Dear Fred,
Hi, you had me over to your
house for a holiday dinner. I'm really grateful.
We sat on
the couch chatting. It's always a challenge to find an appropriate conversational
topic during holiday dinners. There is so much pressure to be grateful and warm
and cozy with people we sometimes see only on a major holiday and with whom we
may have little in common.
Nervously scouting around for a
conversational topic, I mentioned that my cousin blocked me on Facebook.
"Louise" is a female to male transsexual. I think it's because I used
feminine pronouns, eg "she" and "her." She wanted me to use
"he" and "him."
When I mentioned this,
your face immediately became angry, and you actually moved away from me on the
couch. You said, "I'm offended." I think you called me intolerant.
Conversation ended. Me, left alone, high and dry, in somebody else's house, at
somebody else's party, on Thanksgiving.
I want to talk
about why I choose not to use male pronouns for a transsexual. I want to talk
about whether or not your assessment of me as offensive and intolerant is
accurate. Strangely enough, as is so often the case, I want to travel back to a
small, peasant village in Slovakia. So often in my attempt to explain, or
understand, anything, I travel back to a small peasant village in Slovakia.
***
My
grandmother lived in a cottage – hovel – home – built by hand by my
grandfather. Her firstborn, Mary, died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. Her second
child, my Uncle Joe, contracted something – perhaps meningitis. The doctor told
my grandmother to give up on him. That she, a peasant, contacted a medical
doctor is evidence of my grandmother's valuing of Joe. My parents just about
never contacted a physician for me during my childhood in America. Their policy
came close to killing me.
My grandmother refused to give
up. Hope denied her by medical science, my grandmother prayed to St. Joseph,
the father of Jesus and her son's patron. Uncle Joe recovered, and this was
assessed as a miracle. A miracle with a price. Joe was deaf.
There's
a folktale about a farmer who experiences what could be called
"unfortunate" events, and who also experiences "fortunate"
events. For example, at one point a wild horse breaks his son's leg. The
neighbors say, "What bad luck!" but the old farmer withholds
judgment. Later, government troops come to conscript the village's young men.
The broken-legged son is not conscripted. The neighbors say, "What good
luck!" but the farmer withholds judgment. And so it goes.
Such
it was with Joe's deafness.
Slovakia, peasant, powerless,
and poor, had sent the largest percentage of its population to America during
the mass immigration of c. 1880-1929. Coal mining, steel smelting, petroleum:
we took up the hardest jobs. My grandfather left Slovakia before my mother was
born. He mined coal. My mother had never met her own father.
They
put some flowers on an oxcart, and my little mother was plopped upon it, and
driven to a train, and then a boat, and then America. It was traumatic for her.
It only got worse. My grandfather, in the nightmarish
conditions in the mine, developed emphysema. He couldn't work.
Someone
had to go out and work to feed the family. My grandmother and grandfather had
four more children in America. Eight hungry mouths to feed.
Joe
would not be the one sent out to work.
Primogeniture is one
cause of immigration to America, and inspiration for fairy tales. Firstborn
sons got everything. The youngest got a sooty spot by the fireplace, like
Cinderella, and lots of housework, and fairy tales to fuel their survival. The
hero of a fairy tale is often the youngest, exactly because the youngest had
the least, and was often doomed to a life of poverty and an early grave. Youngest
sons often immigrated to America.
Too, exactly because Joe
was deaf, charitable, and industrious Americans had lifted him out of the
poverty of his Depression-era immigrant family. He was sent to a special school
for deaf children. He was learning a marketable trade. He would be set for
life.
My mother's four siblings who had been born in
America were too young to be hired out.
My mother, a very
intelligent, gifted woman, who had been doing well in school, was forced to
quit school. She was sent to raise other people's children, and clean their
houses, thus earning a salary, money to be sent home. "Who's going to feed
the big cow?" my grandmother asked my mother. My mother was "the big
cow."
My mother learned Yiddish and Jewish cooking and
became a live-in nanny. When I was growing up, we regularly ate Jewish foods in
season, like matzah brei. This was a holdover from her being hired out. By the
time she got to me, her last born, my mother had raised three sets of kids.
Here
are three family stories that I cannot verify:
One. My
grandfather, before he died, left a large sum of money, or land, to his three
sons. His sons, not his daughters. This would be typical of peasant patterns. Males,
important. Females, less so.
I don't know if this story is
true, but my uncles certainly had bigger houses, in nicer neighborhoods, and
more land than my mother.
In any case, my uncles might have
had time to learn marketable skills in America. My mother devoted years she
might have gone to school to supporting them when they were children. She did
menial, manual work all her life. And she was the smartest of all of them, and
the most talented. Perhaps the rumor was true, and she really was the love child
of the village priest, who was in love with my grandmother, and not her coal
miner "father." I don't know.
Story two. My
mother regularly sent gifts to her family in Slovakia, often to people born
after she left. I heard that our relatives there gave Uncle Joe, who made it
back for a visit before my mother did, two Slovak peasant costumes, one for his
daughter and one for me. Uncle Joe kept both. Again, I cannot verify this
story.
Story three. My mother was very proud, but there
were times in my childhood when there was nothing to feed us. I was often
barefoot for want of shoes. I was often hungry.
At times, my
mother went, hat-in-hand, to her economically better off brothers, and they
humiliated her. She told me this. I don't know if it is true.
What
I saw with my own eyes suggests to me that these stories could be true. My
uncles were big, loud, sarcastic, unkind, and capable of being mean.
Uncle
Joe flirted with Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't know if he ever became one, but
he would harangue my mother, in his unique style of speech, a bit the speech of
a deaf man, a bit the speech of an immigrant, mocking her beloved Catholic
Church. So brutally insensitive and disrespectful. So typical of Jehovah's
Witnesses. He was her older brother, and she took it.
I was
abused as a kid. The abuse was obvious. I was bruised and unkempt and my
parents said hideous things to me and about me in front of everyone. No one
ever called the police. No one ever sat my mother down and had a talk with her.
No one ever told a doctor or a priest or a social worker. No one ever comforted
me or told me I had some value. They are guilt of this sin of omission.
People
often ask me "Why?" I hate that question .It implies that I did
something to deserve to be abused. Perhaps if I had been prettier, or nicer, my
mom would not have abused me.
I don't know why my mother
abused me. I do know that she was used up and worn out, and that her parents
let her down by removing her from school and hiring her out. Of course, the
ultimate villain here is poverty. But my uncles and my cousins benefitted from
her pain. I suffered because of her pain. They saw my victimization, and they
did nothing.
My cousin Louise was older than I. During one
of the worst episodes of abuse, which everybody heard about, she was at least
thirty. That's an adult. That's someone of age to be responsible. That's
someone with access to a telephone, to a police department.
Louise
did nothing. No one ever did anything. That's a sin of omission.
***
I
got out. I moved on. My bruises healed. I learned to wash and engage in hygiene,
and to eat healthy food, and to go to a doctor when I got sick. These were all
things I had to learn.
One day when I was in my twenties I
realized, "Hey. I was abused as a kid."
I started
attending Twelve Step Meetings for survivors of child abuse. The other adults
at those meetings had also been abused in ways that were obvious, and they were
also betrayed by everyone who witnessed this and did nothing. "It takes a
village to abuse a child."
At this very moment, right
now, in fact, a kid is being abused, in a way that is totally obvious. More
fortunate people are witnessing this, and are doing nothing.
At
that moment, in my twenties, I thought, Hell, I've been betrayed by the entire
world. I have justification for hating everyone. Every single person I meet. And
so do all my friends, my brothers and sisters, in Twelve Step. We all have
reason to hate everybody.
Problem. My religion stood in the
way of that. Jesus is all about forgiveness and love and stuff.
And
so I consciously decided to apply it. I remember the very day. I was in line in
a frozen yogurt place in Berkeley, California, and I decided to smile at the
cashier.
I did.
It was totally phony. I
smiled because I claimed to be a Christian and I felt it was my duty to at
least take a whack at it.
I've been smiling ever since.
It
was only after I made that decision, that decision to smile, that I realized
some things.
I realized, "I am hurt. No one
knows." I got it, "In the same way that my pain is invisible to
others, others' pain is invisible to me." I realized I am surrounded, at
all times, by people dealing with invisible pain I know nothing about.
I
realized, "Others let me down and hurt me in ways they don't even realize …
by extension, I've let others down and hurt them in ways that I don't even
realize. It's not just that everyone around me is guilty. I'm guilty, too."
I realized that I'm not the world's judge, jury, and
executioner. I mean, I easily enough could be, but I despise people like that.
The people who go around blowing other people up, always thinking that they are
righteous to do so.
I don't want to be that person. I don't
want to be the world's judge. I don't want to be the world's jury. I don't want
to be the world's executioner.
I want to be the person who
smiles at the cashier in a frozen yogurt place.
I realized,
"I need people. I want people. I enjoy people. People give me something I
don't get from any other source, not from the woods, or dogs, or birds, though
I love all three.
Even flawed people give me something I
need, want, and enjoy."
My smile, my letting go of my
righteous anger and judgment, allows into my life all the good I get from
people. My righteous anger serves as a bulletproof wall that does not let that
good stuff in.
Dagnabbit! Jesus was correct again. It really
is better not to judge. It really is better to love. It really is better to
smile at the yogurt cashier.
***
So,
it's 2013. Someone I haven't heard from in decades, my cousin Louise, contacts
me via Facebook. Wants to be friends.
I think what I always
think about everyone to whom I am related: "I would be justified in hating
you, possibly in reporting you to the police, certainly in rejecting you. Just
seeing your face and name on my Facebook wall, and confronting the attendant
memories, will, without doubt, cause me winces of pain.
But
here's the thing. Under Jesus' tutelage, I have decided to smile at the yogurt cashier
I might otherwise indict and execute with a righteous-anger-ignited suicide
bomb."
So I decided to accept my cousin's Facebook
friend request.
I decided to place her sins of remission on
the back burner.
I resolved to seek and find what is best
in her.
I resolved to decide that what is best in her is primary,
and that her sins of omission re: me are secondary.
I
resolved to be patient and to hope.
To me, the process I
describe above is what tolerance is really all about.
I did
that with Louise. We were Facebook friends for a while. Then the kerfuffle over
pronouns, then the unfriending and blocking.
That, to me,
is what intolerance is all about. A quickness to judge. A quickness to condemn.
A refusal to see what is best in another person. An insistence that the one
thing you don't like about another person is PROOF that that person is beyond
the pale and worthy of shunning. An insistence that you are the victim. That
your sense of victimization is primary. That whatever pain you felt is the most
important thing. And using that pain as permission to nuke another human being.
I wish we could have talked about the issue at hand without
shunning hanging over anybody's head.
In fact, I'd love to
debate this with you now. Is it correct, is it kind, is it moral, is it socially
imperative, to use female pronouns when referring to a male to female transsexual?
My answer, for me, is no. This is why.
I
would never do anything to stand in the way of anyone who wants gender
reassignment surgery. It's not my business. I do not support any discrimination
against people who seek or who have had gender reassignment surgery.
I
choose to use "he / his / him" for persons with an X and a Y
chromosome, because those strike me as the accurate words to use.
I
choose to use "she / hers / her" for persons with two X chromosomes,
because those strike me as the accurate words to use.
Some
insist that anyone who does fall into line, and refer to xx persons as
"he," is a homophobe, a bully, a hater, an enemy, beyond the pale, to
be lectured, to be demonized, to be shunned.
It's that
approach that bugs me. It's a Politically Correct litmus test. If someone uses
the pronoun "she" for a male to female transsexual, one is tolerant
and cool and hip and worthy. If one does not, one is intolerant and beyond the
pale.
Any such litmus test designed to assign worth to
human beings is part of a process I have to reject.
I think
it is of vital importance to use accurate vocabulary. I know that accurate
vocabulary can hurt people's feelings. I don't think that the pressure not to
hurt others' feelings should dissuade us from using accurate vocabulary. I
think something bigger is involved. I think the urge to control vocabulary use
through demonization and shunning is a totalitarian impulse.
I
don't have a problem with the pronoun you use. I would never try to force you
to use a word you felt uncomfortable with. I would never call you names for
using a pronoun different from the one I use. I wouldn't demonize or shun you.
I
would never do that for the reasons outlined above. I have chosen to smile at
the yogurt cashier.
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