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Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media. |
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WELCOME TO MY BLOG! I comment on things I am reading, thinking about, encountering in media, and spiritual issues. I hope you will find something interesting. PS. I love feedback... |
| The groundhog stood on his haunches and munched my kale obviously preferring it over chard, peas, beans, and tomatoes as he had to get past them to reach the kale. I don’t mind sharing my produce. In fact, it is flattering if someone likes it, but it was a groundhog. I don’t know that groundhog or his address or his kin, and he didn’t ask permission. I don’t even know if it is a male or female, though it is one huge groundhog making me suspect for no reason I can think of that it is male. Perhaps it has something to do with calling God Him all my life— the unknown is by default male. Meanwhile, I had decided my younger lovebird was female because s/he didn’t act like a male and now, at age three years and two months, he is acting male. There is no magic to understanding what is male or female, but I am attached by habit to these distinctions. In the case of the lovebirds, it has everything to do with reproduction. I think I am about to become grandmother to a flock of lovebird babies. When it comes to people though, we care. When I was a child delivering newspapers in winter wearing my brother’s leather bill-cap with earflaps and the leather jacket he had outgrown and a pair of his blue jeans, and a canvas sack hanging off my shoulder full of newspapers, strangers would call me sonny. I would feel indignant and correct them. It really mattered to me then, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be taken for a man now. Of course, no one could possibly mistake my curvy body for a man’s body. Still, I know it matters to people. I also know it is a social construct rather like time and race and ways of talking about the unknown and the heavens. We make these agreements and teach them to the next generation and encourage them to define their lives in the same way that we do. It seems to me we are going through a period of redefinition. Who knew that could happen? Some folks work to stop the change. They might as well stand in a field in Kansas holding their arms out to stop a tornado. Change is rolling on through. What if that groundhog would one day look at me and say I am female? I would simply say, okay. Thank you. Sorry for the mix-up. But if some person I know to be female says I am male or a male says I am female it goes against my socialization, it confuses where they fit into my world. If they change their name, my only struggle is to remember the new name, but I don’t find myself easily saying, okay, no problem when they change their sexual identity. It feels almost as if my identity is destabilized in some way, though I know perfectly well it is not. I remain who I am no matter what choice they make. Rational thinking pulls me through if I use it enough times- practice as it were. But, if I get careless and just go with my feelings, I am tempted to go stop that tornado. Back in the 1960s, we women decided we no longer wanted to distinguish ourselves as married or single and came up with "Ms." which is standard usage now. We have developed words, trans, fluid, bi, gender neutral, androgenous and more that have no pronoun, so, we struggle with pronouns. Now I find an occasional form asks me for my pronouns. I don’t like any of it. I don’t like people making assumptions about my body or identity at all, but I don’t like them asking either. I certainly don’t want to wake up to an awareness that I am different than I always thought I was. That would be simply too confusing and uncomfortable. I don’t know what I would do. But it is possible that I am different than I thought I was and that is probably the problem. I just hope that the people around me who seem just as confused about all of this as I am, will talk about it with curiosity and respect, and oh yes, I hope they will share their kale. |
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