River in Egypt

“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”

I try to keep largely out of the more technical side of the gender wars anymore, mostly so that I’m not constantly handing my enemies (such as they are) a blade to stab me with or at least am generally giving it to them whilst holding on to the friendly end.

Unfortunately, ‘tis the season where all the young progressives and queers return to the family nest for their yearly marination in Fox News so that they can remember why they stay away for the rest of the year. More unfortunately, I’ve been living out as bi and genderqueer for the past few years and came out explicitly to my family as bi last year, so the marinade for this year is flavored heavily with Men Aren’t So Bad Really Tinker You Shouldn’t Be So Resentful Also Sexism Don’t Real and my views are being shoehorned into some kind of weird lesbian separatist man-hater stereotype.

(Yes, that would make me a lesbian separatist man-hater who is, in a nonexclusive sense, attracted to men and male zirself. No, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Yes, making sense is not actually a requirement for this sort of thing.)

So I find myself, yet again, with a frustrating problem that I didn’t ask for and accompanying thoughts on the subject.

The actual position I choose to have, in part because I think it is actually true, in part because I think it is true for me, and in part because I declare it to be so in the engineering sense that everything fits given a large enough hammer, is:

Most people are on board with women being treated fairly, although they may still harbor petty biases. A smaller population, although still of large enough size that one may expect to encounter them occasionally, are sexist in ways that produce minor problems in daily life or serious problems in an intimate relationship. A very small proportion of people, probably large enough that one is not likely to deal with them often in daily life without a means of amplification such as the Internet, have a pathologically bizarre perspective on the matter to the point where they must be avoided, intervened with, or treated as a danger to life and limb.

What I expect to encounter in daily life because of this, which is in line with what I actually encounter, is that I can generally expect to get good results out of life (as, presently, someone who is visibly female, gender-variant, and queer). I can get jobs that support my lifestyle, can make significant purchases (buying cars, houses, furniture, electronics, and firearms) without obstacles that prevent me from acquiring the item in question at a tolerable price, and can date people (if I choose to) who are attracted to me and treat me well. I can also expect to, on an occasional but not necessarily rare basis, encounter the odd hiccup where my gender becomes salient in a way that is not terribly desireable. Actual examples of this include:

At a reception I attended with my parents, I met a friend of theirs and made small talk with him. I was an undergraduate student at the time, and as is common he asked me what I was studying. The answer, which I gave, was that I was a fourth-year student in electrical engineering at an engineering school with a small yet ferocious reputation. His immediate response to this was “Oh. You know, it’s so sad these days that men aren’t supporting women so that they have to go out and work.” Not expecting that response or knowing how to respond to it, I proclaimed a lack of ranch dip and fled.

One of the reasons I left my second engineering job was that while the people I worked with were friendly, they (including two levels of my management) were preventing me from doing things that were part of my job, for reasons that appeared to be related to my gender. I weighed this along with other more general dysfunctions, concluded that I could do better, and left. Years later, my estimate that I could do better having delivered in spades, I cite this job as a lesson learned and as a reason to be thankful for my present situation.

As an experienced handgun shooter, I went to check out the handgun counter at the new Cabela’s in Thornton. As it turned out, they had several used Ruger Super Redhawks, a firearm that I’ve had a specific interest in for quite some time. Hence, after waiting quite a while, I asked the clerk “Could I please see that Super Redhawk there on the bottom shelf?” to which he chuckled and responded “Isn’t that a little big for you?” He then proceeded to double down on the statement after I disagreed with him and mentioned that I’d had prior experience with such things. It was not, in fact, too large. But any purchases of it that I make in future will not be from there.

One of my go-to anecdotes about them thar city slickers who think dumb things about animals is an interaction from a forum where one of the resident bigots tried to assert that a woman working for a living was like a bear eating cake — meaning something that was entirely against the natural impulses of the animal. Of course, as-we-know-Bob, the natural impulses of bears are notoriously compatible with — indeed, aggressively in favor of — them seeking out and consuming human food inclusive of cake.

So here’s the thing. None of these incidents is a particularly big deal. I’ve run into folks who say clangers. I drew a slightly unlucky straw in one of my jobs and subsequently moved on to frolic in greener pastures. Every once in awhile I run into an example of a mode of behavior that the firearm community is very aware of and generally working to eliminate, but they’re not quite there yet. I have an amusing story about ignorance regarding bears, with incidental involvement also of ignorance regarding women.

But mentioning these not-a-big-deal things has a way, at times, of eliciting a not-not-a-big-deal response:

“Oh, but he’s such a nice man. And he had personal problems at that time.”

(Which doesn’t make the words any less said.)

“Remember that nice boy at your first job who followed you around everywhere and mooned silently at you? And you… (sigh)… you just weren’t interested in him…”

“Well, we had nothing in common and I found him completely unattractive. Also I was dating someone else at the time. I don’t think there was much hope there.”

“Well… (mope)… I guess so…”

(If my own list of Loves Regretfully Lost included such as this, I’d wonder where my life had gone wrong.)

“Why would you think I don’t like pinup pictures of women?”

“Oh well, remember Second Job?” A hand is waved dismissively. In tones suggesting arbitrary silliness,“Didn’t you just decide you didn’t like them because they had some pin-ups on the walls or something?”

(That was actually the one thing they didn’t do while I was there, as the infant HR department — one person, not long out of school, who was head of all human resources and the safety program for a small manufacturing shop — had apparently intervened previously. In a humorless buzzkilling way, not-like-you-Tinker-you’re-a-good-sport, or so I was told.)

“Well, who’s to say they weren’t right? Maybe you can’t actually drive a pickup truck.”

(Effectively, I learned to drive in one, so it’d be a great surprise.)

“But maybe he had the perfect gun for you.”

“How could he possibly, having only just laid eyes on me that second and knowing nothing about me, know better than I what I want from having been shooting for ten years?”

“Don’t be so quick to judge.”

(He could tell because I was wearing a shirt with guns on it, also because I asked for one by name, that I like guns. And he has guns! So he must know what I want!)

“Oh, honey, did you ever think that maybe he was just kidding?”

(If so, there’s a certain point where ELIZA effectively becomes a real psychologist.)

So, after this long relating of events, perhaps you too are burning to tell me that something I saw with my own eyes did not happen or reach for anything, no matter how implausible, to make it not mean what it obviously was meant to mean, or to completely invent a series of events to substitute for a story I’ve been telling for years, because it’s absolutely imperative for you to convince me that sexism is not a thing and anyway it’s not important anyway and can’t you just meet a nice man?

(Not in the mirror, I think is meant.)

Here’s the deal, though. If sexism is generally not the end of the world, as a whole, it’s not a problem that what happened happened. I can tell a story about a party foul, or a kind of shitty boss, or a clerk with a big mouth, or someone who should never (or should immediately, depending on one’s perspective) go to Glacier National Park, and I don’t have to make sure to scrub those tales for gender-related references because those people can just be jerks that I promptly disposed of in the appropriate receptacle. And that’s what I believe, and that’s why I don’t have any reason to stuff those events in the memory hole.

(I am aware that there are events which prove that what I declare shall be so is not yet fully implemented in the real world. In domains over which I am Overlord, such test failures are corrected with copious clubbings.)

What denial tells me, though, is that you don’t think that way — that events like that, petty things, are a threat to your worldview or a potential threat to me. You’re telling me that you think things are much worse than I think they are — that I’d better not pass up the advances of any man, for instance, because I could need him later, or that I’d better not say anything about bias that I’ve experienced because it’s so pervasive that being known as being against it could go badly for me, that toeing the line gender-norms-wise is essential for success in a variety of areas that have nothing to do with said norms, and overall that the Party is doubleplusgood and saying otherwise in even the smallest way just isn’t safe.

Any more of this sort of convincing, and I’m apt to conclude that the logical next step would be to take to th’ hills and prepare to repel Russkies. However, since I have already empirically found that a diet made up solely of MREs does not sit well with my digestion, I’m inclined not to come to that conclusion lightly — and I’d appreciate it, for the sake of my innards, if folks would quit trying to lead me there.