An Obadiah Slope column
Late night Marr: A lively interview on ABC Radio’s Late Night Live, now helmed by David Marr, opened up fascinating questions on sexuality and self-responsibility. Marr interviewed Paul Kane, an Australian-philic American poet who is an emeritus professor at Vassar College. James Baldwin, the chronicler of the black experience as a novelist and essayist, was born 100 years ago this week in Harlem.
“How did he see himself sexually? What did he see his nature to be?” Marr asks Kane after the interview had traced how a writer in the 1960s was never going to be radical enough for the left.
“Well, of course, he knew early on that he was gay,” Kane responded. “He wouldn’t have used that word. Of course, the word back then would’ve been queer, but he also was more bisexual really, or as he put it, androgynous. And he would use that term because he felt that everybody was actually at heart, androgynous. It was just a different mixture, male, female. So he really never liked to be categorised or put in any kind of pigeonhole, so he wouldn’t accept the sort of gay or homosexual terminology if he could find another way to present it.”
Listening to this caused Obadiah to recall a conversation with a minister with experience of the gay community. I have never met a guy who has never experienced same-sex attraction.” In other words, he agrees with Baldwin that all of us, certainly males, have a fluid sexuality.
To Obadiah, that is not a radical statement; it simply speaks of the potential in all of us. Feel free to disagree.
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Sanctification: Marr asks about something in the essay Kane wrote in the Australian Book Review to celebrate the Baldwin centenary. “You quote an expression of his, which I don’t really understand. He’s calling for the renovation of the self. What does that mean?”
Demonstrating a depth of knowledge of Baldwin’s work, Kane said “He says in one of his essays, actually the wonderful essay, stranger in the Village, he says, at the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And that coming to terms is the renovation of the self to say, okay, I own this and I have to act on the basis of it. He had a tremendous optimism in the capacity for some people to change, and that’s what he was aiming for in his writing. So the renovation there I think is a kind of deepening and an expansion of understanding.”
Marr responded, “It strikes me as profoundly Christian.”
And he is right. And Kane adds.
“Yes, yes. I mean, he was done with the church, but in the writing and in the eloquence and in the call for compassion and really love, that’s Christian.”
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A possibly dangerous thought: the discussion of the sex of Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who broke the nose of Angela Carini of Italy in an Olympic boxing match, leads Obadiah to an intriguing thought. The text many commenters suggest to tell a man from a woman is their chromosomal identity. XY for male, XX for female, acknowledging a small number of people with XXY.
But Khelif was identified as female at birth, presumably because of sex characteristics. We don’t normally do a chromosome test on a baby.
So in Bible times, someone like Khelif, brought up as a girl, depending on their precise intersex condition with a vagina, would have lived the life of an infertile woman.
At the very least, someone finding out as an adult that their sex has been misassigned deserves compassion and sympathy and to be spoken about in a way that reflects that.
This is not to say that the sex of a human being can change. Or that Khelif should box women. (although those saying Khelif has an unfair advantage should note that Khelif has lost lots of matches against women, and we don’t know the relevant testosterone measures which may not have been tested)
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Tribunal notes: Jereth Kok, the doctor suspended for his words uttered online, has had his week before the VCAT (Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal). Details of his appearance are in The Other Cheek story: Inside the Jereth Kok hearing – the doctor was suspended for conservative online comments.
Eternity, the newspaper/website previously edited by Obadiah, apparently featured with Kok grilled over his piece “a medical perspective on transgender” https://www.eternitynews.com.au/archive/a-medical-perspective-on-transgender/.
In that piece, Kok compared supporting a transgender person’s belief to affirming the false thinking that an anorexic person might have regarding themselves as fat or worthless. He was asked by the Medical board’s barrister whether it was demeaning to say that someone with gender incongruity has a mental illness like anorexia and OCD.
Kok replied, “no, not unless you think things like anorexia and OCD are moral flaws/deficits. Which they are not.” Adding later that mental health conditions should not be stigmatised.
It will be some weeks before the results of Jereth Kok and the Medical board’s tussle at VCAT gets announced.