Hi,
How’s things with you?
Shall we start with some personal stuff and then I’ll get the soapbox out? 😉 I mean, well, habits, yo 😁
Home stuff
I’m grateful this week for mild weather. Not having to worry about when it’s okay to take the hounds out, or when it comes to sleep. That frustration of being too hot to sleep at night and then too hot in the day not to start nodding off. I, for one, do not welcome our new Lizard Overlords 😉
I’m also now part-time. The Ever Lovely Mrs J and I had an end of week day out on my day off. A stroll with the dogs, no clocks to watch, and nowhere to rush to. I may call this recombobulation day 🙂
We’ve some home repairs on the go and these are causing me to be anxious. I keep telling myself that A) we are all okay, B) it’s only money, and C) things will be sorted at some point.
I do find such things stressful. I don’t know why, but I know that I like home to be quiet and uneventful. Drama only in plays and productions, please.
Don’t tell
There’s a bit of the thing at the mo, where – and yes, in going to go straight in to judgement! – there’s this nonsense, that if you don’t tell someone about things, they’ll somehow magically ignore them.
This feels particularly pertinent around teenagers like Child 2.0 and possibly me as well. Yes, we’re generations apart, and yes, our personal directions – and experiences – are different.
I’m a child of the 70s and a teenager of the 80s. For me, and maybe it was different for you, there was little to no sex education. Certainly nothing on relationships, consent, or sexuality – let alone gender. Mind you, given Section 28, is that any surprise 🙄
Yet, here I am, a husband, parent, and trans person. It’s been a confusing and troubling journey – with some unpleasant elements – to arrive here, some fifty odd years on. Bad stuff? Well, self loathing (or internalised transphobia, you might say now), mental health has taken a knock at least twice, and then there’s the social fallout from being outed….
Yet, here I am, luckily. The help and love from others: family, friends, health professionals, good souls (looking to you Chams old guard).
So, what’s the point I’m trying to make? I guess it’s two things.
Firstly, not telling people about sex, sexuality, gender, or any of that is a dumb idea. I was a kid once – yes, just after the invention of fire 😁 – and not hearing about trans people meant I stumbled through life. Often confused, many times hiding, and the mental heavy lifting that takes in toll. There’s studies showing higher levels of anxiety and depression in LGBTQ+ communities. Who’d a thunk being bullied and maligned would impact a person’s health? 🙄 See this week’s special from Rosie Jones: Am I a R*t*rd? By all that’s fabulous, WTAF tech companies!
Poor mental health doesn’t just hurt the person. It can affect their ability to care for others, to work, and – to coin a modern phrase – hurt people, hurt people. So, we mentallers are villains ? No, absolutely not. People in distress do things they wouldn’t do normally. I forget who said it, but In anger, we lose ourselves. People who are hurt say and do things they wouldn’t usually do. I know I’ve been there and it doesn’t make it okay. Yes, I’ve felt shame for my behaviour and yes I’ve apologised. So yeah, mental health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. No Hoover jokes please 🤪
So, secondly, and ignoring the above, what about the don’t tell the kids policy? Or as my goose stepping distant relative might say “Don’t talk about the gays! It’ll just encourage kids.”
F*** off will it. 🙄
Not telling me – or not telling Child 2.0 – doesn’t stop us. We are who we are and we love who we love. There was feck all representation for me as a kid. The closest was probably Danny La Rue or John Inman. Both entertainers and both, perhaps, hiding in plain sight. I don’t think it was until Suzie Eddie Izzard started to be more open and visible. But, hey, we’ve been here before on the awfulness of trans stories in film and television.
Despite the nonsense of not telling 80s kids about sexuality, we now have marriage equality, Section 28 was killed off, and more LGBTQ folk are out. These are all good things and it looks we’ve a proverbial fight on our hands to keep those rights.
That policy of not telling folk and blocking the truth? It’s not going to work. All you’re going to do is alienate a lot of people.
Oh, and the difference between me and Child 2.0’s upbringing? Supportive & loving parents, an accepting school, and the Internet. Society has moved on. Good luck with putting those genies back in the bottle.
L x
Not telling people about something keeps people dumb and to some extent more easy to manage.
For example the Taliban, medieval church hate the concept of an educated person that they could not control, as educated people tend to ask more questions and question whats actually going on.
Granted there are going to be some people who will claim your not giving people an education, but your trying to force your ‘different’ views on the minds of the vulnerable. Its something that organised religion has been doing for centuries
In the words of the excellent comic RPG game, Paranoia: “Fear and ignorance. Ignorance and fear.”
If anyone wants me, I’ll be subventing the local youth by playing records backwards, summoning the Dark Lord by reading the D&D manual, and offering to explain the virtues of good skincare. 🤪
Your invocation was successful , I am the Dark Lord!
Now what is it that you want and what are you going to offer for it.
As suggestion for the next time, use the advanced version of D&D manual the text time
What is this “Advanced D&D” of which you speak? 😉 I think we’re both showing our age at this point 😁
I offer the contents of the spam bin and in return, I’d like protection for anyone who uses a search engine with the mistype ‘Dork Lard’….
…. bonus points to redirect them to the rather good kids books, Dirk Lloyd.
Turns out I was more a child of the 90s than the 80s, but for that I can say your point stands. Section 28 was such a feature of my life (that some people pushed back on in my school) that I didn’t even know TG was an option. Thus, so much of my early life was keeping nameless things as shrouded as I could. So I cab relate. On that basis, and to get to an actual point, I salute what you and your family have achieved. Not knowing the words does not diminish the concept, it merely makes it harder to understand or explain – ignorance literally breeds a kind of suffering. Enlightenment is called that for a reason and, though The Enlightenment wasn’t all gravy it does illustrate the point that learning and knowledge is a general Good.
Glad you are part-time, glad you are coping with repairs (they can suck, but at least they are happening) and so so glad your family has been able to make iterative improvements over the past. We should all aspire to the same.
Section 28 had a long shadow and not in a good way. Like the decriminalisation around being gay; the weren’t suddenly accepting and bigot free the day after the law changed.
But there’s no hypocrisy when certain politicians talk about free speech and then go on (and on, and on, #GwanGwanGwan 😁) about banning books, blocking inclusive education (decolonisation and LGBTQ+ ✊), or denying people who they need to be.
Completely with you on the impact of not knowing about things and then finding out about, say, neurodiversity. As you said at Chams: “Oh. I see.”. 💜 Very much that that enlightenment is understanding behaviours can be part of a pattern and that commonalty can help us understand why we do & think certain ways.
Fingers crossed on the repairs and also reminding myself to be calm about them.
Thanks for the kind words 🙏
There’s ignorance about sex and there’s ignorance about sex, with the latter being perfectly displayed by the response to a FB post seen this morning.
“Scientists hope to use 10 eggs taken from the last two northern white rhinos to create viable embryos to transfer to surrogates of a related species to save the endangered white rhino from extinction.”
Comments:[name mercifully obscured]
“Rhino’s don’t even lay eggs, and theese same scientist are tel us 5g is safe whatever” (sic)
I am caught between hilarity and despair. You sometimes wonder why we are not the species in danger of extinction. (Though we may well be, but for different reasons than ignorance about how sex works.)
I have a head start, being a teenager in the 70s (two years too young for Woodstock, two years too old for punk). Having a mother who worked for TV and theatre, I was aware that both sex and sexuality were rather more fluid and nuanced than biology textbooks would have us believe, and even – if you had the desperation, courage and money – subject to change, as evidenced by April Ashley and Tula/Caroline Cossey, in the way that no amount of night-time praying was ever going to accomplish. Perhaps even more formatively at that age, I discovered that there was sometimes a thin line between professional female impersonation (and that was even a thing) and being transgender, where some performers not only looked [alarmingly, confusingly, enviously] realistically female (just how did they get away with those skimpy costumes?) but some even lived that way offstage.
I’m not sure how much I learned about sex at school except that varieties of peas had strange reproductive habits and, as a friend put it, “how to draw maps of the backs of rabbits”.
And 40 years on, as other parts of the Pride community are openly celebrating, we are still fighting not to be erased.
I want to say “well, you can’t save the rhinos without breaking a few eggs” but I’m not sure it’s funny. 😉
The comment you point to, I feel it’s like the old Fry Meme of “Can’t tell if they’re trolling, or just really dumb”.
Now before someone points out in punching down, it’s okay not to know. It’s a thing that folk miss out on education. But it’s not okay to try and push conspiracy guff. If you don’t know, ask someone! Go look it up in a source. Check again in case there’s different views… 🙄
As to FI people, perhaps hiding in plain sight and using theatre & personal brand as cover.
I hope working part-time will give you a work-life balance that provides more happiness, less stress and opens horizons. It did for me.
I missed out on the benefits of Section 28 as I was a student in progressive (translation: woke) higher education by then and, frankly, being gay or trans was never an issue even in the 1980s in academic environments. Some academic dude once suggested that when kings were philosophers or philosophers were kings, people might be governed better. Oh yes, that was Plato but he was Greek or some such and therefore foreign and responsible for taking suvrenty away (spelling?) so we can’t accept his unpatriotic idea, can we?
Best wishes to you and Mrs J and the youngsters.
Sue x
I’m hoping the extra two Fridays off will help. Good to hear it helped you. The weekend felt less quick, even though we did extra things. Here’s hoping it makes a difference 🤞
“…responsible for taking suvrenty away…”
I think the spelling is okay 😉 What may be making you think it’s a spelling mistake, is that’s it’s more usually seen written as: “theIr tAknig oUR sUvrntY!” 😁