#then turn around and claim GAY PEOPLE are recruiting people to their 'lifestyle' like that isnt LITERALLY THE DESCRIPTION OF MISSIONARY WORK | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

themollyjay · 3 years

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I’m Not An Imposter (But I Sure Feel Like One).

CW: Homophobia, Transphobia, Trans-misogyny

Two days ago, I started work on a new novel called ‘The Defective Paragons’. It took me a little over a day to write the first chapter, because I wanted to get it right. Actually, I wanted to get it perfect. I wanted to capture a specific feeling, but I struggled with it a lot and I want to talk about why.

‘The Defective Paragons’ is not the novel I had planned to write after I finished Transistor. I thought I would finish Transistor, do revisions on The Master of Puppets, circle back around and do revisions on Transistor, and then move on to my first Fantasy novel, The Long Way Home.

Instead, I finished Transistor, did revisions on The Master of Puppets, did revisions on Transistor, then I pulled out an old manuscript I had started back in 2015 called ‘The Caster of Shadows’. I retitled it ‘The Inevitable Singularity’ because it was a better thematic fit for the story, then I went through, made a bunch of revisions, adjusted some character dynamics, cut a subplot that just didn’t need to be in the book, and banged out the last five chapters or so of the novel.

It’s a good novel, and I’m happy with the way it turned out. In fact, I’m really proud of it. I think there are a lot of deep, interesting things said about free will verses determinism, about the primacy of the individual verse the primacy of the state, about the ethics of child soldiers, religious indoctrination, the ways love can become a toxic force in your life and how hanging on to an unhealthy relationship can be a form of self-harm, as well as how religious doctrine can poison family relationships. I also think the series that the novel will eventually be part of has a lot more to say on some very deep topics, and I am really looking forward to writing the rest of the books.

But there was something missing when I was writing it. It was a work that was conceived, and mostly created at a very different time in my life, when the things I wanted to examine in my writing were different. In the books I’ve been writing lately, Mail Order Bride, Scatter, The Master of Puppets, and Transistor, gender has been a theme. Scatter is more subtle about it than the others, though it is there if you look closely enough. Coming off of The Inevitable Singularity, I found myself very much wanting to step back into a universe where I could talk about gender and The Long Way Round just wasn’t that book.

Instead, I decided to jump into The Defective Paragons. I’m not go through the full elevator pitch, but the basic idea is that aliens came in and recruited a bunch of teams of teenagers to be superheroes. They ran around in costume, drove giant robots, and fought off invading alien pirates and bandits. Then, when the time came, the aliens who recruited the teenagers used them as an army to annex Earth. Except one team fought back. They lost, but the novel picks up ten years later when they get a second chance to fight back.

Now, you’re probably asking how this relates to gender, and that’s a fair question. The thing is, the team that fought back has been separated for a decade, and during that decade, the team leader transitioned from male to female, so when someone comes looking for the Team Leader, they spend the first chapter of the novel talking to said team leader without realizing who she is until the very end of the chapter. Through the course of the novel, this woman is going to have to meet up with four other people she used to be incredibly close with before.

I’m not going to lie. I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs the whole way through the first chapter, and those nerves haven’t gone away. But why am I nervous about writing this? This is literally a part of my life. This is something I’ve lived through, something I’ve experienced firsthand, more than once. That experience of meeting someone you knew before, or having to introduce yourself after… That’s my reality, but I still hesitate to write it, because of something that affects a lot of queer people, and trans people I think most of all.

Imposter syndrome. Queer people have our identities invalidated all the time. “Are you really gay?”, “Why don’t you pick a side already?”, “It’s just a phase.”, “The homosexual lifestyle.”, “Transgender Ideology.”, “Sex not gender”, “Adult human female.”, “Trans trender,”. It’s hard to keep track of all the ways people question our identity, and when you can’t go a single day without having your identity questioned, you start to doubt yourself.

I doubt myself every day. I was fourteen years old when I figured out I was transgender. All the signs were there before that, but I didn’t really have that ‘I want to be a girl’ moment until I was fourteen years old. Why did it take me so long? You hear about trans kids who seem to know from birth. Trans girls who want to wear dresses and play with dolls and scream and make a fuss about it from the time they are old enough to talk. If I’m really trans, why wasn’t I like that? Is my body dysmorphia really part of my gender dysphoria, or is my gender dysphoria a result of body dysmorphia caused by my weight issues and my eating disorder?

It is so, so easy to get lost inside your head, to doubt who you are, when the whole world is telling you that you’re wrong, that you don’t know yourself, that you can’t be who you claim to be. Some nights, I lay awake, lost in that place. Some nights, I lay awake feeling like a fake, a fraud, an imposter.

I know the truth. I do. I know that cis gendered men don’t dream about waking up as a woman. They don’t sit around daydreaming about how if they ever got three wishes, the first wish would be to be a woman. They don’t have elaborate fantasies about the life they would live if they were a woman. They don’t cry with joy and relief the first time they see themselves in a dress and makeup. I know I’m a trans woman. But doubt is a hell of a thing, and so is cis-heteronormativity.

I wrote a chapter, and I felt afraid. I felt like I was stealing someone else’s story, even though this was my own lived experience.

If you run into the same thing while you’re writing, I wish I could tell you that there’s a magic fix. That the imposter syndrome will eventually go away, and that you’ll get to the point where the voices don’t whisper fear and doubt into your ears, but I can’t. If there’s a magic fix, I haven’t found it yet. When I’m writing stuff that deals with being trans, I show it to other trans people, and I sit there, waiting for them to read it, afraid the whole time they’ll tell me I got it wrong.

Someday, I hope we live in a world where no one feels this way, but until then, all I can do is fight through the fear and the doubt, to tell myself that what I feel is real and valid, and to tell the stories I want to tell and hope that people will read them and know that they aren’t alone.

#writing #self promotion #original fiction #the grand ascendancy #the defective paragons #the war of souls #the master of puppets #the hearts of heroes #scatter #transistor #mail order bride #the paladins of the republic #the inevitable singularity #The Long Way Round

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a-fight-for-equal-rights-blog · 7 years

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Analyze The Issue Essay

A Stand Against Discrimination

There has always been a constant battle between what older generations think is morally correct and incorrect. Living in a world where we are constantly progressing in the technological world, but staying in the same constant battle with equal rights is a bit of a head scratch. One of the biggest problems thousands of humans face on a daily basis is being accepted. Once you add a more professional aspect to that mix, things get sticky. We have straight educators all around the world, and we too have gay and lesbian educators. Living in this constant ever-changing world, we still seem to have a problem with acceptance. Older and traditional generations may want to exploit these professionals by calling them perverts or sexual monsters, but why should any teacher be treated differently due to their sexual orientation. A teacher is a teacher, they are the educators of today’s society, and no one should have the right to rip that away from them. The typical traditional white man or woman, will, of course, be against gay rights. They will believe that having a gay or lesbian educator is completely mind blowing, and if they are the typical religious individual, they will say being gay is a sin too. There have been numerous encounters where gay men and women have been harassed, discriminated and even assaulted. Back in the 1980’s, this was normal, all over the world gays were being beaten and frowned upon. Here in the U.S being gay was a sin, and being a gay teacher was illegal. According to Angela Johnson, Gay and lesbian teachers have been legally harassed and fired. In 1967 in “Sarac v. State Board of Education” the U.S. Supreme Court “held that homosexuality was abhorrent and therefore clearly immoral; and that it certainly constituted evidence of unfitness to teach.” (pg.12) Why is it that we can’t even trust our own government. The government didn’t realize that it’s humans we are talking about. Actual citizens who shouldn’t be punished just because of the person they love. These men and women who hold such a close bond to tradition and morality need to gain more knowledge of the subject. Rather than being the typical close-minded, egotistical white man, actually realize that just like love doesn’t have an age, love too is blind when it comes to gender. Same-sex love isn’t any sin or immorality, it’s beautiful just like any other couple in love. By the government marking gay teachers as unfit to teach, only proves how cruel and unjust the government is, and in those days the government was run by rich white men. These white men need to gain some knowledge of why gay men and women can’t just choose to love the opposite sex. These gay men and women are born this way, you can say they are wired differently. Only if they took the time to read and to educate themselves, how would the world be today? Less discrimination, fewer assaults, fewer deaths, a world filled with more peace than hatred. The government putting themselves under a spotlight filled with hate in their hearts and carrying out this hate and turning it into a legal action, only creates more wars in our society, in our world. In the 1980’s it was believed that teaching young children was only a women’s job. White men and women didn’t want gay teachers to be teaching kids. Gay and lesbians were considered to be undesirable because it was assumed that they would influence or recruit their students. (pg.122) It was also believed that by having a lesbian or gay teacher, they were bound to influence the child’s sexuality one way or another. This theory was focused more on gay men because it was assumed that gay teachers will recruit young boys into a homosexual lifestyle. (pg.124) The ignorance these men had during that time was completely mind blowing. They believed that by having a gay teacher stand next to a child, that would automatically turn them into a homosexual. As if being gay was a disease or infection that spread with just one person being gay. As if their gayness radiated off their bodies and transmitted their “disease” into the brain and body of a child. How could these men possibly think that being gay had anything to do with a disease or a mental health problem. These gay and lesbian educators are nothing but helpful to the work force, to society. Not the other way around. Besides having caring and loving teachers who are exceptional human beings who are only looking to benefit the world in a positive way, they are also great educators who mold today’s children of society. These teachers are great caregivers who aren’t child molesters, or perverts, but rather teachers who change the lives of their students. According to Carla Rensenbrink, Rosemary Trowbridge a lesbian fifth-grade teacher has impacted the lives of her colleagues and of her students. Rensenbrink says, “Rosemary and I saw several ways that her lesbianism made a difference in her classroom. I've organized these into three sections. The first shows Rosemary's efforts to create a safe place in which her students can be "who they are." The second discusses her long-term interest in questioning the dominant culture and shows how she uses this critical stance to help her students raise questions and deal with the world. The third includes some of the ways Rosemary encourages her students to speak up and to speak for themselves.” Rensenbrink went on and said, “Rosemary makes some claims for what difference it makes that she is an out lesbian teacher: It creates safety," she says. It counters those "million little suicides" so that kids know "you can be who you are here." I saw evidence of this sense of safety in her classroom and also saw how Rosemary's questioning and activism empowered her students to think critically and to speak up. These are ways in which Rosemary's lesbianism affects her teaching.” Rosemary changed the lives of her students, she didn’t turn them gay or into monsters. She was honest with them from the start and that only proved her to be someone they can trust and count on. At the end of the day, that’s what every teacher who love and care for their students, want. Rosemary is a sign of hope, she has been the signal individual who has made a difference. She’s that beacon of hope that will shut up all those rich white men who think that being different, being gay is sinfully and morally wrong. Her story proves to all of us that her gayness isn’t a disease that is passed down, rather she proves that way of being, her heart has changed the minds and hearts of many. Of her students, of her colleagues, and even of her supervisors. Being gay isn’t a sin. It’s not morally wrong and it’s definitely not a disease. Being gay is normal, not abnormal. Gay teachers around the world are only positive influences to their students. They teach and preach the good, the right and the just. Those rich white men back in the 1980’s were wrong. Our world is a better place because of people like Rosemary, we should all strive to be more like that. Gay ain’t no sin, gay ain’t wrong, gay is power, gay is giving a voice to the voiceless and letting ourselves be heard.

Work Cited

King, James R. “The (Im)Possibility of Gay Teachers for Young Children.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 43, no. 2, 2004, pp. 122–127., www.jstor.org/stable/3701547. Rensenbrink, Carla Washburne. "What Difference does it make? the Story of a Lesbian Teacher." Harvard Educational Review 66.2 (1996): 257. ProQuest. Web. 27 Apr. 2017. Johnson, Angela. “Lesbians and Gays in the Schools: Teachers, Students and Courses of Study.” Off Our Backs, vol. 19, no. 6, 1989, pp. 12–17., www.jstor.org/stable/25796874.

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