What women give up to just be

Musings on social justice and equality

My fifteen-year old niece mused dreamily over dinner about her future, her fervent wish to be married, her hunger for a future husband’s name.  I couldn’t help myself.  I thought, but also kept my mouth shut.  How tragic it seemed.  That this girl, this young woman, had already given up on herself.  What kind of society makes self-infantilisation stuff of dreams?

Okay, you can be sceptical for good reasons and bad.  Who is yours truly to opine?  After all, I am a baby.  Even still, after all these years.  I am also just a trans woman…I don’t have a life of pure discrimination and headwinds lived as so many cis women do…okay, I have my own shit to deal with. 

But the patriarchy hurts all of us.  It is a deeply dysfunctional system.  How could my niece, already at the age of 15, want to define herself by the man she marries?  How unhealthy is that?

I remember sitting on a beautiful balmy summer evening on the back dock of a fabulous restaurant on Long Island.  One of those dreamy, limpid nights.  There were four of us—our children were with our British nanny who in a few short weeks had become more plugged into the glam of Hamptons nightlife than we were after a lifetime of being there.  My wife.  Me.  A young couple who had started a business making perfect cakes…they were both gorgeous, are.  He was a graduate of the same graduate program as me, something we discovered as we were just getting to know each other, and which added wind to the sails of our getting to know these strangers.

She, like me, had grown up summering in this little pocket of a place.  Only we never met.  Age difference matters a lot when you’re small.  Although they were both gorgeous, they were also super smart, which just makes people hotter than beyond belief.  But over dinner that evening, the tale she recounted made my heart bleed.  And I wondered how often this happens to women.  Is it all women?

If you know your Ivy League schools, you will know where she went when I say that her undergrad degree was from the top economics and maths programme in the US, possibly the world.  Off the charts bright.  So much so, that she was offered a place in the most prestigious economics program in the world.  All paid.  Not something you turn down.

Only she got pregnant.  She decided, they decided, to keep the baby.  And that meant that even coming from a privileged background, “settling down”, getting stable income, stable life, became the “responsible thing to do”. The injustice of this, not just in her case, makes my stomach turn.

Her husband was a male version of gorgeous that rivalled hers.  And he was smart too.  After all, he went to the same grad school as me, which I most humbly posit is one of the top three in its field in the world. Prestige.  But over this meal, I couldn’t help but think he wasn’t in her league.

The man-child is just another narcissist.  At the time we met, he wasn’t employed either.  She had started this baking business, and looked like a fantasy with her perfect apron, perfect looks, and perfect cakes.  He served coffee at times when she was too busy to be there, looking after their child, or being there at the crack of dawn to bake because later in the day it just got too hot for the AC in their small industrial kitchen to work.  In other words, she worked, brought home the bacon, raised their child, and sacrificed her dream.  Later I learned just how far this went…

He was involved in some beautiful and worthy causes, including community gardening.  But he also went fishing with his buddies and didn’t seem to be as obsessive about carrying life’s load.

It was a darling business and they were a darling couple from the outside.  But I later learned that to open the bakery and a subsequent restaurant business, they had to borrow money from a local bigshot.  The money came with strings attached.

She had to have sex with him.  Hubby was also roped into providing blowjobs.  The shark who lent them money was the godfather of the local swinging scene.  These two were hot tickets.  I just can’t help but think how far they were away from the dreams she must have had as a young girl growing up, going to an elite private school, and graduating Summa Cum Laude in Maths and Economics.  Not only was her brain destined to opine on some of the greatest problems afflicting modern society, but her social conscience would have made an enormous impact.

They escaped that situation, and I have remained loosely in touch with her, but not with him so much.  They had to leave and will likely never return.  I had tried to encourage her to restart her studies, but there is a feeling that life slips away.  Wouldn’t society be better off if women in particular, but all of the people who carry the can for everyone else, had the freedom to reach their full potential?

These are two small examples.  Really small.  And yet, in their lives, what else is there?  And how many women does this happen to?  Your mother?  My mother.  Absolutely.  Mothers everywhere.

In Gabor Maté’s book on ADD, Scattered Minds, he makes an incredibly powerful argument that the single most important role that exists for adults in the creation of a healthy society, is the parenting of children.  But we don’t treat it as the aspiration that it should be.  It becomes a cross to bear.

There has been a shitstorm around that idiot football player who made a stupid speech at a graduation ceremony…it was an important speech in that it is helpful to be reminded how much we still have to overcome for justice and equality…even more, because the patriarchy is a broken system which does not get anything close to true value out of its inputs—we are all sub-optimised.  There is a cogent economic thesis for this.  The Brookings Institute in a recent opinion piece opined that raising the labour participation of women to the level of men would have a positive 5 point increase in GDP!  That would put the US on a higher growth rate than the one that China has been on for the past thirty years.

And just to take this one step further.  That idiot football player who thanked his wife, she who buried herself in him, so that he pursue his dream “to kick the ball really far” was the ultimate man-child.  Throw him to the jackals.  The incel narrative is just so yesterday.

When I say I’m a baby, I don’t mean it when I say he is a baby.  He is a hopeless, selfish, narcissistic, child in the sense that any sensible woman avoids when she says, “I don’t want to be a mother to my husband.”  And she shouldn’t.  It is a thankless task, even when he calls it “her highest calling” invoking some biological imperative that requires her to give up her dreams to become the slave of a patriarchal “ideal” that sees women in the home, surrendering any hope of personal autonomy and self-empowerment to a man and their brood.

When I say I am a baby, it is aspirational.  What?!  Yes.  I aspire to experience love as unconditional.  Without thought.  Without noise.  With just an intense, soul-slaking slurping up of a partner, without rational thought or personal interest, just the comfort and knowledge of ‘needing’ love, this kind of love, on a profound level.  Not lust, just free-flowing love.  Who cares if it takes sub-space to get there?  Or Little Space?  Might as well be the same for me.  When I come out of it, I am energized beyond belief, filled with gratitude towards the person who navigated me there and back, and eager to support and give to that person.  When I comment that I am more a man now than I ever was as a man, I refer to this time between sub-space, when I am a solid, unstinting, generous friend, daddy, father, lover, and human.  I grew up a long time ago…did the work, still do the work.  Not bad for a baby, eh?

How many older women do you know, can you see on the streets, mothers, who have a permanent frown on their faces?  Sadness etched into the lines around their eyes, in the hard set of their mouths.  I had two mothers.  Both married to my mother, at separate times.  

My own mother went to Smith, which at the time was possibly the best education available to a woman in the US.  She married an Ivy League grad, my father, a man who turned out to be a narcissistic pig, an abuser, a selfish man.  Somehow, I still love him.  That’s fucked up.  I just don’t process him as anything other than he is.  I keep him out of my heart, so his toxicity stains as little as possible.  But he wrecked two women’s lives from the standpoint of what this post is about.  Yes, they lived glamourous and international lives.  But it was his life.  She was just so much décor.

Thank goodness my mother escaped, and thank goodness for my stepmother, who had herself crushed by him in little and big ways every damn day so that all of us children could grow up happy and well.  And the perverse thing?  Co-dependency.  Is this what a narcissist wants?  It is a bit like Stockholm syndrome—that we come to love our abusers…in many cases not even knowing abuse for what it really is.

And who can blame the victim for this when all of society is rigged to give men women’s power?

Yes, as a trans woman, part of me is jealous of a cis woman who is straight.  It seems so normal and comfortable.  And the allure of being taken care of is seductive.

As a male child, I railed against this in so many ways.  I railed against women who not only accepted this but embraced it.  I railed against men who perpetuated it.  

What did I do?  I gave everything to my wife.  I signed over all of our property to her when we bought it with money that I made.  My money was ours.  She stopped working before we had our first child…I married her, however, because she was a high-flyer.  I thought she would never lose her thirst for continuing in this way. But she didn’t.  

She settled into not working.  I won’t say that she settled into motherhood or looking after our kids because I stayed at home, mostly working from home, did most of our cooking, and we had two nannies when the children were small.  Live in.  And later, we had live-in tutors for them so that they would do better in school.  We ate all our meals together, and every day, without fail, I cooked lunch and dinner for them.  In the morning, I ran them to school.  She put out cereal and sat with them over breakfast.  I never did.  I don’t eat breakfast and was usually in the shower or already doing something.

My goal in my marriage was to have a wife that was fully in her power, fully engaged.  When she was not going back to work, I began to worry.  She said, “I have to look after the kids.”  That was more about her than actual time or effort spent.  She needed that for her sense of self.  We sent our kids to boarding school, and once they left home, there was no reason for her to not do something, to work, to pursue something, a passion, knowledge, a project, a cause.  “Doing” for her was posting on Instagram about how glamourous her life was.  It was certainly more glamourous than mine, as she would take vacations, go on trips, with or without the kids depending, while I often stayed home to work.  She’s still active on Instagram, but it isn’t like this is invisible to me even though she has “unfriended” me, my friends, my family.  It is a sieve anyway.

I asked her if she wanted to go back to school.  Whether she wanted to do a course, learn something, develop a hobby.  Her answer I felt was pathetic.  I hated it.  She said, “I get my excitement in life through you.”

“But you can’t.  You can’t ask me to be the source of your happiness.  That has to come from you.  You can’t put that on me.”

She later told me that it was the cruellest thing anyone had ever said to her.  Truth is, we were ill matched.  Had I known this about her, I would have never married her, but then I wouldn’t have my most precious cargo, my children.  So we take the good with the bad.  I would have never left her.  We’d still be together, me dying inside a little more every day.

This is a big part of why I am so unbelievably happy now.  Okay, coming out as trans is even better, but there is a lot of joy that it lands with.

This issue of dreaming and seeing them fulfilled, fulfillable, has become personal.  As an male, I know first-hand what I could take for granted.  Poor baby has lost privilege.  I am glad to experience it, because it takes me out of the armchair and puts me in the trenches.  I have lost two real jobs because of being trans.  I don’t accept that this is anything other than discomfort of people that I consciously gave up manhood for womanhood.  And it makes me want to fight.

All of this is part of why I love to be around Sex Workers. I find that this career choice is so utterly and ultimately empowering. The small number that I know chose the profession because they wanted to. Some of them chose it to pay for their higher education. But every one of them has chosen for their personal empowerment. Whether that is to process shame in their upbringing, to process sexual trauma, to harness male desire in a raw way and to monetise her personal power–all of these serve that one purpose, which is to give her choice, to allow her to fulfil her dreams. Whatever they are. And that is far sexier than any persona they create. A woman who is in her own power is the most beautiful thing that walks this earth.

Can we have hope for the future?  There are a very small number of issues which the future of civilisation currently hinges on.  Our progress does not bode well.  Perhaps this will presage a revolution, but revolutions typically never build what the set out to do, co-opted as they are by the forces of stasis, hegemony, hidden power structures.

What are those issues?  The disparity between rich and poor.  Our failure to shift from an extractive society to one that is primarily focussed on “the commons” (reflected in everything to the literal consumption of resources to the toxicity of modern political discourse).  Human’s apparent need to “other”, which lies at the core of this post.  And on this last, I am most optimistic, for women are more than half the world.  And women are waking up.

A gynarchy or a matriarchy is a step too far…there should be a role for men…but this current state of fairs is ridiculous.  If for nothing else, every woman needs to her honour her dreams, needs to be uncompromising in her pursuit of her potential…and any man that is unsupportive, stands in her way, or through chauvinistic narcissism seeks to take advantage of her fundamental generosity of spirit and higher tolerance should be relegated to the wilderness.  

Women’s freedom to dream and to see those dreams come to life is essential for human civilisation.  My role in life is to educate on this topic, to be with men and women, as many as possible, in the short time I have, to effect this change, to bring it about.