Free Puppies and Ice Cream For Everyone!

As I was putting on my makeup to go out this evening, I was listening to the live stream of Chet Edwards' town hall meeting and I had a realization. Now, this may be something that others realized a while back but it just hit me today.

All the yelling and sign-waving really isn't about heath care/insurance.

The people who come to these town halls to yell and scream also gripe and complain just like the rest of us when their insurance rates go up or their hospital bill is higher than they thought it should be. It all boils down to the age old debate about how much power and involvement the government should have in the everyday lives of its citizens.

The people who yell and scream at these town halls would yell and scream about anything that meant the government would be more involved in their daily lives. If President Obama announced a plan tomorrow to help ease the suffering caused by the recession by giving everyone in America a free puppy and an ice cream cone, I guarantee that you would have people at town hall meetings yelling about how it should be their decision whether or not they get a dog and asking how private ice cream companies like Baskin-Robbins can hope to compete when the government is giving out free ice cream.

Again, not earth-shattering. Just something I realized for myself this evening.

George Washington and Sarah Vowell

I came across this quote by George Washington while reading Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates (p. 244):

"All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States...gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

This was Washington's response, addressed "to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island," to their question about whether the new United States government would uphold the freedom of religion they had enjoyed in Rhode Island.

I, personally, find his statement of moving beyond mere tolerance to be very progressive, even though we as a country haven't lived up to that.

On Hold...

Well, a new semester is almost here.

Things haven't gone exactly how I had planned. The summer was excellent. The students were great and seemed to very easily accept me for who I am. They seemed to have no problem accepting me as a man who wears women's clothing. Even the one student who got very upset about receiving a bad grade on an assignment never made any reference, to my face, about how I was dressed.

I was able to enjoy four wonderful weeks of dressing the way I want to everyday, and I am going to cherish the memory of that time. It showed me that I can do it, that I can be who I am and not have to constantly worry about what other people are going to think.

Now...family issues have led me to decide to put dressing full-time on hold. This is not a permanent decision, just a temporary one as I work through some issues. I want to preserve the positive memories of dressing full-time this summer and not have paranoia destroy the positive experience I had. But who knows. in six months I may say "Screw it! I can't take this anymore!" and start dressing full-time again. We'll see...

What does this mean for this blog?

Well, as you can see from the long period of time between the first post and this second post, I'm not the most frequent updater. I don't know if you can really call something with two entries a blog. But for now, I hope to continue this blog. Though I may not be dressing full-time, I'm still a transgender woman struggling her way through academia. Instead of being a record of my personal journey, it may begin to focus more on my research.

I don't know if I even have any readers yet or not (probably not) but I guess we'll see where this goes.