Finding Belonging

Many years ago, I read the following and for a while it was my motto:

"If you always do what you've always done, 
         you will always be who you've always been."


If you hold an idea in your heart, like magic, other ideas that give greater understanding find you, or as mom used to say, "Be careful what you wish for dear".

Ending my post one week ago, I felt tremendous frustration because Ami Kaplan is right. Nobody should be putting up with a second class life, and just as barriers are breaking down and other societal 'norms' are being challenged and are disappearing, limitations faced by transsexuals are artificial and wrong. Yet how can we expect these changes to happen if we always do what we have always done?


A few days go by and somehow I find myself doing something that should have happened years ago, subscribing to Helen Boyd's blog en|Gender. Yesterday part of the answer to the question arrived on her blog.
Allyson Robinson's TEDx talk at Columbia University is titled "You Can Be Anything You Want To Be", yet it is so much more than inspiration. It is a window into how deeply engrained the WE/THEY dichotomy is. It is a call for everyone to understand that changing how we reward those who conform with inclusion, and exclude those who are 'other' is not just a moral problem, it is ultimately damaging to the future of our species.

When years ago in a time of crisis, I told my teenaged daughter that she could "reinvent herself any time she wants to" it was not an empty promise, but words of hope for her to find a way out of a bind she had created by trying to live up to the expectations of others. I never thought of ever taking advantage of the same advise.

Silly me.