Tag: delusion | A Banana Peeled

Tag Archives: delusion

Gender and me

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I don’t get gender. I fully acknowledge this is a me-thing as most people seem very wedded to their gender, but let me break this down. And I mean this is the most real, non-sarcastic way. I know how it sounds and that it may seem like I’m throwing jabs. I truly am not.

Here’s the thing. As I understand it, gender is currently not predicated on genitalia, but on how you (general you) identify, gender-wise. For trans people, this seems to be that you don’t identify with the gender into which you were born, but the other (binary). But some people also think that being nonbinary is also being trans.

At any rate, one of the tenets of feminism is that you can be anything you want as a woman. You don’t have to be stereotypically feminine, but you also don’t have to reject things that are stereotypically feminine. I actually have a quibble with this because it has gotten to the point that anything done by a woman is a feminist act, and I am not down with that. You can decide not to fight the sexism in an individual situation, but that doesn’t mean some things aren’t objectively sexist.

That’s not the point of this post, though, so I am going to move on with difficulty.

Well, no I’m not. Because it’s part of the point. I don’t understand why we have to use genders at all. K and I have talked about this at length. She thhinks that within our lifetime, we will resort to using they/them for everyone. And within her kids’ (the ones she teaches) lifetime, gender will be done away with completely. Her kids think that in her lifetime they/them wil be used for everyone, but not the latter.

I think they/them might become the default, but probably not in my lifetime. Then again, marriage equality took much less time than I thought it would. I remember roughly five years before it happened, I was saying to K that it would happen in my lifetime, but probably not for another twenty years. Then, after intense debate, it suddenly happened in a very short amount of time. Frankly, my head was spinning at how quickly it happened beacuse I was hunkered down for a knock down, dragged out, kick-you-around fig9ht.

I’m reminded of those early days with gender identity and how fast it’s been evolving. I was reading a post on Ask A Manager* from 2019 that had to do with gender and sexism. Basically, an older woman was tired of being called ‘young lady’. She politely told a service worker why she did not want to be called that (sexism as part of the reason), and the comments were wild. I don’t want to get into them too deeply because the wildness is not why I’m musing on this post.

A continual disappointment

Posted on December 10, 2021 by Minna Hong • 2 Comments

I thought my parents leaving would make my life easier. And, to be clear, it has. I still have to interact with them ,however, and last night we Zoomed with my brother while they grind out their quarantine for two weeks in a hotel room. My brother was late because he had appointments all day long and my mother couldn’t wait so she started a meeting. First thing my father asks is if ‘the restaurant’ was still sending meals. He meant Origin Meals, which is not a restaurant, but prepared meals. I said no. He barged on, worrying about my breakfast (because we didn’t eat Origins for breakfast).

Side note: i have a weird habit of adding an ‘s’ at the end of things when abbreviating them. Like Origin Meals to Origins and Cub Foods to Cubs.

I mean, I’ve lived alone all my life except for one year and have managed to feed myself up to this point. More to the point, what was he going to do about it? And what had he done about it while here? Jack and shit. My mom cooked breakfast, not him. He just sat on his ass and scrolled through his phone, adding spam to it because he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

Anyway, after the needless talk about how I’m feeding myself, my mom nervously cleared her throat. I went on high alert because I knew that she was about to say something that was going to piss me off. And I was right. She brought up what I was doing with my life and mentioned getting a degree in psychology. A graduate degree, to be clear.

Backstory: Every time my parents visit, there’s at least one if not several talks about what I’m going to do with my life. I understand why they bring it up, but they go about it in the worst possible way. And in this case, I was hoping we could skip it entirely and just be happy I was alive. But, no. They brought it up–or actually, my mother brought it up several times. The times my father was there, he just sat there with that blank look on his face because he couldn’t follow the conversation. I made it clear that I did not want to talk about it because I was focusing on recovering. I said I had enough money to be fine for six months (and, really, I could go a year) and that was what I was going to do. Please note the six months comment because that’s important.