Maëlys McArdle

Category: Life

Every other post.

  • Comically uninformed books about trans people

    Comically uninformed books about trans people

    Some history

    Up until very recently, gender diverse people were shut out of the publishing world.

    If they wanted to exchange ideas in print, they had to do it in their own newsletters and zines such as in Friedrich Radszuweit’s Das 3. Geschlecht – Die Transvestiten (translation: “The 3rd sex – the transvestites”, 1930-1932) or Rupert Raj’s Gender Review (1978-1986).

    Not that there weren’t books on trans people, but they were either medical texts written by cisgender people such as Magnus Hirschfeld/Max Tilke’s Die Transvestiten (1910), Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) and Richard Green/John Money’s Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969), or they were autobiographies of trans anti-celebrities such as Lili Elbe’s Fra mand til kvinde (translation: “From man to woman”, 1931), Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography (1967), Dianna Boileau’s Behold, I am a woman (1972) and April Ashley’s Odyssey (1982). Publishers weren’t interested in trans voices otherwise; this was a society that regarded queer people as dangerously unfit and outlawed trans women wearing dresses.

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  • The Lure of Thoughtlessness

    Being in my mid-thirties I’ve witnessed a revolution in day-to-day activities.

    The fundamentals look the same: spending time at work, making meals at home, driving places. The details are completely different. Everything in the mid-90s took more time and was less accessible. Work meant waiting in traffic. It could take a month between when taking photos and having a picture in your hands. Depositing money meant driving to the bank, and if it was a cheque, waiting days for it to cash. Paper maps and dictionaries were time-consuming necessities. Letters took a week to arrive. Music was limited to the small collection of CDs you purchased or FM radio. You could only get delivery for pizza and Chinese food; anything was an outing to a restaurant. If you were queer, especially in a smaller town, meeting new people was constrained to who your friends knew, the gay bar, and events.

    It’s a completely different world now, the smart phone being the latest harbinger of change. This has been wonderful, but there are two big caveats. One is with the platforms with suggested content, infinite scrolls, and/or regular notifications: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, even Netflix. They are engineered to capture your attention, with content tailored to you specifically, drawn from millions of user-generated options. When one app closes, there’s another to open. I’m not one to believe that books are inherently a superior form of entertainment, but unlike older forms of distraction, these are easy to unintentionally lose half a day to mindless scrolling.

    We need to have time to engage with intentional activities, or even be occasionally bored, and be wary of being sucked into unintentional distractions. We need to be with our thoughts. Turning away is getting harder and harder as the content increases in personal relevance, thanks to clever engineering and opening these apps becomes a habit while a noticeable void is felt in their absence.

    The other big caveat is with the inability to disconnect as a result of smart phones and remote work. For example, I get work messages at midnight, and if I’m on-call, I need to respond immediately or I risk losing my job. I am not permitted to simply work 9-5; I must be there for work 24/7 but I’m not paid a cent more for it. Even when not on call I get emails at all hours, and meetings can be at any time because the staff is spread across time zones. When people take vacations, they will be contacted while away to do work for some urgent matter or other. So again, this revolution which made remote working possible, saving a daily commute and opening up job opportunities, also prevents the ability to take mental space for oneself. It doesn’t have to be like this.

    We’re so lucky to have so much more free time and new ways to forge connections thanks to this revolution. We need to ensure to take care of our mental well-being by being intentional about how much time we use aimless distraction. We also need right-to-disconnect laws and a culture shift that accounts for this revolution.

  • Maldives

    Maldives

    I’ve spent the last week in the Maldives. I was mostly in Malé with my partner, but also visited Villingili.

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  • Trauma made me small

    Trauma made me small

    And that smallness became my prison.

    As I sit here looking to the ocean, I think of how I haven’t travelled as much as I wanted to. Not because of finances or any material constraints, but because I thought I didn’t have it in me to do it.

    It’s the same about how I only got my first car in my mid-thirties. It was unfamiliar, so I thought I couldn’t. Or how I thought I couldn’t move away from Ottawa. Or how in relationships my smallness extended to my own self, my worth, and how much I left it to others to do the emotional heavy lifting.

    The limits were real, but entirely psychological. The product of complicated formative years, with well-meaning but emotionally stunted parents. They gave me a lot and supported the hobbies that would become my livelihood. But in many ways they made me small; where others grew to learn how to navigate difficult feelings, I learned to self-harm to avoid the threats of violence that came with expressing them before my parents. Where others learned how to share their inner thoughts, I learned that doing so would be used against me. Where others learned to engage in difficult conversations, I learned only avoiding led to safety. Where others learned to explore their body, I was left with only a desire to be hit like my step-dad would. Where others had friends or family to confide in, I had no one. I had no emotionally intimate friendship, my big sister couldn’t stand me and my only grandparent wanted nothing to do with me. Never having had an environment where vulnerability was safe, I feared any jumps into the unknown that would make me so.

    I entered adulthood not thinking anything about this, but, entirely controlled by its effects. I was able to take care of my affairs – get a job, get a place, enjoy friendships – but was lacking intimacy. When that closeness was eventually found, I was toxic. I was deeply jealous of their freedom, and punished them for it. I put down a partner that moved to Vancouver, and a friend that travelled the world. I reduced them to these singular things. A friend got a nice car and I only had thoughts of envy. I was bitter and mean. The smallness that was necessary in adolescence became a trap in adulthood that I didn’t even know I was in.

    I lost so many good people to my hurtful behaviour. While I’m glad I’ve learned to do better, at 36, a lot of time has gone by. There is no undoing what I’ve done, only moving forward with a freedom I’ve always had but never known, and a regret for those I’ve hurt. I am not burdened by this regret as they’ve moved on, and so should I, as we all deserve happiness. It’s not a neatly packaged ending. So be it.

    Where once I felt I couldn’t, now I can.

  • 36

    I’m 36. If I had had a kid when I turned 18, they’d now be an adult themselves. I’m older than my mom when she had me. This puts things in a different perspective.

    So much of my adulthood has been defined by my being emotionally stunted and making my issues other people’s problem. With that finally behind me, plus money and good health, I find myself with a freedom I never really had before.