I go through my life being a weirdo and pretty much ignoring all the evidence that I am a weirdo because I know I’m a weirdo and I don’t really care. Most of the time. Plus, that’s too many uses of the word ‘weirdo’ in one sentence. But I’m making a point. The point being that I’m a weirdo.
Anyway, the reason I’m thinking about it is beacuse I’ll read old posts at Ask A Manager as a way to wind down at night. The one I chose last night was from someone who knew a new hire from working with him in a different place. In the last place, there was rampant sexism because they hired from a Christian college that proclaims that women should submit to men. The letter writer asked how, if she had been on the hiring board, could she probe for this kind of attitude?
Alison said (broadly paraphrasing), that she would ask about diversity issues. This was for a managing position, so the questions were geared towards that. One of them was, “How do you think about equity and bias around things like race and gender when hiring or developing people?” She had possible follow-up questions to each question. the one for this question was, “How have you known when your efforts to foster equity were working or not?”
I have seen other posts (not necessarily from her) about asking people how they work with people of different genders, races, ethnicities, religions, etc. It’s funny to me beacuse I always have to work with people of different everything. I’m the minority in almost every category I can think of. Protected by law, I mean. Gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, and age. Agender, areligious, Taiwanese, bisexual, fifty-something. Back in the day, I used to joke that I was a triple threat (race, sexual orientation, gender) and that was before I went even more buckwild.
That’s why I get frustrated when people try to lecture me about looking at it from other points of view. Not that I can’t afford to widen my horizons because of course I can. Everyone can. But it’s irritating because it never feels ilke it’s a two-way thing.
About a decade ago, when being more aware of social inequities came to the forefront, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Any time issues of, say, gender or sexual orientation were brought up, white cis dudes were given a free pass. What I mean is that the people most pushed on the isuses were minorities themselves. I understood it was partly because of the whole ‘a reasonable perosn will more likely change than an unreasonable one’, but it was frustrating.
I know that I can be better. Everyone can always be better. But there is a part of me that is resentful. I’ll admit it. No one cares about Asian people or agender people or areligious people or bisexual people. All of those cotegories get pushed under the rug–or worse yet, aren’t even realized.
I don’t think it’s malicious. I eman, I know it’s not malicious. No one is going around thinking, “We are going to ignore anything that isn’t this or that.” It’s partly human nature–thinking in the binary I mean. Although I find it funny that nonbinary has been so quickly accepted as a category, but not agender. Like nonbinary isn’t that understood, but it’s more so than agender.
I know that I’m jus old person shouting at the sky because no one cares. I mean, even my best friends don’t completely get how erased I feel. It’s hard to feel worthwhile when there’s no one like me. At all. Not in that ‘we are all unique’ kind of way. With each modifier, I add one more deviation to the bell curve. Asian. Tick. Taiwanese. Double tick. Agender, areligious, bi, twice dead. I’m not even on the bell curve any longer.
In my middle age and having died twice, I just don’t have the energy to push for change any longer. I’m irate that I was brought back to life only to have the Supreme Court decide to drag us back to the ’30s. Choice is such a huge issue. I have said that I did not die twice to come back to a world in which my niece and nephews have less choice than I do.
I was thinking about the gender issue before I ended up in the hospital. i was trying to figure out what exactly were my feelings about my gender. Then I ended up in the hopsital and decided I didn’t care enough to really fight it. If people wanted to call me a woman, fine. My metaphor is that it’s like an ill-fitting coat. It covers my body, but it’s not comfortable. It gets the job done, barely. I probably won’t get rained on, but I’m going to be too warm at the same time.
It’s just not worth the effort. ‘Woman’ is close enough. I have shared experiences because of what people assume me to be. It’s fraught, though, because I got told all throughout my life that I wasn’t really a woman. At some point, I just said, “Fine. I’m not a woman. I don’t care.”
I never felt as if my gender was a hardcore part of me. I understand that people have that feeling, but for me, it just wasn’t an issue. I assume I was female beacuse I needed an identifier. But I got lost in the weeds because I could not understand what that meant. I wasn’t being snarky, either. I just didn’t feel a deep connection to the word or the idea of what a woman should be.
It’s the same with my sexual identity. Back when I first realized I wasn’t just attracted to men, there was the mantra that your sexual identity was not a choice. Which, I understand why queers did not want to give an inch. I always felct it was, though, for me. I mean, I supppose you can say that me being able to be attracted to a variety of genders is innate, but then we’re getting tot the question of is an absent god still a god? What I mean is that I don’t believe in the Christian god, but I do believe in something bigger than humans. I have a harder time believing that our world just suddenly came into existence out of absolutely nothing. But I also believe that this deity, as it were, is not interested in each individual human being because I cannot reconcile that with all the atrocities of this world.
I’m done for now. I’ll pick this up in the next post.