In which I get my boobs removed

The title of this post comes from a hilarious exchange I had with one of my coworkers at Au Bon Pain. Someone I'd never spoken to before came up to me while I was standing at the cash register and, during a lull in customers, said, "So, maybe this is weird to ask, but I heard you got your boobs removed?"

She asked if it hurt (I guess, but I had lots of vicodin) and how I felt about it (really relieved) and then we had to go back to work. Afterwards, I realised that she had put together "buzz cut" plus "mastectomy" and come up with "breast cancer", but because she never asked why I had surgery, there wasn't a graceful way to correct her assumption. I've been having a lot of these kinds of conversations lately, where people ask the wrong questions so I don't know how to tell them the right answer. Mostly I'm just not that invested in other people's dumb assumptions, but the experience of being home again has really highlighted my favourite part of getting surgery: everybody I met already knew their shit.

I do mean everybody.The women at the front office of the plastic surgery institute: incredibly invested in a traditional presentation of femininity, to the point of getting plastic surgery themselves-- and yet, they were genuinely excited on behalf of the trans men getting the reverse surgery. The woman who took my money at the clinic: a professional bureaucrat-- and yet, she apologized for having to ask for my legal name and write down my sex as female. The parade of nurses who took my vitals and gave me my IV and administered my anesthesia: not in any way specialised in trans care-- and yet, a brief glance at my chart and they knew exactly which name and pronouns to use.

I'm not really a sensitive person, any more. Not when it comes to being trans, anyway. I understand that people aren't going to 'get it' right away, and I understand that they are going to be curious. When someone calls me "ma'am", they are probably just trying to be polite, and I have cultivated the habit of accepting their politeness in the spirit in which it is meant. When someone asks a personal question, they are probably just trying to learn, and I answer in good faith every question that is asked in good faith. At this point, these exchanges just don't have any sting to them.

And yet, when I got surgery, it was such a profound relief to be in a space where I wasn't constantly choosing between explaining myself or becoming invisible. It was like a fish suddenly discovering that it lived in water… by leaving the water… and breathing the air better than the water? Perhaps I am a lungfish. Perhaps this was a terrible analogy. It was like suddenly realising that I lived in a cisnormative world. Which isn't exactly a widely-shared experience, but probably more so than the lungfish thing.

To get this blog post back on track: I feel like I have a lot of friends who have the basics under control, but want to know how to be a better trans ally after all the 101 stuff. And I think the answer starts with combating cisnormativity-- which mostly means remembering, at all times, that you may not actually know the genders of the people you see around you. And you probably do not need to know. Today I actually asked for someone's number while having no clue whether they were cis male, trans male, or cis female; their gender would have eventually become relevant, but at that point I just wanted a way to contact them to talk about Doctor Who somewhere other than the crowded Amanda Palmer concert.

If you have to ask, think about what information you actually need and why you need it. If you're a doctor and you want to know if I need a pap smear, ask if I have a uterus. If you're putting together a form, think about whether you really need a legal name. (DMV: yes. Blackboard discussion forum: no.) If you're just making friends… ask my name, and where I'm from, and what kinds of books I like to read.

This, I realized, is what I most want from the people in my life: I want them to ask what they actually need to know, and then carry on with what they were doing. Or, in other words, know your shit.

Hold Paramount

Having just recently had the chance to invite the next group of engineers to join Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, I have been thinking about the Fundamental Canons of the engineering profession. These principles show up in the National Society of Professional Engineers’ Code of Ethics for Engineers, and read as follows:

"Engineers, in the fulfillment of their professional duties, shall:

1. Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
2. Perform services only in areas of their competence.
3. Issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.
4. Act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees.
5. Avoid deceptive acts.
6. Conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession. "

Good stuff, right? I have a feeling someone mooched a bit off an English-major-college-roommate to get all that just right, though the initial form from the fictional “roommate” character was most likely in paragraph form. And iambic pentameter.

The engineer shall strive to do those these things

Which we’ve laid out in gloried detail here

And shall not stray – whilst on the job or not

Else should be lost the post that’s held most dear.

I got to thinking how well these apply – in bullet form, and with some tweaks – to just about everything. As a professor, I can see these applying to the specifics of what I do in the course of fulfilling my responsibilities. I can see these applying very well to the work I did in the Navy and to the work others have done or will do in all branches of the military. And relevant to the current location of the words I write, I can see these applying to being an ally or a member of the LGBTQ community.  For this post, I am going to take on just Canon 1 (after all, I would hate to upstage Pachelbel).

Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the LGBTQ community. Even the order of the words here was chosen with great care. First – the safety. If tragic events over the past too-many years have taught us anything, it is that there are still spaces of high danger for people in the LGBTQ community. Above all else, we must strive to make this school, and this city, and ever-larger circles of influence safe spaces for people to own and express their sexuality without fear. No true progress can be made under the specter of harm. 

Then - Health.  Perhaps half a tick down from safety if one were to construct a kind of Maslow’s Hierarchy of What to Hold Paramount. I think this includes physical health, and emotional health, and spiritual health. This means fighting discriminatory practices in the health and insurance industries. Demanding that resources be directed towards understanding the developmental psychology of people across the sexuality and gender spectra and eliminating any sense of heteronormativity in psychological or psychiatric practice. Creating support structures to heal those who’ve been bullied or otherwise wrongly convinced they are somehow less-than. And within faith communities, refusing to accept when decontextualized and often willfully misinterpreted passages are wielded as blunt instruments to diminish others. 

And finally - Welfare. To borrow from Merriam-Webster, welfare is “the state of doing well especially in respect to good fortune, happiness, well-being, or prosperity.” This state is something that requires a feeling of Safety and possession of Health to fully obtain, but something which is nonetheless the birthright of every person and something we must all work to make available.  The desire to promote the Welfare of members of the LGBTQ community, for example, is where the strongest possible opposition to Amendment One comes into play -- though I suppose it could be argued as well that Amendment One and the cynical and misdirected attack on many people of North Carolina it represents pose a threat to the safety and health of our fellow citizens as well.  On issues such as Amendment One, being an ally means, first, acknowledging privilege and then, second, demanding that said privilege be applied universally. 

As you might imagine, neither of those processes ever really takes place in a vacuum. Along those lines - I was just recently a part of a task force charged with examining the role of the LGBT Center in campus life and looking at how it serves the undergraduate, graduate, alumni, staff, and faculty communities at Duke. All I will say about that is, in being witness to the creation of the final report of the task force, I realized that as thankful as I may have been before for the existence of the Center, and Janie, and Jess, and the support staff, and the student workers, and the student leaders - I didn’t know nearly the half of just how important that space and – more than that – those people are to so many in the extended Duke community. They are working to build – and in some cases, re-build - lives. The resources of the center and the scholarly and vocational attainments of the staff are critical parts of fulfilling Duke’s Mission of…”attending not only to [students’] intellectual growth but also to their development as adults committed to high ethical standards and full participation as leaders in their communities…” 

I better stop there (ask my students – I’m a rambler). Though I have to throw in one last thing - with early decisions out, and with Blue Devil Days and regular decisions fast approaching, I do find myself thinking about the Class of 2016. So to both the prospective future fellow alums and to those of you already here, I will say that from all I have learned over the past year especially, there’s one thing I want you to know. And that is that this is a place with a good many people who are deeply committed to holding paramount your safety, your health, and your welfare as a fundamental canon of being a part of the Duke Family.

Fracture Mechanics

First of all – welcome back! I’m honored to get to post on the first day of classes for 2012, and I hope all the returning students, staff, and faculty reading this have an excellent, productive, and fulfilling semester. I’m very much looking forward to the classes I get to teach this semester as well as the different programs with which I get to work. I am also starting to mentally prepare myself for this May; as much as having the opportunity to work at a college is a blessing, there’s also this issue of having a large portion of the population taking off every year…

One of the facets I most appreciate about working at a college is in the diversity of backgrounds and interests of the population. When the mission of the institution is “…to engage the mind, elevate the spirit, and stimulate the best effort of all who are associated with the University; to contribute in diverse ways to the local community, the state, the nation and the world; and to attain and maintain a place of real leadership in all that we do,” there is a wealth of possibilities for how that might be accomplished. The university represents fertile ground for interdisciplinary projects and for the cross-pollination of experiences and expertise that are rarely in such close proximity within the world outside of academia. The university also provides opportunities for different communities to come together to explore the broad commonalities as well as the subtle (and sometimes less-subtle) differences within those communities.

And here, I’m afraid, is where fracture mechanics comes in.

Fracture mechanics primarily covers how cracks manifest and spread through materials. An object that could otherwise withstand a certain amount of stress can come apart due to the propagation of one or more cracks. The forces that exist within the material are re-distributed due to the existence of a flaw. The stresses get concentrated to levels much higher than average in the vicinity of the crack, and a once-cohesive material capable of sustaining much higher tensions is progressively ripped apart as the crack spreads.

I am concerned about the fracture mechanics of Duke’s undergraduate LGBTQ community, specifically within the context of some of the discussions that have occurred on these pages and offline. I worry that there are flaws that are perceived or real, and that there is a tension in the community that is being concentrated on those flaws. I fear that fractures may race across the community and make separate and disconnected what was once mutually supportive. I wonder about whether the energy might be channeled to form new bonds across boundaries or if that energy will end up being expended in accentuating the cracks.

Part of the difficulty I see is this – the LGBTQ community is not some homogeneous entity but rather an aggregation of diverse individuals. And that intra-community diversity is evident even when you start looking at the people macroscopically labeled by the umbrella terms within 'L''G''B''T''Q'. Besides, “LGBTQ” doesn’t even cover the full spectrum – I think the most inclusive alphabetical attempt I have seen is something on the order of LGBTT2QQIAPS - so inclusive, it includes a number, but still not enough. Beyond that, even, we’ve recently read examples of people who have identified with a “label” writing about existing outside of them in different ways. Just as the discrete rendering of the rainbow flag doesn’t completely represent the continuum of colors to be found in a real rainbow, mere assemblages of letters cannot completely represent the continuum of people to be found in community.

Along with that, I wonder how much using the macro labels to posterize groups of people might be helping to promote fracture. “Well, the Purples are doing this, and as an Indigo, I don’t like it!” “Why are we always talking about / do we never talk about being Orange?” My fear there is this: that the worst behaviors and attitudes ever seen in any member of a group then gets codified as The Behavior and Attitude of That Group. At which point, members of that group either get defensive or offended, and the potential for communication – between the groups or the individuals – is diminished or lost completely. It becomes a clash of the stereotypes, and it initiates a crack in community.

Given the above, my deepest hope for the New Year is that the community I will choose to refer to as the Aggregation of Awesome will be mindful of the hazards of fracture mechanics and will instead direct energy towards strengthening the bonds of mutual respect and understanding. Where there are flaws, perceived and real, determine the most constructive ways to identify them, if possible – eliminate them, and if elimination is not possible – at least keep them from spreading and causing more damage. Where there are differences, acknowledge them, celebrate them, and learn from them. Understand that Differences and Flaws are two wholly different things.  Recognize that there will be times when everyone can be together and times when smaller communities are needed to provide a space for exploration, discovery, and affirmation that should be respected and encouraged.

Finally, as we are at a university, seek to educate yourself and teach others in ways that will “engage the mind, elevate the spirit, and stimulate the best effort of all who are associated with the University” – including letting others know ways they can better engage your mind, elevate your spirit, and stimulate your best effort.

Freshman Christmas Again (Also, How I Became an Ally)

Somehow, it doesn’t feel like winter break is starting today for me. Maybe it’s the fact that I just got out of my last final, a math exam, and am too exhausted to consider anything else, or the fact that instead of running out of class with all my friends and going home for a Christmas party, I get to go back to my room and clean the pig sty it has become. But whatever it is, whenever my family calls me to ask what I want for Christmas, I’m at an utter loss of what to say-Christmas? Already? It seems like a foreign concept, since I’ve spent too much time in Gothic Wonderland and not enough in Winter Wonderland. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’ve forgotten Christmas exists, but it doesn’t feel like the latter half of December used to-a buzz and carols in the air, everyone being nicer to each other than usual, freezing cold weather, wondering if for once, it would maybe be a white Christmas in the south, excitedly discussing with my sisters and friends the number of days left until break and what we would do with that precious two weeks off, and all those ridiculous themed school projects we had to do before winter break…in some ways, I’m not that shocked I’ve forgotten what time of year it is.

A bunch of people I know tend to lament the fact that, near Christmas, they’re the exact same way they were the year before. I don’t think that’s been the case for me ever since I was in middle school. Some things about me will probably never change-despite many years passing, I’m still a Legend of Zelda geek, I still love soccer and horseback riding, and South Park has yet to stop being hilarious. I still walk around barefoot whenever possible, and I don’t think I’ll ever be half as girly as most girls. But I know I’ve seen myself change a lot in the past four and a half years. I’ve gotten a little bit taller, a whole lot smarter, and a lot more outgoing (maybe a bit more outgoing than some of my friends would like!). And, admittedly, I think my heart has changed in many ways.

I’m not exactly proud to say that at the beginning of high school, I didn’t approve of people being gay. I didn’t think it was right, in any universe, to allow gay marriage, and being gay in itself was worthy of damnation. If you had told me I’d willingly attend BDU, base my Writing 20 final paper on relating gay marriage and the integration movement, and would gladly assist with passing out shirts at Coming Out Day (and wear one), I would have thought you were absolutely insane-partially because I never would have thought I could get into Duke, but also because I couldn’t see myself taking such a controversial stance on a topic that inevitably started flame wars no matter where you turned back home.

That all changed one day at school. Seeing one of the only openly bisexual (closest you get back home to being gay) people in my school being bullied by a pack of teenagers struck a chord with me. I spent seven years being the bullied one for not being like the other girls, but I had never been the bully. No, I had resolved never to stoop to that level, knowing what it had done to me. Those people tormenting that poor kid were definitely bullies. And I was no better than them, if I thought the way they did. Loving your neighbor didn’t mean that convoluted thing we had been taught at private school-love the people who are like you and show everyone else tough love by refusing to associate with them and not letting them do what you think is wrong-but something else entirely. It meant accepting other people, period. And that was for everything-race, religion, sex, age…and sexual orientation, I realized that day.

I wish I could say that was also the day I learned just how effective an uppercut to the jaw could be, but that day wouldn’t come until 10th grade in a soccer match. At the very least, though, it was the beginning of a process of undoing all the things I had been forced to believe for a part of my life. Over the course of a year, I learned not only to accept the LGBT community and its allies, but also people of other religions and backgrounds by extension of that knowledge. In a way, high school saved me from going absolutely insane because I learned to accept myself, too, even if I wasn’t like the other girls. And it also opened a number of doors to me-including the courage I needed to attend that first BDU meeting back at the beginning of the semester.

So, as a freshman once again, I know I’m a much different person than I was the last time I was a freshman at Christmas. As opposed to the cynicism and cold shoulder I presented to the world as a freshman in high school, now, I’m only like that once in a blue moon. If I’m not content, I’m positively overjoyed with being alive-just ask my friends. I like to think it’s because I’ve learned to judge less and love more, something that started all those years ago when that bisexual kid got bullied. If I hadn’t realized what I did on that day, I don’t know where I’d be today (but probably not anywhere near as amazing). Maybe that’s why I can’t think of what I want for Christmas-I’ve found something so much better than anything my family could ever possibly hope to buy for me. And, cheesy and overrated as it is, I guess that’s what Christmas is really about…love and joy.