Out of Sorts

Those words—out of sorts—formed in my mind as I drove from my house to my Saturday morning coffee shop (shout out to Bean Scene who look after me so well).

It, the out-of-sortness, started this morning with Facebook. Cruising around I came across the report of a transgender man➤woman who won the women’s swimming and smashed the record.

I don’t have a problem with transgender people. I probably should, given that I live a lot of my life in very conservative circles who have a lot to say about the matter, but I don’t.

To me, all people are of value and have reasons—often pain-based—for what they do.

What bothers me about this transgender moment was the message that landed with me: men are better at being women than women are.

I spent much of my childhood and adolescence wanting to be a boy. My mother liked boys better and boys were stronger than me, often using that strength against me. I wanted to be loved and strong, and that looked to me like being male.

Then I encountered a man who loved me and valued my emotional and intellectual strengths without using his physical strength against me.

I married that man.

And came to see my female body as an amazing thing all in its own right. I have never had to dumb myself down for my husband. My marriage has been and continues to be, a place of flourishing for both of us.

So why do I feel attacked thirty years later by a transgender man winning a women’s swimming competition?

Why am I so offended by the now-retracted LNP phallic symbol of womanhood?

Why was I upset that a man in authority over me, on a Zoom meeting, commented that my home office ‘looks very academic’?

Taken aback by his words which were clearly not a compliment, I replied, ‘that’s because this is who I am now.’

It felt odd, defending myself. He knows I am about to be awarded my PhD. What about that isn’t academic? Why the surprise that my office looks like the office of an academic unless the surprise is that it is the office of a female academic?

I wish that I had something pithier to reply to him but even now I still don’t know how to respond. Maybe it is because my academic self has been under fire this week not only from men but women, too.

The verbal criticisms coming my way is that I am being too academic, too “Litty”. What else am I to be? I have three degrees in Literature! It is no secret that I write, that I think in logical ways framed by the literature I have studied, and that I am highly practical and deeply philosophical.

It seems even my own gender has problems with what is perceived as my masculine attributes. Attributes, by the way, that I take a great deal of pleasure in and am open and honest about. In a parent/teacher meeting with a student and her mother, I confessed that I am not the person to talk the student ‘back from the edge’ and that we would need to find someone else at school to do that for her.

I am honest with my students, too, ‘if you are upset and come to me, I will give you tissues, wait for you to feel a bit better, and then send you to someone who will cry with you.’

Why, as a woman, is it unusual for me to not only look like an academic but to actually be one? Why do I need a man to show me how to be the best woman in the pool? Who in the LNP thought that no one would notice their highly offensive symbol for women?

Why do other women criticise my mind? Aren’t they supposed to be on my side?

And why, as a curvy, well-loved, happy-to-be-a-woman woman, am I bothered by all of this?

Here is the crux of it.

In my academic world, no one hardly notices my gender. Perhaps I am fortunate to be in an academic community that has already worked its way through self-esteem building based on degrading others by gender/race and has mostly gotten past it.

I value people. Individuals. I see them—you—as containing something truly unique to your situation, circumstances, and personality. Even the numpties in the LNP have things they can offer to the greater good. I suspect, however, that they have opted for the easier degrade-the-other option rather than the harder, improve-ourselves model of building self-esteem.

We each have something to contribute.

My female body offers my mind ideas and insights into the things I think, just as the male body offers the male mind insights. This should bring us together. Strong bodies should not be used against those that are weaker, they should be used to protect and defend.

But, of course, I underestimate the intoxication of power. The false sense of self-value that comes when one stands over another. It is addictive, this power. Just look at the lengths people go pursuing it.

Notice I didn’t say ‘men’? We are all capable of pushing others down as we reach to be the top of the pile. Some go to great lengths to ensure you are at the bottom. Some simply don’t notice that they are uncomfortable around men and women who don’t fit their tightly-held ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman.

I don’t want to be lauded as better than anyone, female or male. I simply want to feel that being a woman—and an intelligent one at that—is not something that can be stolen from me or used against me.