Miller_andrea
[Note: This post ushers in a new web-only series of interviews for St. Louis Magazine called "Online Conversations."]
Andrea Miller grew up sheltered, in a nice Methodist family in St. Charles, Mo. She majored in English, married young and found a job in social services, working with young girls who'd been removed from their parents because of abuse or neglect. Those girls rocked her world. So much of who they were was shaped by their environment -- down to the 10-year-old who’d been misdiagnosed with child-onset schizophrenia. Turned out she'd learned the behaviors -- the frantic monologues, the paranoid world view -- from a mother with schizophrenia. As soon as the staff stopped paying rapt attention to the child’s rants, her delusions melted away.
Miller now holds a Ph.D. in sociology from American University and directs the new Center for the Study of Human Rights at Webster University. She wound up specializing in the grayest area of all: human sexuality, that wild blend of nature with environment, experience, societal mores and random forces. -- Jeannette Cooperman, Staff Writer
What's the typical reaction when people find out someone's bisexual?
They either don't believe it or they feel deceived. If someone who's bisexual is dating someone of one gender and then switches to the other gender, people will feel tricked. And if a bisexual's dating someone of the opposite gender, so that they appear to be a straight couple, people get really mad. "Oh," they'll say, "you are pretending to be heterosexual so you can get these privileges heterosexuals get!"
We do have trouble with ambiguity, don't we? If I can't tell whether someone's male or female, I'm staring hard, trying to figure it out.
We all feel this need to figure out people's gender so we can interact with them appropriately. Of course, underneath that lies this other assumption that everyone's straight. What if it's a woman attracted to other women? Your comments will still be inappropriate.
What's it like to be someone who's constantly being assumed to be something she's not?
Like identity theft. You walk around in the world with people mistaking you. I also identify as bisexual, and I use my own experiences a lot. My husband knew I’d had same-sex experiences; we went to the same school! I thought, "Well, I'm not going to all of a sudden call myself straight." But because I have a partner who is male, and we’ve been married a long time, people accept me more easily. I didn't trick them. I got married and did what married people do.
How do your students react?
One called me a traitor. She came to my office, and we had this great, really open-minded discussion about gender -- and then she said, "I don’t know how much of this I can tell you, because you're a traitor." She believed I was a traitor to the lesbian community because I married. She didn't believe it was possible to be bisexual.
I've had gay friends insist bisexuality doesn't insist; they say it's just wishful thinking.
This is very common. People will say to me, "You have gone over to the side that gets all the privileges." We're up to, what? 1,147 privileges that married people get that non-married people don't.
Anybody else have a similar reaction?
Last semester in my "Bisexualities" class, a woman, married to a man and identifying herself as bisexual, wrote that for her, honesty meant talking not just about being bisexual but about her actual sexual behavior. Turned out she and her husband had decided not to be monogamous. She was very active in the St. Louis swinger community. And her honesty put her on the line more than mine does.
Why did she need to be so forthcoming? It's her private behavior, right? None of anybody's business?
To get other people in society to understand sexual identity, she thinks we are going to have to get to the point of being able to say out loud what we are doing.
As a society, are we still moving toward candor or heading back in the other direction?
Honesty’s been held up, of course, by abstinence education. We talk a lot about sexuality in our culture, through film and music and media -- yet you can't talk about it at school. The No Child Left Behind law said, "We are going to give you money only if you do abstinence education." Are schools going to take that money? Of course they are! Most of my students didn't learn about sexuality at home, either. When one of my students asked her dad what a vagina was, he was so uncomfortable, he pulled out a globe and pointed to China and said 'Here’s va-China.' It’s got to be confusing.
Confusion isn't prompting abstinence, though.
The age of first sexual intercourse, at least for straight people, is 16.1 for boys and 16.8 for girls. They are getting a lot of mixed signals. And we're blaming the kids instead of looking at what our religious communities and educational institutions could be doing to help them.
Still, surely we've made progress.
Oh, definitely. Homosexuality was only removed from the manual of psychiatric disorders in 1973, and look how much better it's understood now. What's still in the manual, though, is gender identity disorder. In some cases, they talk about it as a medical emergency.
What do you mean?
If a baby is born with mismatched sexual chromosomes or characteristics, or an adult feels trapped in the wrong body, the medical profession assumes this is a pathology that needs to be fixed.
But surely, especially with younger children, there are milder forms of gender-bending that could be absolutely normal?
Exactly. My 5-year-old boy is into Dora the Explorer. And when we went to get a new car seat, he picked out the bright pink one that said Princess. Now, I know why -- he really likes bright colors, and all the others were gray or brown. I said, "Your friends might comment," and he said, "Well, I'll just tell them I like pink." He's autistic, very high-functioning but also very literal! My younger son, Levi, who's 3 and can already see social consequences, is saying to Theo, "You can't get that, it's for girls!" and I'm saying, "Yes, you're right, Theo, pink's a great color." We get up to the cash register still having the debate, and the clerk's saying, "Are you guys getting this or not?"
The serious question is more extreme, though: whether to perform surgery on an intersexed newborn to give it more typical sexual characteristics.
Recent stats say 1 in every 2,000 children is born intersexed. I think that's low. The American Pediatric Association still recommends that surgery happen within 48 hours, but last I heard, the American Medical Association was moving to restrict those surgeries, delay them until a young person can consent. There are all kinds of ways to be intersexed: chromosomally, hormonally, with ambiguous genitalia …
What has made doctors rush to operate?
The late Dr. John Money, of Johns Hopkins Medical School, believed that if we can't teach children at a very young age if they are a boy or girl, that will just mess them up for life. Now, people who were under his care are writing books saying, "The surgery's what messed me up." And a lot have undergone treatment to undo it.
How do physicians decide which direction to take a baby with ambiguous genitalia?
Everything smaller than one inch is made into a clitoris; if it's an inch or bigger, you get to keep it. Isn't it laughable? One child was born with very small penis, so it was made into a clitoris, and now she has to insert a rod every day to keep it from closing. There are men in their forties who still can't urinate. And most of the time the surgeries don't do anything for the psychological definition of the self. You can make a body anything you want, but your mind has to buy into it.
Gender ambiguity makes people really nervous. But bisexuality, which is a different kind of fluidity, seems to have become almost cool.
At least among college-age students, I do see a shift. They're saying, "I'm not 'confused,' and I'm not 'ashamed.'" They refuse to label themselves. They'll say, "Yes, I'm with a girl right now, but maybe that will change." Bisexuals talk about traits they prefer; they're not concerned with anatomy. A lot of gay, lesbian, and straight people, too, have begun to realize there are a lot of ways to have sex.
Is bisexuality harder to understand for people whose own sexuality is very strong, and very clearly focused, than it is for people closer to the middle?
Oh, sometimes I think it's not even about biological drives. I think we are so into labeling that the label's even more important than how we really feel. Sexologists are starting to say that a lot of our sexual behavior isn't so much natural and instinct-driven as part of this culture our society has created. We know we're supposed to be pleasure-driven.
Hence all the Viagra ads?
Yes. We are very focused on men's penises. There's all this stuff out there about erectile dysfunction, and women can't even get birth control without a prescription! My students really believe men have an insatiable drive. Haven’t we gotten past that yet?
What frazzles your students?
Ethical, public-policy questions. They don't like abstinence-only education, but they don't want 14-year-olds having sex. I want to shift the question. Why is it all about having sexual intercourse? What are more fulfilling ways for girls or boys to be intimate, feel good, and have fun? We’ve got to reframe this debate -- because it's not getting us anywhere.
The old certainties, the rigid categories, have exploded. What's the fallout?
For me, the fallout's good: It leads to the idea Dr. Alfred Kinsey put forth back in 1948, that we all sit on a continuum. Most people aren't purely heterosexual or homosexual. We're comfortable talking about people as if they only fit into one of two boxes: male or female, heterosexual or homosexual. But if someone gives me his or her life history, I'm usually listening thinking, "There’s a lot of variation going on here."
