Hi,
So we’re midway through November and we’re into Trans Awareness Week. If you’re not aware of it, it’s a period of time where anti hate policies are activated on social media and angertainment creators take a much deserved break from holding us diabolical trans people to account…
Oh, who am I kidding! 😁
In more civilised areas that’s not the case. Indeed it’s been so rather lovely to see a surge of good news stories about trans folk and their lives. To read about people just getting on; hearing how getting who they need to be helps; and how to be a good ally; etc.
Which brings me around to this evening’s post and an perhaps an odd intersection. This week on the radio, I happened to catch an interview with someone who studied the positives around science. Yes, it’s progress, and yes more knowledge, wisdom, understanding, etc helps us. However, this interview was around looking for the research that suggested a positive future. The idea that we can change things and make improvements.
So, as much as I enjoy a dystopian setting… at least until it started to feel like we were actually living in one! 🙂 How about some feel good thoughts too push against the negatives?
I’d like to see society wise to the faux culture wars and tricks for votes (yes, that’s an intentional pun). To drive home to those in power that healthcare, the climate, and simply being able to afford food & housing are the necessities. Not the pointless time wasting of making scapegoat of the week and actually improving things for the public. I think we are starting to see that glacial shift as the shouty blowhard liars fail to deliver on anything. Well, anything other than look-at-me histrionics.
I wonder what a future might be where gender is more fluid, people change as they need, and we’re all free to be as we need to be. A time of no judgment that you dress, present, and perhaps can change the outside to align with the inside.
I think this can happen and I hope that it does. Maybe it’s worth working towards.
Each gentle act of allyship.
Each day out as ourselves.
Every time we’re open to friends, family, colleagues, and the public.
Representation and conversation brings the person away from the stereotype, slays myths and hate, and maybe, just maybe, brings us to the every day.
L x
“I wonder what a future might be where gender is more fluid, people change as they need, and we’re all free to be as we need to be.”
I’m still trying to work out the pronouns and genders in Ann Leckie’s ‘Ancillary’ universe. I should see if there is a Wiki on this. There’s a scene in Leckie’s new book, Translation State, where one character at a committee hearing realises that for some species this can be a choice and proudly declares that eir are human and e and corrects their form of address from Ms to Mx.
Yes, that moment in a story where the author references a term, a place, or an acronym; and you realise you’ve not remembered reading the explanation earlier. 😣Well, assuming there was one! 🙂
As a kid of the ’60s/’70s I was brought up on a culture of looking to a future where mankind would thrive. Material signs of this included the UN’s worldwide food, vaccination and health programmes, culminating in the elimination of smallpox after two centuries of effort, something that my science teacher enthused about. And on the dream side we had shows like Star Trek (and Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space!) that saw a positive place for man in the vastness of the universe. I think Cold War rivalry actually helped nations to try to outdo each other in future-driven programmes. And then all that somehow went gradually to pot. When a leader in promoting human rights like the UK should seriously be looking at leaving the European Court of Human Rights, that it jointly founded after the horrors of WW2, simply in order to brutalise refugees, then things have gone very badly wrong. Maybe that positive culture was cooked up in a haze of pot smoke, or maybe selfishness, nationalism and exploitation had to take a rest after the excesses of war, which you were reminded of by all the crippled veterans around. Or maybe I have a rosy-tinted view of times as a child. One could discuss this endlessly but clearly as culture gets more macho with nationalism and hate on the rise to disguise the failings of governments’ domestic policies, then the feminine gets crushed, and that means trans people as well as women. ‘Twas always thus. I don’t think the general public see trans people badly, but the general public have no real voice now. Sue x
We might yet thrive. At least, if we learn to curb our excesses around consuming the planet’s resources, hating on each other, etc.
If only I’d kept some of those 70s/80s “you’ll be living in space in 2030” books. Maybe we’re more likely to be building survival pods in the hotter parts of the world. Oops. Still, it’s possible to act locally and try to reduce our own impact on the climate.
I think waiting for the deniers and money-before-people folk to act is fairly pointless. Still, I shall look forward to clogging their underground lair’s air vents 😜
You can make a start by getting you eye examined ! Your far to young to be classed as a granny !
Ha ha. I was thinking of the title as a future yet to be.
That said, my youngest sister is a grandma. She had a family young, so they’re now of an age to have kids of their own.
I hope the future works out that way, it would be nice to think that what we have now is the worst it’s going to get.
I have a friend who is seriously considering living in Malta as they don’t like the way it’s going over here.
Only a few years until my oldest could father a child, a scary thought !
Things do seem to have gone backwards over the last decade in the UK. Despite the progress around marriage equality, the UK is very far behind other countries in Europe and the wider world. Well, I say seem, the UN didn’t hold back and there’s LGBTQ+ organisations who’ve been very specific about poor rights and treatment for UK transgender people.
If I think back to the 80s and the BS around Section 28, AIDS, and how LGBTQ folk were treated, it seems similar. An out of touch government, a hostile press, and the ‘moral crusaders’.
To coin a phrase: this too, shall pass 😉
Grandma Izzy? It has a ring to it. 😉 Hopefully a few more years before your children start thinking about a family.