I literally raised my hand and put my palm out towards his face and said "I seriously cannot do this," and I walked away while asking my wife to take over. She kindly went and found the repairman while I went and had a cigarette. I thought I was pretty clear on the whole male privilege thing. I mean I have been dressing as me for about the last fifteen to twenty years. I have experienced people. I have experienced males behaving as males may tend to do. I thought I knew what it felt like for someone to exert their privilege. I was wrong.
As you may know, I am a teacher. Currently I am on winter break. That does not mean tons of fun filled exciting vacay days! Nope. It is filled with trying to get everything done that I have been avoiding for the past 5 months. Yesterday we had two different home repair guys come and do some work for us around here.
The first was a Culligan water guy. We have super bad well water pumped into our houses around where I live. The result has been that our water company wants Culligan to install in home water filtration systems. Sounds great, except for that we get to pay extra for that. And most of us don't want it. Heck, I already get Culligan delivered. Anywho, I had to have it done.
What I didn't need to have is the Culligan dude explain to me that he was going to drill a new hole in my sink because that is the way he has done it for twenty years. When I asked why he couldn't just use one of the four holes already in the sink. it was explained to me that it would be harder, and he may damage our faucet and he didn't want to accept that responsibility. However, it seriously took me about four or five times of asking him repeatedly about it before he said that stuff. Prior to that, it was, this is the way he was going to it, because he said so. Wow, seriously?
That project got finished up and in the afternoon the heater repair guy arrived. I explained our problem. The heater kicks on in the middle of the night, the fan starts blowing, but the burner never lights and thus all we get is frozen in the middle of the night. I explained how we can turn it off, then on again, and it works for a little bit until it fails again. The dude was going to go look at the heating unit but then asked to see my thermostat. Upon viewing my thermostat, he explained to me that the temperature was set too low for the unit to come on and that my solution was that I simply needed to adjust my thermostat.
I'll admit I began my eye-rolling around this time. I explained that was the case because it was the middle of the day, and not freezing cold as it is at night. That my thermostat was set properly, but the heating unit was not functioning properly, for a reason other than the setting on the thermostat. The guy futzed with the thermostat some more, and then called me over to him. He then began very slowly explaining to me how a thermostat works.
Which is exactly when I shoved my palm out towards his face, told him I seriously could not do this, and walked away. Fortunately my wife took over. She soothed his fragile male ego, and listened to him patiently explain how to set the thermostat. He then reprogrammed my thermostat, that I installed, and that I programmed to turn on with my preferred settings. Eventually my wife got him to go on the roof and at least look at the unit.
I thanked my wife up and down and asked "how in the hell have you dealt with this bullshit your entire fucking life?" To which she laughed. We then had a good conversation about the realities of trying to live while being female.
Meanwhile the repair guy went on the roof, looked at the unit, did nothing, came down, and told us it was fixed and it would be $65. It was really a good thing my wife handled it, because I don't think I could have handled paying him anything. I was certainty not interested in paying him for treating us like we were stupid. The guy seriously did nothing except for basically tell my wife and I that we are too stupid to know how the thermostat in our house works.
This is a weird occurrence for me. On the one hand it is terribly insulting. On the other hand it is flattering. Why the positive? Well it is a reality of my life, I want people to gender me properly, as a woman. If I am being discriminated against because they perceive me as female, well that is at least a win for being properly gendered! Yay! But, really, no, not yay, actually boo! Boo? Well not for the gendering part, but for the realities faced by millions of women, ever fucking day!
Can I tell you a story? Why yes, I can! I was visiting my hormone providing doctor. She told of a story of a transwoman at a party. A guy came up to her from behind while she was bending over. The guy swiped his hand down between her legs and up between her butt. The transwoman was shocked, but that was not the point of the story, my doctors point was how unfazed she was at hearing the story. Her response was one of "yup, that's life as a woman." Wow! Seriously?
I mentioned to my therapist how pissed this all makes me, especially when I hear some cisgender people talk about how transitioning is such a choice. Yeah, well I'm curious, why would anyone think that someone would be interested in choosing this.
I thought I knew about privilege. I thought that when I was presenting male that I did not take advantage of that privilege. However, I now realize how foolish that was of me to think. Privilege is generally not something that someone takes, it is something that someone gives. As in, there was nothing I could say to get that heater repair guy to listen to me and take me seriously, he had to want to do that. And what he saw was a dumb blond girl who couldn't possibly know anything about how a complex thing such as a thermostat worked, and thus he had no interest in what I was saying. That's privilege there pal.
So yeah. I've got lots left to learn. And as a society we have a lot of growth to do still.
Love you!
Love yourselves!
Love and respect life, for it is precious.
November 5th, 2010 - I began this blog. When I started out, I did what many bloggers do, I headed to Blogger.com. It is a nice friendly platform "back end" for blogging. I never really saw much of a need to change things up. It worked and that is all that mattered.
