I think it’s kind of funny that my protocols for addressing people with regards to their gender, race, class, etc are amazingly simple and fair - yet so many people, including progressive people, have problems with them. It comes down to a very easy praxis:
ask - don’t tell/assume
It occurred to me in my early 20s, shortly after moving to The Big City, that far too much of what I “knew” about people was really my own presumption and projection. That there was and is a strong impetus to label people, to put them into conceptual boxes for some perceived convenience. This perpetuates those categories as memes. And also is hardly ever truly necessary! So I switched over to the mental exercise of simply leaving those categories for people blank - unless they happen to explicitly fill them in themselves. And it turns out that the time I have ever needed to know has been approximately zero.
Some have decried this as being a form of wilful blindness or ignorance, but it really is more acknowledging ignorance which was there already, and does not change through me guessing and putting my own labels upon people. If a person speaks up and says “I think that my experience as a black/lesbian/proletarian/zoroastrian/etc person is relevant here”, then I accept that it is and I listen and try to benefit from their experiences.
I had the misfortune to be in the Boys Brigade, which is the organisation that the Scouts came from. I am sure that the American Fundamentalists would feel far happier with their sons in that organisation.
However, if you are LGBT I would recommend staying well clear of it. To be honest, I would just recommend that anyone stays well clear of it, unless they like having drill practice every week.
Yet, on the other side of the country it was well known our teachers were hiding in the local pub at lunch hour, just to get away from the students. Hell, getting busted in the school zone right in front of our school was the only thing that initiated action against one famously drunk-all-the-time teacher we had (and I am not entirely sure how much was the school board taking action and how much was the “drunk driving in a school zone” effects. BCTF is a force most do not want to reckon with.
AFAIK the Scouts were nothing to do with the BB. I remember when anyone mentioned the BB my parents would do the look they reserved for the JWs or the Mormons. The history I was told was that the Scouts were almost self organising, a grassroots organisation. Is this wrong?
Sorry, which country? I’m in Canada, and the province I’m in (Ontario) has famously strict drinking laws, many of which are pretty much how they were put in place when Prohibition ended {looks wistfully towards Quebec}.
I’m going to go out on a limb and consider a pub close enough to go to during lunch hour sounds like the UK to me, and post this:
Bottom line is, schools are under a lot of pressure to be safe for students, and the most common solution to that is to expect small “c” conservative behaviour from staff. Which can make it difficult when they’re expected to also be progressive on things like gender.
That’s a shitty thing to say, especially to someone who’s got family in Kelowna/Penticton. I’m not the “other side of the country” from you, I’m in the middle. Hence the confusion.
How can you know I’ve forgotten about you when I don’t know where the hell you are?
Before Robert Baden-Powell started the scouting movement he was a Boys Brigade officer, who became vice president of the organisation in 1903. He did an experiment where some Boys Brigade companies would become Boys Brigade Scouts, later these groups split off to become the Boy Scouts.
One of the reasons for splitting off was that the scouting movement was more progressive for the time, and as far as I know It always has been.
I think the reason I ended up in the BB was because there weren’t any scouts nearby. I could walk to and from the local church on my own, but the nearest scouts was a car drive away and my mum couldn’t drive at the time (my dad was in the merchant navy and away quite a bit). I would rather have been in the guides but they wouldn’t have let a trans girl in back then even if I could have got away with transition.
I haven’t found that in the official histories - is there a source? The version I had was that in 1907 or thereabouts B-P organised an experimental Scout camp on Brownsea Island which drew on BB members, Etonians and Harrovians as part of Baden-Powell’s belief in social mixing. It was never exclusively BB. I wonder if the BB has “improved” the story?
“other side of the country” “BCTF”. They are what we mystery reader/writers like to call clues. (Please read this as more lighthearted than nasty… that is the intent.). Yes, ON its in the East. Eastern Conferences, Eastern Standard Time, back East. Try to go West of us and you get wet.
I haven’t replied and am not going to mention for a couple of reasons.
I realised we were derailing.
I read the post in Fuck Today and I am not going to pile on someone who is having a bad day. I made the original crack before I read that post.
But it wasn’t that long ago that an MP declared at a public event that Canada stretched “From the Rockies to the Atlantic”.
The political erasure of BC is a bit of a sensitive / front of mind thing around here right now, because it has cost lives and those lives are now being used by Ottawa as a negotiating tool. Fetanyl has been a crisis for quite a while here, but instead of Federal funding, we saw pleas for help either ignored or dismissed with a side of victim blaming telling us to shut down Insite and pop-up clinics like it that were saving lives. Only when Ontario’s problems started hitting the news did the Federal monies emerge and they still come with conditions like a province must buy into the federal health care deal, whether it benefits them or not. A lot of people here bought the promises of changing the voting system. FPTP means the government gets chosen before our polls even close. Now we’re told that the system won’t be changing.
So, yeah, we snark about it a bit. Is that not our Grand Canadian Tradition? Laugh at what we are powerless to change?
The inclinations of the Austrian and German officer classes are briefly discussed in Fashion and Fetishism. I think Kunzle wastes too much time on collars, though.
The other side of the country from BC is not Ontario, it is Newfoundland & Labrador. That’s over a thousand kilometres past Ontario. I know several Maritimers who would be horrified to be lumped in with Ontario.
And I recall residents of both Vancouver and Victoria pointing out the mountains to me when I’ve visited there in the past. Are those not part of the Rockies? The Okanagan Valley is as Rockies as it gets and that’s definitely BC.
BCTF is pretty obscure for anyone who is not a) in BC and b) a member or a friend or relative of a member of the BCTF. My immediate family are related to two former members of the OSSTF, but I guarantee they can’t remember what it is or what the letters stand for without being reminded.
Tonight I’m hosting a videoconference with my friend Stephanie Bonvisutto. She is a women’s studies doctoral student at Stony Brook University, and she is putting together a really great discussion. It’s about safe spaces in yoga for LGBT but I think whether you are interested in yoga or not, it’s going to be just generally a good discussion about making a space a safe space, and particularly for LGBT people.
When: Jun 20, 2017 9:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
At the risk of a post proclaiming, “It’s not like that here!” (because it is), I do want to share something that I’ve shared elsewhere because it does give me hope. I live in southern Alabama (albeit a university town), and my son has a transgendered friend who he has known since 2nd grade; they are about to enter high school.
We’ve watched and experienced the transition and the pain the family has endured. I’m not sure there’s anyplace in America, the place with which I’m most familiar, that I would recommend raising a transgendered child, but on first glance, Alabama would not pop to mind. However, I’ve been so pleased by my son and his friends’ reactions to their friend – it is really “no big deal” to them. This is not to suggest that it’s been “no big deal” to all the other people in the family’s life, but I have witnessed the magnet school they attended be overly accepting of his transition.
I guess I’m sharing to explain that change is possible anywhere and it usually happens through the personal. One child, one family, affected all sorts of people and through the influence of other parents, the damage was less than it could have been and may have affected opinion in ways that the general could not.
Again, I’m not sharing to defend Alabama or its politics (such a defense is simply not possible). I’m only sharing to say that I’ve found hope in such personal interactions recently, even in Alabama. The personal, coupled with national and international movements for acceptance, can affect change that is not easily undone.
“Used to be” – when I started as a librarian at a large university in Mississippi in 2001 and subsequently got pregnant, I was told I was lucky that I didn’t get transferred from public services (aka reference librarian) to technical services (aka catalog the books) after I started showing because that was the unofficial policy until the mid 1990s. A direct quote: “It was considered too vulgar to have a pregnant woman interacting with the public.” And what individual was going to challenge that, especially pregnant staff members who needed their health insurance?
Thank you for sharing about that. I always found people in Alabama really accepting individually. it’s in the groups where people do thoughtless things. But actually being up North now, I see that the conversations are much quieter here. It’s almost the opposite where politically people are liberal but at an individual level, conversations aren’t happening.
Well, I feel I’m giving too much credit to people here in deep South. I’ve managed to find pockets of acceptance, and yes, that is reason for hope. But this scorched earth is blanched with such blood and suffering that I mostly fear it will never recover. That’s how I feel most of the time.
BCTF = BC Teachers Federation.
However, I’ve been so pleased by my son and his friends’ reactions to their friend – it is really “no big deal” to them. This is not to suggest that it’s been “no big deal” to all the other people in the family’s life, but I have witnessed the magnet school they attended be overly accepting of his transition.