The long story of his childhood, his memories of being bullied because he was short, says so much about the problem of unchecked patriarchal values. The more I read things like this, the more I see the damage done to male children who are trained to dismiss their own thoughts and feelings, and the more I understand how freedom of expression is a threat to the status quo.
When I think of the new gender identities, the backlash, and what they mean, my sense (and I use that word because I have no proof) is we are moving into a new world of relationships between ourselves as individuals and our society.
The discomfort that parents feel in this discussion, in society, and in education, is understandable but it would be a mistake to dismiss it as propaganda.
Feelings are not valued much in science, engineering, and so in politics it blows up as rage. Or something.
I know this is vague and most writings are about concrete events like school boards acknowledging new sensitivities to accommodate children. Of course a parent who finds out their kid identifies as different than the gender given by their genitals at birth.
What an idea? How can a boy who came into this world with testicles and a penis believe he is anything other than male? Because his mind is also operating and questioning.
If he is not aggressive, consumed by sports and keen to fight for acceptance, if he hates the feeling of having to prove himself, if stories of masculine behaviour make him feel uncomfortable, is it necessarily his fault? Or could it be his society pressures him into a singular identity. Either you are like this or you are not a real boy.
Young men are pressured into denying his feelings. He musn’t cry. He musn’t be gentle. He must show aggression or he will be bullied.
A girl also feels frustrated that she must hide any aggressive aspects of her feelings. If she feels desire she must be a slut. If she wants to study science or engineering she may be laughed at by her teachers. If she wants to climb mountains or join the army, carry a gun and kill the enemy, will she be ridiculed by her peers?
But these are societies pressures on gender. Is the new gender identities a protest against the myths that have dominated our society, about how we should behave, look and feel like?
It was early in my memory I felt so relieved that I was born a female because the aggression was something I couldn’t identify with. If I was bullied in the playground I could not fight back. If I was ridiculed I could not stand up for myself. But being female made it easier than being a male.
Personally I feel society’s expectations about how women and men should think, feel, behave is part of the control fantasy, just like how the poor, the worker, or the ruler should behave.
When I worked in an engineering company as a clerk typist, I mentioned to a co-worker that someone from another department made demands on my time. Was that right? Should I do as he asked? The co-worker said, it’s just the pecking order. But I was not a bird pecking at seeds in the dirt.
Eventually I learned that in business there was this hierarchy that must not be questioned. Communication was top to bottom.
But I could not accept that. Clearly that was a plan that dismissed the feelings of workers, caused harm and communication breakdown.
Later in life, expressing my thoughts and feelings was not appreciated. I think too much, was the dismissal of what I said.
Humans who think too much! What a nuisance to pre-organized, sanitized systems of operation.
Back to gender identity and parents teaching their children how to be in this world, is fraught with worry. Doctrine is not everything.
However if someone says they are male, female, trans or two-spirit, I must believe them or at least listen to understand why they identify that way.
That late capitalist society is uncomfortable with that, indicates to me our system depends on controlling us. The system is organized to maintain control to varying degrees. What societies manage to control for centuries? Authoritarian ones along with torture, public floggings, wars and hunger.
Our survival depends on free expressions of who we are as long as we don’t harm anyone — physically, financially or emotionally. We have been manipulated for centuries, now we can learn how to live together in peace.
I was just a shell. My determination to be a success had dissolved into emptiness. It's not that I was a success before that, it's just I felt I might as well die.
Before I went to that school where teachers and the headmistress were kind, I had been told and was convinced I had to prove myself. Be a success. I was average in most ways but then this school did not work on getting students to compete and prove themselves.
How did it come to pass I felt I had to be a success. My mother and her sisters focused on cleaning, looking beautiful, being perfect, and for my mother - upholding the feminine mystique by not talking about feelings, always looking clean and dressed, and being on top of the housework.
These things are fine, but it appeared that no-one in our family ever failed. They were persecuted but remained strong to the world. However I knew my mother felt betrayed by this world. Her first husband was killed in the war and she had to return to her town with a baby and no father to support the family. So she had to marry again. She found a man who came from a strong family who saw themselves as above the my mother's working class. Then she got pregnant again, so he had to marry her.
She did her part in being a perfect housewife who couldn't do everything my father wanted her to do. She couldn't make chocolates and look after the house and babies. But my father was raised in a home whose father was absolutely in charge. My father's mother did not appear to like my mother. My French grandmother was an "insult" to my grandfather's family because she was a farmer's daughter.
This was England where commoners had to step off the path to let the aristocracy walk by.
My mother's first baby was raised by her mother because it was thought my father could not raise a child who was not his own.
This is all my interpretation of how it was. I also believed my mother had so many heartbreaks that I had to make up for it by being a success. It was something I had to do. It was not an option. Mother got pregnant four times and none of them were planned.
She attracted men like flies to ripe fruit. She was petite and delicate in appearance. She suffered bad nerves and depression. My father's family were strong and tall. They had learned how to work in offices, in business. My father's father was a leader in the masonic temple, and when my father was caught smoking a cigar, his father made him smoke it to the end even though it made him sick.
This all sounds very cruel, but the British were nothing if not forceful. The history is full of pomp and circumstance while those at the bottom were whipped for not doing what their masters demanded. It was these absolutes that allowed us to travel the world, taking the land away from the people who were there and calling it "discovery".
The very worst thing an Englishman can do is cry. To torture, beat up, rape is strength. To give up, is not allowed. Women and children witness cruelty as a mark of strength. No matter how exhausted and stressed a man might be he must be ready to not only fight but win.
That said most people were not this way. Most people I knew were gentle and kind until they were in a position to control.
Back to the new school when I was sixteen, crying on the way home from school.
The reality was my mind was screwed and I had to learn this the hard way.
Constantly told that I would never get a man, never amount to anything, I was empty of self esteem. I wondered if anyone would love me. At that time I turned my head to see this boy and felt something. What was it? A recognition? Did he look like my brother? Was it love at first sight?
Did he scratch "I love Janet" on his pencil box, or did I just imagine it. I was never top of the class. Never a winner in sports or anything. My mother thought I was gaumless, a dreamer. I wondered how to be a success so someone would love me and was ready to live a life without love but this boy captured something. The thought I could be worthy of love and I was filled with excitement. Suddenly I had a boyfriend.
He would put his arm around my shoulder or hold my hand. One day during lunch we went for a walk to the park. There he kissed me and I fell with him to the ground. He got on top of me. It was stirring and wonderful and I was lost in this bliss.
Then I realized. This is how a woman gets pregnant, lives in poverty and ridicule and is shunned by her family. (I had a dramatic gene in my blood - everything was wonderful or dreadful). I told him to get off and thought I must be strong, that love was not good for me because I had to be a success or else I would be like all the cast off women in the world.
After that I walked home crying, I couldn't sleep, for days it felt this was the end of my life. Everything was finished for me. There was nothing in the skills I had developed. I was a dreamer. A cry-baby. Somehow I had to be someone else. Yes suicide was a way out but I never had the guts for that either.
How had I been so convinced of worthlessness.
It took a few years and a move to another country before I realized that this episode shocked me into a realization that love should not be thrown away. This trauma taught me to value love, to be loving and kind, because I couldn't live without love.
Two years after this I met a boy who would become my husband, and I was grateful I had learned that lesson and now opened for that vulnerable part of me, the part woken and ready for love. To the first boy I am grateful for this lesson. He was a lovely person too.
War? Violence? Hate? Mysogyny? Bigotry? Poverty? Extreme wealth? Greed? What is the cause?
Humanity? Because we have language and we know these are our problems. But what is behind them? What drives the violence in our societies? What impulse makes us hate, condemn and even murder?
Education, socialism, science, politics, take us down different paths with different answers.
I know that my persistent questioning irritates people who just want to get on with life. The answer I have received from one wise man is “there are no solutions”.
But one thing that strikes me hardest, is that we are not isolated units at all. We struggle with global problems because we know they affect us even if we didn't personally create them.
I am affected by the trauma experienced by some even if I don't know them personally.
Listening to the news these last two weeks, it seems that Poilievre is getting the publicity along with reports that he is rising in the polls. And this is CBC radio. Why is there so little reported on what it would mean for Canada? What I hear is just criticism and put downs from the radio I have always looked to for fair reporting. Where are the politicians who counter this reporting?
"Poilievre, to the credit of his communications team, has managed to dress up his right-wing program with populist rhetoric that resonates during a time of rising economic insecurity." warns Sas.
Is it just a game? Winning? No matter the cost to the vulnerable? Just keep pouring out insults. That's how comments on social media and big business seem to be operating. The human heart and mind will soon feel defeated when no media voices question the cost to our society.
Many Americans who are suffering poverty and racism have crossed the border to Canada. Yet there are signs of higher incidents of attacks on minorities and women recently.
Of course I only read and hear things from corporate media and those who stand up for social justice. I am concerned that violence and hate feeds on fear, it doesn't care about integrity or facts.
The human being has been robbed of his or her worth in this late stage capitalist playground. Not that a communist or fascist society is any better.
Societies are mostly known for what they do wrong, not what is right. What we need is to fall in love with life again. This humbles us. We can fall into the mysteries and awe of each day if we are present.
The human who is unsure, feels lacking but not knowing what he or she lacks, is attempting to be wise but has been over-ruled by stories of "greatness". Yes it's great that someone invented airplanes, radios, medicine, but we don't know the person behind the invention other than the name.
What we don't usually know is all the manufacturing of myths about the heroes held up to us as someone to emulate. We don't know the scheming, the silencing, the manipulation, that goes into publicizing the product. How the product is worshipped and not the person, unless the person has been made into a "hero" with the right looks, the right class, the right gender.
We are not evil. We are busy bees buzzing around the current excitement. Desperate to learn more, to feel more, to play more, and to be seen more.
The Bully has silenced the emotional part of his/her psyche, swallowed the pain of emptiness in order to succeed, in order to be someone, something, anything other than nothing.
Some who are not popular keep quiet and slither down the corridors, they do not look anyone in the eye, their posture is tentative, shoulders up they look down. Those who are popular often don't know it but they don't suffer shyness, they assume they are okay, the air is friendly. They are smart enough to get through the curriculum with good marks but they are not super performers. Super performers are bullied by the masses who resent their easiness with themselves, then they suffer bullying and turn into themselves, now uneasy with the future. They don't fit any more. Everything must be questioned, re-examined and "controlled".
Most of us are not "alpha" egos, most of us need community, need to succeed at some things, but political climates make "talking" dangerous. Expressing one's beliefs and feelings is the most dangerous thing to do for individuals and most of us lived through the high school where the apparent winners were the bullies to our young minds.
Young men are trained to use power over thoughts and feeling. Don't share your thoughts with anyone. Keep it inside. They don't go away they turn into other attitudes. As they age they admire and worship strong leaders or strong men. They may hate those who have lower status as defined by the group. How society works - as in the "authority" of popularity at school or the office. As in the headlines of well funded media. As in the authority of class structure.
A society who hasn't addressed this issue through school curriculum or media, is one where the bullies win even though they are shivering in their shoes understanding there is no way to be popular without bullies, without fear and mealymouthed values. It's not that bullies are brave. They may target others by creating rumours, only talking behind the backs of those "who must be silenced".
Julian Assange, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, minorities, the homeless, the poor, the drug addicted lonely souls who can't find a place to belong, the criminal gangs who are so alienated they create their own deathly communities where the gun or the knife rules without words.
