Posts Tagged → resistance

We made the first trans woman at our church retreat cry

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. I’ve seen a lot of stories come across my social media feed this week. One of the observations was that if you don’t know any trans people, it’s probably because they don’t feel safe around you. That seems right.

I want to share with you a couple of my experiences in providing safety: one time I got it right and one time I fucked up. I realize that Transgender Day of Remembrance isn’t about me. It’s about those we’ve lost or harmed. As an ally, I’d like to add my voice to the chorus, so there aren’t so many losses.

When I lived in California, I attended a church that was “open and affirming,” which meant that we welcomed lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) members. We didn’t have a test of faith for membership or even tithing requirements. It was a progressive church and it’s where I learned to protest– against the war in Iraq, for Obamacare, for gay marriage– you name it. It was a comfortable moral and spiritual home for me. It wasn’t perfect, for example, on race issues, but it fed me emotionally and I needed that.

There was a young trans woman in our congregation. She joined before she started transitioning, so there was a before and an after. Let’s call her Chelsea. Her family had disowned her. She worked in a technical field, but the environment wasn’t great. She was on her own.

The church had an annual women’s retreat, where the women of the church went to a camp in the mountains for a weekend. (I don’t really know what the rest of the congregation did while we were gone. I never got to see it.) We sang, prayed, mediated, walked, talked, and ate. There’s an amazing labyrinth on the grounds for moving meditation. It was a lovely time and in two days, it we did feel like we were getting away.

On the Saturday afternoon, we were having a sharing circle. The retreat leader had given us an exercise and we were discussing our responses. Honestly, I don’t even remember the activity. We were nearly done the session when Chelsea started to cry. It started quietly, but got to the level of noisy sniffling. No ugly crying.

It was hard to know what to do. Was it something we did or said? None of us were really close to Chelsea. I was easily 10+ years older than her and the rest were even older.

When I get nervous, I tend to get quiet. I went and sat next to Chelsea. I think I touched her on the arm or shoulder. We communicated a lot with our eyes.

“Happy tears,” she said and I understood. This was her first women’s retreat. She came and she was treated the same as any other participant. The night before, we wore pyjamas together. Nobody questioned whether she should be there. She wasn’t silenced or ignored.

I’m proud of the safety that we provided Chelsea, not just that weekend, but also after. She eventually formed a chosen family with church members. When Chelsea had her gender-affirming surgery, a woman from the retreat went with her. My part in this was tiny and it wasn’t hard. But it meant a lot to someone who had experienced a lot of rejection.

So, let me tell you about a time when I didn’t make it safe for a trans man.

Several years ago in Toronto, I was teaching an undergraduate class in computer science where students had to work in teams. From my own experience, I knew that it was miserable being the only woman in a group. So when I formed groups, I made sure that there were at least two women in each group. Groups with only men were unavoidable and acceptable. To achieve this distribution, I had students fill out a form that asked a bunch of questions, including gender.

When it came time to create this groups, I didn’t have forms for every student. They could have missed the class or just neglected to fill out the form. I sometimes had to check the university database of student records or even LinkedIn. Having pronouns in your profile was not common then, so it wasn’t that helpful.

I had one particular student who answered “male” on the form that I provided. Let’s call him Tom. But in his university record, his sex was “female.” He presented as male on his LinkedIn profile. I placed him in a group as a male.

At the end of the next class, Tom came up to me and asked why I was looking at his LinkedIn profile. He was friendly and not confrontational. I said that I was trying to confirm gender for creating the groups and I was confused by the university records. You can see where this is going.

Tom was taken aback and said that it was a ridiculous mistake on the university records. I commiserated.

Later, he sent me an email. He was trans man. Although he was comfortable with his status, he told me that I should be more careful about outing people. I had a sick feeling in my stomach. He was absolutely right and I apologised.

This was a good lesson for me. I was trying to solve a problem for women and it didn’t even cross my mind how my solution would scale to transgender individuals. I think if I were doing this again, I’d be more explicit about my intentions to handle inequality and get students to help me arrive at the solution. It’s patronizing and infantilizing to do otherwise.

The second occasion happened after the first, so it’s not like I didn’t know what good looked like.

On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, I’m thinking of you, Chelsea, Tom, Tami, Hunter, Alex, Veronika, and June. Thanks for the lessons that you taught me and are teaching me about how to be a better person. I’ll still get things wrong, like pronouns and anti-oppression, but you have my support.

It’s a process and here’s what I commit to do. Be humble. Educate myself. Listen. Do my best. Expect to get things wrong. Ask for forgiveness. Accept feedback.

How little I knew you Geraldine Ferraro

When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president in 1984, I had no idea what it meant to be a feminist and to be limited as a member of a marginalized group. But I did have the impression that Ferraro must have been a Very Bad Person, based on the people talked about her, both in terms of content and tone. It didn’t occur to me that her gender had anything to do with it. Her passing on the weekend provides me with an opportunity to reflect on how little I understood at the time about her and what she did for us.

That year, I was thirteen years old and in grade eight. I was not following politics at all. To me, the most significant event on the world stage was the birth of UK’s Prince Harry in September. I knew that there was a presidential election in the US and who candidates were. I knew that Geraldine Ferraro was running. I had no idea what the issues were in the election. But I did have the impression that Ferraro must be a Very Bad Person.

The news was always critical. She had said the wrong thing. She was doing things she shouldn’t have. Her past was questionable. More damaging than the facts were the implications, which read like a laundry list of words to marginalize someone: incompetent, immoral, not Christian, too uppity, exceeding her capabilities… The adults around me (both men and women) seemed to feel a sense of outrage; how dare she run for Vice President!

It did not strike me as remarkable that a woman was running for the position.  I had the mistaken idea that the world always was and will be this way. It didn’t occur to me that people expressed these sentiments about her, because she was a woman. I had the mistaken idea that men and women had equal opportunity in our society.

To give you an idea of how unenlightened I was, let me tell you about the most memorable scene (to me) from the move Top Gun. Maverick (Tom Cruise) had kept Charlie (Kelly McGillis) waiting, because he stayed to play beach volleyball with his mates. When Maverick arrived at Charlie’s place, he made weak excuses and asked her to wait some more while he had a shower. Charlie said no and made him talk to her un-showered. This scene amazed me, because it was an example of a woman not letting a man get away with bad behavior. In my daily life, male relatives often acted badly, and women just put up with it. It never occurred to me that there was something that we could do about it.

But, in a sense, there wasn’t anything we could do about it. On one occasion, I did resist and it didn’t work out well. My brother, sister, and I were supposed to take turns making lunch to bring to school. My brother, being the youngest and the only son, often shirked his duties with little reprimand from our parents. The job was often left to me and my sister. We probably should have just not made his lunch until he pitched in. But that was too blatant and would have drawn the ire of our parents. My sister and I hatched a plan: we would make his sandwich inside-out with the bread in the middle, the meat on the outside, and the condiments on top. We giggled like fiends as we prepared this messy revenge. When my brother came home, he was furious. (My husband says that it was probably because we embarrassed him in front of his friends.) He raged and yelled at us. And what did we do? We did what we saw our female role models did. We acquiesced and didn’t do it again. It’s astonishing, now that I look back on it. The me in 2011 would never put up with something like this. I don’t think we did our brother any favors either.

Reading Ferraro’s obituary gave me a new appreciation for what she did and how far I have come. I know what it’s like to be under attack. I know what it’s like to have special attacks lobbed at me with astonishing vitriol, because I was a woman and I dared. She held up remarkably against the barrage of attacks. She opened up possibilities for women who followed. Rest in peace, Geraldine Ferraro.

Accounting for Taste on International Women’s Day

It is International Women’s Day today, and I wanted to acknowledge it with a post. It can be difficult to explain to men why women’s rights is still an issue. After all, laws and regulations that prohibit women’s participation are decreasing and opportunities are increasing. But the point is that there is still lots left to do because women and women’s views are marginal, meaning they are not the default assumptions.

Let me try to explain using a story.

Movie star and activist, George Clooney, has a reputation for being a practical joker. One of his more elaborate pranks involved an enormous hideous painting that he had pick up  from the curb on garbage day.  George often played golf with his close friend, Richard Kind. For a year, whenever Richard asked him to go play golf, he would say, “I can’t. I’ve got art class.” Finally, Richard’s birthday rolled around and George gave him the big, garish painting, with his signature and in a frame. George said, “‘My art teacher’s really proud of me but this (painting) is the first one we’re both really proud of. You’ve been so supportive, I want you to have it.” It hung over Richard’s couch for two years and George would send instruct their mutual friends to go and compliment the painting in superlatives. Everyone else was in on the joke.

I want you to imagine what it was like being Richard. For years, he looked at this painting and thought it was awful, but everyone thought it looked amazing. He probably had many feelings of self-doubt, questioned his own taste, and his ability to appreciate art. He was the odd one out and constantly being reinforced by messages from his friends.

Being a woman is a bit like this. I’m constantly bombarded with tiny hints that I’m the odd one out, that I’m not the default. Karen Valby wrote, “When women rally around something in pop culture, it isn’t long before the objects of their attraction are loudly trivialized or dismissed.” Take the book (and movie) “Eat, Pray, Love” for example, which tells the story of how a woman got over being an unhappy divorcee by traveling the world. In other words, it’s a rite of passage story where the main character is a woman and the antagonists are inside of her. Not your typical story, which in part accounts for its success. The novel made it to number one on The New York Times paperback nonfiction list and was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It doesn’t get much bigger than this.

Yet the page for this book on Amazon.com is filled with hateful comments, not just by men and not just by people who have read the book. Elizabeth Gilbert has stopped reading and responding to the reviews. She sums up the reaction to the popularity of the book and movie this way: “If women like it, it must be stupid.” In high school, there were certain musicians that girls liked, such as Duran Duran and Corey Hart, and boys always made fun of us for liking. I could never understand what was so bad about them. It’s like a twisted version of the prank that George Clooney pulled. But the worst part is it’s not a joke.

The blog “My Fault I’m Female” features anecdotes sent in by readers when they had to face stereotypes or deal with unequal treatment or plain old incomprehension, just because they were female. I like reading this blog because it reminds me that I’m not crazy and that it’s OK for me to be angry at the thousand tiny cuts that I suffer because my existence challenges assumptions.

Living on the margins is an odd thing. On the one hand, things are never easy, because I’m not one of the “cool kids,” to borrow a metaphor from high school social interactions. Interactions always have to be negotiated and discovered anew, because things can’t be taken for granted. On the other hand, there are advantages to being able to understand and appreciate cool and not cool. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

December 9, 1906 and December 6, 1989

This year, December 5-11 was declared Computer Science Education Week by the US House of Representatives, with leadership from Congressman Vernon Ehlers and Congressman Jared Polis. The goal of CSEdWeek was to raise awareness of the importance of computer science for every student at all levels. Some understanding of how computers work is absolutely essential for everyone as more and more of our lives move onto the screen and the web.

The week was chosen to coincide with the late Admiral Grace Hopper‘s birthday. She was born on December 9, 1906– the first date in the title of this post. She received a PhD in mathematics from Yale University at the age of 28 and six years later she had reached the level of Associate Professor at Vassar College. She took a leave of absence from this position to enlist in the Navy to help with the war effort. Hopper served on the Mark I computer programming staff and was a pioneer in programming and the design of high level languages. She passed away on January 1, 1992. Hopper was a tiny woman– she needed an exemption when she enlisted because she was only 105 lbs, 15 less than the minimum. But she was an inspiration to us all, through her colorful anecdotes, and lively and irreverent speaking style. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is conference to bring together women in computing from undergraduates and onwards, from industry, academia, and government.

I have attended two of this and they were amazing experiences. The first time that I went, I brought my 4-year-old daughter with me. My intention was to be a role model and to mentor other women. Boy, was I wrong. I received far more mentoring and inspiration that I expected, and provided very little myself. I was reminded that despite the strength of my own beliefs, it is still important to go to the temple and be with other believers. It feels so different to be in a conference room with 1800 women and the occasional man. It feels like I belong, and I say this with no lack of confidence in my abilities or comfort level at other conferences. It makes me dream about what it would be like create other places in the world where I, and other women, felt this way.

CSEdWeek also coincides with the 11th anniversary of the passing of Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. On December 6, 1989– the second date in the title, a man armed with a hunting knife and a rifle went to École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec with the self-stated intention to fight feminism. CBC Radio 1 had a tradition for many years of not naming the perpetrator to emphasize the innocent victims, and I follow that here. The killer went into classrooms and offices, and specifically targeted women. In one classroom, he sent the men out, before lining up the women and turning his gun on them. All told, he killed fourteen women and injured ten other women and four men, before committing suicide.

This occurred during my last year of high school, so I came of age as woman in the shadow of the Montreal Massacre. I, like the rest of the country, struggled to make sense of it. Was it a symptom of general misogynist tendencies perpetuated by society? Or was the killer just a crazy person?

By the time I entered university, there were annual candlelight vigils commemorating the event and December 6 was designated National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. While there was no denying the tragedy of the event, I benefited from discourse surrounding it. There was much greater awareness, sympathy, and understanding of rape, date rape, and domestic violence afterward. Still, this took many years. In the early months and years, it was hard to find a narrative for the event that allowed us to live with ourselves and to look to the future with optimism.

One claim that I heard, liked, and repeated myself was that the gunman was a nut and that his act was the equivalent of someone going into a classroom, lining up, and shooting all the red heads. I wasn’t very enlightened at the time, but this explanation felt right to me. The guy was a nut. Even if there were misogynist messages everywhere, you don’t see everyone running around shooting women. (Well, they do, but I did say that I didn’t yet have my consciousness raised.)

But over the years, I have come to realize that my choice of analogy was more apt than I realized. I chose “red hair” as the category, because it seemed silly to categorize people based solely on hair color. Yet, little did I know that there is a strong bias against redheads, or gingers as the British call them. Jokes are told about them, red-headed children are teased and bullied, and even surgeons fear doing operations on them.

Red hair is just a physical trait, but it’s also one that significantly influences life course and has some associated genetic characteristics. It seems to me that sex is similar. As a woman, my physical equipment is different from a man’s, and this affects my life course and makes me more susceptible to some disorders. But at the same time, these are just physical characteristics and not determinants of my humanity, ability to feel emotional hurt, or entitlement to equal rights as others who have different hair color or personal plumbing.

Grace Hopper’s birthday and the Montréal Massacre anniversary are not just chronological coincidences; I think they are both part of a larger narrative about women in technology. Women still have to seize their own space and demand that there be a place for them in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But at the same time, the status quo needs to make room for them. This goes deeper than numbers and percentages, but also looking at curriculum (why programming first and not design or user studies?), decorum in meetings (unruly), a de facto dress code (jeans and t-shirts), obligatory passage points, and the kinds of skills and contributions that get counted.

The ground was broken for me by other women, including Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Jean Bartik, Marlyn Meltzer, Kay Mauchly Antonelli, Betty Holberton, and Fran Allen. I feel very lucky to have them as my fore-mothers. But I am looking forward to the day when unexceptional women feel that it’s OK for them to go into computers too and when I can feel a strong sense of belonging not just at a Grace Hopper conference. Until then, I too will continue to break ground (not without cost!) as a woman in technology, a researcher, an author, a professor, and a mom.

If a revolution were organized by women…

New York Times Magazine had an amazing article this week,
The New Abortion Providers, by Emily Bazelon. It talks about efforts over the last thirty years to make abortions a part of mainstream medical practice.

This approach reminded me of a discussion that I had with a couple of ladies at church. Despite their age (or because of it), they were die-hard feminists and progressive Christians. They talked about how their grandmothers were also feminists, but in a quiet way, behind the scenes. They opined that behind any social movement that was successful had women doing the cooking and organizing while the men were doing the blustering. But at the same time, they didn’t embrace the dominant narrative of feminism. Jo Cranson mentioned Ashley Montague interviewing a grandmother who ask why she should settle for equality when it’s less than what I had before. Robinmarie McClement cited Susan B. Anthony being very concerned about women losing their quiet power behind the throne, if they pursued feminism as a public battle.

Protests and gauntlets in front of free-standing clinics are effective because abortions are a marginalized medical practice. If more doctors performed abortions in their offices or in a hospital, it would make it much more difficult for protesters to single out patients. This change would involve making abortion a standard procedure in the practice of family doctors, internists, and OB/GYN.

In 1995, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education made abortion training a requirement for all OB/GYN residency programs, meaning that medical students would be receiving mandated hours of lecture on how to perform abortion. This motivation behind this move was to make abortion part of the professional qualifications of a doctor. Even if the student never performs an abortion, they needed to be educated about it.

The next step was to make in-roads into academic medicine by establishing fellowships to provide advanced training and to support research.

“A physician at the U.C.S.F. medical school set up the Family Planning Fellowship, a two-year stint following residency that pays doctors to sharpen their skills in abortion and contraception, to venture into research and to do international work. In recent years, the fellowship has expanded to 21 universities, including the usual liberal-turf suspects — Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, U.C.L.A. — but also schools in more conservative states, like the University of Utah, the University of Colorado and Emory University in Georgia.”

International work was an important component because it exposed the fellows to countries where back alley abortions were still common. Another side effect of the residencies is that the physicians need to perform enough abortions to “train to competency.” In other words, they need to do enough procedures to be able to handle complications. This process often involves performing many, many abortions in a hospital setting, because the complication rates for first-trimester abortions are so low (about 1%). This training usually occurs in hospitals, which means greater, safe access for women. Coming out of these fellowships, residents are equipped to make decisions about the place of abortion in their own practice. The decision whether or not to offer thee treatment is not necessarily a simple yes or no, but possibly choosing a cut-off, such as 7, 9, or 13 weeks.

These small changes are brilliant, because they don’t involve direct confrontation with the protesters on the front lines. They make abortion more available by changing the context. If physicians could bring the simple procedure into the medical fold, it would reduce the need for free-standing clinics and the vulnerability of their patients. (An abortion at 9 weeks gestation produces no recognizes fetal parts and takes less than five minutes by a skilled provider, using device that is “about 10 inches long, costs only $30 and looks like the kind of appliance you might find in a kitchen drawer.”)

There are still other obstacles in the way, such as hospitals being squeamish about associated with abortion and the cost of extra medical insurance, but change is afoot. Moreover, this is a change brought about largely by women for women, with the support of male colleagues, away from the glare of publicity and politics.

Many of the protégées Grimes is talking about are women. In the first generation after Roe, abortion providers were mostly men because doctors were mostly men. Since then, women have streamed into the ranks of OB-GYN and family medicine. They are now the main force behind providing abortion.

Let’s hear it for social revolutions organized by women.