An open letter to a Northeast Avalon Times columnist

Dear Ms. McGrath,

I believe what you were trying to write about in your January 2015 Column in The Northeast Avalon Times is gender and the harms that gender causes in our society. It's a pity that you obfuscated this very relevant topic with your thinly veiled hatred against girls/women with a particular hair colour and eye colour.

As someone who is blonde (and blue eyed) and has raised a blonde (and blue eyed) daughter I would like to point out a few inaccuracies in your article.

First of all, I am still blonde and I'm 47. Yes it did get darker and now it has grey throughout but I did not 'resort' to artificial products to 'restore' my natural hair colour. And neither has my now 20 yo daughter.

Secondly, and I know I can't speak for all blonde blue eyed women BUT my own personal glory was found by completing not one but two degrees, the first one majoring in Mathematics and minoring in Computer Science and the second a graduate degree in Engineering. I've got other glories lying around too and none of them have to do with the colour of my hair and/or eyes. My 20 yo daughter is currently accumulating her own set of glories that (shock!) also have nothing to do with her hair or eye colour. She is in her third year double majoring in International Development and Economics and is on the Dean's honour list. She is going to India on a placement in May. She backpacked Europe last summer. She volunteers. She is in the Student Leadership program. And (another shock) she wore pink as a child, as I did. I myself was not into the whole princess/doll scene but, alas, she was. But she also liked books. And interactive games. And swimming.

Thirdly, your attempt to determine whether me, my daughter, and others of our ilk are repulsive is, in a word, repulsive. It is also repulsive that you question how you would have treated your own daughter if she herself was blonde and blue eyed. It is also repulsive that you compared blonde and blue eyed people to albino bugs. It is also repulsive that you are given a public forum to voice these repugnant views.

Fourthly, apparently you know my Mother. How do you feel about her now, knowing that she raised not one but two blonde and blue eyed girls? Is your opinion of her diminished or does it remain the same since she herself is not blonde? Does she get demerit points for occasional buying (or making) pink items of clothing for us? Or letting us see a princess movie? These items need to be clarified.

And lastly, and most importantly, you realize that hating people on sight might be indicative of needing to see a psychiatrist? It's called being a sociopath. Unfortunately the prognosis is not good for this type of ailment. Maybe, with encouragement, you'll get the help you need.

Sincerely,

Orla Hegarty BMath MASc

P.S. If you wanna read up on the whole gender issue thing I'd recommend Gender Hurts by Dr. Sheila Jeffreys. It's available, for free, in our provincial library system.

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.

Pondering on the Playa

She was fully clothed but wearing an object strapped around her hips and it jiggled towards me as I sat on the Playa watching her walk towards me.

I had once briefly worn such an object, years ago, courtesy of my drag-king performing lesbian sister. The sight of it made me leap up and run towards the young woman and grasp this familiar eerie-real-skin-feel toy and exclaim "aren't these great!". Impulsivity is a weakness with me, admittedly.

Her reaction was immediate and intense. 'She' was a she-he. A trans-man. She-he felt violated. Her-his pain was real. I empathetically responded albeit mystified.

In the drag-king lesbian community a flaccid strap-on is a prop worn under clothing in order to provide a bulge. When I wore it I enjoyed a playful small taste of what it would be like to have external sexual organs although without any sexual sensation. The young trans-man I met on the Playa last week felt that this object WAS her-his sexual organs despite the lack of any hard-wired neuro-connectivity.

She-he then admitted she-he was being a douche for walking around exposing her-his real-fake sexual organs.

Witnesses to this interaction were as perplexed as I was. Some of them hugged me as I proceeded to flashback to the terror I felt at the #radfemriseup conference where we received threats from people like her-him.

Later in the week a man dismissed me outright when I queried his statement regarding a two year old being transgendered. I asked him how was it possible that a toddler, years away from sexual reproduction, could feel or act as a gendered human. He literally walked away, frustrated that I could not understand the 'logic' of his claim regarding a two year old 'feeling' misgendered.

These two interactions made me realize how imperative it is to work towards eliminating the ever increasing the gender as a construct entrenchment in modern society. If we don't do so we risk, once again, the subjugating of females to mere objects of  sexual satisfaction or reproductive sows - as is it is still the case throughout much of our world.

Truth is
Beauty

Photo credit to
Trey 
Radcliffe