gender – Memphis Flyer

Memphis City Council member Edmund Ford Sr. said he did not understand gender identification in a statement issued late Friday meant to ease the bellicose insults and threats he issued at citizens during a meeting last week.

Ford berated Alex Hensley, an aide to Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, and George Boyington, who leads intergovernmental relations and special projects for Shelby County Assessor of Property Melvin Burgess.

Hensley listed “she/they” in her signature on a letter given to council members about an ordinance before them. In referencing the letter, Ford called the pronouns “so irrelevant” before sarcastically asking Hensley, “Who is she and they?” Hensley said, “Me … that’s a letter from me.” Ford did not continue the conversation.

Later in the meeting, Boyington came to Hensley’s defense. Ford invited him to speak only to “blow you out of the water back across the street” to the county adminstration building. Boyington called Ford’s behavior “unprofessional.”

The Shelby County Committee of the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP), said Ford’s actions were “bullying, trolling, and abusive” and called for action by other council members.

For his gender comments, Ford said the use of them on the letter was unfamiliar and the meant “no disrespect” to Hensley. However, it was clear the topic was not new to him as he accused Boyington Tuesday of wishing to speak about what Ford called “gender mess.”

As for his many other insults and threats, Ford said he’d only keep in mind suggestions to temper his remarks.

Here’s his statement in full:

“As the representative of District 6, I am well-known as a passionate advocate for my community. Admittedly, my passion, especially in my support or defense of my position, can sometimes be a bit too forceful. It has been suggested to me that my position on matters might be better received if my remarks were more tempered. I will keep this in mind in the future.

“It is with this understanding that in addressing the staffers, I could have been less harsh in my delivery and tone. Unfortunately, the Shelby County staffer presenting on the Unified Development Code ordinance received the brunt of my frustrations.

“In seeking clarification on who exactly authored the letter that was presented to the Council by the County, I asked the representative who was ‘she/they’ in the signature line. The term ‘they’ suggested to me that there was perhaps an additional author of the letter.

“Once the Shelby County representative clarified that she was both ‘she’ and ‘they,’ I supported her answer and right to specify her gender and pronouns without further inquiry.

“My time on the council has meant that I have gained knowledge and understanding on a variety of unfamiliar topics. The use of gender pronouns in the letter was unfamiliar to me so I had a lack of knowledge of this practice when I made the query. My asking about the use of ‘she/they’ had nothing to do with gender identity, because I had no familiarity with this as a means of self-identification.

“I now know about this practice and hope people understand that no disrespect toward the Shelby County representative’s gender identity was meant by my question.”

As becomes increasingly obvious, we are unmistakably in the middle of a sea change apropos relations between the sexes. That “we” clearly refers to the corridors of power in politics, media, entertainment, and elsewhere. And by the sexes, we mean something beyond the erstwhile binary sense of the word. It is obvious, in this polymorphing world, that a contemporary Noah would be hard put, in filling a lifesaving craft with representative survivors, to restrict himself to the ordinary one-and-one-makes-two.

There was a time when the mechanics of the existing sexual universe could be rendered by the old cartoon of a stone-age man using one hand to drag an unconscious female by the hair, while the other hand held the club that rendered her supine and the bully boy’s to dispose of, presumably as a guest, permanent or temporary, in his lair.

Crude as that old stock image was as a metaphor for primitive courtship, it bespoke an uncomfortable truth about the enduring algorithms, through stage after stage of social evolution and of gender and power.

Now all that is being called into question, and good riddance. The club — which is to say, the male dominance built into the prevailing social model — is being challenged with a vengeance. Maia and Isis are reincarnated as Wonder Woman, who is no man’s tool and won’t be dragged anywhere. The Playboy Philosophy has gone to its reward. The reversals of fortune that have seen Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Charlie Rose, and seemingly countless others purged from their positions of acceptability have been quick and presumably irrevocable.

The parameters of the emerging new order are indistinct, as yet. The old order will no doubt reassert itself to some degree. The giddiness felt by some will doubtless subside. The boundaries between healthy sexual interplay (flirting, hooking up, etc.) and sexual harassment are in flux and are being redefined. And the challenge now is to reform and redefine stable and just forms of behavior. The boys club is being deconstructed.

This is a revolution that won’t be accomplished by elaborate blueprints nor by elites with specialized knowledge. It will be determined by men learning to behave and by women reporting bad behavior.

The only “guidance” the current moment of transformation has required is an old-fashioned one, summed up in the biblical phrase: “You shall know the truth, and it shall make you free.” The instigators of the powerful change now underway have, for the most part, been members of the American free press doing their jobs: afflicting the comfortable by exposing various male misbehavior and predation, previously behind facades of silence and acquiescence.

It is no accident that the deniers of this overdue revolution are represented by bona fide predators — in Washington as well as in Hollywood, New York, Alabama, and elsewhere. But it appears increasingly obvious that those who deny their acions and seek to sustain the dying male-dominated zeitgeist are doomed to be outed.