Friday Philosophy: Perspective

On Monday I read Learning to Count Past Two…with a few updates as asides…to a Women’s Studies class called Changing Women’s Lives.  My partner Debbie is coordinator of the Women’s Studies Resource and Empowerment Center (WSREC)  and teaches that class.  It would be great if it were a faculty line, and hence a full time position, but that is not the case.  She’s rather considered more of a hybrid staff/adjunct faculty person (i.e. she gets no benefits, except as my spouse).

Let’s not even talk about adjunct compensation.  It’s one of the things our society should be ashamed of.

I’ve presented that piece live a time or two before.  It was, in fact, written to be presented to a Psychology of Women class at the University of Central Arkansas.  The professor who invited me to lecture her classes several times didn’t get tenure.  That’s an observation, not a conclusion.

But it is true that many, many people think that teaching about people like me to college or high school students is beyond the pale.  And I leave open the definition of “people like me.”

The chapter the students were in the midst of studying was on gender.  Debbie is disenchanted with the book she chose.  It turns out the authors/editors are more stuck in the 70s with regard to gender than she initially thought.  I only skimmed the gender chapter, but I have to agree.

How simplistic is it to present “gender is entirely a social construct” as a given?

I mean, they did include reference to Anne Fausto-Sterling re: intersex issues and to Les Feinberg, Kate Bornstein and Judith Butler about gender, but there seemed to me to be an undercurrent of disapproval about transfolk.  More Old School, if you will, and Old School didn’t understand us and attacked whatever they didn’t understand.

Les was allowed to contribute an essay.  And I enjoyed the essay very much.  But I do note that it was the very last essay at the end of the chapter.  And I did make a mental note of the fact that almost all feminist text books I’ve seen, if they do deign to include something written by a transperson, it is almost always something written by a transman.  Why is that?

Some of the students had read some of the essays, but few, if any, had read the Feinberg piece.

After I got a chance to say my piece (which they were also provided a copy of in BlackBoard), I asked for questions.  This impromptu portion is actually what I enjoy most.  I’m not comfortable as a speaker…which is why I rather call myself a writer.  That way I get to sit while I interact.  I rarely hear a new question anymore and I have stories to illustrate answers to just about every question imaginable.  Most of those stories have been included in other writings hear and there.

In reference to a question about the reaction of my friends and family, I got to talk about that, but also about how it feels to become a topic of conversation in six states almost overnight and about having religious folks want to chase me out of town.  And I also got an opportunity to talk about turning what could be a liability into an opportunity.

I was asked about whether or not I had ever been assaulted, and I got to talk about the mixed feelings a transwoman would have when hit in the neck by a baseball-sized rock by a group of high school kids who were screaming, “Dykes!  Dykes!” outside of the Women’s Coffeehouse at Vino’s in Little Rock.  And about how the cops didn’t care.  And further about how straight men needed to get over the need to beat and/or kill transsexual women…and the faster the better.  Thinking that results in the thought that transsexual women are responsible for that sort of interaction and deserve what they get is another of the shames of this society.  We wonder when someone is going to recognize that.

And I also got to speak a little about personal self-defense, though I’m always quite uncomfortable doing so, for personal reasons.  Being an MP was not the best time of my life.

Another common question, though it often takes awhile for people to get comfortable enough to ask, is whether sex feels to me like it does to someone born with factory-installed equipment.  In short, “Are your orgasms female orgasms?”  Honesty is the best policy:  “How can I know?  How can I know what anyone else’s orgasm but my own feels like?  I’m a woman.  My orgasms are therefore a woman’s orgasms.”

What else is there to say?

Back in December, I wrote The Observer.  Even in the midst of an event like that on Monday, I am an observer.  An examined life, and all that…

I hope Socrates had this right.

So I’m sitting there watching myself interact with these students, and with Debbie since we also brought up our civil union…oddly, the students didn’t ask about that.  And I’m remembering what it was like at that first time and in that first place that I presented the piece.  And I’m reflecting on the differences between the two classes.  Back in Arkansas, most of the women in the class were conservatively Christian, southern, white women.  The audience Monday was all women of color who live in or near Newark, NJ.

I’m also forced to remember then in other respects.  There have been so many alterations on the fabric of the environment in which the speaker exposes the words.  The world changes…slowly.

And the speaker has changed in many subtle ways.  But that’s harder to measure.  Heisenberg applies…or if you prefer, The Observer Effect.  The act of observation necessarily changes what is being observed.  And it also changes The Observer.  All we can ever know is an approximation to what is.

And if you ask me to go beyond observing the changes in The Observer, my brain starts becoming mushy.  I’m sure there is a there there, but something prevents me from doing more than stepping quickly and lightly into and out of that space.

I mostly feel the need to nap after visits.  That doesn’t encourage writing about them.  So I write poor approximations to what I think I can remember myself thinking.  Life is complicated.

People often express their concern for me when I have reported what it’s like to be me.  One of the students present wrote me a letter.  She is in one of my classes as well as Debbie’s class.  I told her on Thursday I would write back to her this weekend.  She’s the woman who asked about whether I had ever been assaulted.  I asked for a couple of days to develop a frame of reference.  

It’s all about perspective.  Viewing me now from the point of view of the me who existed in 1992, there is no question:  it’s a good life.  

Mathematically speaking:  Even if sometimes the acceleration has been negative, the velocity has always been positive.  I increase.

Not bad for someone who is basically lazy.

Cyanide On Being Lazy The bad part about laziness is the guilt that insists I accomplish things in order to hide that facet The paradox is that if I became free to be lazy I suspect I would get much more accomplished –Robyn Elaine Serven –February 29, 2008