We find another example of playing the culture’s logics against themselves in the early queer fight against AIDS in the face of government silence and national inaction. In march after march, protest after protest, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) activists asserted a new logic, “Silence = Death,” which became the clarion call of those who would turn away from queer suffering and ignore the death of gay citizens as convenient, natural, and deserved. In one powerful statement, film historian Vito Russo proclaims that, “[i]f I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from the fact that not enough rich, white heterosexual men have gotten AIDS for anybody to give a shit” (AIDS). Russo’s angry statement makes powerfully visible the perverse cultural logics that sent many AIDS victims to their deaths in the 1980s. His is an angered, inflamed critique—as well it should be, revealing the price that queers pay in a culture that refuses the confusion of identity and desire.

All human beings carry within themselves an ever-unfolding idea of who they are and what they are capable of achieving. The individual’s sense of self is not determined by chromosomal sex, genitalia, assigned birth sex, or initial gender role. Thus, the individual’s identity and capabilities cannot be circumscribed by what society deems to be masculine or feminine behavior. (625)

Following logically on such an assertion, the next declared gender right maintains that all people should have the “right to free expression of gender identity.” Given that, people should have the “right to secure and retain employment and to receive just compensation” regardless of gender identity. The series of interlocking “given thats” that follow result logically in assertions about the “right to control and change one’s own body,” the right to medical care, the right to marry and form committed relationships, and the right to bear and raise children. The clear and powerful document sustains its logical development from the first principle of the “right to define gender.” But that logos builds from something truly provocative, something truly queer: the right to define gender. The manifesto works initially from the principle that gender is not natural, and that it should not be a defining characteristic of identity; it is, rather, a mutable, changing, and changeable characteristic that should be subject to individual definition, not biological necessity. By subverting from the start one of the most pronounced and unquestioned assumptions of our culture—the naturalness of our gender—the “International Bill of Gender Rights” creates a counter-logic to gender norms, a counter-logic that questions notions based on normative assumptions about naturalized gender.