The gender badge vs. the gender vadge

Dear Females,

I apologize for travelling along the third wave feminism road.  It was the road called equality and it seemed to logically follow the road my mother and grandmothers fought for. I apologize for calling it equality and erasing liberation from the nomenclature of feminism.

I apologize for believing that in the 21st century women had a right to choose to sell her body. I apologize for thinking porn helped further sexual liberation. I apologize for thinking pro-choice = reproductive justice.

I apologize for thinking that women and men were wired differently and I somehow won the genetic lottery by earning the right to call myself a mathematician and an engineer despite being born female.

The road to my enlightenment was long and twisted and admittedly, privileged.

My privilege came from a mother determined to not award gender badges to her daughters. A mother who allowed me firetrucks and my sister cowboy regalia. A mother who encouraged a love of learning and a love of math. And a father who 'allowed' this freedom and even (gasp) changed our diapers in the late 1960s. A father who 'allowed' my mother to be the primary wage earner and he even cooked our family meals during the week and took us to lessons and medical appointments. There were no gender badges awarded in my family growing up. And when my sister came out as a lesbian in her early twenties in the early 90s, my parents embraced her despite their catholic upbringing and a church determined to erase her reality.And we did not seek to give her the gender badge of butch dyke or femme lesbian. She simply loved women and we accepted that without needing to label her beyond lesbian.

And now my privilege is being slammed because I also have the audacity of having a gender vadge. I am a female that calls herself a woman and I happen to also have a vagina. The fact that my parents tried so hard to eliminate the gender badge from my life - as did other freethinking parents who saw the harms of boxing in their children into prescriptive gendered roles while children - is now considered irrelevant and even dangerous to third wave feminists. Flaunting the fact that I have a vagina and others born with one need liberation is deemed cissexist. Saying that someone born with a vagina is more likely to be penetrated in a violent act whether for money or torture is called sex-phobic. Telling people that I want access to female only space is pronounced transphobic.

The only thing that seems to be relevant today is what gender badge you feel like you have and the quicker you identify your gender then the quicker your "problem" can be solved if you don't have the right body parts to match. The solution ultimately  involves lots of drugs and genital mutilation surgery. But, if caught early enough, the gender badge will be awarded.

My vagina is not gendered, it is female. My brain is not gendered, it is human. My feminism is not gendered, it is about females. My privilege is not gendered it is about socio-economic class and education and race.

Ultimately I am sorry that it took me so long to wake up to our female born reality and what the true liberation of females entails. The road behind is only a couple of centuries old and I fear the road ahead is much steeper than it was before gender badges and gender vadges become priority #1 in First World Feminism.

The penance for my own third-wave feminism fiasco will be that for the remainder of my life I will cry every time I see another female shame another female for anything.

And I'm crying a lot these days.

Sincerely,

A 46 yo womens liberationist.

Blonde, blue-eyed and bullied

She was shiny brand new and red and gave me the ability to get around quicker.  This meant I could explore more since I could now get around faster.  A dream come true.  I didn't have that tricycle for long but there was a huge amount of emotion attached to my ownership of it.

This is not instagram, this is me in 1972

I don't recall riding very much before the 'incident' occurred.  I remember realizing that a tricycle was a bit of a rip-off as a mode of transportation.  Running using your legs could get you places faster but the tricycle was a slightly improved version of walking.  I don't remember any of my neighbourhood friends having tricycles so it wasn't a peer pressured acquisition.  I had probably seen trikes on Sesame Street and imagined a whole new world of exploration opening up to me so I pestered my parents for one.

My mother has maintained, as did her father before her, that as one ages there are certain memories of early childhood that take on a crystal clear quality to them and they start to come back to you as you age.  In the last few months I've had two very powerful ones return to me.  I have not sought out these memories.  They seemingly have been floating around in the nethersphere of my mind and after being poked at and prodded at by seemingly unconnected current events they decided to park in a neuron or two in my brain and literally crystallize.

The family story about my shiny red trike goes as follows:

"She sold her trike at the park so we never got her another bike after that. That taught her a lesson for selling her brand new bike for a dime no less!"

Despite my protestations when later informing them of the 'truth' (my bike was stolen) I don't think either of my parents have ever really believed my version of events.

Yesterday I was mulling over my recent entrance into the land of urban bicycling.  I thought back, with enormous gratitude, to my aunt giving me her old two wheeled bicycle when I was about 10.  For years my parents had held to their promise and my younger sister was finally on a two wheel and my aunt took great pity on me and gave me her clunky, old lady bike (my sister had a cool bike, or at least much cooler than the one gifted me).  I learned to ride on that bike and am enormously grateful to my aunt now for providing me with it. I now ride my current old lady bike with pride.  It's all about mobility and the ability to explore and this new found mode of urban exploration is a new world and I am excited about it.

At the end of this mulling I reflected back to when my trike was stolen.  And then it hit me.  The crystallization.  I recalled, for the first time as an adult, the big kid telling me not to tell anyone about the stolen trike:  "Or else".  While he was delivering this threat to me I could see in the distance his equally big friend who was wheeling away my trike from the fence in the park where I'd left it with the other kids bikes and trikes.  My trike was shiny and red so there was no doubt that it was mine. I watched the trike disappear with a sinking heart.  I could not even share with my friends. I felt enormous fear and the certainty that this big boy would indeed deliver on his threat if I told.

So, clever child and problem solver that I was, I concocted a tale that laid the blame squarely on me so that this threat could never be acted upon.  I also wasn't that devastated since I had had the trike long enough that my eye was already on the bigger goal of a speedy two wheeler.  My reasoning process could not have foreseen the long term consequence of this fictitious tale and I would go 5 or more years before my aunt took pity on me and gifted me her 'old lady' bike.  Long after we moved away from that neighbourhood I tried to tell my parents the story of the stealing but I don't once recall ever adding the bit about the friend bullying me.  I think part of the reason I 'hid' that bit was because my younger sister would have pounced on yet another reason to ridicule me for being a wimp.

The two older kids that stole my bike probably regarded me as a cute little rich kid whose parents could well afford to get their darling girl another trike.  I do know that they lived in the area so I pretty much avoided that park again.   I didn't want to be questioned or threatened again.

Be still my bleeding heart.

At four years of age I recall having a sense of wonderment and fulfillment when I escaped the confines of our modest home in order to explore our neighborhood. Alone.

The family story about these occasions involve me escaping my bedroom in the early mornings in order to galavant, unescorted, around my downtown Toronto 'hood (Coxwell and Danforth). One particularly notable occasion involves me using a screwdriver in order to pry open the lock my parents had put (in desperation) on my bedroom the front door. These early morning escapades must have scared the bejesus out of my parents. Not in a 2012 way though. This was 1971, in the era before mass publicized child abductions. Four year olds were accorded a lot more intelligence and street smarts back then.

I have no recollection of guile when performing these Houdini like efforts. What I recall, with pristine clarity, is the glorious feeling of freedom that I had to observe and marvel at the world around me. One particularly crystal clear memory from that time involves me staring at what I now know is a bleeding heart plant that was in a neighbour's backyard. I couldn't tell you now if I stared for a minute or an hour. A plant that grows pretty pink hearts. Kinda incredible isn't it? I still think so.

In fact, I can tell you that each and every bleeding heart plant that I have seen in the subsequent 40 years has brought a smile to my face due to the recollection of the joy and marvel I experienced as a four year old seeing it for the first time.

And now, when my heart is seemingly bleeding from the despairs and regrets that are searing through my middle age, I can turn to my four year old self and remember that I will always have the ability to view the world with marvel...as long as I 'escape' whatever is holding me back. And if I had the smarts to figure out how to do this at four years of age, I most certainly can do so at 44.

An only

In my lifetime I have seen the disappearance of the large family in the socio-economic landscape of North America.  We all know of them.  The families with 4 - 10+ children.  An old neighbour of mine, 10 years my senior, is the eldest of 14 children.  Both my parents came from small Irish 1940s-50s families...four children in dad's, six in mum's.  The largest families I know today have four children and they are anomalies.  Most families only have one or two children...sometimes three (gender 'triplets', as often as not).

In most modern North American families the parents decide when or if there will be other children.  The miracle of birth control has allowed this decision making to be easily enforced and the availability of safe access to abortion makes any errors in judgment or failures of birth control remedied effectively (if desired).

However in some families there are choices made, either by nature or nurture, that disrupt this parental decision making pattern.  I was raised in such a family and it is only quite recently that I have accepted this.  I had one sibling, a sister, for nearly forty years and then, she disowned us.

Seeing the starkness of that last paragraph brings a lump to my throat.  You know that saying, "You can choose your friends but not your family."  Well, my sister wised up to this about five years ago and got the hell out of her own personal Dodge which included the entirety of her blood relations - and all connections to Canada.  So although she did not choose her family, she claimed personal freedom by firing the lot of us and moving overseas.

I played some part in this and tried to own the whole thing, for many years. I only recently realized that as usual, I was overcompensating.  Trying to take blame on where blame was not due.  In fact, there is no blame to be had anywhere in all of this.  It is comforting to finally realize this.  In my small 1970s immigrant irish catholic family we were victims.  Each and every one of us. Victims mostly to a society that has changed with an alarming and ferocious speed since the dawn of the industrial era.

I admit to being overwhelmed by sadness at times about this loss.  I also admit to being angry that I am left to deal with aging parents on my own.  I find I have a grudging admiration for the tenacity it takes to follow through on this.  A tenacity that I feel, for myself, is best directed at other things.  Like staying off the smokes and exercising daily. 

Throughout the course of my life I have often been overwhelmed by feelings of being trapped.  As a single parent this was manifested quite magnificently.  Wisdom is now allowing me to see that the only thing that ever traps me completely is my own attitude and by blanketing myself with the feeling of being trapped I am unable to see anything to move forward towards.  Being trapped is a very safe way of being.  A comfort zone, if you will.

In order for me to loosen and start to remove the blanket that traps me I know I don't need to fire my family.  But I do need to acknowledge that I really am now an only child. And there is no-one and nothing to blame for it.  It just is.

Click pic to find source:  an excellent blog post about the
advantages of being and raising an only child.

Food Porn

Lunch time in a suburban Catholic school in the 1970s went something like this.  The bell rang for lunch time dismissal.  If you were in Grade 2 or younger you waited for an older sibling or a designated substitute or a parent (mother) to pick you up to take you home.  Or you waited for an older sibling or designated sub to take you to the gymnasium to eat your bagged lunch with your fellow 'bus kids' - of which there were only a couple of dozen in a school of a few hundred.  If you were in Grade 3 or older you were allowed to take yourself home or go to the gym yourself.

I attended a school such as this and I was a bus kid.  I was one of the very few children that had a mother that had paid employment (and possibly the only one whose mother made more $ than the father).  I was also the only child I knew that had a family that had public marital troubles in it's history (although god forbid I ever talked about that).

In grade 5 and 6 it started to become 'cool' for kids to stay for lunch rather than go home so I recall that we started staying in our classrooms for lunch.  This allowed me, an irish immigrant child, to gain further insight into the food choices of the mostly italian, portuguese and filipino families.  I would come home to my parents begging for things like nutella (on fresh italian bakery bread, OH MY).  And wagon wheels.  And pop tarts.  Their deli-meat based lunches smelled a lot different than my peanut butter and carrot (yes) sandwiches on brown whole wheat (cheap) bread.  My lunch treat was an apple and very occasionally a couple of (cheap) cookies.  I started baking at a very early age just so I could improve the contents of my bagged lunch.

Even today, the smell of the deli counter brings my mind directly back to those childhood lunchrooms.  And one of the proudest accomplishments of my parenting career is the fact that my daughter came home regularly during much of her elementary school years so she was able to experience a period of time that included a hot midday meal.  But she, like during my time, started wanting to stay with her friends in grade 6 and by grade 7 she was taking the subway downtown to an alternative middle school which ended her childhood hot lunch era.

One of my own guilty pleasures has been the provision of nutella for my daughter.  This was one item that never came into the household I grew up in and was regularly provided for my elementary school peers.  I wish I could also say that she also brought fresh homemade cookies throughout her childhood.  Let's just say that she too started baking in a quest to improve the contents of her bagged lunch.  After all, the apple doesn't stray too far from the tree :)