Aside

It is polite to address people with a salutation. Sir, Ma’am, Miss, and the like. That is, unless you get it wrong, whether deliberately as an act of rudeness or hostility, or out of ignorance. Ignorance can be corrected through education, but rudeness cannot.

I am ordering desk copies of texts from academic publishers, and in most cases the forms cannot be completed without selecting from the ‘salutations’ pull down menu which contains only gendered options. Now I am old enough to remember the fight to include Ms in that menu. The open hostility to the idea that it was a woman’s right not to disclose her marital status when functioning in public environments, and that was a valuable and hard-fought and won battle.

The next one is Mx, the gender neutral salutation. I’m ordering books. You don’t need to know my gender, or what’s in my pants. It has no bearing on what I am ordering, and should have no bearing on your data analysis. If you want data then, ask people to self-identify for surveys.

It is honestly some of why I want to get the doctorate. To facilitate the salutation ordeal.

“No, it’s Dr…”

T-shirts, moving, molds and moulds

I can never remember which one of the two spellings is about creation, and which is the one I am allergic to. I should though, because the fungus renders me unable to breathe, think or function, and instead I am lost and rudderless in an ocean of half-formed thoughts. Perhaps I am lost like most of the rest of us in this time of crisis, looking to be directed into concrete action by some external force, or perhaps I am doing what I do best, learned in a childhood of trauma – keeping my head down, trying to keep working, and hoping that the things that are making my life so terrifyingly uncertain will be over soon. Since that last one brings tears to my eyes, I’m fairly certain that it’s correct. I have piles of stuff to take to the Goodwill, and I have to be ready to move in a month. That’s certainly manageable. I could pack this room in a day, but I am mostly just having panic attacks instead. I am presenting at two conferences next month. That is also manageable. I have four final papers and a syllabus due – not too much work. Most are related to the conference presentations, either the ones now, upcoming ones, or publications stemming from those presentations. So, no particularly new research or new work although there are new concepts every week and it feels like my head will explode sometimes.

I am struggling with what Berlant terms cruel optimism particularly the capitalist consumerism of this society, and the necessity of presenting myself in a particular kind of way. I am in a department which mandates being ‘scent free’ but so far most of us are not using gelatin as a hair product or washing with baking soda. As an asthmatic and someone with inflammatory illness coping with people coming in from smoke breaks and being in a moldy building I understand the desire to have people behave in a way that makes me less sick. I used to have wonderful thick hair. It was also very frizzy unless lots of product was added to it, because of being mixed-race. So, now after 8 years of being on lupus meds, and three years of being on T I have thin, fine, brittle frizzy hair that breaks and falls out all the time. It’s still hard to deal with, but washing it with baking soda is not going to cut it. My practical side says I should just hack it all off again – it wouldn’t be the first time, but I’m not quite ready for that, and I’m a bit vain. The more pragmatic part wonders each time if it’s the last time I will be able to have long(er) hair. So, hair, like everything with living with chronic illness is tied into the spiral of degeneration and fatality as well as of negotiation with the illness, and of cooperation and collaboration with community for the purposes of engagement and sustenance.

Where cruel optimism comes into it, is that there are things that I would like – that I imagine in my grad student life as ways of presenting myself that are beyond my immediate reach as a (very fortuitously funded) graduate student. This is not remotely a complaint, but living with a chronic illness, life becomes a negotiation, and even when it seems like there is enough, there is forever the possibility that tomorrow that money you spent on a tshirt or some hair products will be needed for the co-pay for your blood tests, medication, or for a specialist. The optimism lies in imagining or being able to have things with available capital, and the cruelty lies in the fact that once obtained, they are again unsatisfying, and preclude the ability to obtain other potentially necessary or satisfying things.

I think it could be extrapolated to social capital which I have rarely had sufficiency, and certainly never excess of. In accumulating it against future necessity one gains a sense of security in the face of potential need, but if one spends it, then one has the fact once again of not only being bereft of advantage, but also being in deficit and owing those from whom one has asked favours. I am so grateful to be in a department which sees community rather than hierarchical models of networking, because although I can and have functioned successfully within that models, I know that I function better in a community.

Being counted

“I opted to leave question e-two blank as I identify as trans, queer and liminally gendered. I object to being registered as male or female in the service of data collection, and point out that it will skew the data to classify gender variant people in binary categories. My identification has not yet changed, so for the purposes of this study classify me as female for analysis if necessary, but understand that by doing so you are contributing to the systemic erasure of my identity”

Many thanks to Sabine Grutter for the format of this Census response:
8 Things Trans And Intersex People Need To Know About The 2016 Canadian Census

Aside

In contemplating the move to America, I keep coming across my desire to work in a good way, to honour my ancestors, to honour the others doing this work, and recognizing my accountability to those others engaged in this struggle as well.

My memories have been of Edward’s Gardens and the walks with my Vanaisa. As we wandered the forests we would ‘meet’ the people who lived there, negotiate with them for permission to cross their lands, trade, share meals, and then meet the next people. I think of this as being my grandfather passing on basic skills for negotiating the world.