I have discovered that I have a magic power.
A hospital in my jurisdiction uses a fingerprint scan to permit access to secure areas, like the Emergency Department and the Birthing Area. Last year, before I was out to the public, I had to give my name and fingerprints to the staff.
Since then, my name has changed. Since then, every time I have to get into a secure area, my old name flashes briefly on the display above the scanner. It’s a small thing, and so in the frantic bustle of transition it was low on the priority list.
But, after several months on other shifts, I was finally working during business hours when I had a free moment. So I parked in the lot at the hospital and walked briskly from the air-conditioned interior of my patrol car through the muggy heat to the air-conditioned office. I was in uniform. The pleasant young woman behind the desk greeted me and smiled knowingly as I took a moment to breathe in the air-conditioned office air. She asked how they could help. I told her that my name had changed.
“Oh!” she said, with a smile and a twinkle in her eye. She turned to a different computer. “Let me just pull you up in our database…”
As she got logged in, we chatted about the weather, and I expressed enthusiasm for the fact that her chair was seated directly in front of the air conditioner outlet, and she nodded, grinning. She agreed that it was a prime location. We chatted. All friends, here.
A list of names appeared. I saw mine.
“Now,” she said, “what’s your new last name?”
“It’s my first name,” I said. “It’s ‘Grace’, now.” I pointed to the line with my old name.
“…Oh!” she said. Her smile became mechanical. “Okay…” She edited the name slowly, as though expecting me to correct her. When it was done, I smiled and said, “Thanks very much!”
“You’re welcome,” she said, professionally polite, and she stood and faced me squarely, her body language mechanically polite. “Is there anything else?”
“No, that’s it. Have a good day!” And I left.
It happens that the hospital has two identical but separate systems. I don’t know why. So I made my way to one of the secured areas, where the second system lives.
The nurse behind the desk greeted me as I walked through the door I had just opened with my fingerprint. “Can we help you?” she asked, a little quizzically. They don’t routinely see uniforms in that area. “Yes, please,” I said. “My name has changed and I’d like to update it in the security system.”
“Okay,” she said. She worked her way through a system she plainly did not use much. “And what’s your name?” I told her. She glanced at my nameplate to be sure of the spelling. She typed. “Come on around, and we’ll need to scan your fingerprints four times.” I recognized the procedure I had gone through originally, months before, and I realized that she was entering me as a whole new person. Darn, I thought. Why didn’t I think of this before? I went through the procedure. She directed me to test the system, and I did. She commented to a newer employee, “And now she’ll be able to get in whenever she needs to!”
“Thanks!” I called, from over by the door.
She smiled. All friends, here. “You’re welcome!” she called.
And I left.
A day or so later I managed to damage the keyboard of a laptop which I own personally but sometimes use for work-related stuff. It was technically usable, but awkward, with several critical keys misbehaving. I dropped by the local repair place, in uniform, laptop tucked under my arm.
The pleasant young woman behind the counter lit up when she saw me, straightening visibly and smiling broadly. “Hi!” she said. Her eyes crinkled.
“Hi!” I said. “I have to confess that I damaged my keyboard.” She tutted at me. We discussed cost to diagnose, probable cost to repair if that was the only damage, and logistics. She presented these facts with friendly enthusiasm, as though she had managed to surprise me with a thoughtful little gift. Yes, because the replacement part would not arrive until tomorrow, I would be permitted to pick my laptop up at the end of the day and limp along with it until the next day.
I returned a few hours later, still in uniform. The pleasant young woman behind the counter glanced my way. Her eyes slid off of me and back to her keyboard. “Hi,” she said.
“Hello,” I said. “Okay if I pick my computer up?”
She considered. “I’ll ask the tech. Excuse me a moment.” She got up and walked into the back room. I looked around at the displays. No other employees were looking in my direction, but none of them were pointedly not looking, either, or had just shifted so as not to be looking.
I wondered who had told her. I wondered why. I wondered if she had figured it out all by herself. I suspected that she had not.
She returned with my laptop and set it on the counter. “Thanks,” I said. “Do I owe you anything?”
“No,” she said, her expression professional. Polite. Civil. “We can settle up tomorrow.”
“Okay!” I said. “Have a good day.”
She turned back to her computer. “You, too,” she said in a tone which hoped for no reply, her eyes on her screen and her body focused on her keyboard.
I returned the following morning to turn my laptop over for repair. The same young woman was behind the counter. She was professional. Civil. I was friendly.
When I picked it up at the end of the day, I was looking a bit frazzled. I had just directed traffic for a few hours in the mugginess, and had only had a chance to rinse off and dump body heat in a quick cold shower, and run a brush through my hair. Here was meet fodder for pleasant conversation, if she cared to.
She was professional. Civil.
I was friendly.
We settled the bill. Ouch.
“Thanks very much!” I said as I left.
“You’re welcome,” she said, her eyes on the screen just a little too intently for her tone to achieve true carelessness.
No one in a professional setting owes me anything other than professional, polite service. I know this. Neither the first woman or the third woman did anything wrong.
But you know, if you’re not looking for it, it’s not obvious that I’m trans. So I get a front-row seat on the contrast between how they behave when they don’t know I’m trans, and how they behave once they do.
Before, they welcome me. Afterward, occasionally they still welcome me. But often, they tolerate me, and wish that I would go away.
I have a magic power. If you haven’t examined your own culturally-implanted transphobia, I have the power to make you display it. I sometimes wish that I did not have this power. I would be content to be ignorant of your transphobia. It would make my life easier. It would make your life easier. Ah, bliss.
But there it is. I have this power, and it manifests whether we like it or not.
Maybe someday I’ll get used to it.
Maybe someday your reaction will prompt the person next to you to say, “Dude. Really? That is NOT cool.” and then turn to me with the welcoming smile instead of the civil one, and say, as though you care, “How can we help you?”
Maybe if I’m not used to it by then I’ll have the presence of mind to say, “You just did.”
Grace
“No one in a professional setting owes me anything other than professional, polite service. I know this.”
——
Well, then what else are you complaining about here? There is probably not a single person on planet Earth that everyone likes and agrees with. Frankly, if they give you professional, polite service, they are way ahead of some people who have treated me poorly.
Varusz – could you please cite any point in Grace’s post where she is complaining about anything; it seems to me that she is making an observation, not a complaint.
Plus, the point is not that people are not treating her well. The point is that people’s treatment of her changes once they discover her history. Sure, it could be a lot worse. But that doesn’t mean that she should shut up about it. Note that she didn’t confront the two women she describes, nor did she try to get them fired. She wrote about her experience. I’m not sure why you think that her doing so is in any way disparaging of your own bad experiences.
“No one in a professional setting owes me anything other than professional, polite service. I know this.”
This is where I find grounds for making complaints- treating a customer any differently for any grounds other than theft (including bouncing checks or fraudulent returns) or extreme rudeness(customers have a much wider berth than staff here) is unprofessional.
What Grace didn’t mention is that the snubbing she received is both impolite and unprofessional, oddly enough in serviced based businesses the level of service matters.
This is not to say that others don’t also receive poor service for a number of just as wrongly”justified” reasons, nor to say that the over all quality of service hasn’t been lowered considerably (on average) to make truly good service a rare treat. It is to point out that in two places where the quality of service was shown to be higher (from the same people), it dropped due to personal and not professional reasons. And that IS an issue that deserves correction every time it shows up.
I started reading and hoped your superpower would be that your fingerprint opens doors that it should not be able to open, e.g. because it’s somewhat similar to someone else’s fingerprint.
*sigh*
I would, perhaps wrongly, cut the people in these examples a little slack. In my own immediate post-discovery interactions with trans friends and colleagues (some transitioning, some transitioned long before we met, some immediately out, some only after years of knowing each other) at least a small part of my brain has been occupied with “Am I doing this right?” — should I be completely nonchalant, would it be offensive to ask any questions, would it be offensive not to ask any questions, ditto on making any comments, and so forth. Sure, that’s my problem, not anyone else’s, but it has taken anywhere from a few minutes to the better part of an hour to process. And during that time I’ve almost certainly acted stilted.
For my friends and colleagues who are trans, that hasn’t been any fun, and I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have that not-fun with every #@% person one meets every day. But I don’t immediately see a way around it, at least until gender occupies a very different place in our culture.
I have that power as well Grace. Although it is before and after they find out I am HIV+.
I am not “out” and you can’t tell just to look at me.
There are people that know status, that I have not told. Here’s a good one..
Say I will bump into a lady at the supermarket who once worked with me years and years go.. She makes grand announcement. “oh I haven’t seen you in so long. How are you? You look so good”
Like they were expecting me to look like a leper or some emaciated zombie.
I know, that they know
and they know that they learned it from someone else and that I never told them
and they have to pretend that they don’t know…
and I pretend that i don’t know that they know.
it hurts sometimes but i laugh because they NEVER have the guts to say,
“hey, I want you to know that ..so and so told me a few years ago about your health and I’m glad you are doing so well.”
C.
I just stumbled across this blog and will check back some times as it seems really cool!
“Maybe someday your reaction will prompt the person next to you to say, ‘Dude. Really? That is NOT cool.'”
So, is “NOT cool” an observation, or complaint? It may seem like a quibble, but it goes to the heart of what paul is saying.
Quite clearly, many people find it hard to be “cool” when encountering trans people. This is an unfamiliar situation. So much of our social interactions are gendered; gender ambiguity requires us to be conscious of our typically unconscious behavior.
This awkwardness doesn’t have to signal animus. Nevertheless, it signals “otherness.” And, as Grace suggests, it can be trying encounter this day after day. I suppose it’s akin to focusing attention on another person’s physical anomalies (blindness, loss of limb, etc.).
Or so I’ve gathered from a trans acquaintance. In his male youth, I always called him dude. And I still do — and immediately cringe.
She can afford to be patient with me; it’s not like we see each other a lot. But she’s growing less patient with her parents. Her parents are supportive, if stressed by this change. Yet they regularly use male pronouns when referring to her. After all, they’d had decades of practice doing so. Again, all innocent errors. But trying nonetheless.
So, am I and her parents “uncool”? As a descriptive term, yes: We have not yet developed a confident, relaxed manner for dealing with this change.
Are we “uncool” in the sense of violating norms of politeness? Kinda. We know that we’re causing discomfort to an innocent party and a friend. We regret this. But we currently lack the capacity to do otherwise.
So, at least in my case, I don’t FEEL the way I’d feel if I knew that I had violated other social norms. I’m muddling through.
What would make me feel like I had violated a social norm is if, the next time her dad stumbles over a pronoun, I turned to him and said, “Dude. Really? That is NOT cool.”
Off-topic: Check out the subtle cues. The crinkling eyes. The shifting gaze. It all leads to two conclusions. First, someone learned that Grace is trans. Second, Grace is a hell of a writer.
Time to start the betting pool — genre and year. I pick crime novel by 2015.
Xmas time would be nice. But no pressure.
“NOT cool” is a complaint. It’s also not something Grace said – it’s something she suggests someone else might say in a hypothetical future. Fantasizing that people will complain about something is not the same as complaining about it. And note that my post (which preceded Paul’s) is not a response to what he says, it’s a response to Varusz’s reaction, which was different.
One difference between what Paul and you are talking about and what Grace wrote is that you both are talking about the reaction of people who are close, or at least familiar with the trans person in question. Grace is talking about the reaction of strangers in a work environment.
If a friend of mine, or a family member, were to reveal to me that they are trans, it may take me some time to adjust. I hope they will be patient with me, though I don’t think said hypothetical trans friend owes me patience. However, that is a different matter than if someone I don’t know comes up to me in a work context, and the fact that they are trans comes up in the conversation. I sincerely hope that there will be no change whatsoever in my attitude and demeanor towards them.
Varusz:
It’s unclear to be what you think you’re contributing here. You’re not engaging meaningfully with the post, you’re not addressing the underlying issue, and you’re not even really addressing the topic beyond saying “stop talking.”
I actually find the open anti-trans sentiment of some folks less offensive then this. At least that has some sort of philosophy, bigoted though it is, behind it. There’s a coherent body of thought. There’s an argument.
This is just graffiti. This is the insult shouted from a passing truck. This is threadshitting. This is “so what?”
It’s not useful. Don’t do it. This is my moderator voice.
—-Myca
(Bearing in mind, of course, that this is Grace’s thread, and it’s her call. Don’t mean to step on your mod-toes, Grace.)
Myca, I felt that I had a relevant comment. I have nothing against Grace Annam personally, and she can also respond to me. Maybe you don’t fully understand the point I was trying to make (not malicious) due to my occasional ineptness.
Having said that, I have noticed that you really take your “power” on this board seriously (usually an indicator that you have no real power in real life). I have seen you ban and delete people trying to make serious points. Roll on, I guess. I disagree with your extremely heavy-handed approach/bullying, not that it matters.
Telling you you’re out of line because you basically told Grace to quit whining—about something that is legitimately hurtful, when she wasn’t even complaining, but just observing—is about as far from bullying as it gets.
Carol @ 6:
This is a really good blog that deal intelligently with a lot of different issues. I followed it for years, and aside from the occasional troll, it tends to have good debate and good points.
Grace – Thank you for sharing your observations. I, too, would enjoy reading a crime novel or other story, should you choose to lend your talents to the field. As always, I wish we lived in a world that was more open to differences and less about judgment.
Varusz,
Personal speculations about Myca (such as “you have no power in real life”) aren’t how we like to do things here. Please avoid doing that in the future.
If you have any further responses to Myca (or to me) about our moderation of your comments, take them to an open thread, not to this thread.
Finally, please do not post any further comments on this thread, unless Grace specifically invites you to.
I’d hope so, but I doubt I’d pull it off. I simply haven’t met (that I know of) many transpeople and I have never been friends with someone who told me about their trans status. It’s just not that common in my area. If someone mentioned that they were trans (or if they told me anything else about themselves which happened to be very different from my experience), it would be pretty hard not to have an inner “Huh. Really? Interesting. Etc.” conversation before I eventually moved on to putting them in the “whatever” mental box along with everyone else.
I would do my best to keep that from showing through, but I can’t guarantee that I would succeed. Trans status is an unusual trait, numerically speaking, and it’s hard for me not to pay extra attention to things which are unusual, at least at first.
It would be even more difficult to avoid that mental conversation if I heard about an actual transition, which is even more rare: I have never known someone both pre- and post-transition, or someone who was mid-transition. It’s harder to “reset” what you know than to learn something new.
Is that transphobic? Perhaps; I guess it depends on your definition. I don’t doubt my ability to end up shuffling transfolk into the “whatever” box in the end, but I certainly have to spend a bit of mental energy on it. I spend that mental energy on almost everyone unusual, though, and I don’t think that taking energy to process unusual things is particularly bad.
Hey, where’s my last paragraph?
Rarity may be an acceptable reason for people to be surprised. But even if it’s predictable, it doesn’t make it any less shitty for the recipient. It certainly doesn’t help that the reactions of “people who don’t really care in the end, but openly need to adjust” and “people who dislike transfolk and are trying to hide it” are , from the perspective of the recipient, pretty damn similar.
It’s bad that Grace would have to endure this, and I wish she didn’t.
What gin-and-whiskey said. For me, the impersonal interaction is even more fraught, because I can’t expect to repair any mistakes, and I don’t know what the person I’m interacting with wants. Any judgement on my part, even a nominally positive one, is an unwarranted presumption, because it’s none of my $%#% business. (Sort of on a tangent, there was an somewhat interesting HuffPo piece just recently giving a Dummies guide to interacting with a person with a disability; I wonder what the same piece would be like for trans people.)
But the very fact that we’re discussing the inner turmoil of all those poor put-upon cis types who have to interact with someone who doesn’t conform perfectly to sex/gender norms pretty much tells you how shitty things are. So I’m sorry.
From my point of view the superpower would be the ability to tell the difference between a person who is making a professional transaction and is behaving in a friendly manner, and a person who is making a professional transaction and is behaving in a a professional manner. But I have never been considered astute in interpreting social signals.
However I can tell the difference in my own head. There was a computer support person I had to watch my words around for several months after I found out he was a conservative christian. I also frequently have that problem when I find out someone served in the military. (Do I apologize for the whole Iraq mess? Is thanking him for his service condescending? It’s probably best not to talk about it.)
Essentially, any bit of surprising (or non-typical) information will slow me down, and cause me to retreat to a more formal level of communication, as that is the safest way to avoid saying anything that might be considered inappropriate.
So, at least, if you got that reaction from me, it is unlikely that it is disapproval, but is instead an attempt to avoid saying or doing anything that might be considered impolite.
Oops
It looks like my comment was the same as #16, and was responded to by #17.
So I contributed nothing new. Sorry.
Just dropping into this thread super-briefly to say that it sounds like you picked a really crap power, Grace. If you’re going to do superhero roleplaying, you should chat with Kip, he was always good at finding good powers that bolstered the character conception. I’m more of a min-maxer.
If all else fails, go with flight or teleport. The most-mobile character usually survives.
Has nobody here ever experienced a really crap day working retail/customer service? Honestly?
Does any ostensibly progressive person really expect retail/customer service workers to be happy, helpful, obsequious servants at all times?
Nothing reported here need *necessarily* have been due to the trans status of the writer. In my experience (wine shops in central Texas, 16 years – liquor retail 25+), a trans customer is a break in the monotony, at the very least.
I do not wish to diminish the reported experience. I do, however, request that we all weigh the possible projection involved.
I’ve “done” retail and customer service, gads have I “done” them in more forms and ways than is worth listing. Can we please move on from the “poor worker” mindset It’s not unreasonable or unfair to ask people while at work to perform their duties without shaming or belittling the customer. Which is what happens as soon as the worker reduces level of service based on something that has nothing to do with the interaction.
The examples that were shared in this thread showed that quite often-during the SAME interaction the quality of interaction changes based on personal bias. Clearly shown as the shift occurs when one certain piece of information is discovered not, a sudden rush of other customers, or six hours being added into a shift, or anyone dumping coffee over their work station.
Frankly, anyone who can’t keep their personal bias out of their job needs to find a different job. I will raise the specter of privilege and point out that if it is YOUR business then go ahead and display your bias and let your company thrive or die because of it. Or for the rest of us, find a job that supports your bias and expect the same ebb or flow of it’s success as people choose to support or avoid your new place.
However, if you want your job to be free of effects of your personal beliefs- keep them to yourself while on duty and treat customers well, professionally, and without judgement on their lives.
Hm.
If I understand the implications of Varusz’s post correctly, it is pointless to write about an observed pattern of behavior, unless that pattern of behavior concerns people treating one worse than he, personally, has been treated.
Seems cumbersome, and limiting.
Eytan, thank you for your comments, as always.
Also, Myca:
Thank you for so clearly articulating your reaction to Varusz’s response. That helped me better understand some of my own response to it.
Also, thank you to Myca and Amp for moderating when I was busy with work and family stuff. That night, I sat down to write a response, and after my eighteen-hour day it just wasn’t in me to be coherent, and since then I’ve been up to my neck in life. You are both welcome to moderate in my threads, as are the other Alas moderators.
Complaining about moderation has always struck me as bizarre and egocentric. Moderation is one of the cornerstones of a good online community; they don’t happen without moderation, and they don’t happen with moderation which is too loose, or too strict, or too inconsistent, or too, too, too… good moderation is very much an applied art, and a difficult skill. If you find an online community is to your taste, enough that you want to participate, complaining about the moderation is like going to a forest because you like the cool and the quiet, and then proposing that the management cut down the trees because you want a view.
Merlyn:
True. Next time I break my laptop, I’m likely to consider another service, even though this one is the most convenient. Not because what happened is reprehensible, but because it’s a stressor which I don’t need in my life, and if I can easily vote with my feet to avoid it and I don’t feel like doing evangelism-via-exposure, why not avoid it?
Evangelism-by-exposure is necessary to overall progress, but it’s like wearing a concrete path smooth. If you try to do it all at once with your own bare feet, the results will be traumatic to your personal feet. If possible, I prefer to limit my evangelism to a level which does not require changing dressings afterwards.
Monika:
Well, you’re right, though I wouldn’t call it a superpower. Loops, whorls and arches, plus a scar or two, just like everyone else… :)
@Carol: I’m sorry to have to share this superpower with you. That sounds like it really sucks. I remember some of what it was like in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early-to-mid 80’s. I have been teaching people that HIV is hard to catch for my entire adult life. In college I was explaining to my fellow students that you couldn’t get it from toilet seats. I used to have to show trainees, by example, that putting a hand on the shoulder of an HIV+ person, or handing them a pen, was a fine, humane, and routine thing to do; they would get the information that a prisoner was HIV+ and would not want to touch them, but of course you have to touch people who are in custody, and maintaining alert physical contact is one of the best ways to get early warning if they decide to get violent, which people in custody sometimes do, and it’s when things get violent that HIV transmission is most likely. So, I used to show them that even if they felt the need to glove up, they still had to treat HIV+ people like people. Thinking on it now, it seems as though this has been a lot less necessary, in recent years. Maybe we’re making progress, or our training is getting better.
I ramble. But, yeah. That sucks.
nobody.really:
Depending on circumstances, it could be either. Even in that tiny scene with the co-worker character it could be either, depending on the backstory.
I did not intend that one-sentence story to be a stand-in complaint for me; I’m perfectly capable of complaining directly. (But once I wrote it, it’s not up to me, anymore; it’s up to the readers.) At the same time, do I sometimes lament the unfairness of my state, rending my hair and gnashing my teeth? …sure, at least figuratively, and while I try to keep it private for all our sakes, I suppose sometimes it’s bound to leak out.
I had more to say about this, but it started to get long, and so I’m working it into a short post instead of a long part of a longer comment.
@paul & @gin-and-whiskey: See previous paragraph.
nobody.really:
:D Thanks. We all have dreams and limited time to pursue them. I will say only this: there is no telling, at this point, which genre or format will cross the finish line first, and when, but the genre you picked is in the running, and the year you picked is theoretically possible but not likely.
Robert:
Well, if we’re going to run the points on it, it’s arguably a Flaw or Disadvantage, or a Side-Effect. Personally, the superpower which I’d love to have, and which it’s clear my player did NOT take (that twerp) is Invulnerability. But then you run the risk that the GM thinks that it’s original to trap you in cooling lava, or something like that.
On the other hand, apparently my player has been spending XP on Sarcasm, or I’m in a system where you simply gain in the skills which you are forced (forced, I say!) to use routinely:
Oriscus:
Sure. I worked my way through college doing tech-support for the students at a prestigious college, many of whom displayed a level of entitlement which inspires awe in me to this day.
And now I work in law enforcement. I’ve directed traffic for hours in a major intersection during rush-hour when the traffic lights died unexpectedly, and had to deal with people who actually thought it was appropriate to bring multiple lanes of traffic to a stop so that they could ask me for directions, and/or why the lights were out. I’ve taken statements from domestic violence victims in their apartment while standing on a carpet so saturated with pig urine that it squelched. I’ve had a man in a Lexus, on being given a ticket for not having bothered to have his car inspected for the last ten months, tell me more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, “I can afford ten times that fine, but it’s not the fine amount, it’s the principle of the thing,” and that I was a sad, sad example of modern law enforcement for inflicting that sub-$100 ticket on him. I have watched a driver drive past the “Road Closed” sign, and an officer who was dealing with another car which had just driven around the sign, and a big, yellow excavator, and an eight-foot-deep hole in the ground, only to drive up to me, stop, wind the window down, and say, “Hey, why’s that ‘Road Closed’ sign there?”
I could have continued that paragraph until I dropped from exhaustion.
But that’s beside the point, because this was never about people having a bad day. In the first case, she gave every sign of being in a good mood and being happy to see me, at the outset, and she was in my presence and working on my problem the entire time. In the second case, it’s possible that she had an unrelated bad experience in the meantime, but that’s not how it seemed to me at the time. I have come to have a bit of expertise at reading people who are discovering that I’m trans. More than I want, really.
(Robert, here’s where the Sarcasm skill comes in.) That’s true. We have nothing to go on but the written statement of a professional who is trained and experienced in observing and articulating human behavior in order to be able to perform such tasks as testifying accurately and relevantly under oath in probable cause hearings. Besides that, we have no evidence, so it would be safest to discount the whole thing.
I’m glad that you find us refreshing. Your fascinated gaze brightens our days, I’m sure.
Does the fact that you did try to diminish my reported experience have any bearing on your claim that you did not wish to? Does that mean that you changed your mind while writing, or does it mean that you simply wrote poorly?
Care to expand on that? Keep going. Your comment makes a good point; sometimes people have a hard time believing the degree to which my (and others’) lived experience, carefully observed and painstakingly related, can be discounted by people who simply don’t want to believe it. So, thank you for your example. Very evidentiary.
Go ahead. Who’s projecting, and what is she projecting?
Grace
[content removed by moderator]
Robert, stop posting in this thread.
Also, stop posting on Alas for tonight. Do something else until you’re sober, or have your head straight, or whatever the issue is.
Grace
I am late to comment on this post, but I just wanted to say how well-written and spot on I think it is–not to courageous in being willing to dissect the seemingly trivial and mundane moments that allow so many people the comforts of their complacency. Those are often the moments that people defend the most vigorously.
I was also struck by this sentence:
It is not quite the same thing, but I have had an analogous experience when people who did not know beforehand suddenly find out that I am Jewish. The change in their behavior can be both profoundly demoralizing and enraging at the same time. I am sorry you have to deal with this phenomenon, but I am glad you are able to write about it here, because it is a phenomenon that needs to be named, a story that needs to be told. Thanks for writing.
Richard,
Thank you for that. I have cousins who are Jewish, but I am not, and so I don’t have that experience. From your description it sounds like a cousin to the experience I was describing, certainly. I’d be interested in hearing more detail, if you’re willing and able. In this thread would be fine with me.
Grace