Tag: gender

i feel quite small today

Today, the Alabama House of Representatives voted to make it illegal for doctors to proscribe gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth (18 and under).

I am grateful for what a few representatives said in the battle that ended in a vote of 66-28 in favor of this bill.

Rep. England: “You’re saying this is about children. It’s not. What it is about is scoring political points and using those children as collateral damage”

Rep. Rafferty: “Its totally undermining family rights, health rights and access to health care.”

I was pretty numb while I read this headline at first. A protective numbness.

I was numb until I reached this quote in the article from Rep. Wes Allen: “Their brains are not developed to make the decisions long term about what these medications and surgeries do to their body,”

When I read that, I was angry. I was frustrated by the utter stupidity of it all. I wanted to storm down to that house and explain to this man that going through puberty ~naturally~ or whatever Is A Choice, and a choice with lasting, lifelong repercussions. I want to ask why he thinks the state should be able to make this choice for children: A choice that he states will have lasting effects on their bodies.

I have been fighting my body for years, and if I had been given the option at the beginning to not have to go through that, hell yes I would have picked that.

I’m not a better person for having had two puberties. I’m just sadder.

All I want is to be able to protect those kids in Alabama. I want to protect my trans students from the ricocheting pain I am feeling after this bill. And after all the rest.

I feel quite small today.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091510026/alabama-gender-affirming-care-trans-transgender

motivation when I’m tired

(Alternatively titled: A teaching philospohy)

In trying to understand who I am as a teacher
I found a misconception I had been holding on to:
I thought the pull to teaching was math.

(And I do love math
I am grateful to have it as a partner in this endeavor
I love its definitiveness and ambiguity

Give me good pattern any day of the week and I’ll be happy
Or an algorithm
a visualization
a comparison
a mapping
a graph 
a prediction 
a puzzle

Math is a language where you can express 
both more 
and less 
than you can with words.

Math carries a precision that syllables and sentences never can
Yet fails to articulate the finest points of humanness)

But to say I am tied to teaching because I love math 
is a knot that will unravel under tension. 
I would not have ended up here if I had not accompanied a bouquet of trans folks
On legs of their expeditions:
Through crushing expectations
Through meeting themselves 
Through glimmers of expansive freedom
Through letting the world in to meet them.

I teach in order to hold a place for these gender explorers and defiers
For these norm breakers 
For these students looking for someone to see them, to know them.

	
I stumbled into teaching with my crochet hook and calculator 
with enormous and hazy and overwhelming dreams
To chip away at these walls against which my back is pressed
To exist where they said we couldn’t
To make space
for us.



Black trifold board poster with a rainbow geometric stripe from the bottom left to top right. Title in silver: lgbteacher: being out in the classroom as an act of radical honesty. Bottom right is a timeline with pictures. Middle contains titles with flap doors that reveal to more
final project for my first grad school class in teaching in 2019

right now in Texas

powerful people 
Think that it is abuse
To let me feel free

They want our existence to be reported 
Our support systems ripped out from under us

They want us gone
Because we make them question every lie they ever told themselves about how they were allowed to exist through the world

We make them confront the terrifying expanse that the universe becomes when you realize it is your right to define yourself boundlessly,
to be fully human, 
fully unique and yet the same, 
fully perfect 
and yet never not fully a work in progress 





There are people 
Who Think that it is abuse
To help me feel free

But who refuse to see the enormously obvious, heart shatteringly painful reality that is
That their words rip open barely healed wounds 
There will be unthinkable, unforgivable pain because of this
There will be lives broken and lost.


I want to hold a message of hope. 
Of ‘we will prevail’. 

But it’s hard to stay positive and be a trans person in a world where your right to exist continues to be questioned in new old ways.
I’m tired.
I’m in pain. 



——-
Required afterthought:
But we will care for eachother 
And we will care for ourselves 
And we will be free

assorted thoughts from my notes app (pt. 3)

  1. Statistics for how many calls I get per day to sub for various schools, despite working full time (I stopped keeping track after 3 days)
  2. “I am better adapted to a world with technology” (most of the time)
  3. “When teaching I give away the answer too fast”
  4. A selfie from when I was feeling cute
  5. Outline for my murder mystery review activity
  6. Things to do with my mom during break
  7. “I need more structure for self care”
  8. “My body is a plane of a non Euclidean geometry”
  9. “I love looking for patterns in data”
  10. “Proofs are about seeing connections”
  11. A list of ideas of things I would love to create from writing a book to
  12. How do you be introspective without being overly self critical (edited from original longer jumbled thought)
  13. “Adapting to a genre vs conforming to it”
  14. “Bad healthcare’s effect on my relationship with my body: Its too expensive to check in, So I tune it out. I tune out the creeks and throbs, the stiffness and pressure”

assorted thoughts from my notes app (pt. 2)

  1. “I have to consider the possibility that I have not done something wrong up to this point”
  2. measurements for boards for the bottom gap in the fence
  3. “Asking questions is not questioning”
  4. “Queerness is: the rebellious joyfulness, the purposeful mismatching, the thoughtful subversion”
  5. “cookie butter”
  6. Idea about animating mathematical operations to see how other people perceive them
  7. “Thursday Dentist”
  8. “Radio Plays”
  9. Just the letter “S”
  10. “Onion powder, thyme, red pepper flakes”
  11. “I want people to know I’m queer just by looking at me. I know you can never really know but I want them to ~~~ know ~~~ ya know?”
  12. Quote from The Body is Not an Apology (Sonia Renee Taylor): “How we treat our body spills into how we treat others bodies”
  13. “Shambling” (Thats it. Thats the whole note.)
  14. Ideas for costumes for the show I’m designing: Outgrown clothes, star stuff -> bleached = touched by stardust?
  15. “Camera people filming camera people”
  16. “Real in the lie”
  17. “make things accessible for more people, and more people will come”
  18. “Implication vs passive aggressive communication”
  19. List of possible coffee shops for meeting a new friend
  20. “What is proof?” (again, that’s the whole note…)
  21. Queer book recommendations from a friend (I have not yet read any): Untamed, This is How it Always is, Keeping you a Secret
  22. “Correlation Theories”
  23. “building relationships with people who’s lives inevitably overlap mine. making sure some peoples lives continue to overlap mine”