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Since I've been eating a vegan diet lately, I can't lick the egg off my face. I have to remove it by other means. Maybe Max and Marley will lick it off.
How did it get there? Well, yesterday I wrote a post about a proposed gays-only village in the Dutch city of Tilburg.
Turns out, the thing was a hoax.
But the fact that so many people--including yours truly--believed it shows us the degree of homo- and trans-phobia, even in a supposedly liberal country like the Netherlands.
The joke's perpetrators created it for that very reason. Who's responsible for the news that wasn't? The Roze Maandag foundation, which, among other things, organizes Pink Monday, held in Tilburg every summer. ("Roze Maandag" is Dutch for "Pink Monday".) Not surprisingly, they orchestrated the hoax for the very reasons I said it worked.
Dorothy Parker once said that in this country, we elect our practical jokes. I hope that the Dutch--or, for that matter, any other nation--don't erect physical structures based on hoaxes.
I have always had mixed feelings about high schools specifically for LGBT people. On one hand, such schools might shield students from bullying they might experience in other schools. On the other, segregation always turns the ones segregated into second-class citizens.
Now a developer wants to build a gays-only neighborhood in the Dutch city of Tilburg. Mayor Peter Noordanus has endorsed the idea.
I'd be curious to know how much support there is for this idea in the Dutch LGBT community--or across the Netherlands generally.
Proponents of the project point out that recently, there has been an increase in the amount of violence and oppression against LGBT people. That, in the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage and reputed to have some of the most gay-friendly laws and policies in the world.
Moreover, more than one-fifth of all gay people report that they don't feel safe in their own neighborhoods.
How can that be in the Netherlands?
Well, as in much of Europe, "Skinheads" and other hate groups have increased their membership. These home-grown terrorists blame gays, immigrants and others who are simply different from themselves for their society's ills--including their own inability to get a job.
Sound familiar?
Still, I don't see how any good can come of such a program. If anything, segregation sends the message to haters that it's OK to harass and brutalize those who already exprience oppression. That is what happened in this country between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.
And, if such a colony is constructed in a country like the Netherlands, what does it portend for LGBT people in other parts of the world?
I try to keep myself in the moment and to appreciate where I am.
Still, it's not hard to want to be on a bike in Leiden, Netherlands when I see this:
As of this writing, Argentina remains the nation with the most enlightened laws regarding gender identity. Essentially, any Argentinian 18 years or older can live in whatever gender he or she chooses. There are no prerequisites: no hormones, no surgery, not even a third-party recommendation or consent.
A year and eight months have passed since Argentina's ruling. Since then, the United Kingdom, Austria and Portugal have done away with the requirements for hormones, surgeries or other medical or psychiatric interventions in order to change the gender marker on a person's identification documents. A German court has ruled in favor of a similar policy.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Netherlands is about to join them. Like their European counterparts--and unlike Argentina--the Netherlands will require expert testimony attesting to the applicant's long-held conviction that he or she is of a gender different from the one to which he or she was assigned at birth. The Dutch will, like the other nations mentined, not require any medical, pharmacological or psychiatric procedures or treatments. One way in which the Dutch have parted company with those nations, though, is that a person has to be only 16 years old in order to make the changes.
I began my previous paragraph with "Perhaps not surprisingly" because, for one thing, the Netherlands was the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage. Perhaps even more relevant is the fact that in 1985, it was one of the first nations to pass legislation enabling transgender people to change their registered gender. In the ensuing quarter-century, the laws have lost some of their edge as understanding of what it means to be transgendered has advanced in the medical, legal and academic communities as well as among the general public. So, apparently, the Dutch figured it was time to make the changes to reflect that knowledge as well as their changing understanding of human rights laws.
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