Dyssonance

Fourteen.

It’s the age at which most kids are aware of both their sexual orientation and gender identity.

It’s the age at which suddenly reparative therapy is behind one.

It is the age at which, in most cases, the brain has finished it’s internal development.

It is the number of years from the formation of the Second Continental Congress in 1775 to the Ratification of the current Constitution of the United States of America.

It is the number of night in a fortnight.

It is the age of Coming Into One’s Own.

It is the number of lines in a sonnet.

It’s the number of paintings that Peter Gabriel commissioned for an album. Black paintings.

It is the number of points that began the reshaping of Europe into what it is today (after a yet another war that was partially caused by those points.)

It is the atomic number of silicon.

It is, in years, almost the amount of time that it takes for Gender identity or expression to follow Sexual Orientation in anti-discrimination laws when they are enacted separately.

The time gets longer each day.

I’ve written a couple of different posts over the last two days while I relaxed and took some time for me, personally.

I called a gal out on a forum I follow for being a jerk — I’ll will eventually go there and have to deal with her, since she goaded a new gal into getting upset and flouncing.

I engaged in semi-friendly discourse with various anti trans people. This particular group, however, is trying to lay claim to the word transsexual, and has a personal issue with me.  I talk about them from time to time. The last comeback hurled at me was kinda sad.  I thought about pointing out that technically the person was incorrect, but the idea that they were using was just, well, to freaking hilarious and it took me a good hour to stop laughing about it.

For the record, I am not a big shot.  I am not all that important.  I am not someone of great significance.  I am just me.  Flawed, perhaps damaged, but still human and just another gal making her way in the world.

I am best one on one, or standing before a room, or when I write.  I prefer to write.  I’m going to try and do more of it, and try to work on my “voice” and my style a littlke bit — but I have no illusions that I’ll ever be a journalist or will, singlehandedly, create a massive change in the world.

I was asked a really good question, but in thinking about it, I am stumped.  Truly stumped, as I am not someone who runs around with particular preconceptions about what I’d like to see happen when it involves other people,  One of my faults — I can generally say what I suspect will happen, bnot usually what I would like to see — I[m too used to maintaining a distance and standing outside myself in that sense to really be able to get in and answer the question that was asked of me.

But, generally, I took it easy this weekend.  I didn’t push myself, I didn’t do much at all, really. I broke four nails.  My eye was nice and happy again today, as I suspected it would be, and it will be even better tomorrow.  I did grocery shopping today, and now have several crockpots purring away, turning chicken and pokr and beef into shredded versions of themselves that I will use as multiple bases for several dishes.  One will even be turned into filling for some pasta tubes which will then be baked.  Should take me about two hours to fill the whole dish with little tubes of stuffed pasta.

I’ll be having salmon tomorrow night.  Pork chops the night after. Meatloaf the night after that.  Simple fare, nothing fancy.

And at one point I sat down and read about the events unfolding in Maryland, where people were trying very hard to stop those damn trans people from being treated equally under the law.

You know what that *really* means, right?

It means putting in a punishment for those who do not treat trans people like everyone else.

In short, it means the ability to get redress for grievances.

Fired for being trans when all that matters, really, is that you were able to do the job?  That’s wrong.

Kicked out of your home for going full time?  That’s wrong.

The majority of places where there is a law doing that for sexual orientation do not have them for Trans folk.  Most of those still don’t have one for trans folk.

It’s fourteen and half years between the two, and its still growing.

Each day.

Every day.

Each day that passes, that average of 14.5 get’s longer. The two days that I took off and did stuff just for me, that time grew.

People often say that Trans rights are about 20 years behind gay rights.

I say that’s wrong.

They are 14.5 years behind gay rights. And that time gets longer with each day that passes.

Socially, here’s a quirk people don’t want to talk about in the whole rights for LGBT thing:

Transsexuals are not a problem. People understand us.  They think we are fine, whatever, weird but hey, some folks are weird.  They pity us. They talk smack about us behind our backs and say nice things to our faces and they have a marginal awareness about us but don’t really know what we are about.

They want us to look like women, though.

They are, like the gals I mentioned earlier, trying to force the world to be heteronormative.  This is the kind of thinking that leads to gays in Iran being forced to undergo sex changes.  Right next to the trans folk doing the same thing.  They have all kinds of reasons, but, in the end, it’s really just a bunch of women who don’t like what they think of as men saying they are anything like them.

Which to most of those people is pretty stupid, and strikes me as nothing really horrible.  Seriously.  They do that stuff because they need to do it,  It helps them cope with the things in their lives and the time of their transition and it’s perfectly fine.  I do the same thing when I criticize myself about my temper, or I fret a little too much over my overall appearance. It’s part of why I’m so damn lookist and a big chunk of why I think voice is so important.

Which is, ultimately, kinda unfair and not really all that reasonable about me.

Everyone has something they do.  That’s just theirs. Yeah, it’s bigotry, and yes it’s prejudice, but you know,  only they can unlearn that.  You can’t make them do so.  And why would you want to?  TO force them to suddenly accept such things is, ultimately, doing the same thing they do.

I say just let them be. Soon enough they will encounter another group like then that has a slightly different point of view and they two groups will engage in a meltdown.

I figure, right now, it’ll take about oh, fourteen years.

I was fourteen in 1979. That was a terrible year for me. I remember it well — pretty much everything after 11 is still readily recalled, even though I wish it wasn’t. That was the year I was pushed into things that made me hate being called smart.  That was the year that body had finally won the battle and I collapsed into myself.

That was the year that my issue with being cold sprang into full bloom instead of just the passing years where I simply had to avoid old air blowing on me.

That was the year when I had my future pulled out from under me.

That was the year I changed my mother’s understanding of me.

A lot can happen in fourteen years.

Sorry, fourteen and a half.

More than I really want to think about right now.

But, apparently, what can’t happen in that time is that people will “come back”.  That we “will get your chance”.

And it never ceases to amaze me how people can say that.  How people can justify letting people *starve* and *go jobless* and be forced to find some sort of strange way to make a living.

How people can justify a million people being left to be discriminated against.

In the end, when you corner them, they say it aloud. The reason.  And there is always a reason.  One thing behind all of it that logic and reason cannot touch.

They find it icky.

They think about showers.

They talk about bathrooms.

They piss and moan and they argue about something called modesty and they don’t even know that’s what they are talking about.

Did you know that most married couples never see each other on the toilet?

That we instill that modesty in our children by the time they are 7 — and usually earlier?

I watched someone ream another person recently because “trans hate” could only have existed in the last 100 years. Seriously.  They were trans themselves.

And I thought to myself wow.

THere is so much people don’t know, so much they don’t want to know.  So much they don’t care to know.

And yet, with  preschool, kindergarten, grade school and high school, they have 14 years of education.

Too bad they don’t add another 7.

It would make for a better world.  A more complicated one, but better.

And the number of years wouldn’t be 14…

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