A History of Women, Gay People, and Gender-Diverse People in American Politics

Disclaimer

I have no credentials that suggest that you should believe anything I say here. I may also get facts wrong.

Early

Very, Very Early

In the beginning, there was order.

Very Early

Molecules formed! Our cousins, as entities driven by order. Gas formed!

Then, WHOA: Stars formed.

Life

Humans often divide orderly creatures along three lines: Life and Non-Life, Feeling Life versus Non-Feeling Life, and Human versus Non-Human.

There is the concept of a soul.

Competition for resources. This gets mega complicated, because of course it would!

Thingies Assemble Into Cells

I forget what the thingies are called. No, not organelles. They're called that once they are inside of a cell, performing a function. They were called something else before they did that. Proto-cells? Or were they just cells, and cells merged to become bigger, beefier cells?

I'm not going to look this up. Go ask someone else.

Sexual Differentiation

How do we feel about this, at this point? Is this plan going well? Should we reevaluate?

Just kidding, we don't get to pick.

Modern Humans

Humans are, importantly, the sweatiest animal.

Sike! it's not important for anything else in this document.

Okay, if we really wanted to, we could draw connections here. Our being the sweatiest animal allowed us to become persistence hunters in the African midday sun, and this affected our entire evolutionary trajectory, which affected our psychology and our eventual success with whatever we're doing now. But we have to draw a line somewhere for relevance.

Self-Domestication

We are the Golden Retriever Ape.

Review of the excellent book Survival of the Friendliest: https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/9/1/68/6104762

Modern Humans Assemble Into The First City

Priestess Enheduanna, The First Known Writer

"Who was the first writer to ever put down words? Not Homer, who penned the Iliad and the Odyssey around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Nor was it any other man. It was a woman. Not Sappho, who came 1,000 years later, but a high priestess and poet named Enheduanna of Mesopotamia. She was not only the world’s first author, but she wrote in the first person about goddesses, priestesses, worshippers, mothers, workers, and rulers. She also wrote about sexual abuse."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiegoldsmith/2022/11/01/the-worlds-first-author-was-a-woman-not-a-man/?sh=34a560916e8e

https://www.history.com/news/the-earliest-known-author-was-a-woman-from-mesopotamia

https://localhistories.org/a-timeline-of-women-writers/

The Usurping

The Transition of Power from the Goddess to the God, and from the Household to the Parliament.

Thank Yous

In chronological order:

Thank you to my mother, for making me, and for being clever with language and helping me fall in love with language.

Thank you to Pastor Steve Haines of First Methodist Church in Greensboro, NC., for attending to my spiritual upbringing.

Thank you to Chris Johnson, who was my professor for a course on Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. His course introduced me to the concept of emergent systems, which has had a major impact on the way I see the world.

Thank you to a friend who remains anonymous. She introduced me to new ways of thinking on history, faith, and politics, and helped fill many gaps in my understanding.