I tend to overthink things. By a lot. I’m not talking about spending five more minutes on something than I should, but obsessing over something that I should just let go.
For example, gender. I have talked about it ad nauseam, and I know that it’s not good for my mental health to do so. I also know that for whatever reason, I can’t ever come close to understanding gender. Sometimes, I feel like I’m about to grasp it, but then it slithers out of my hand.
Then, I say to myself, “I’ve made my peace with it.” I may even believe it for a minute or two. However, the dissatisfaction slithers in, and I’m in despair once agian. What is gender? Why can’t I feel it or understand it? Why am I such a freak–yet again? Just once, can’t I be normal?
The answer to that is a most emphatic no. There is nothing about me that is normal. Not my hobbies to my lifestyle to my pop culture tastes to everything else. I have mostly gotten used to it, but it niggles at the back of my mind now and again.
Especially in a time when my federal government is actively hurting me and mine. I have said that I’m relieved at the last time I had to declare my gender on my driver’s license that I chose F. Even though it’s the first time they included NB, and I would have chosen that if I was thirty years younger. This time, though, it was right before the elections. There was much muttering from certain people* about the queers something or the other blah blah blah I always close my ears at this point.
I will say it’s always amazed me that people can get so wound up at a tiny minority of people who have no impact on them at all. Not directly. And, no, “they’re ruining women’s sports” or “they’re a menance in the women’s bathroom” are such bullshit.
By the way. Those arguments are never made in good faith. Do you know how I know this? Because the same people are not concerned about domestic violence abuse victims, the vast number of sexual assualts in America, or any other array of issues that face women, nonbinary people, genderqueer people, agender people, and, yes, indeed, even men in this country. The only time the conservatives roll out ‘but the wimminz’ bullshit is when it comes to their transphobic bullshit.
Pardon me if I don’t believe them when they bleat about caring for women when the do everything they can to make life harder for women in so many ways*. Pardon me again for giving such heavy side-eye at the faux concern.
Here’s the thing. There always has to be a bogeywoman the pols can point at so the slavering masses. For me, it started wiht Reagan and the ‘welfare queen’. Thus began the stereotype of the black woman trying to game the welfare system while driving a Cadillac to said welfare appointments. Reagan also systematically further disenfranchised gay men during the first AIDs crisis, but I’m not going to talk about that, either.