Saturday, June 26, 2010

come back


Come back to me

please

I'll take care of you I swear I'll protect you from them if you come back to me

come back to me

COME BACK

Thursday, June 24, 2010

I'm really starting to like painting. A lot. I think I'll keep painting pictures. Charlie says he likes them.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

listen


Charlie

why

I didn't mean

I'm so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry

No God

only darkness

Monday, June 21, 2010

It's amazing how easy it is to spread black paint around. It's almost like the canvas wants to be black.

blood on my hands



Charlie

WHY DID I DO THIS TO YOU

I'm so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry so sorry

Blood on my hands

WHY IS THERE BLOOD ON MY HANDS

Friday, June 11, 2010

Offensive As Hell: I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry

Come to think of it, I don't even know why I watched that movie. It had Adam Sandler in it. That should have been enough to put me off, except I was naive and idealistic enough to think that being a comedy about gay people might counteract the involvement of Adam Sandler. I was very, very wrong.

For those unaware, the plot runs like this: Chuck and Larry are two straight, white firefighters and best friends. Larry is a lovable fat guy whose wife died about a year ago, and Chuck is his slimmer, sexier, perpetually single best friend who gets laid at a rate of about 1.5 women per night. Larry realizes that, with his wife dead, he doesn't have a beneficiary for his life insurance, and that it's too late to change it to his kids. He's got to find a beneficiary or else his insurance will expire. In a fit of mad inspiration, he discovers that gays have just been given civil partnership laws in his state (New York, where all the cool movies happen), and so he hatches a mad plan: obtain civil partnership with Chuck, making him beneficiary of his insurance policy.

What a wacky plan, right? This poor, dear man is so desperate to take care of his kids that he'd do anything - even marry his male best friend - to make sure that they were taken care of in the untimely event of his death. Isn't that amazing?

No.

The movie is nothing short of a train wreck from beginning to end. While the creators took a stab at making Chuck and Larry likable, forgivable characters, the movie is so deeply entrenched in "irreverence" (read: toilet humor and complete insensitivity) that you end up too mad at its creators to even care about Larry's motives.

No, I take that back. The fact that the movie's writers obviously thought they were being sensitive about the issue made it even worse.

The movie starts out with a scene that's going to set the tone for everything to come: our two main characters, out on a call, struggling to rescue a hugely obese man from a burning building. The man insists that he is too fat to walk, so the characters end up carrying him out on his bed (or something else equally huge; I don't remember exactly). The entire scene is disparaging and generally insensitive of this kind of obesity, playing it (like everything else) for laughs. Given that the man's fatness has absolutely nothing to do with the remainder of the story, it feels pointless, jarring, and just dumb. The only thing I can figure is that it serves as a kind of litmus test for the rest of the film: if you liked that scene, you'll enjoy the rest of the movie; if not, please get in line for your refund. I probably should have stopped watching there, but like I said, naive and idealistic. Moving on.

During this brave rescue, there is an accident and Chuck is injured. Larry rescues him, ensuring that Chuck will forever feel indebted to him, and reminding him of his own fragile mortality. That's when he abruptly decides to check up on his own life insurance (or something like that), only to find out that while he could have named his kids as beneficiaries back when his wife died, the only way he could get a new beneficiary now is if he got married.

So he talks Chuck into signing up for civil partnership (remember, he owed him - otherwise there's no way in Hell he'd have OH MY GOD ACTUALLY MARRIED A MAN EEW EEW EEW), and they start down the path of their whole gay-marriage charade: Chuck moves into Larry's house, they put up a rainbow flag, they drive up to Canada and get married for realz (by a disturbing pseudo-Asian guy who seems to get voyeuristic thrills from the weddings he performs), they start attending gay parties, the whole nine yards. Along the way, they deal with Larry's gender-nonconformist son, squick out the rest of the firefighting team (with one exception, as follows), inspire a fellow fireman to come out of the closet, punch out an anti-gay protester, and generally come to the realization that being gay is OK after all. At the end, when the fraud is exposed, all the gay people that they've met over the course of the movie cheer for them. Never mind that they lied to everyone; never mind that they exploited the newly-granted rights of second-class citizens for their own gain, never mind that their attitude throughout the entire movie is "it's okay for you to be gay, but for me it's disgusting." Never mind that, as the movie explicitly states, by committing this fraud they're making things harder for all the genuine gay couples who want civil partnerships. They have learned a valuable lesson about gay people and acceptance, and so they are now heroes. Somehow.

The really sad part is that, even though this is supposed to be a movie about how gay people are people too and deserve to be treated as such, the movie is about straight people. Straight people who, from beginning to end, can imagine no worse fate than to be gay. Straight people who waltz into the gay scene, fool everyone despite their obvious disgust for anything resembling physical intimacy for one another (though a threesome with a blow-up doll is apparently okay... yeah) suffer a little bit of discrimination, strike an epic blow for gay people everywhere, and then emerge from the experience more-or-less unscathed. (They do get arrested, but because of the outcry from the gay community the charges end up dropped.) In fact, they come out better for the experience, as Chuck and Larry both find super-hot women that they can start dating now that they're not gay anymore.

Don't be fooled by its appearance. This isn't a movie about gay people, or even about gay acceptance. It's a movie that exploits the lives and problems of actual gay people (and several fake ones) for cheap laughs, without giving them the dignity of an actual voice in the film. (The closest that they get when a gay character speaks up to praise one of the protagonists for their courage/inspiring actions/whatnot.) This movie is, in essence, a straight guilt film - and a bad one at that. (See also "white guilt films," the genre from which this movie gets most of its cues.)

The really sad thing in all of this is that the premise of this movie could have done better. For instance, if the jokes had been less rude and in-your-face; if the main characters had had some actual hesitations about what they were about to do (besides "EEW EEW GAY NASTY"). If they'd actually learned something. If they, instead of the gay community, had been the butt of the movie's jokes. If everything hadn't turned out magically sunshine-and-rainbows (but EEW NOT RAINBOWS EEW GAY) in the end. If they'd accepted that the audience was going to hate the protagonists and ran with it, instead of trying repeatedly to garner our sympathy, it could have worked.

But they couldn't do that. After all, Adam Sander was in this movie, and nothing is more important than his ego.

(Incidentally, what is it with the portrayal of gay black men in comedy films? Did I miss the memo from the black gay community that they're all big, scary-looking men who secretly just want some romance? Naw, I'm nitpicking. This entire movie was so clueless that I shouldn't bother expecting any better.)

Read.

I'm not going to qualify this further. The content of this blog post proves that it should be read.

http://stuffwhitepeoplesay.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/912/

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Self-Taught and a College Education

Here's a fun fact about me: I'm self-taught in pretty much everything I do. Mum passed down the basics of housework, the alphabet, and some math; everything else I've dug up mainly of my own accord. Writing, in particular.

You've read stuff from people who've had high school educations in English. They suck. Half of 'em cant use punctuation correctly, half can't spell wurth a darn, half make regluar typos, and haff just dun care. (There are a lot of overlaps.) I can count on one hand the number of times I've stepped into a school building, but I have a college-ready writing level. (Y'all would be in real trouble if I ever used it.)

I was considering going to college to study English, of all things. After all, when one studies a subject one should always be willing to learn more. But seriously, do I need to do that? I can pluck images from the very world around me, transform them into words and arrange them to evoke those same images in the minds of those who read. If I wish to tell you of the pale orange sun brightening the hood of an old silver car, or a cool spring wind teasing the tops of the red-green seed grass, I can do so.

I'm thinking of studying communications instead. I can write just fine. I could learn how to explain myself better.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Fat: A Final Note

If you have an overweight kid, the last thing you want to say to him or her is "Don't worry, you're going to find someone out there who will love you for who you are." This just reinforces in your kid's mind that they're not attractive and that, essentially, they're going to have to wait around for that one special someone who can tolerate dating a fat person.

And for goodness' sakes, take an active role in your kid's health. Don't just leave a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table and expect the kid to do the rest. Buy real food. Resist the urge to buy "snack foods," AKA socially acceptable junk food. Learn to cook. Teach your kid to cook. Pick a physical activity you can do with your kid (that the two of you won't end up resenting). Don't EVER criticize him or her for being fat. Your kid is a prisoner in his or her own body and is probably even more embarrassed and worried about being overweight than you are. Don't kick him or her out. GUIDE him or her out.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Fat, Pt. 2

In the last post, I made an introduction to the topic of fatness and a criticism of pervasive fatphobia. In this post I'm going to take on an equal and opposite problem: the Fat Acceptance movement.

Fat Acceptance, despite its desire to combat the unhealthy thinking and behavior that accompanies fatphobia, is not an appropriate option. The majority of people involved in the fat acceptance movement are obese or overweight people who have had little to no success controlling their weight through the diet methods prescribed by conventional wisdom. They can shed the weight, sure (or some of it, anyway) but as soon as they get tired of starving it comes back.

Frustrated - and rightly so - they've given up. Instead of fighting their fatness, they've decided to embrace it, and tell the rest of the world that it's time to do so to.

So what's the problem?

Firstly, fat acceptance places a false dichotomy on the entire health/diet issue. Either you follow Conventional Wisdom's starvation model or you live with being obese your entire life. Either you have no willpower (which simply isn't true for many of these people) or your genes are wired to keep you from slimming down. This either/or declaration completely ignores the many other options there are available - including alternative diets, which are not only sustainable when done correctly but have proven effective in many cases where the conventional diet has failed.

(Full confession: I subscribe to one of these "alternative" diets. As I have said, I am a caveman. I haven't lost weight in years - in fact, I've gained a lot recently due to exercise - but I have successfully ended the fat-building cycle while managing to eat the foods I want and stay fully nourished.)

Secondly, fat acceptance push several other notions that are contrary to reality: the "healthy at any size" philosophy, which flouts such facts as internal fatty buildup, skeletal strain, and correlation to a number of illnesses to proclaim that obesity has no impact on a person's health; the "fat is normal" philosophy, which ignores the inherent suddenness of this rise of overweight people; the "beautiful at any size" philosophy, which will optimistically describe the fattest bodies as "curvy;" and the associated "everyone is fatphobic" idea, which insists that if we could all get over our societal hang-ups we could learn to love fleshy blobs that barely resemble human beings.

If I have offended anyone or caused them to cry, I sincerely apologize for hurting your feelings, but I stand by this: As the saying goes (credit to Krishnamurti), "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." The reason fat bodies are not the standard is not because they are not the social ideal, but because they are not the ideal for good health or functionality. Obesity cripples the body, limiting one's strength and stamina. The types of diets which are known to cause or reinforce it are equally as harmful, crippling the immune system and throwing the body's functions out of whack, leaving it vulnerable to stroke, heart disease, and diabetes - three of the greatest killers in the modern era. Occasionally, you will come upon someone who is truly obese in spite of the best health care conditions, or someone who eats a poorer diet but survives free of the typical killers, but these are rare occasions. For every obese person you know who lives to a healthy old age, there will doubtless be five or more who have suffered from heart problems, or else are afflicted by diabetes or mobility problems. Some of these problems are doubtless brought on by age, but it is not practical to dismiss obesity and diet simply because one is frustrated with one's own inability to lose weight.

This is not a one-size-fits-all assessment, of course. Much of it is based on my own experiences and family, but plenty of it is based on interpersonal stories from others on the Internet and my own experience with the fat acceptance community. Yo-yo dieting is not the answer, but treading carefully into a new lifestyle with your eyes wide open and plenty of knowledge at hand cannot be more dangerous than giving up and letting the pounds pile on.

But if I do not agree with either of these camps, where then do I stand? I am not instantly critical of someone just for being overweight. It makes them appear less healthy, and therefore attractive, in my eyes, because extra weight is a common indicator of poor diet or other problems that can result in weakness or early death. But I cannot criticize someone simply for having that body - not when I have been completely unsuccessful in curing my own weight problems. The greatest hurdle, I believe, is in overcoming my eating disorder; it is true that weight loss can be prevented or even reversed through the consumption of excess calories. The second hurdle is in mustering up the strength to say "no" - to fight the societal pressures to consume certain foods, and also my own senseless urges as they crop up. I will not say that I am perfect or that my experiences speak for everyone, but this is your world as I see it.

Fat

Back in the 1970's, when my mother was a teenager, she was what they referred to as "fat." (Whether she was overweight or obese, I neither know nor particularly need to know.) Back in the day, if you were a young, white, dating-age woman, being fat was absolutely the worst thing that could happen to you (worse, even, than belonging to a different religion from the guy you were interested in). It wasn't just that individual men saw fat girls as unattractive. It was that the male hivemind saw fat girls as unattractive, so even if you were a man who found a fat girl attractive you wouldn't have dared go out with her. Many of these young women were so desperate to get some male attention that they would sleep with anyone who asked, just to say that they had a boyfriend. (In case that sounds remotely like a good idea: as a consequence, fat girls were proclaimed "easy lays," further discouraging anyone from wanting to date them for other reasons.) In order to get my dad to pay any attention to her (and boy, what a catch he was), my mum had to virtually starve herself until they were married.

Fortunately, things are a lot better now. Right?

Haaaaaaahahahahahaha.

Sure, it's no longer quite so stigmatized for a man to date a fat woman. He's allowed to it, but now he's derogatorily referred to as a "chubby chaser" - a special brand of pervert who's into FAT WOMEN of all things. (Same goes for gay men, actually.) Meanwhile, fat people on the whole are seen as stupid, slovenly, lazy beasts, shuffling down the sidewalk in search of their next Big Mac. On the other hand you've got the "size acceptance" people, who are so frustrated with their inability to lose weight through conventional means that they've given up and are declaring that they - and the rest of the world - need to get over it and "embrace their curves," among other optimistic euphemisms.

The problem with these mindsets - the "hey, fatty, ever heard of a gym?" and the "beauty at any size" perspectives - is that neither of them seem to grasp the complexity of the situation.

Before I continue, I feel I should point out that I am a caveman, and everything I am going to say is going to be informed by that fact, and therefore it will not necessarily be congruent with the perceived reality of non-cavemen. Gehddovuhit.

Firstly, the anti-fat. This is the mindset that is the most annoying and potentially damaging, for a few reasons: firstly, it is so pervasive that even fat people hang onto it, and secondly, it advocates a "weight-loss-at-any-cost" mindset that can and has destroyed people's health. Even worse, it's based on a model for health that is narrow, incomplete, and based on dodgy science.

Case in point: my mother. Weight problems from a young age, as I said. She spent most of her earlier adulthood doing the "yo-yo" form of diet - follow the guidelines until you reach the recommended poundage for your height, at which point you get sick of starving yourself and start eating again, at which point the weight comes back with extras. The reason this happened was because she followed the "starvation diet" model - an idea that encouraged her to underconsume calories to force her body to cannibalize itself, and get most of her other calories from carbohydrates - a source known for its low calorie-to-consumption ratio, which gives the consumer the illusion of being full without eating extra calories, and its ability to burn up extremely quickly inside the body, leaving you with... nothing.

So just from a scientific standpoint, this kind of thing is damaging. Fatphobia has led to doctors and dietitians everywhere to advocate the dangerous "calories in/calories out" lifestyle, wherein people try to eat as little food as possible and expend as much energy as possible to force their bodies into a starvation state so they can shed those horrible, horrible pounds.

Problem is, it doesn't work. For one thing, the body isn't fooled by your attempt to stuff it with calorie-void fluff (hence why you can eat three cups of salad, but only one six-ounce chicken breast). You can persuade it to accept fewer calories if the food you eat is nutritious, but the kind of food they advocate - bread, cereal, rice, and pasta - is anything but. It's cheap energy, and the human body doesn't appreciate it.

Since continuing on this subject would require a long, dull, scientific and highly controversial blog post all on its own, I'm going to turn the reins over to Mark Sisson at Mark's Daily Apple. He is also a caveman, which means that he eschews the "stuff with fluff" dietary ethos in favor of a grain-free, meat-and-veggies type of diet. Before you read any of his resources, check out the pics of his abs.

Anyway, so in lieu of an actual health-focused diet for the overweight, they have the low-calorie model begotten by a knee-jerk fear of fat and fat people. That's the scientific side; now let's talk social.

Years after she recovered from the need to yo-yo diet, my mother is still suffering from fatphobia. I can hear it in the things she says. She describes her own body (a victim of lower-end obesity) as "gross." She puts down chubby women who dress in revealing clothing, rails against pot bellies, and gripes regularly about the bad food choices people make - despite being a fat woman herself.

This hypocrisy not only confused me, but encouraged severe self-esteem issues when I was a child. I remember getting into a spat with my little brother over some food, and my mother marching me into the bathroom, made me look at my own obese reflection and made it known to me that the reason I was fat was because I ate too much. Another fat-combating tactic that she employed: poking me in the stomach and telling me exactly what I'd been eating too much of. My dad joined in the fun, criticizing me for an accidental overspill of bleu cheese dressing by telling me I was well on my way to becoming my obese aunt. The message: "Even though I am buying you highly-processed food, including sweets, and ignoring your actual nutritional needs, you are making yourself fat."

Now, it's true: I have an eating disorder. I will eat when I'm bored, I will eat when I'm stressed, and I will eat even when I'm full just because I like the taste of whatever I'm eating. It's something I fight with all the time. And realistically, there's no way my parents could have known that I was sneaking frozen snack cakes to eat in the middle of my chores. But maybe instead of blaming a ten-year-old child - who saw his/her parents not as trying to help him/her, but as creatures bent on controlling as much of his/her life as possible without actually making an effort to help him/her change - they might have taken a little more proactive steps. Like not bringing snack cakes into the house. You can't ask a ten-year-old child to muster up a level of self-control that many adults (including my dad) can't cultivate in themselves.

Yes, I would say that fatphobia has affected me deeply.

Even today, when my mother professes herself to be an ally of persons with "extra fat", it doesn't take long in any conversation for her colors to come through. We can talk about someone who appears 20-40 pounds overweight, and her favorite way to preface her acceptance of their fat level: "I'm not saying he/she couldn't stand to lose a little weight, but..."

Persons familiar with the anti-racism movement might notice a similarity between this and another popular white phrase: "I'm not a racist, but..." It means basically the same thing. "I don't want you to think I actually support being people being fat, but I think she's fine just the way she is [as long as she doesn't dress in any clothing that I think is unflattering on her]."

So. Anti-fat = fail.

Tune in next time for Part 2, where I take on the fat acceptance movement and why it isn't any better for people.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Becoming Your Label

As I've said, people have a lot of labels. Some of them they wear for life, like their skin color; others fade with time, such as age and class; others come upon them suddenly and in a life-changing event.

I can name the labels that came upon me that way: atheist, transgendered, anti-racist.

When a label comes upon you, it often comes as something of a surprise. Sometimes you've purged a label that already covered that aspect of yourself, but sometimes the other label comes in and forcibly removes the old one. And sometimes you're surprised by a label that's always been there, because something you've just seen or done has made you deeply, acutely, aware of it.

I've had all of this happen to me at one point. Releasing my "Christian" label was an intensely painful process; taking on the "atheist" label took several months. When I took on "transgendered," I had already discarded "cisgendered" as a label that had never applied and adopted "girlfag." When I discovered "white," it was more a realization that it was more than just a skin color - that there was an identity that went along with it and that it was something worth mentioning about myself.

In each case, I had to figure out what the label meant for me. And in each case I went through roughly the same process: reading, learning, trying to understand the societal nuances that made this label, comparing myself to other people who had this label. And I made the same mistake each time: trying to become as similar as possible to other people who had the same label.

It started out when I became an atheist. Even though I use that label to describe myself, I'm not an atheist by the popular definition. I believe that there may be gods out there (not an overarching God, but smaller gods), and perhaps some kind of ghosts, and while I will not outright believe a claim without any evidence I will not immediately disclaim it for lack thereof if it is not actually possible for me to acquire evidence. (You might call me a "somewhat credulous skeptic.")

But when I got out on the Internet and started reading the writings of other atheists, I found that our beliefs didn't really match up. Most atheists prefer a "nonexistent until proven otherwise" approach; a demand for hard evidence before they believe in the proffered spirit. I see nothing wrong with that; they haven't have the same upbringing I had, regaled with tales and the occasional witnessing to miracles that, if they happened as reported, could not reasonably be explained scientifically. I would also not expect them to take these stories as evidence, since most of them were related to me through parties and their veracity is greatly suspect. But I cannot discount them.

And yet, I tried to. Not intentionally, of course. But the more I read of other atheists and their rather stricter worldview, the more I began to feel the subtle societal pressure to conform to the same standards. After all, if so many of them believe this way and I don't, it must be because I've got something messed up. And after a while I found myself parroting the things they were saying, repeating the "pics or it didn't happen"-style phrases, and insisting that gods were all in people's heads.

After a while - and with the help of my sister - I realized that there was a problem. There was no good reason for me to be acting that way. I had reasons to believe the things that I did, and denying them wasn't making me more skeptical, just conformist. In essence, I was trying to be the most atheisty atheist I could be.

I had the same problem when explaining my atheism. I originally abandoned my faith not because of evolution, or science, or the many horrible deeds committed by Yahweh throughout the Bible, but because I had been shown that Jesus was not the Jewish messiah. But when people started asking me why I wasn't a Christian, I started abandoning that story - in favor of the much more commonplace (and rather overdone) explanations I had heard from other atheists. Again, I was trading in my identity for the group identity.

It was harder to do that when I realized myself as transgendered. Right away I realized I didn't fit the "standard" (see also: stereotype): I wasn't male-to-female, I wasn't attracted to the same sex, I hadn't pervasively felt from the time I was young that I must belong to the opposite gender. It didn't take me long to realize that my limited grasp on the subject was... well, limited - in fact, that's what led me to taking on the label in the end. But even after I had learned the subject extensively, even after I knew that people could manifest at different times and be attracted to different sexes and identify as androgynous or two-gendered and everything else, I was always trying to discount my own experiences. I would compare myself to others, and since I never fit the common story - I didn't identify as male as a child, I was never uncomfortable with my lower genitalia, I wasn't attracted to the same sex - I was convinced on some level that I wasn't really trans, or that I wasn't trans "enough" to count. I think in a way I was still trying to convince myself that I didn't have to be trans. But in a bigger way I was making myself feel inadequate because, after failing to fit in with the larger world around me, I had found a world that I actually might belong to - and I still didn't fit in. I felt like I was the freak among freaks.

The third event deals not so much with a label I like to use, but in a label that due to my upbringing I am saddled with, and bear the results thereof: "white."

In an earlier post, I mentioned the blog Stuff White People Do, an educational resource on "the ways of white folks - I mean, some white folks..." I followed a link from one post to another post (readable here), and in the comments section there was a discussion that had become rather heated.

The post, you see, was on the way some white people treat black women. They see them not as vulnerable human beings, but as people of steel, capable of taking whatever flak the world throws their way. This stereotype, the black ladies explain, is perpetuated by modern media, which has portrayed every black woman ever as that type of character (which they refer to as the "sapphire" stereotype), or as an older, takes-no-guff, fiercely-protective and overweight woman (the better-known "mammy.")

White people read this, and understood this, and knew that the black women were right and they needed to do better. So they asked (and I wondered) a seemingly innocuous question: "How do we treat you like people?"

The reaction was swift, completely unenlightening, and deeply revealing of the problem at hand: "You know already."

And I (though I did not participate in the conversation), and several other white people in the thread, said "No, I don't."

It was all nonsense, of course. I already knew what had to be done. In fact, I'd already written about it in my Peach People post. But I'd fallen prey to that quintessential white fallacy: getting hooked on labels.

One of the black ladies had mentioned that white people tend to be bad at socializing with black women. I (and, I expect, the other white persons who asked the same question), remembering that I was a white person, hastily made the conclusion that I had made a mistake in my line of thinking and that I had somehow missed some crucial piece of information that would teach me how to treat black women like people.

What I, and seemingly a number of other white people, had failed to realize was that I was completely overthinking the situation. And it was the black ladies - one very patient and frustrated black woman, in particular - who finally put us in our place and made at least one white person (that'd be me) feel very, very silly - and very, very white.

See, once again I had conflated a label with an identity. First I assumed that because the label "white" applied to me, I must be vulnerable to the same fallacies as the other white people that had been described. Then I assumed that the label "black" entailed some kind of enormous cultural gap - something that made the fact that they were also human and women rather trivial when deciding how to treat them. If I really wanted to know how to treat a black woman as a human, all I needed to do was see her as - well, a human.

Each of these stories belies the same problem in the use of labels. There is no doubt that labels have a purpose - they enable one person to get a loose grasp on another person's identity at a quick glance. But labels are not an instant guide to an individual's personality. Each label is a facet of a person, not the whole person - and yet their entire being is affected by that facet. Labels are further divided into sublabels, which in turn are shaped by quirks and nuances that make the overall label nearly meaningless. Labels are not useless - it is true that all persons with a particular label have something in common, whether a little or a lot. But it is important not to overvalue their meaning, not to assume any specific meanings for a label, and not to get so hooked on one label that you ignore the other facets of a person's being.

And yet I managed to do it three times before I ever figured out what I was doing wrong. Sounds like I've got some work ahead of me.

Trans Man: The Teenage Years

Midway through puberty, my voice started cracking.

I wasn't sure what happened at first. I'd be in the middle of a sentence and suddenly the sound wouldn't come out right. My voice would switch tones abruptly, or refuse to make a sound at all, usually in the space of a second or so. I'd try to clear my throat, but it never really worked.

And then my voice dropped. I mean, seriously dropped. I'd gotten used to speaking in a nice, feminine child's tone, and suddenly I didn't recognize the sound that was coming out of my mouth. It never dropped below an acceptable female level, and nobody else noticed, but you can bet I was self-conscious about it. See, my mum had told me about puberty; she'd told me that girls' voices changed but that they didn't crack like boys' did. There were so many ways to interpret that statement that I was sure that I had violated a rule of girls' puberty somewhere.

The main problem with this story is that there are three different ways that it can end, all of which are pertinent to my life story, so I feel that I should include them all.

1: Deeply embarrassed by my lower voice, and not wanting to be seen as any more unfeminine than I already was, I started forcing my voice into a higher register - especially when talking to my parents. It wasn't hard or miserable or anything, but it still hasn't become natural for me.

2: The sudden drop in my voice got me wondering if there was something off with my body. I already had a few of the other classic symptoms - male tendencies, mainly - but this was my first real clue. Though I later found out that it wasn't unheard of for girls' voices to crack (though it was unusual), the beard hairs that came in later confirmed a hormone imbalance.

2a: I had very mixed feelings about the whole thing. I was feeling a lot of pressure to be feminine, both overt (my mother telling me how to attract boys) and subtle (my mother constantly criticizing my aunt and her lesbian lover for being unfeminine). On the other hand, there was a feeling - more a primal urge than a voice - that latched on to every masculine aspect of my puberty as "correct." Ergo, not only did I have to wonder why my body was doing this, but I had to deal with the feelings that came with it - that strange feeling of bitter gratitude, of disbelief that this could actually be happening and a deep desire, against all reason, to embrace it.

2b: Equally as confusing was the pattern that I was starting to see in myself. I'd always known myself to be a nonconformist, sure, but suddenly I realized there was a pattern to my nonconformity. I liked boys - and not just in a romantic sense; I wanted to spend time with them, talk with them, do the things they did and just generally hang out like guys would. I liked boys' clothes, and had always favored them over girls'. (When I watched Smallville, I spent a large part of my time ogling Tom Welling's wardrobe.) I sat like a guy, which had always irritated my mother (who wanted me to be ladylike, and didn't understand the need to accommodate imaginary genitals or large thighs). There was no ignoring it - I consistently leaned toward the masculine.

As all of this stuff hit me at once, I had exactly one question: Why the hell wasn't I a lesbian?

Friday, June 4, 2010

How To Be A Peach Person

In my introduction blog, I covered a bit about race labels and why I don't like identifying myself as "white." I proposed "over-privileged peach-skinned bastard" as an alternative, which I later shortened to "privileged peach person."

After a bit, it occurred to me that there were facets of this "peach" thing I wasn't covering. For instance, I don't feel it's appropriate to refer to all white persons as "peach" - white supremacists and clueless middle-class WASPs, for instance, can keep on being white. It's more than a race; it's a mindset. So what exactly is a peach person?

To be a peach person, you must meet all of the following requirements:

  1. You must belong to the "white" race.
  2. You must be aware that as a light-skinned person, you are more privileged than persons of other colors, particularly in the company of other light-skinned people.
  3. You must acknowledge and accept that you have no special right to this extra privilege, but that you have it anyway.
  4. You must be willing to employ that privilege, as well as other resources at your disposal, to try and make that privilege available to persons of other colors. How you do this is up to you. Call people out on racist remarks, lobby to get persons of other color into influential positions, band with persons of other color to form an interracial alliance, whatever you are able to do.
  5. You must accept that the superiority of fair-skinned people is an illusion, and remember this at all times. As others have said, check your ego at the door. No matter where you go or who you are with, remember that light-skinned people are not nicer, purer, smarter, or more human than people of other colors.
  6. You must own your white heritage. No matter what you call yourself, you are still the product of a long line of oppressors - a line that shows few signs of letting up - and as such, persons of other color will be disinclined to trust you. You need to accept the stigma of being pale, just as other races have been forced to accept their stigmas.
  7. You do not need to make an official commitment or label yourself an "anti-racist" or anything else. You only need to be willing to accept that your skin color is only your skin color, and the privilege you have exists only because you were born into a profoundly unjust society, and that you have a responsibility to try and correct the imbalance that granted you that privilege.
That is what it means to be a "peach person." To call yourself peach is to disown your "white" ego - to accept that you, too, have a color, and are no different (essentially, if not culturally) than those of darker shades. You are not "lowering yourself to their level." You are declaring that the level you thought you occupied before - that white people believe themselves to occupy on a daily basis - is an illusion, perpetrated by a pale-skinned society so caught up in itself that has almost forgotten it exists.

(I cannot take credit for everything in this list. In fact, I really cannot take credit for any of it. It is thanks to the excellent anti-racist blog, Stuff White People Do - and the many lists of advice for anti-racist allies that they link to - that I have come to understand any of this, much less condense it into a single train of thought. The owner and contributors have opened my eyes tremendously, and I thank them for knocking me off my own white pedestal.)

Label Your Posts

Just a quick piece of advice to people starting blogs for the first time: label your posts. Back when I had my first blog (a few years, back, it ran for about a year, good times), I made the mistake of not labeling my posts - tagging, actually, since that was on WordPress. Later on, I started tagging my posts, and I noticed something amazing: my blog was getting attention. Not a lot of attention, but fast attention and response as well.

So remember this rule of blogging: label your posts. It allows people outside your blog to find ingoing links, and the more interesting posts you have with labels, the more likely people are to come to your blog.

One of the Girls

A little while ago, my mum was talking to my dad about a household chore. After a bit, my mum said "One of the girls can do it."

That's how I've been referred to pretty much my entire life. Unless someone specifically wants something from me, I'm just "one of the girls." My sister and I are, for most intents and purposes, completely interchangeable. After all, we've both got boobs and vaginas.

This is what it's like growing up in a Christian household where gender roles are just that rigid. Regardless of what you do when you grow up, as a child you are supposed to go through the entire girl routine: wear a dress to church, grow your hair out long, learn how to cook and clean and keep up a house, and otherwise be completely indistinguishable from the other girls in your family. Whenever someone outside of the family wants something from me or my sister, they ask for "one of the girls." They never ask for "one of the kids;" they either want either one of us or our brother specifically. If they want all of us, we're "(brother's name) and the girls."

I don't think anyone here realizes how demoralizing and dehumanizing that is. To assume that I and my sister are interchangeable because we have the same body parts is to completely discount our entire identities. We have different personalities, different ambitions, and different skillsets. Asking for "one of the girls" is like going to buy a new car and asking for "a sedan." We might look similar on the road, but we're sure as Hell not going to handle the same.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

An Apology

As I have mentioned, I am white (unfairly privileged peach-tone, as I prefer it). As I have mentioned, all peach-toned persons from the United States are racist, whether they mean to be or not. Having thought about myself, I've realized that I've (unintentionally) had a number of racist thoughts/perceptions through the years, and I need to apologize. By having these thoughts, I have unintentionally contributed to a system which marginalizes minority races, especially those of darker skin color, and that is unacceptable. So here is my apology.

I'm sorry for not trusting blacks and Latin Americans as implicitly as I do other races just because of your skin color.
I'm sorry for assuming that Hispanic Latin Americans are shoddy parents just because you shop at Wal-Mart and buy beer.
I'm sorry for seeing a black person in town and thinking "Whooooa, cool!" You are a person, not a novelty item.
I'm sorry for thinking that I might date a white girl or a black guy, but a black girl would just be too weird.
I'm sorry for ogling the Asians who are out shopping for groceries.
I'm sorry for being so ignorant at age 20 that I was actually surprised to learn that South Africa had urban cities in it.
I'm sorry for referring to everyone of a darker color as "black" or "Hispanic" or "Asian" or "Native American" (or whatever other label you can think of), but failing to specify when someone is European-descended.
I'm sorry for opposing affirmative action. (I do, however, think that there are better alternatives. Though since I'm peach-toned, I could be wrong.)
I'm sorry for instinctively dissing hip-hop because it was invented by dem underedumacated black doodz.
I'm sorry for even having to use the phrase "dem underedumacated black doodz." Especially since you've probably had more schooling than I have.
I'm sorry for ignoring media by and about persons of darker color because I was convinced that I wouldn't be able to relate to it.
I'm sorry that my perception filter allows me to look at a crowd of all-peach people and fail to notice anything odd.
And finally, I am very sorry for feeling that I was superior to my (racist) dad.

I am not asking for forgiveness. I am not attempting to make reparations or whatnot. What I did was inexcusable. This is just me saying that I was a jerk, I realize that now, and I regret it and want to do better. Now I am done apologizing, and I'm going to spend my energy on more constructive things, like learning how to erase the internalized racism I'm currently dealing with and how to call it out when I see it in others.

Introduction

Hello, my name is William, and I am here to talk about labels. I know I bear a ton of them: human, white, blonde, European-descended, fair-skinned, able-bodied, female, daughter, sister, low-class, obese, transgendered, FTM, male, brother, pansexual, part-time crossdresser, in the closet, blogger (as of now), writer, English language persnicketor, caveman, environmentally conscious, animal welfare supporter, meat-eater, atheist, agnostic, panmaterialist, pacifist, activist, homeschooled, country boy, unemployed, self-taught, slacker, single, Zac Efron fangirl, single, cat person, dog owner, racist, anti-kyriarchal, food lover, adrenaline lover, American. (I'm sure I've missed a few.) All of these apply to me in some way, even though I don't necessarily agree with or want to use all of them. No doubt all of them have colored your perception of me, making you less or more likely to take me seriously, less or more likely to view me as shallow or immoral or worthless or potentially annoying. Some of them seem like outright contradictions - humans are good at that.

So here's a breakdown of my favorite and least favorite labels - the ones that I identify with and the ones I'd rather leave behind.

White, European-descended, fair-skinned

I don't like to call myself "white." First of all, it's simply medically untrue (I'm also a persnicketor). Secondly, the term "white" brings up so many associations of Anglo-Saxon superiority, Aryanism, and other stuff that I just do not subscribe to. If you have to lump me, I'd rather be called "White" than "Caucasian" (my ancestors just are not from Georgia and that term is SO flippin' racisto), but for common usage I prefer to be referred to as "fair-skinned," "European-descended," "North European-American," "light pink," or even "unfairly privileged peach-toned bastard."

Female, male, transgendered, FTM, gay, bisexual, transvestite

I am female-to-male transgendered, which means that I am biologically female and perceived as female in the outside world, but as far as I am concerned I am male. Here on the Internet, I prefer to use male pronouns and a male name. I enjoy wearing women's clothes very rarely, and only on my terms.

White, obese, slacker, American

This particular set of labels will get me pegged pretty quickly as yet another water-buffalo American, shuffling down the sidewalks in singleminded pursuit of my next Big Mac. Well, I'm here to tell you that I don't eat Big Macs (or fast food, if I can help it), I don't shuffle, and unlike some people I actually take responsibility for my own obesity and am trying to repair it.

Caveman, meat-eater

With all respect to the American Heart Association, American Diabetics' Association, etc.: sorry, but you're wrong. The anti-meat, pro-carb guidelines currently in place are based on faulty data, half-baked assumptions, insufficient studies and a whole lot of hyperbole. That's why I won't eat hot dogs or processed hamburgers and sausages if I can help it, but I will happily sink my teeth into a whole, chemically-minimal piece of beefy goodness. (I also work out. That's the other side of being a caveman. And to soothe any further concerns about my health, I also eat plenty of green vegetables and fruit, and my blood sugar has been almost completely under control ever since I started eating this way.)

Atheist, agnostic, panmaterialist

Again, all of these are true. I am an atheist in that I do not worship any gods. I am agnostic because I do not know for sure (and not because I'm "between religions" at the moment - I'm just not interested in that kind of a relationship right now). I call myself a panmaterialist because I appreciate the fact that everything that exists in the universe now came from the same place, has existed forever, and can never be destroyed, only configured into new shapes. Even human minds will live on in the minds of others, sometimes for generations after the original has passed. Everything that exists is part of a living, ongoing network that cannot truly be destroyed.

Zac Efron fangirl

It's true. I can't help it. Looking at Zac Efron makes me so happy that I just want to squee, because he is that pretty. You could say that Zac Efron is my one weakness.

Country boy

I'm not a cowboy, just so you know. I've lived in the country my whole life, yet I've still grown up into a middle-class type of young adult. I don't even like cows that much. But I like to live out here, I like to take long walks and photographs, and the fresh air is to die for.

I'll extrapolate more on these and other labels in other posts. These are just the ones that stand out to me as the kind that I identify with the most or the least, or that other people are most likely to consider when they decide what kind of person I am. That's what labels are for, after all.