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, and their respective violence against women.

Brown tweeted his frustration at still being asked questions about his violence against Rihanna two years on, pointing out that nobody is taking Sheen to task for his history of violence. Obviously it is not okay for Brown to be “over” it, and we need to keep questioning any public figure who has done such a terrible thing – but, in the second half of his tweet, he kind of has a point.

When I wrote about Charlie Sheen, back at the beginning of all the ugliness that has gone down in his current media blitz, I (somewhat naively) considered him solely from the perspective of his TV role, and I (very naively) concluded that his role on Two and a Half Men makes the snarky denizens of the internet leery because of its uncomfortable resemblance to real life. Obviously, this has proved not to be the case: cyberspace will forgive any sin if it finds something funny. Sheen's twitter account garnered a million followers quicker than anyone had before; he has been fawned over by numerous talk show hosts who are happy to avoid difficult topics as long as he talks about tiger blood and goddesses and winning; and many of the things he has recently said became memes inescapable on the web. For the past month, we have all been talking about Charlie Sheen, but we have not been talking about his abuse of women.

The Feministing article does a good job of tracing the connection between racism and violence against women in the US back to times of slavery, and showing how the image of African-American men as aggressors against (usually white) women still pervades US culture. This is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon of intersectionality. Obviously violence against women is a feminist issue, but in this instance the cultural response is such an inextricable blend of misogyny and racism that we simply cannot divorce the two, and attempts to approach this sorry story as a purely [implied: white] women's issue are dishonest and counterproductive.

An astonishing number of people do not take systemic racism seriously. They deny its continued existence today, or they try to soften it by calling it “subconscious” or “latent”. But ours is a world where a TV executive can refuse to hire people of color for years, and nobody notices until he admits it out loud. How much more overt can it be?

Violence against women is not taken seriously either. We are told that feminism has achieved its aims, in the West at least, and we are “over-sensitive” to perceived instances of misogyny. But in the West a prestigious newspaper can still blame an 11-year-old for being gang-raped by dozens of men. How much more overt can it be?

The Charlie Sheen débâcle of the past month has been characterized by misogyny; with our treatment of Chris Brown for comparison, it's evident that racism also plays a part. A man of color with a history of violence against women appals us. A white man with a history of violence against women entertains and delights us. Everything about this phenomenon is shameful and sickening. We in the media and internet need to start showing a sense of responsibility. We need to start asking the uncomfortable questions and we need to stop perpetuating the same old systems of injustice. Social media and information/communication technology can be a powerful force, and we should be using them to do something worthwhile.

Fortunately, the life cycle of a meme in cyberspace occurs at warp speed. Already it seems the internet has tired of the great Sheenstravaganza of March 2011: tickets for Sheen's forthcoming tour have undersold, and we internauts have turned our derision and glee to newer phenomena. This has more to do with pop culture's infinitesimally short attention span, however, than it has to do with morality. On Newsgrape, my “Charlie Vs. Barney” post has more hits than anything else I've posted there, and I regret not using that pulling power to write something more responsible. Like everyone else who has written about Charlie Sheen without foregrounding his history of violence, I can only say: mea culpa. I'll try to do better next time.

Five Good Things

Cold, dark, joyless – I hate January. Since I left the tropics (OVER NINE JANUARYS AGO!), I have really struggled to enjoy anything that happens in between, like, October and April. This year, my January has had an additional layer of existential blah blanketing the customary winter blues, like a lasagna. A lasagna of misery. And the outside world – which, lest we forget, continues to do stuff independent of this little blog – hasn’t fared much better, what with the airport bombings and the shootings of politicians and the Andy Murray losing the Australian Open again.

Buuuut life goes on. Even when it feels like your life belongs on www.ultraslo.com, things are still happening: TV shows are airing new episodes, movies are being released, websites are being updated daily (daily). So, without further ado, here are Five Good Things that happened this January.

1. Black Swan gets released here

I think I covered this pretty extensively the other day; but really, I had been soooooooo OMG EXCITE for so many months, and usually that’s the road to disappoint. For once, my stratospheric expectations were not only met but surpassed.

2. Parks & Recreation returns to TV

Somewhere in between its lackluster first season and its replacement in NBC’s fall lineup by Outsourced, P&R (or, as it’s been rather charmingly nicknamed, P-Rex) became a critical darling, rivaled among sitcoms only by Community. I think that in my own abundant outpouring of love for Community I sort of forgot how good P-Rex’s second season was, but the two episodes of season three that have aired thus far reminded me what a comic powerhouse this show is. Episode two, “The Flu”, was particularly good – I had to keep rewinding it to catch jokes I’d missed through laughing so hard at other jokes.

3. This interview with Udo Kier

What a journalistic tour de force. Udo Kier, deliverer of maybe the greatest line of dialogue in cinema history, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is quite bananas. ‎"I cannot answer you, because it’s totally unknown to me what you just asked me, and also very boring"; “I knocked at [Pamela Anderson’s] trailer—which was enormous, as big as her breasts”; “you can put two grams of coke on top of the Bible, and you first take a line of coke and then you open the Bible. Because then you understand” – this interview is the gift that keeps on giving.

4. My original theme song for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia hits YouTube

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I subtly linked this video earlier in the month, but subtlety does not get you noticed in this shallow, celebrity-obsessed, screechy-tabloid-headline culture of ours. I’ll be honest, this obscenely catchy little ditty has not been getting the attention it so richly deserves, and to redress this gross injustice I may have to sully my hands by (yeesh) promoting it. Until I get round to that, however, repeatedly linking it to my readership of four will have to suffice.

5. John Shore launches ThruWay Christians

John Shore is great, and you should be reading his blog already if you have any interest in forward-thinking Christianity, LGBT rights, or interfaith dialogue. This month he surpassed himself by launching ThruWay Christians, a hugely exciting new online community for “Christians who find conservative/right-wing Christianity too oppressive and exclusionary, and progressive/liberal Christianity too theologically tenuous.” John has long been a voice of reason crying out in the reactionary wilderness of mainstream (US) Christianity, and now he’s taking his exceptional blend of faith and level-headedness to the next level by spearheading a movement toward the full acceptance of marginalized people by the religion whose major selling point is its supposed inclusivity. I truly believe that future historians of Christianity, as they shake their heads in disbelief at twenty-first-century Christian attitudes toward LGBT people, will look on John Shore as a towering figure of 2011’s church.