Water flows uphill, you know?
It does.
You just have to make sure there's enough water.
You fill the glass from the bottom up to make sure you have enough water.
Trickle down doesn't work. The water gets stuck at the top.
But you know what IS true? A rising tide lifts all boats. The problem with tides, though is that they go in and out, and some of us are going to be left out at sea when that tide goes out unless we can throw a rope to the people on shore and trust them to tie us off securely.
Look around at who is hurting most. Help them. Demand that the people who can help them do.
Yeah, it's political. It's political metaphors...
I've been frustrated for years. My whole life, really, but when I was younger, it wasn't so much a daily frustration. I figured I'd get older and have the power to do more about it. Now I'm right in that age range where I have about as much power as I will to do something about it, and it's frickin' hard to even know what to do.
Aside from the things that I DO know to do. Chat with neighbors, brainstorm ways to help here and now. Offer help when I can. Volunteer at my kid's school. Talk to fellow workers about how we can make things better at our job(s).
I...
This might seem like a tangent, but it was the impetus for thinking about talking about politically-charged stuff in a blog post.
I saw a video and read the comment section.
The video was an interview with a mother and her daughter. It was clear throughout the video that the girl was happy, that the mother was supportive, kind, and a good parent. The comments were filled with vitriol about how the mother wanted something and was manipulating her daughter and forcing her to be something she wasn't. I didn't see that at all, and while I know a short video isn't going to show me everything I need to see to be able to make the call one way or another, none of the commenters had any more context than I did, and they'd come to this conclusion. Some shared anecdotes that they thought were relevant, but that, from the information they gave anyway seemed entirely irrelevant to the circumstances. It made me want to share my anecdote, which is also not relevant to the circumstances in the video, but which IS relevant to the anecdotes those people were sharing, and demonstrates that what they think happens is wrong - they're wrong-headed to assume parents parenting the way I parent and the way this parent seemed to parent (though, again it was just like a 10 minute video) are not causing what happened to happen.
So here's my anecdote. Well, first here's a summary of the anecdote that many shared, and that my mother has shared with me, too.
At some point in their childhood, all of these people experimented with the idea that they weren't the gender they were assigned at birth. Some said it was because their parents had always wanted a girl or a boy, so they wanted that, too. My mother said she saw how much better it was to be a boy, and so she wanted that, too. And they concluded, because of this experience from their childhood, that if their parents had parented like I do, that they would have transitioned, and that they would have been wrong and been harmed.
Their claim is that this girl dresses in "girl clothes", changed her name, and thinks of herself as a girl because her mother "always wanted a girl". They have no evidence of that, but they assume the video is full of the mom lying and that the happy child doesn't know that she's actually unhappy.
Well here's my anecdote. Nothing about my parenting style is particularly about gender. The thing that's relevant about my parenting style is that I respect my kid. The other thing that's relevant is that I think gender isn't a big deal. I mean, obviously, politically it's been made into a big deal, but I don't think there's anything innate about gender that's a big deal.
Okay now here's my anecdote. When our kid was 4, he told us he wanted to use they/them pronouns, that he was both a boy and a girl. We said ok. We told his teachers. Everyone was cool about it. He had long hair. Sometimes he wore pink. The teachers commented to us that they were surprised how supportive the other kids were. Side note: we weren't surprised. All that gender-normative vitriol is something taught, not inherent, so if they weren't learning to be jerks about gender, then they weren't going to be jerks about it. About a year later, our kid told us he was a boy. We said ok. No big deal.
The point is, saying "ok" to kids experimenting with gender isn't going to force them into being something they're not. They'll let you know if and when they figure it out for themselves. If you think, if someone had shown you that it was no big deal to be a different gender, then you would have become that gender then either:
yes, and I'm sorry, and it's not too late to transition
or
no, you wouldn't have, that's not how it works
I wish people would respect and trust kids.