March 11, 2009

Do you listen?

Just what the hell is going on anyway?

A preacher was shot Sunday in the next state over. Late yesterday at least 10 people were killed in Alabama. This morning at least nine have been killed in a town just north of Stuttgart, Germany.

Are these events happening more frequently or is the media reporting them more frequently? I can see the pieces of a perfect storm gathering ... and I wonder.

When I was in high school, the "R" word had been thrown around (recession). Times were supposedly hard, but being from an oil-rich state, we didn't really notice. Most of the families I knew were white collar ... and above it all. But I had several friends from junior high on whose families were not white collar, whose families were struggling. And, because my parents were so incredibly tight with money, I assumed we were struggling as well. After all, why else would my mother decide to make my clothes as I started junior high? And learn to cut hair using my sister's head? (And thank all you hold dear I was not the guinea pig for that little experiment. I had enough problems socializing in school without that burden to bear as well. In fact, one of my "nicknames" in high school was Supercuts as it was. *sigh*)

At any rate, I began wondering in high school about the difference between the very rich and the very poor. I paid attention in history classes, you see, and I tended to be more of a "big picture" thinker than paying attention to the tiny detail of exact dates.

Historically, as the numbers of the poorest rise and the wealth levels of the richest increase, the more likely there is to be bloodshed. The poor overthrow the rich (or attempt to) and try to either even things out, or just snag the riches for themselves.

We are rather greedy by nature it seems.

There's not been a serious length of history with the kind of middle class we have in the industrial/digital world now. There's no historical analog that I know of ... and of course, I only had history as a minor in college, so I could be missing something.

But I am beginning to wonder if these isolated violent rebellions are the consequence of a middle-class which now feels downtrodden. So many people have heard and internalized that "you can do anything, you can be anything" and they've taken it to heart. But what hasn't been internalized is that you have to work for these things, that they are not handed to you. And when these "entitlement folk" see someone born to a wealthier family or a celebrity and assume that "that person is lucky," that they just had it handed to them, that they don't deserve it ... the anger builds.

How many times have I heard, "she doesn't deserve what she has" ... "I worked hard all my life and life has shit on me. What did I do to deserve this when he has it so easy?

And if there is no release, if things worsen instead ... that anger has to erupt somehow.

Now, while everyone is tense about the economy, people are getting more and more angry. Some of it is well directed at jackasses like Madoff. Some of it has no focus.

And I'm afraid that there will be more and more of these tiny eruptions of violence, not just because of the economy, but because so many people feel that they are not heard. Their anger is not heard. Their fear is not heard. No one helps them.

From Columbine to Virginia Tech, that seems to be the clarion call. Someone hear me, pay attention to me, make me feel that you are listening and caring.

It chills me.

I remember having to sit next to Chris Caverns every six weeks in homeroom one year. He was a bit of a creepy kid and no one seemed to like him. After the third six weeks ... half way through the year, I finally decided to ask my teacher why in the bloody hell she kept putting me next to this creep. Particularly after he talked of blowing up a tree at the school with a couple of D cell batteries and some spare wires. (I told him that's not how bombs worked and the circuit wasn't really going anywhere. I think I even checked out a book on electricity to show him.)

"Because you listen to him. That's all he really wants, is someone to listen to him."

I often wonder what became of him. Did my listening in homeroom class help him enough to avoid his becoming one of these desperate shooters? Did he find other people to hear him?

Why aren't we listening more to each other? How do we slow down these bursts of violence?

I don't have the answers.

But I'm still willing to listen.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:44 AM | Comments (2) | Struggles | Stumble

March 7, 2009

Brakes Are Over-Rated

My father was ... is ... an alcoholic. So maybe that one tidbit will help you understand a little better my desire for my own set of wheels. After years of being forced to get into the car in the evenings with a drunk, I was ecstatic to be able to take myself places and not have to worry about Dad's condition ... or Mom's reluctance to leave the house for any reason.

So that rolling deathmobile may have represented freedom to me in a way a little bit bigger than it did to most teenagers.

Shortly after I moved out of the house ... actually, as soon as my mother discovered that I was planning on moving out of the house, she planned on divorcing dad.

At any rate, moving out, getting a set of wheels, meant a great deal to me.

But, of course, in the U.S. it generally takes more than a minimum wage job to make even the barest of livings. I was staying in an apartment complex with a roommate for $201 a month and we could barely make ends meet on our budget. Neither one of us went out clubbing -- cost too much in gas to go to clubs and we couldn't really afford the cover charges anyway. And, of course, I was paranoid about drinking and driving given my dad.

In the course of starting college and filling out financial aid forms, I discovered something about my family that completely shocked me. In 1986, my father filed a tax return just under six digits.

We had a hell of a lot more money than I'd been led to believe.

Now, in some ways, this was a good way to have been raised ... I wasn't a spoiled brat and I didn't expect to be given a lot of things like some of my friends. I didn't expect to have the latest and greatest popular stuff. The Swatch watch craze pretty much passed me by, as did a slew of other Name Brand Fads. And, I expected to work for the things I wanted.

But, I've also been led to believe ... just by the society I grew up in ... that when even an adult kid really needed something, something important, that you could rely on your parents to help you to the best of their abilities.

So, I was driving the rolling deathmobile to work one day, about a year after moving out. I worked at Bizmart, an office supply megastore (eventually bought out by the ever-evil OfficeMax).

I pulled up to a red light ... and my brake pedal went all the way to the floor. Nothing.

I slammed the car into neutral and prepared to yank the wheel into a curb to avoid entering the busy intersection. Luckily there was enough of the brake pads left that the combination of the brakes and neutral did stop me. (The emergency brake had never worked.)

By this point, my parents had been divorced for about a year and my father had agreed to help me with college as necessary and to repair the rolling deathmobile when it broke down. At this point, it had only broken down once and he'd been fairly good about getting it fixed.

I finished the drive to work gingerly, but without any further scares. Throwing the transmission into neutral seemed to be the key to getting enough brake power to stop reasonably. The trip home was a little more nerve-wracking, but no major incidents. I called my father and let him know the brakes had completely failed. It was Sunday night.

"Well, I can't do anything about that now."

"I know, Dad, but should I take it in to Pep Boys in the morning? My roommate can get me to work tomorrow, but I need the car back for classes Tuesday."

"Well ... I don't know."

"Dad! I have NO brakes!"

He sighed. "I'll look at it on Saturday."

I was shocked. I thought parents were supposed to be concerned about their children even after they moved out of the house. It's not like I was going to a private university and sucking the money out of him. It's not like I was driving a BMW and demanding that he pay the insurance and maintenance. I'd already gotten grants for my college tuition, so he wasn't having to pay for my schooling anymore. I was taking care of all of my own bills ... our town had no public transportation and walking was not an option -- everything was just too far away.

This was not a hole in the muffler that I could drive around for a week.

Brakes, I thought, were kind of important.

I got off the phone with Dad and was at a loss. My brain was going like 60, trying to figure out how to get out of the problem I was in.

And then, I remembered what I'd gotten in the mail just a day or two before.

My first credit card. $500 credit line for the college student in need. I got it for emergencies.

Brakes seemed like a necessity. Not having brakes seemed like an emergency.

I asked around, found a good mechanic -- NOT Pep Boys -- and paid the $120 repair bill with the shiny, new credit card.

I never asked Dad to repair the car again.

He didn't call me on Saturday to ask about the brakes.

He never did ask me about them.

Guess it didn't matter to him. After all, he's the one who bought the rolling deathmobile to begin with.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:31 AM | Comments (0) | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Struggles | Stumble

March 6, 2009

Rolling Deathmobile

My family was not rich and I had no pretensions growing up that we had money. We didn't have a pool, we didn't have a family room with a pool table or fooseball, and I didn't expect a car for my 16th birthday as many of my classmates did. After all, in the '80s, we didn't have the $500 for me to go to Washington, D.C. with the rest of the honors geeks or the $50 for the PSAT that could have gotten me a national merit scholarship, so I knew we didn't have a lot extra.

What I couldn't understand was that my parents really didn't seem to want me to have a job, either.

At any rate, I will admit to having more than a little bit of envy for my classmates who drove their second hand beaters to school ... and especially for the ones who drove their own BMWs, Porches, the Alfa Romero and the Lamborghini. But it was an idle kind of thing. I had no idea how I would ever manage a car of my own since I was so rarely allowed to take mom's car, couldn't work and my parents didn't have anything to spare.

So, I was trying to take some vicarious joy out of my mother's quest for a new car when her ancient and decrepit Delta 88 had lived far past its prime. I was completely stunned when Mom passed a book to me advising me how to pick a used car -- we were going to use the money from the sale of the Oldsmobile to buy me a car for my senior year of high school. Ecstatic, I threw myself into the task. We made little checklists of things to look for and examine and set out to various used car lots.

But, everytime I found something within the price range, the answer was the same -- "let your father check it out first. We have to wait for him."

After two months of this, I gave up. I'd get my hopes up over a cool car and be ready to drive it to a garage for a check-up only to be told again to wait for Dad ... and he never looked at any of these cars.

I thought maybe I'd get a surprise for my 18th birthday. Nope. Christmas? Again, no. I gave up completely.

Mom tried to bully me into going car shopping again, but I kept asking her what the point was and she, too, finally gave up.

I threw my after-school time into our drama production and forgot all about it (mostly). The day of our premiere, my grandparents and mom were beaming at me from the audience. A shy kid (despite the hyperactivity -- I'm just a mass of contradictions), my mother in particular was shocked and proud when I'd decided to pursue drama. But I was more than a little surprised when Mom and my grandparents dragged me out of the theatre as fast as they could after my performance, telling me I had to come outside NOW.

About a month early, my graduation present sat in the parking lot. A red Buick Skyhawk hatchback with mag wheels. Only 6 years old.

I was completely stunned. I really hadn't expected to get anything.

In retrospect, I would have preferred a nice pen set. You know, like the 5 other uninspired, generic pen sets I got for graduation.

My idea of a new car had been small, foreign and standard. My father's was small, American, automatic ... and red. Yes, the 18-year-old wanted something more practical and the 40-something wanted RED. And, as it turned out, he bought one of the worst vehicles on the lot.

First, the mechanics on the lot had not yet looked at the car ... it had just come onto the lot as a trade-in from the new car lot. Second, my father's idea of working on a car is to stick his lit cigarette face deep into the running engine and bang on things, so his examination was incredibly intense and thorough. Third, the car had a glass roof ... a "moon roof" that was an obvious home-job. I have never seen any project EVER use so much caulk. (It did, however, never leak from the roof, I will say that.)

Oblivious to most of this at the moment, I was ecstatic. My own wheels! Freedom!

The next day I took the car to a shop to get an evaluation of it. The mechanic walked back out white as a ghost and said, "I hope you didn't pay much for it."

The car had been in a serious accident which had broken the frame of the vehicle. It was welded back together underneath the driver's side door. The mechanic looked at me and said, "Don't ever get into even a fender-bender in this car. That weld could snap at any time and the car will crumple at that point ... right at the driver's seat. Don't even let anyone rear-end you."

I stared at him, horrified, looked back at the car and then up to the moon roof. He just bit his lip and nodded. He didn't need to say it. This car was a rolling deathmobile.

As a result, I was probably a far more careful driver than any of my peers, including my best friend Andy, who totaled out at least two cars in high school and the beginning of college.

Somehow, though, we nursed the car along for about two or three years before the repair bills were $200 every other month, rather negating the bonus of having a car with no car payments.

Highlights of the deathmobile were the time that Mom decided she knew "what was wrong with that car" -- she happened to be reading a book on auto repair ... I have NO idea why because she certainly wouldn't deign to stick her fingers in the engine. Coincidentally, the parts needed for this repair happened to be on sale at Pep Boys ....

Net result: Dad broke the timing chain in his efforts to fix a car that had been running just fine. The car wound up at Pep Boys for about three or four days while they repaired the car for me. However, when driving it on the way home, I took my foot off the accelerator for an approaching red light.

The car didn't slow.

It sped up.

Crap. I put my foot on the brake and it did slow to a stop. However, I had to ride the brake all the way home because the car continued acceleration regardless of whether or not I was pushing the accelerator. I called the shop the next day and complain, telling them they need to fix it. They hem and haw around, telling me they were nowhere near the fast idle choke and that they didn't break the car. I point out it wasn't doing that before they got hold of it. Yelling match ensues in which they think they can bully me because I'm a kid ... bad mistake.

I take the car back and they fix it.

Phone call, "Your car is ready, but I have to tell you that there's a potentially dangerous problem with the vehicle."

I'm thinking, yeah, the frame is probably cracking already.

"Three of the four engine bolts that hold the engine in the car are missing."

At this point I'm sure that they had the three frickin' bolts sitting in the mechanic's pocket because he was pissed that I made them fix the fast idle choke. Of course, they have the car ... and I don't have the bolts ... and there's lots of potholes on the way home. I tell them to fix the car and tell me when it's done again.

Two weeks later, the car is ready. They had to order the bolts. Mmmm-hmmm. I believe that. My father, on the other hand, is ecstatic because they only charged me $12.00 to fix the car -- no labor, just the cost of the bolts. He's now convinced these are the most honest mechanics in the world.

But my favourite story about the rolling deathmobile is when the brakes went out.

Well, really, I guess it's a story about my dad more than the car.

But I'll save that one for another day ... until then, if you see a red Buick Skyhawk on the road ... don't scare it ... it'll fall apart if you honk at it, shattering the inch thick glass roof and probably exploding, creating a crater the size of Detroit.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:22 PM | Comments (2) | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Struggles | Stumble

March 1, 2009

Everything is amazing - and nobody's happy

Via David Airey, via swissmiss. Seriously, listen to this ... give it a think:

He's got more than just a little point here. We can do absolutely amazing things today and it hasn't made us as a society any happier ... it's just made us demand more and demand that things work constantly and without interruption at the same time wanting services and products to be cheap. And fast, can't forget it has to be fast. We don't want to wait any more than we absolutely have to ...

And that's led to a lot of problems.

Take a dear friend of mine as an example. I'll call her "Donna." Donna owns her own small business, doing what she loves. Unlike most people, this means she has some flexibility in work hours, vacation time and so forth. It also means that she can't really take a sick day without serious consequences. So, when she started feeling badly, she put off going to the doctor ... not just because taking a sick day means losing a day's business completely (and trying to reschedule clients' missed appointments means working long, long hours before she feels 100% better) ... but because she also can't afford health insurance since she owns her own very small business.

She got quite ill with a staph infection, was forced to take some time off work and then got better slowly. And then had what she thought was a relapse. She could feel pressure in her head, just behind her left ear and the doctor told her there was nothing there. It built up and built up and still the doctor did nothing and insisted nothing was wrong.

The doctor did this partly because the symptoms she described didn't make sense and partly because the doctor assumed that without health insurance Donna would not want to run expensive tests (that the doctor was sure would all be pointless anyway). Obviously, Donna was just a whiner.

Let me tell you now, Donna's tolerance for pain rivals mine (remember I broke both bones in the lower half of my leg and I thought it was "just a sprain"?). A whiner and hypochondriac she ain't.

Two years go by. TWO YEARS. Constant pain, headaches, neckaches. It's all she can do to force herself to go to work and yet she also takes on a part-time job to try to help pay for all these pointless doctor visits.

How does this relate to our need to demand more, demand things work constantly without interruption, cheaply and fast?

Because we have become a culture of speed and results, we tend to only look at symptoms and not causes. The battery on your car went out? We'll just replace it. Why did it go out? Eh, who knows, just replace it and look it works. But then it goes out again a few months later. Eh, just replace it.

If you take the time to find out why it keeps going out, you will fix the car for a longer amount of time and probably save yourself a serious breakdown issue later on.

It turns out that because the doctors ... there were several over the course of the past two years, many of them specialists of one kind or another ... someone finally listened to everything she said. Instead of focusing on "my head hurts and it's debilitating," the doctor asked a series of questions and Donna gave out the same symptoms she'd been giving out but now thought couldn't be related since no other doctor had put them together. Each doctor she'd been to prolonged the diagnostic process because they only heard selected bits and tried to treat a couple of symptoms.

Had they really taken the time to look and listen to her, they'd have quickly discovered the discs in her neck were screwed up. (If I remember correctly, one is blown and another is bulging.) Bad discs in the neck are well-known to cause headaches. Just think about a time when you've had a lot of tension in your neck ... the muscles tighten and tighten and the pain eventually travels up to the head.

However the first doctor was positive that since she'd had a sinus infection which caused a headache once before, obviously that was the problem ... the fastest diagnosis based on symptom.

But that is so incredibly short-sighted.

Yes, we do live in incredible times where we can get from New York to California in a day when it used to take three or four months.

But we're so used to the speed now that I'm not sure we take the time to marvel at that fact instead of the fact that we're about to miss the mixer for our 20 year high school reunion. (Okay, so that's my dig at myself.) We're so caught up in the N O W ... that we forget the good things about waiting and about taking our time.

Sure, if I'm in a car wreck, I want the fastest ambulance to come and help me. But would I rather wait for the mechanic to truly fix my car ... or just getting it running so I can make it to work almost on time? Why should I waste materials getting battery after battery installed in my car? Doesn't it make more sense to discover that the alternator needs repair in order to keep the battery charged? Yes, it's more expensive to fix the alternator than to buy a single new battery. Yes, it will take more time than swinging by Auto Zone and snagging a new battery. But it will actually fix the problem instead of patching up the symptom.
(Yes, that's a simplistic car issue. Yes, it could be other things. Work with me here, you get the idea, right?)

This applies to so many things in our lives. Take some time today to marvel at what we can do. Just arriving at work is a marvel for many of us. And what we do for a living? Think about how awesome it is to use email to communicate with someone who used to be 90 days away from you.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:21 AM | Comments (1) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

December 9, 2008

Interesting Times

Tracy complained. Frequently. At least that's my recollection. She would go up to the teachers and complain about seating arrangements. Or a particular student being noisy. And the teacher would "take care of it."

I would go up to the teacher and complain and be told to "deal with it."

Hrm.

When I queried various teachers over the years about this phenomenon which seemed so vastly unfair to my little elementary school self, I was told things like:

"You're stronger than so-and-so."
"I put Chris next to you because you listen to him - and that keeps him quiet. He doesn't act up when he sits next to you."
"You're smart enough to do your work correctly even when you can't hear my lesson."

And, of course, So-and-so complains all the time - I do what she asks to shut her up.

In other words, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

So, I tried to be assertive and squeak. I was told to quit being a brat.

Hrm.

It has always seemed to me that there were kids, adults, co-workers who nearly always got their way ... and those who pretty much never did. And then the rest of us, of course, fell somewhere in between.

I found out years later that one of the kids who used to squeak enough to deserve an entire factory of WD-40 devoted to him, was given leeway because of "his family life." His mom was an alcoholic.

Interesting. Out of a group of four in elementary school, at least three of us had an alcoholic parent and I didn't see great exceptions made for us. Well, for some of us.

What scares me a great deal about the way the current economic bailouts are going is that I'm seeing the same damn pattern. I see businesses and individuals who made stupid decisions, who should have known better, who shouldn't have done such risky things ... getting bailed out.

And folks and businesses who tried to be responsible and do the right thing ... be passed over.

Of course, we're so screwed at this point that I certainly do not have the ability to filter through all of the information and make any kind of decision over who should and who should not be bailed out. After all, if the big three auto makers finally collapse, this country is going to be in a LOT of pain for quite a while. But maybe it needs to happen if the damn CEOs can't pare down their lifestyles. I don't know. Maybe someone else will come in and buy up one of those companies and be able to fix things with reasonable wages for all.

I do know that a lot of what's going on economically right has a hell of a lot to do with greed and wanting to avoid consequences. "Sure, let's extend credit aggressively. The more we extend, the more money we'll make off interest because you know these dumbasses will spend more than they can really afford. And then we'll up their interest rate AND their limit so they can buy more. They'll be paying us interest forever and we'll have a steady stream of income."

Except there's that nagging little detail ... if those "dumbasses" spend more than they can afford, won't they eventually NOT be able to make the payments?

Oh, no problem. They can use a different credit card to pay us.

Yeah. That'll work.

And of course, that's just a tiny piece of the current mess.

We're in a bad situation, no doubt. If we were ... if our government were to let every company take the consequences of their actions in order for them to learn the lessons they need to learn ... I don't think we'd be saying recession. I think we'd be saying the 2000s and 2010s were the time of the GigaDepression. Maybe TerraDepression.

On the personal level, however, it's disheartening at the very least to see these CEOs in their fancy cars and ridiculously expensive clothes asking for government cheese. It's not earning them any popularity with the populous.

And then I hear about the family with the autistic and blind son who had their house rebuilt by Extreme Makeover ... and are now in foreclosure ... Dad worked for the auto industry in Detroit ... laid off ... had to take out either a second mortgage or a new mortgage on the house after being laid off ... after the show had already been through ... after his property taxes went up by $1000.

From the extreme gratitude and hope generated by the show ... to slapped back down to "their place." What right do the masses have to be happy and to hope for a better future? That's for the chosen few.

Not every squeaky wheel gets their own WD-40 factory, it seems.

Too many individuals are slipping through the myriad of cracks opening up in our economy and society. And the cracks are opening up far wider and with more frequency than we can comprehend, much less handle.

And all of this? This is why "May you live in interesting times" is a terrible freaking curse.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:51 AM | Comments (3) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

November 3, 2008

More On The Pronoun Game

So, a while back, Lisa took me up on my post specifically about an episode of the TV show Bones, called "The He in the She." Her feeling, and the feeling of many folk in the trans community, is that the episode wasn't all that great - some would call it perpetrating stereotypes, some call it not enough discussion. Then, of course, I fell down on the blogging job again and have let the subject slip for a while.

It's back.

First, I'm going to intersperse Lisa's comment throughout this post because I think many folks don't really read the sparse comments here on older posts and I think this is an issue worth bringing to the front again. Second, since we're discussing gender and sex, we need a few quick working definitions. Please note that better and more detailed definitions exist - this is a working definition for the purposes of this post. Sex = your biological sex as reflected by your genitalia. Gender = a social construct of ideas defining how each sex should behave. (I.e., females like dolls and shopping and staying at home with the kids. Males like Tonka and cars and going to work every day and avoiding housework and the kids. Gender roles often are interpreted as stark stereotypes ... the reason some folks insist there are more genders than there are biological sexes is precisely because most people do not fit into these narrow stereotypes.) A fast definition of "cis" is someone whose biological sex and genders match within "normal" parameters. That is, a female might like cars, but also very much enjoys wearing dresses and make-up, etc. A cis male might enjoy cooking and spending time with his kids, but still exhibits primarily "male" behaviours and interests.
Think of it as a continuum instead of as a black and white - one end of the line is folks who are stereotypically "male" or "female" whose biological sex is male or female. And then the other end of the line being a stereotypical "male" who is biologically female and a stereotypical "female" who is a biological male. There's LOADS of room in between encompassing all the variations of human existence. But the end that tends to match sex and gender would be "cis" people and the end where sex and gender appear mismatched would be "trans" people.

Now, I think Lisa made some excellent points in her last comment and I needed some time to digest them. First:

Many cis people like to assert that they're confused about trans people's preferred pronouns, which gives them an opportunity to misgender trans people repeatedly. Asking them to use the proper pronouns is asking them to stop taking up that particular bit of space, because trans people do happen to be standing there and need breathing room as well. That's what my point about taking up space was about. I was thinking of Amanda Baggs' analogy about how people are like water when I wrote it.

This is interesting ... but I had to go look up Amanda Baggs' analogy to really get it:

people seemed to be a lot like water. Water spreads out to take up whatever space the container it is in allows it to take. People, also, seem to spread out in a similar way in terms of what actions they view as okay for them to be doing. And they rarely notice all the space they are taking up, until some person or event makes it clear to them. It just feels ‘natural’ to take up as much space as they’re allowed.

At first Amanda is talking about the portion of the Harry Potter books when Neville finally stands up to Harry and his friends and tries to make them play by the rules. Ron fusses that Neville was supposed to stand up to other people not them! Ron is essentially telling Neville to expand to fill the space somewhere else - and not to impede Ron, Harry and Hermoine's expansions. (We're getting back to the cis/trans and pronoun issue in a moment, hang on.)

Then, Amanda goes on to talk about Irit Shimrat's Call Me Crazy. A psychologist who reviewed Shimrat's book was at first offended and dismissive of Shimrat because she felt that her entire profession was being dismissed and belittled ... and then she realized that her "feeling of being discounted and unfairly stigmatized in this book parallels what Shimrat and her colleagues often felt as patients." Baggs goes on somewhat scathingly to protest that the psychologist's "hurt feelings" are in no way analogous to the experiences of "captivity, degradation and torture" which many psych patients are subjected to.

Now, here we can circle back to the cis/trans issues - and indeed, the core issue at stake in the episode of Bones as well.

Crap, I just used academic-speak, didn't I? I'm sorry. I get carried away when I analyze things. It won't happen again.

Anyhow, I think the situations are analogous and, in fact, very useful depending on the person having the revelation. Yes, there are several degrees of magnitude difference between the shrink realizing that there's a parallel and the psych patient being degraded and essentially tortured. But the right shrink getting that realization can make a huge difference. If they have that eureka! moment of epiphany, then change is possible. Has the shrink felt the exact same way? No, but then we're not actually comparing hurts here. We're talking about understanding.

It's the same when we talk about cis/trans issues. If a cis person continually fumbles with pronouns or worse, insists on using the wrong ones, they are like the water expanding to fill all the space at the expense of the other folk in the room. They're like Ron Weasley insisting that Neville should stand up to everyone except them.

Now here's the thing. To effect a long-lasting change in society, we need both the people who see the small steps - like this shrink who finally sees that psych patients are too often discounted even though her experience of hurt feelings is in now way similar to what Shimrat has been through - AND we also need people agitating that this doctor's epiphany is not good enough.

To bring it back to Bones, we need both episodes like that one which struggle with the topic ... AND we need the angry reaction from the trans community to cry out that it's not enough.

The first is a stepping stone ... the second is making sure we can't then step backwards onto our familiar ground, but that we must continue stepping forward.

ARGH. I've written far more than enough in the past hour and covered only one small portion of Lisa's comments (and the excellent post by Amanda Baggs as well). But, I think this is enough to digest for one post. More laterz ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:02 AM | Comments (2) | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Struggles | Stumble