I got one for three reasons despite living downtown. The first is that for the last six months I have spent over 3 hours a day bussing to work. The commute by car meanwhile is 25 minutes each way. I want that time back. Second, I wanted to learn to drive standard for my worldwide travels and especially my move to New Zealand. Third, I wanted to go camping a bunch this summer and that’s just easier with my own vehicle.
The car I got was a 2014 Ford Fiesta with a bunch of nice extras like fog lights and turn lights on the mirrors. It had 70,000 km on it and I paid $5,000. It was a very generous price by the seller, and I appreciate them for it.
This is my first car, and though I took a few lessons, I had never driven manual before. In a trial by fire, a few hours after I got it I drove it, my bestie, and her two sibs to the Gatineau Park. I stalled it four times that day.
I didn’t have license plates. I thought it would be more difficult to get through the bureaucracy of getting my first car, but it took three minutes at Service Ontario. The safety was done, I had proof of insurance, and the used vehicle package was filled out.
It’s been three months since my vaginoplasty, and two months since laser eye surgery.
Healing has been going well on both fronts. As far as my eyes go, I see better than I ever did with glasses in good lighting conditions. In poor lighting, when looking at bright objects such as crosswalk signs or screens, there is this visual effect accompanying these light sources that reminds me of what things look like when you have tear drops in your eyes. There was also a bloom effect around bright lights and this seems to have reduced significantly. It may take up to a year for my eyes to heal fully.
With regards to my genitalia, I had a bit of a scare two weeks ago. I had discovered a growth in my surgical site. It looked like parts of my insides had fallen out of my body. After communicating with the overnight nurses at the recovery facility, it turns out it was hypergranulation. It’s a common complication. I went to see my doctor, and she necrotized the tissue. Over the next week it simply disintegrated with grey bits lining my underwear. Otherwise bleeding has ceased, and the surgical site has been healing quite nicely. I figure I’ll post photos at the six month mark. This too may take a year to recover fully.
The follow-ups between laser eye surgery and bottom surgery have been starkly different. For laser eye there was an in-person follow up the next day, next week, next month, and now at the three month mark following the procedure. With bottom surgery, which was far more complex and expensive, I was on my own. Nothing ever came of the surgeon’s assurance he’d see me in a month following surgery. There was an automated email for two weeks, then nothing. I sent questions about bleeding that went unanswered. I heard nothing for three months. When the complication occurred, they did respond but asked questions for a different surgery than the one I had, then when I corrected them they gave me instructions to follow that were again for a different surgery. It reminded me of how bad communication in the lead up to surgery was.
Neither surgery have been a source of much thought as of late beyond medical recovery. It all feels so normal. I adjusted to life without glasses immediately. I don’t miss constantly cleaning lenses, having my breath fog my sight, or minding the frames. As for having a vulva instead of a penis, that too was a quick adaptation. I don’t miss my penis, the sex, the spontaneous erections, the bump it made in my underwear or taking four diuretic pills a day. Having a vulva with a clit isn’t exciting, it just is. It reminds me of my breast growth during second puberty. It just was. Things might as well always have been this way.
I’m glad I did these surgeries. They are a testament to how far I’ve come to be able to make these big steps in my life. With that, I conclude with my instagram stories during the course of my surgery and ensuing stay in rehab.
Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post where I talked about my focus shifting to queer and trans issues. I was ignorant at the time, and spent the next decade unlearning, and growing. I’ve reached another inflection point in my life where I’m exhausted and am now stepping away from this work.
I wrote that first blog post in my early twenties. I’m in my early thirties now and there’s a cohort of queers a full generation younger than me. They are freshly traumatized with newly acquired vocabulary validating the wrongs they previously couldn’t name. They have an outsider’s perspective which lets them be incensed at injustice in a way that gets lost with better knowing the institutions that produce them. They are more inclusive than we were at their age, although still quite exclusive, and favour immediacy. They aspire for big picture changes.
They need space to go through the experiences we went through and grow. I need space from that type of advocacy and its unbridled anger, all-or-nothing approach, selective dependability, clique based on desirability, and relationship turmoil. The older queers I know have pivoted from system-level change to working at a smaller scale, where their impact is immediately felt, and started doing so in a professional capacity. They are social workers, nurses, union reps, librarians, executive directors, and academics. Their activism is intertwined with their jobs.
I don’t have one of these occupations, nor am I a user of services, and this makes me an outsider. We don’t need more people like me. We need insiders. It takes insiders for things to change in the small measures necessary to transform the social landscape. It takes insiders at Health Canada and Blood Services Canada to end the ban on blood donations from gay men and trans women. It takes insiders in the Ministry of Health to stop denying coverage for reproductive care to pregnant trans men. It takes insiders in LGBT community organizations across Ottawa to stop excluding services to francophone newcomers. It takes insiders at retirement homes and their corporations to make elderly gay people from going back in the closet. It takes insiders in Catholic schools to stop the messaging that queer and trans youth are unwanted. It takes insiders in research positions at universities to ask the right questions to change policy discourse. It takes insiders to make the little changes everywhere. At this point in my life, there’s not really a place for me and I want to use the energy I’ve been investing in others to work on my own growth.
A great many things have happened in the past ten years to be more inclusive of queer and trans people though these gains have been imbalanced towards white, settler, and affluent individuals. Some things, however, remain much the same. Housing needs to be a right, sex work needs to be seen as work, education needs to be affordable, mental health care covered by the province, jobs accessible, and basic income guaranteed. A lot of trans people are still dying in Ottawa and communities across Canada and they don’t always look like the packaged-for-cis-audiences trans narratives on television. Things are not okay. There was a funeral this weekend. But I can’t do this anymore.
I conclude with two observations I’ve made a decade apart about the nature of prejudice to show that it, or perhaps I, haven’t changed that much. Here from a piece I wrote ten years ago about opponents of equality for gay people:
It’s hard to understand those that sit on the other side of the fence. An emotion that could easily be confused for hate fuels these people. They subscribe to inducing great torment, and yet are completely uncaring of this fact. It’s a particularly dangerous human state, one which is passive, and doesn’t involve violence nor rage. After all, these are rational people, behaving in a calm intelligent manner. Yet, in this one aspect of their livelihoods, they are able to commit themselves to such vast societal destruction.
In the end, a lot of prejudice isn’t fueled by hate, but by discomfort, and only with vulnerability can it be addressed meaningfully. Though discomfort is more innocuous-sounding than hate, actions (or lack thereof) rooted in discomfort can be indistinguishable in their cruelty and harm done to those motivated by hate.
I love helping others learn to code. My approach is to preserve the enthusiasm people bring to the table when they first show up.
Enthusiasm is easy to squander. When people feel lost, they lose enthusiasm. When they’re told that they’re doing something wrong over and over, they lose enthusiasm. When they feel embarrassed about what they don’t know, they lose enthusiasm. When they can’t see the end in sight, they lose enthusiasm. When they face constraints peers don’t seem to have, they lose enthusiasm. And they especially lose enthusiasm when they are made to feel like they will never be okay at it. A lot of this can be prevented by the educator’s approach.
Learning anything new is hard, and with that comes an inevitable loss in enthusiasm. To counter that effect, I try to:
Keep newinformation to absorb to a minimum and revisit what they already know
Structure learning so participants can make regular and visible progress
Encourage experimentation and making mistakes
Show genuine enthusiasm yourself – how you visibly perceive the content has an effect on others
Align content to other interests they have as to leverage their enthusiasm for that other subject
Create my own teaching material which prioritizes the reader’s feelings over quantity
It’s much easier to preserve enthusiasm when there’s no fixed deadlines. Still, no matter what the context, I place as much importance on listening as to speaking. It’s also important to the participant’s success and those of others for there to be boundaries, but I am very selective about which constraints are necessary. I don’t offer unsolicited advice, instead keeping the pace commensurate with the learner, checking in regularly, and showing genuine interest in the questions they ask. Anything new tidbit they glean is great so no question is ever too rudimentary.
Bringing this into the real world, I’m currently mentoring a comp sci student. They chose the problem they wanted to solve. They drew what they wanted the ideal app to look like. I helped them identify the MVP and reduce the scope. This brings the deliverable into something tangible, which reduces the chances of getting discouraged to the point of wanting out later in development. We then broke the project into three discrete parts: the front-end, the back-end, and the data store. We focused on each component starting at the data store. Isolating the problem space to one component gives a light at the end of the tunnel and reduces how many new concepts they have to grasp. They created the repo on GitHub. I gave them small assignments that could be done in 30 minutes.
For the two-part workshop I gave at Algonquin college, my approach was “less is more”. I wanted participants to come out of the sessions being able to say that they could code. I wanted their computer screens looking like that of a professional developer. I also wanted to impress that they already had many important skills relevant to this type of work.
I showed them what software developers actually do (Google things a lot), covered what a programming language is, went over the emotional intelligence aspect of software development, before finally getting into a bit of coding. I selected a programming language with real-world applications (Python) and IDE (Visual Studio Code). The format was alternating between showing a new little thing they could do, and then having them experiment, with one mentor per four participants. They learned about showing text on the screen, doing simple math, using functions, getting user input, creating functions, and reading files. I omitted a lot of content that’s usually in introductory lessons for the sake of keeping it as simple as possible while covering a lot of functional ground. So I didn’t go over the difference between an integer and a float, or cover index-based loops, or ASCII vs UTF-8, etc.
The workshop was free. They didn’t have to come back for that second session if they didn’t want to but they all did, safe for one. They were enthused and wanted to learn more. That’s exactly the emotion I had hoped to elicit and what we should all strive for.
When approaching instruction, center how you want people to feel. You want them to feel like they can do this. Like they’re making progress. Like what they’re learning is relevant. You can pull all of that off in a way that’s honest with them. I think too often the enthusist’s emotions isn’t considered at all, and that this is to the detriment of all.
You don’t measure vulnerability by the amount of disclosure. You measure it by the amount of courage to show up and be seen when you can’t control the outcome.
Brené Brown, The Call to Courage
The dominant narrative in contemporary Canadian society is that prejudice is a thing of the past. That racism ended with the U.S. civil rights movement, sexism with sexual liberation, and colonialism with confederation. These myths prevail even as the facts disproving them shout in our faces.
This dissonance between perception and reality is of little surprise given that these narratives around prejudice are driven by the political landscape, executive boards, and media – all of which are currently dominated by affluent white men*. Theirs isn’t a malicious role so much as reflective of the smallness of their shared experience. But it takes more than affluent white men increasing awareness to change things; it takes institutions and organizations looking like the people they serve in substantive numbers at the highest echelons. There can be no tangible improvement as long as affluent white men make up the majority of decision makers.
In the end, a lot of prejudice isn’t fueled by hate, but by discomfort, and only with vulnerability can it be addressed meaningfully. Though discomfort is more innocuous-sounding than hate, actions (or lack thereof) rooted in discomfort can be indistinguishable in their cruelty and harm done to those motivated by hate.
Discrimination is normalized
Before going further it’s worth listing some of the discrimination that is normalized in the current climate. The threshold for acceptability into unacceptability seems to be the point where today’s affluent white men* would immediately benefit from its resolution.
For some examples of marginalization, let’s look at how women are excluded from positions of influence:
In the 42nd parliament (2015-2019), only 26% of MPs are women. Male perspectives define the legislature.
In 2018, 148 women and girls are killed in Canada. 90% of their killers are men. In Toronto, a self-proclaimed incel targets women in a mass murder. Women are harassed by men for simple activities like walking down thesidewalk.
In 2017, the Quebec government implements a ban on face coverings, designed to prevent women from accessing public services and obtaining jobs in the public sector if they are visibly Muslim.
To this day, the Canadian government refuses to treat indigenous peoples as equal partners. In 2007, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is adopted with 144 nations voting in favour. Canada was one of the only four nations to oppose the declaration. In 2018, the private member’s Bill C-262 is introduced by NDP Romeo Saganash to harmonize laws with the declaration. As of the time of this writing, it looks likely to be killed by delay.
This does not have to be our reality. We could be on the path to reconciliation, work to end sexism in a tangible way, and treat all faiths with equal respect. It just takes people in the right positions choosing differently. They do not.
The reasons are twofold: the affluent white men* in decision making positions don’t have to and don’t want to. The don’t have to part is easy enough: they are not personally negatively impacted by this discrimination, the people they are accountable to don’t ask for it, and there’s no legislation to mandate it. As change carries risk of losing eminence, maintaining the status quo is more desirable.
Then there’s why they don’t want to. There is one class of people who don’t believe there are widespread experiences of discrimination. They persevered and were able to make it, and so if others did not have the same outcome, it’s attributed to character. They are not inclined to appreciate the additional barriers specific to separate groups. This class is not the focus of this article.
There is a second class of people who do believe discrimination exists but are unwilling to make the decisions that would challenge it. Members of both classes share the belief that they personally would be worse off were they to push for this change. The former because they don’t want the world this change would bring. The latter because pushing has consequences. Either way, the end result is the same.
It is this second class which believes prejudice exists and is morally wrong but make successive decisions to uphold it that is the focus of this article.
Acknowledging the cost
For affluent white men*, doing the right thing has a cost. Money spent on accessible entrances, washrooms and spaces means less money spent on them. Inclusive hiring practices means more restrictions on how they behave. Respecting indigenous sovereignty means they can’t operate unilaterally. Gender balanced executive boards mean less job openings for them. They give up something.
Even smaller gestures, like friends speaking up when hearing a joke that belittles a group of people, or teachers openly vocalizing for a GSA in a Catholic school that’s opposed them, lose something by doing so. Maybe it’s the esteem in which they’re held. Maybe it’s the work environment. They feel uncomfortable.
Bearing these costs is a very difficult proposition for affluent white men* to accept when doing so is entirely voluntary. It predisposes them to stand back, be silent, and presume others will carry out the change in a kind of bystander effect.
Change requires losing control on outcomes
It’s difficult for affluent white men* in decision making positions to accept a cost when they don’t have to. It’s even harder to accept when they can’t predict what the cost will be. What would their life look like if decision makers in the government stopped perpetrating this slow-motion genocide against indigenous people? What would their life look like if decision makers in companies decided that half of managers should be women? Or more immediately, what would their work environment look like if they spoke up when their colleague made a sexist joke?
For tangible change to happen, these men need to be okay with being vulnerable. As Brené Brown put it in that opening quote, that means doing things knowing the outcome can’t be controlled. It’s scary and a reality that those on the receiving end of discrimination know too well. They have no choice. That vulnerability is foisted upon them every day.
Discrimination will continue for generations because decision makers preserve their sense of safety by keeping to insignificant changes or voicing support only in the company of like-minded individuals. Only when they accept to be uncomfortable and assume the cost of doing what they know is right will they be able to say that they stood up to prejudice.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King, The Trumpet of Conscience
*Specifically affluent, Christian heritage, white, settler, able-bodied, straight, cisgender, men who own a car and a house. Or individuals who fit eight out of ten criteria.
