In this study, I was asked to create a protest song/poem reading to address issues occurring around the world. I was instructed to research my own personal choice of topic for this poem. I wrote my own piano melody in order to compensate for enhancing the feelings and emotions in it. This poem researches the various problems with how people judge homosexuality and gender identity. That within both of these categories, I personally believe they are caused by how people identify themselves. There is plenty of controversy about how to define and explain what being a transgendered or homosexual means. And that there are people who believe that they are misguided and confused because they believe that opposing a “natural order” is inhuman and needs to be cleansed. I access these ideas in my song and put myself in the perspective of someone who acts on these beliefs. As an anti-homosexual, their only motive is to justify that their beliefs (opinions) against homosexuality has a real reason, when they are avoiding the simple and only right solution: acceptance. I do this just to see how obviously wrong it sounds. That opinions and beliefs are the cure to eradicate the cause for why people wish to love someone who they believe is different from them in identity, even if their gender is the same. A person born a certain way and identify as the opposite gender is still different from the person they choose to love, because they see themselves as that role fully. And regardless if they cannot reproduce or fit in with society, they are doing nothing wrong. It is as if we are forcing them to be “raped” by telling them it is better to be with a man if you are a woman and vice versa. In the world today, we know there are people who would go to a funeral of a man who was homosexual and call him the devil, and that he deserved to die. People will literally create laws in other countries completely stating that homosexuality and transsexualism is illegal, and you can be arrested and forcefully taken advantage of because they believe it is the cure. They commit suicide because they cannot believe they can go on living with people who judge them based gender. Intersex people are those born with ambiguous genitalia, meaning you are not physically just a male or female. When intersex people are “fixed” they decide that you are a certain gender and doctors literally mutilate infants and determine they are a certain gender based on what they believe is more physically fitting. Then that person grows up and wants to be the gender they were not given and was raised to believe they were something they actually weren’t. Intersex people have just the same psychological influence as a transgendered person and homosexual because they all want to be recognized by people a certain way. And saying they are in-equal and that someone deserves treatment over the other, or that it is their fault and choice, is wrong.
Poem: The Only Difference is You
Full original piano piece I developed:
The only Difference is You
Order is just another name to call practice.
In all the ways we speak, we practice not what we preach,
But by what we claim is order.
Organize, categorize, mobilize
Our ideas
Our beliefs
Our motives
But lest we remember our progress,
We forget what impacts we make
On those all around us.
Hide the eggs and tell them to go looking
So that in the end they can be rewarded.
By showering them with love.
But deny them the privilege to enjoy it.
Raise a child under the dictatorship of your order
To keep them healthy but closed to learning
To accept what they are made with
Not who they think they are
Tell them what to see.
Where to look for the answers.
And you believe there is no disorder in their indifference
Because your solution is that a person can be fixed
If we decide our cure is our opinions
So combine your morals with your actions
Combine your research and your commitment to do good
And tell a man he is not a man
Because of what he shows
Tell him that there is a way to love yourself
Tell him that there is a world of opportunity
Regardless if you were born as something opposite
Of who you are
You were born mishappend
So we fixed you.
You are a woman
So we raped you.
You are misguided
So we teach you
You are confused
So we disagree with you
But remember what you say is because of your order
Because your words turn to opinion
They turn into the sirens that mute all the screaming
When you realize he cannot awake from his dreaming
Asleep he dreamt of awaking from his past
When those voices told him to love because of how you are created
When the creation was based on the order
Of what makes someone one thing or the other.
Is a man a man because he can use you
Or is he a man because he can commit to you
Is a man a man because he can please you
Or is he a man because he can love you.
Tell him there is a way to love himself— because he loves others
Tell him there is a world of opportunity— because he designs it on his own.
Regardless if you evolved from something
Opposite of who you are.
If there is a difference
Tell yourself who to compare to.
Look around you and tell me they are all the same.
Only because they are nothing like each other.
So when you decide they are confused because of their choices
You can realize the cure was acceptance.
You can decide you believe your love is worth it.
You can decide because you believe you are the same.
Even if you believed you were made
As if you were perfect.
