LADIES! It’s up you YOU to end rape!

This week I was linked to and subsequently extremely angered by the @EndingRape twitter account, which in the past week or two has focused on “ending rape” mainly by giving women the sort of “NEVER WALK AT NIGHT! ALWAYS WATCH YOUR DRINK! DON’T WEAR HEADPHONES WHILE JOGGING!” fear-heightening tips that I’ve complained about here before. Scrolling back some more turns up a few comments that I do agree with (mostly retweets, not original content), but those “helpful tips” put a pretty terrible taste in my mouth.

The website affiliated with the twitter account has an enlightening profile of author/speaker Richard Hart, who’s styling himself as a lone manly voice of information on rape prevention. It really creeps me the fuck out that his bio paints a picture of a brave man standing up to fight the Good Fight against rape by framing anti-rape work as something you do to protect your daughters and/or save your educational institution a bunch of money in lost fees, not so much because rape is fucking terrible and people (not just women!) deserve better.

Whose job is it, by the way to prevent rape? Judging by the titles of his books (Keep Your Daughter Safe: 171 Ways Young Women can Prevent Sexual Assault, Keep Your College Daughter Safe: 161 Ways College Women can Prevent Sexual Assault, and Preventing Sexual Assault: 171 Ways Women can Prevent Sexual Assault), the answer is clear: WOMEN.* Better start memorizing, ladies, until you know all 171 Ways by heart! But don’t fret – if your pretty little brains are burned out from all that book-learnin’ in college, you can ignore ten of those tips and you’ll be just fine.

How lovely, that the “expert” way to deal with rape is to load women down with a list of rules to abide by to keep scary, shadowy Bad Guys from raping them. If he had an equivalent program of talking to men about how to respect women’s bodies, not coerce partners into sexual activity, honor people’s boundaries and limits, and stand up to other guys pushing boundaries or making rape “jokes,” that would be one thing – the lists would still be terrible, but at least I would have a sense that Hart is aware of the reality of most rape and sexual assault situations. But of course he is completely silent on that side of things, and the end result is that he’s giving women this huge burden of responsibility to abide by a restrictive code of conduct and live in a constant state of high alert in order to prevent something that other people consciously choose to do.

The statistics quoted on this website do mention that most rapists are people known to their victim, but that fact isn’t reflected in the tips (at least the ones posted on the twitter account or in excerpts on the website); they are very focused on stranger-in-the-bushes rape, and not acquaintance or date rape at all. So ultimately, even if things like “KEEP THE BUSHES TRIMMED OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE! NEVER USE INTERIOR STAIRWELLS!” could somehow eliminate 100% of stranger rape, they’d still be pretty unhelpful in the grand scheme of things.

On a final note: I think it’s a pretty clear sign that you’re missing the point on rape when rape crisis centers tell you to step back.

*Note that in Hart’s world, apparently, all rapists are men and all rape survivors are women.

Pissing off the Right People

A really exciting thing in my life right now is the volunteer work I’ve been doing for Scarleteen since early this year. I actually have a longer post in the works about ST, and how volunteering has been an incredibly positive experience for me, but yesterday something happened that’s worth mentioning in its own post.

I wrote an advice column that went up on the site yesterday morning. It describes a sad situation, to be sure, and anecdotal evidence from friends and acquaintances tells me it’s not an uncommon one, but despite the unhappy subject matter I was really excited to have written it (this was my first advice column for the site) and am happy with how it turned out.

When I came on shift at Scarleteen that afternoon, I found out about the following tweets, both from one person:

#radfem2013 bc this is anti lesbian and anti woman [link to my article]

#radfem2013 bc this passes for sex ed for teens [link to my article]

Honestly, my first response to this is just to laugh. I’m really not sure how “your girlfriend is entitled to her feelings but not to be rude to you; you are probably going to find that you’re not compatible any more, sorry” can be interpreted as an “anti-lesbian/woman” stance. Not that I’m saying anything I write is above reproach; criticism stings, sure, but I’m still open to it, assuming it’s coming from someone at least halfway reasonable.

My assumption here, though, was that this person is the flavor of “radical feminist” who is hateful towards any trans person; I was right! The #radfem2013 hashtag references this conference, which is pretty viciously anti-trans although it’s more apparent on its twitter feed than on the official website. A little digging turned up @NyctoDea’s terrible tumblr (seriously, if the name alone doesn’t clue you in, the fact that the sidebar makes a nasty “men in dresses” comment should do the trick) that follows a familiar trans-hating radfem pattern. I’m not concerned about upsetting or offending this person. I don’t mind it at all. I laughed about it a bit on twitter that afternoon, and I still think it’s something to laugh about.

But really, once that initial evil stab of joy at irritating a terrible person wears off, I have to keep making a joke out of this because otherwise I will explode with rage, you know? It’s really really not worth it for me to try to engage with her (which is why I’ve linked her tweets directly here but haven’t replied directly on twitter), because I know she won’t care. And I can’t make her.

So my response remains: if I’m pissing off radfems with what I write, I’m probably doing something right.

Bathroom Challenge, Part III

Another year, another misguided bill introduced to keep trans folks from accessing bathrooms. What is it with these people? 

I just sent an email inviting lawmaker Rep. John Kavanagh to take the AB Bathroom Challenge! I’m not expecting a response, but if I receive one I’ll definitely post it.

A nice touch here is that Kavanagh is suggesting that the documents in question should be not state-issued IDs but birth certificates. Now, of course requiring any form of ID for restroom access is offensive, disgusting, and just plain WRONG, full stop. But in most states, it’s much easier to change the sex listed on your driver’s license than on a birth certificate. For example, in Ohio, where I was born, there is no way I can change the sex listed on my birth certificate, and most other US states require genital surgery before they will make that change.

So it turns out that, in many cases, the only people who can have their birth certificate changed or amended will be those who want genital surgery of a specific type in the first place and are either extremely financially privileged or good at fund-raising. Look! Here we are, back again at the idea that the only proper trans people are the ones who have done EVERYTHING in their power to bring themselves in line with cissexist standards of what proper bodies look like. What a surprise.

Some fun Kavanagh quotes from these two articles:

“The city of Phoenix has crafted a bill that allows people to define their sex by what they think in their head. If you’re a male, you don’t go into a female shower or locker room, or vice versa. It also raises the specter of people who want to go into those opposite sex facilities not because they’re transgender, but because they’re weird.”

“[The bill is] designed to protect young children from being exposed to the other gender in their fullness in inappropriate situations. I’m just restoring sanity, because the Phoenix bill turned gender upside down.”

(I know that “defin[ing] sex by what they think in their head” and “turn[ing] gender upside down” are meant to be scary here, but my reaction is “oh hey, rock on!”)

A few minutes of research this morning turned up a few instances of women being assaulted by men in restrooms, but you’d think if any of those men were “men in dresses,” that detail would be included in HUGE BOLD PRINT in the story. So far I’ve heard of exactly one case of someone doing this (anecdotally from a friend), and even if there are a few more that have happened, I would guess the numbers are statistically insignificant in comparison with cis men just dressed as men assaulting people in bathrooms. And, unsurprisingly, such assaults are already against the law. It isn’t like there’s a huge loophole here that perpetrators can saunter through.

Also, I know I addressed this in the original Bathroom Challenge post, but… in what universe does anyone in a public restroom wander around with their genitals exposed? Women’s restrooms don’t generally have urinals or open stalls, and ANY woman exposing herself outside of a stall would raise eyebrows. Where does he think this exposure to trans folks’ “fullness” is going to happen?

Yes, locker rooms are a different story in that it’s more likely for people to be partially- to entirely-nude in them, but I really doubt that trans people (and let’s face it, this is again something that’s targeted primarily at trans women) in locker rooms are in a rush to be naked in a way that might make them feel unsafe. In all honesty, I figure the people who worry about Bathroom Attacks probably also subscribe to the idea that Deviant Homosexuals are everywhere, lying in wait to attack innocent children, and would object to the idea of naked men being around little boys in locker rooms as well. So where’s the outrage over that? (Maybe there are indeed people out there campaigning for nudity-free locker rooms, who knows.)

Of course, this attitude isn’t limited to the US: discussion over a recent trans rights bill that passed in Canada’s House of Commons contains the same tired pedophiles-lurking-in-bathrooms argument.  

It’s a horrible fact, but worth saying: anyone who is a sexual predator isn’t going to care about the law. If they want to go in a bathroom to attack someone, they’ll do it. An attempt to keep trans people out of bathrooms is just going to mean more urinary tract infections.

This is what happens to women on the internet

Yesterday I was enjoying some delicious brunch when I overheard one of the women sharing our table tell her friends about her experience at a bar the previous night. She was playing pool with a friend and one of the guys they were playing against kept telling her about how he had “Asian fever” and had dated more Asian women than white women, apparently as a way to flirt with her – because of course women love nothing more than to be singled out as potential dates due to their race.

From what I heard of the conversation, I don’t think much else happened beyond that guy making a fool of himself, but it made me think of this cringe-inducing post from the Creepy White Guys blog and the way that a lot of entitled, creepy men like to pay attention to women but will turn on them and show their true asshole colors very quickly if they don’t get the response they want.

Sometimes when I hear stories like this I think “how gross, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with that when I was a woman” but hey guess what: I did! I’m just good at temporarily forgetting about those incidents, because who wants to remember traumatic events?

In the fall of 2002 I shaved my head; I’d gone from long hair to fairly short (for me at least) hair that summer and when my grandfather died in early September I knew I was going to shave it when I got back from the funeral. This was back in the days of Livejournal and I joined a community specifically for women with very short or no hair to get pointers and see other people’s pictures. My roommate helped me and I took four pictures with my webcam to document the process from my original hair to the end result. The pictures were on my webcam site, my personal and mostly-public Livejournal, and in a post on the bald women community page.

A week later, someone in that community got in touch to let me know someone had taken those pictures and posted them on a short-haired/bald women fetish porn site, plus he posted a link to my journal on the site’s forum and as a “link of the week” on the front page. The main site was a huge grid of photos, some sexual and some not, so while the pictures I had taken were just of my face and the top of my shoulders and weren’t sexual at all, they were right next to explicit shots. It was really gross and invasive and I felt completely violated by it. I wrote an angry email to the site owner and I remember that it was a lot angrier than I normally let myself be but that I still toned it down a bit because I was afraid to be too angry, like maybe I didn’t deserve to be as mad as I was about the whole thing and should just calm down.

I don’t have a copy of the email anymore, but the site owner’s response was something along the lines of “well I will take the pictures down, but I don’t see why you’re so angry since it was a compliment and the pictures were public anyway, you bitch. You should be grateful I thought you looked good enough to post them.” And he did eventually take the pictures down, but he apparently thought it would be a great act of revenge to add a sidebar link to my silly-pictures webcam, meaning I got more creepy attention. A few days before I’d learned about the stolen pictures, I got some weird IMs from people who said they’d seen my pictures (either they mentioned the LJ community by name or I assumed that was where they’d seen them) and tried to get me to chat with them, which I was not into. By the time the pictures went down I was getting a LOT of unwanted attention from creepy dudes who could not understand why I was so pissed off that they kept bothering me. Either they didn’t understand that I hadn’t authorized the porn site to use my pictures or they just didn’t care. I don’t think any of them were as mean about it as the site owner but they weren’t exactly gracious and apologetic either. It was kind of a “STOP bothering me.” “but you’re so lovely, I just have to tell you regardless of your feelings!” sort of scenario.

Looking back through my journal from that time, I saw that I referenced another Creepy Guy interaction I’d had a little over a year before that left me feeling upset in a similar way, although this earlier incident was even worse, I think. My first year at college, I was really sad and lonely in the beginning of the spring semester and had the “let random people message me” option enabled on my ICQ client so I sometimes got local dudes trying to take me out for Indian food after exchanging two sentences with me. I did go on one (disastrous) date with someone I met through ICQ and shortly afterwards uninstalled the program, but there was one person I chatted with for a while who turned out to be pretty terrible but was good at hiding it at first. I don’t remember his name, but he said he was a lawyer in Wisconsin and wanted to talk about a pretty intense fetish he had (I am still not comfortable giving a lot of detail about this). I wasn’t particularly interested in it, but at the time I was in a pretty bad mental place and this person was giving me a lot of positive attention so I was willing to talk with him about what he was into. I didn’t have to discuss anything explicitly sexual and his particular interest seemed so odd to me that it was kind of interesting asking him about why he liked it.

So mostly our interactions were him trying to talk about his fetish and giving me compliments (it isn’t like he knew much of anything about me, but this guy gave a lot of them which I realize now was his grooming technique), and me asking him a little about why he was into it and timidly saying “what… would happen if someone actually did this to you?” because I’m pretty sure the real-life answer is “broken bones.” And I guess this wasn’t enough for him, because after a week or two he started bugging me to meet up with him and act this fantasy out for real. Now, I may have been lonely enough to chat with a guy halfway across the country about his dangerous fantasy, but I had no interest in actually doing anything about it, or seeing him in person. I’m sure it was clear to him that I had almost no boundary-setting skills or self-confidence at that point so he pushed and pushed and it took a lot for me to give him a definite “no” even though I knew I didn’t want to do it (plus, how do you sort out the logistics of visiting a college student in a shared dorm room for activity that would probably be classified as assault?).

And when that “no” came? Dude was fucking furious. He called me a slut, bitch, whore, how dare I lead him on, he was going to sue me (?) for it, insult after insult, “never contact me again as I am blocking you.” Did he think I’d beg for him to talk to me after that? I was relieved, so relieved when he said he was blocking me; I was already a little afraid of him and he had been starting to make me uncomfortable, but that initial grooming process made it so that I didn’t feel like I could just stop talking to him. I remember that this happened right before spring break and I spent that week (on an otherwise nice vacation with my family in the New Mexico desert) feeling a low-grade dirtiness and dread the entire time. I was so embarrassed that I’d let it happen to me.

In both instances it’s really interesting for me to note that I felt upset and angry over what had happened, which is perfectly understandable, but also had a lot of residual shame and embarrassment over what had happened even though I hadn’t really done anything wrong. But the people who act like this, who explode in anger when someone deflects their creepy advances or calls out their behavior, are good at focusing that anger and trying to convince their victims that the situation is their fault and that they deserved it. These people are fairly good at appearing to be somewhat friendly or decent but the moment something goes a little bit wrong, they’re tearing off their suit to reveal a Superman costume, except instead of Superman it’s a screaming, rotting pile of meat trying to trick someone into having sex with it.

That Creepy White Guys tumblr I linked to above is scariest to me not specifically for its content but because the content isn’t surprising at all. If you just showed me the initial message sent by the user (he actually opened with “ni hao ma,” what the shit dude) and asked me to predict his response if the woman he messaged wasn’t interested (whether or not she was aggressive about it), I would have come up with something  pretty much identical to what he actually wrote. This sort of thing is not a surprise to me, which is the worst part. This is just what happens if you’re a woman who spends time online. How fucking depressing.

slowly lifting that weight

The past few months have been hard on me.

Part of it, I think, has been recovering from surgery; even after the worst pain was gone it took a while for me to be as active as I like and that’s always a difficult situation for me. But even when I wasn’t able to pin down any real reason why I should be feeling bad, it was still there.

When I first received a mental health diagnosis, well over a decade past when I now know it was clear that I had a serious problem, it was a combination of depression and anxiety that seemed twinned together in my therapist’s mind and in mine; when I started medication she picked one that addressed both. And when I went off that medication a few years later, I felt like I had both under control. There wasn’t much of a separation of the two issues in my mind; it just felt like I had one problem to manage.

After my partner and I moved to San Francisco, my mental state took a pretty severe downturn after that first month or two when the stress of the move caught up with me and I realized I’d lost a lot of my support network due to my distance. At that time the problem manifested itself almost entirely as severe anxiety; the depression was present like it always is, but I was able to manage it moderately well.

Recently, it’s been the opposite situation. I’m not having to fight off intrusive thoughts all the time, I’m not worrying too unreasonably about minor things in my life. I’m sure I’m still more anxious than someone without an anxiety disorder at all but it’s not terrible in comparison to how it’s been at other times. But holy shit, I have been reminded rather forcefully recently exactly what a depressive episode feels like. Or doesn’t feel like, because sometimes it isn’t much of anything, just a grey weight covering my emotions and smooshing them until everything feels flat and thick and vaguely the same. It’s hard to do basic tasks like “email a friend” and “open the mail.”

When I was ten years old, my parents got a call from my teacher who let them know I had told some people at school I wished I was dead. I still don’t remember saying this exactly, but it’s certainly believable based on how I felt at the time. The weekend before that phone call I remember sitting very still for a long time after I came home from a soccer game, crying and staring at the clock and thinking things will never get better. That’s the moment that stands out to me, twenty years later. I remember that afternoon better than the school day in question.

They confronted me about it that night, and I (being extremely upset and also having the sense that I’d been caught doing something wrong) had a difficult time explaining how I was feeling. When they asked me point-blank “are you planning to commit suicide?” I said no, because of course I wasn’t – how on earth would I even go about doing that? I was fucking ten years old, I didn’t know how actually go through the process. I couldn’t figure out how to explain to them that while I didn’t have an actual plan, I wouldn’t mind if it just happened – that I wanted to die, that I didn’t feel like I was worth much of anything or particularly likeable. After I told them I wasn’t going to kill myself I didn’t have the chance to try and explain any further, because they got angry, as if I was playing around. My dad said something like “that’s not something you joke about.”

I am not a parent. I will never be a parent. I probably can’t understand how horrifying it would be to have your kid say “I want to die” to you. It probably was a traumatic discussion for them too. But all I knew was that I was hurting, I felt like everything inside me was rotting away, and when someone finally talked to me about it, I wasn’t able to get any help. That was the lesson I learned from them (and to a lesser extent, from a friend a few years later): if you let anyone know how upset you really are, they will be mad at you. So no one must ever know.

It’s taken a very long time to unlearn that lesson. Even now, when I have been able to seek help for my issues and have taken medication when things were at their worst, when I know that many of my friends also struggle both with mental health problems and the stigma that surrounds them, I’m often hesitant to let anyone around me know when my brain starts acting up again. Even my friends who I know will get it. Even my partner who I live with. It’s so hard to let go of that voice that says “if you tell people, they will be angry. They’ll think you’re lying.”

Right now, things are feeling a little better than they have been. I can take that voice and tell it “anyone who would get angry with me for being honest isn’t worth my time.” I’ve started an exciting new project that’s given me the added bonus of managing my time more efficiently during the week, I’m about to take a relaxing vacation with my partner, and the second cat we adopted at the end of November likes to climb on my chest and start purring if I lie down in bed. There’s a lot to be happy about, and it’s still hard. I worry, when things improve a bit, that it’s only a matter of time before the weight presses on me again. But part of my struggle to feel better, to be more comfortable no matter what shape my mind is in, is not to hide what’s happening.

So, hello friends. It’s been tough. But I think it’s getting better. Thanks for reading.
I’ll have more to say soon.

Family is always complicated

An important thing to know about my mom is that she is, as she will readily inform you given the chance, a very private person. We have a pretty good relationship and I generally find it easy to have conversations with her, but I still don’t know that much about her, in a lot of ways. Some of this is just in comparison with my dad; he loves to tell stories about silly things he did or people he dated when he was younger, and many of those stories are ones I’ve heard several times. Stories from my mom about her past are precious things I don’t hear often. I don’t know that much about what she was like when she was younger. And that’s ok! I tend to share a lot about myself with people I’m close to, but I realize not everyone is like that. It doesn’t make me feel less close to her; while she’s not as open with me as I am with her or as I might like her to be, she certainly isn’t closed-off and I respect her different comfort level in regards to personal information she shares.

Mom works in music education; for the past fifteen years has done some substitute band directing in the county but has focused on private lessons at home and in schools. She started the in-school lesson program at my high school my senior year and still teaches there, which means she’s still in contact with my high school band director and other people who knew me over ten years ago when I was a student.

When I was visiting my parents over Thanksgiving, she mentioned that she still hasn’t told any of these people that my name or pronouns have changed, because she “just doesn’t want to get into it.” So several years after the fact (I came out to my folks in the summer of 2005), she’s still having conversations with colleagues where they ask how [birthname] is doing and Mom just says “she’s fine!”
On one level it seems ridiculous that my mom’s been interacting with colleagues for years and hasn’t told them about this huge change in my life, even if they specifically ask her about me. I am really uncomfortable with people even knowing my birth name, and of course while I can’t make her forget it I’m not happy that she might still be actively using it (I was using my current name as a nickname in high school, so I can at least hope she might be using that instead some of the time). She’s really the only person in my life who does slip up on my pronouns from time to time (but not my name, at least!), and after she told me this I wondered if it’s because she still talks about me using female pronouns and my old name, so they’re still fresh in her mind when she talks to me. It doesn’t hurt as much now as it used to, but I can’t pretend it feels good to hear her make that mistake after several years. It does still sting a little.

But I can’t manage to be as indignant about it as I’d expect to. I think it ties into her sense of privacy; it might feel like something that’s too big or personal to discuss even with friendly colleagues, and I want to respect that. It is often weird to come out on behalf of someone else. I sometimes have a hard time with it and I have a lot more practice than she does. I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now, and maybe I’m a little upset? But while the situation is uncomfortable to think about, I realize it doesn’t impact my life that much; the pronoun problem isn’t great, but I can only assume that will continue to get better with time.
I don’t think her pronoun mistakes are a conscious snub or a sign of any problem she has with me; while things were strained for a while after I came out to her (a trainwreck of an experience that should probably be its own blog post at some point), it’s been years since I had any sense that my transition was upsetting to her. I’ve had her introduce me as her son many times with no hesitation or apparent discomfort. I really do think it’s mostly due to the fact that she hasn’t made the switch to using the right language for me all the time.

In an ideal world I’d like to have her using my current name and pronouns in all areas of her daily life, but I’m not ready to ask her to do so at this point. I know it’s something she’d be unlikely to be comfortable with and I don’t want to press the issue. It would matter more if I had any chance of seeing these people again, but if I did I could just come out to them myself. It’s just one of those ways in which Families Are Weird, I guess; I don’t think I’d put up with this behavior from a friend, but somehow when it comes from my mom I’m less likely to do anything about it.

[Edit: For context, when I came out to my parents I did tell them they were welcome to out me to people I might not have a reason/opportunity to come out to, such as their friends and co-workers, to make this sort of situation less awkward. My dad pretty much instantly told his co-workers, especially ones who had met me, because he's Mr. Talky, but it's possible that Mom only told some of her relatives who I'm not particularly close to. But that blanket permission is in place and has been for years, so there's no doubt on her point that it isn't her place to out me to anyone else. I prefer to do so myself when possible for several reasons, but when I can't she knows she's welcome to. I guess I just never updated that status from "welcome" to "encouraged."]

Alice B. Chokelas

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I woke up before 7am two days in a row to catch the last few games of the day in a Berlin-based roller derby tournament (sadly, I am not hard-core enough to skip sleep and start watching at 1 am). Friends who have had a conversation of any length with me since early this summer have probably picked up on the fact that I am just a teensy bit obsessed with this sport. I’ve had a few people comment on it (happily, most of them have been along the lines of “it’s fun to see you so excited about this”), and I’ve struggled to articulate exactly why roller derby has become so important to me. Clearly the obvious response is “because it’s fucking amazing,” but  I suppose that’s a bit of a cop-out.

First off, it’s fantastic to see a sports league that celebrates women’s strength and athleticism. I know there are many other women’s sports leagues, of course, but with something like the WNBA it seems like it’s greatly overshadowed by the men’s counterpart. In roller derby, women’s teams are the default, not an afterthought. It’s great to hear (mostly male, actually) announcers talk about not how attractive the players are but about their strength or their strategy on the track. I have heard the occasional comment about a player’s appearance from commentators, but they’ve been rare and generally sandwiched together with commentary on her actual performance. I’ve felt the need to raise an eyebrow at an announcer once or twice, but that’s it. And fans who show up to matches are VERY enthusiastic, which makes for a great atmosphere.

Also! There’s a fairly wide range of body types among roller derby players. It’s nice to watch a sport that doesn’t have one “ideal” or typical body shape;  depending on the situation it can be most helpful to have endurance, speed, power, agility, or some combination of these, which means I’ve seen spectacular players who embody a lot of different body shapes and sizes. Plus, I don’t feel like images of women in roller derby are necessarily packaged as artificially as a lot of other women in sports can be. Yes, there can be a sexy component to roller derby* but most of the images I’ve seen of roller derby players are action shots with protective gear on and sweat flying all over the place, not airbrushed bikini shots.

And let’s talk about those names, shall we? SO FANTASTIC. Derby names are kind of like drag or burlesque names, except with more violent puns and fewer sexy ones (although there are plenty of those). These are generally both hilarious and clever, and I love seeing a new team and mentally high-fiving all the players who have wonderfully creative names. I’m sure there are people who think silly names mean people won’t take the sport seriously, but all you need to do is watch a match to know it’s serious. I approve of making an intense and competitive sport something that can also be approached with a sense of fun.

All those things aside, though, there’s something else that’s really drawn me to roller derby, and it’s taken a while for me to be able to process and articulate it (and I’m not sure that I’ve really gotten it down perfectly yet): I see roller derby as the sort of women’s space that I would probably have felt very drawn to and maybe even comfortable in, had I known it existed earlier.

At the WFTDA championships earlier this month, the host team in Atlanta had a brief expo match of their junior derby league, which had age 7-11 and 12-17 divisions. I can not even imagine what it could have meant to me to be playing roller derby when I was that young. I spent my preteen and teenage years feeling uncomfortable with my body and awkward with regards to how “being a girl” worked – I didn’t question my gender at that point but felt like there were a lot of rules I didn’t know or understand how to follow. Is it a little unrealistic and romantic to imagine that those problems would have gone away if I’d strapped on some protective gear and learned how to take some hits? Maybe, but I think it would have been a great environment for me to learn how to be IN my body, doing something physical where I could come up with a silly name and maybe have a sports experience that was more supportive than the ones I had when I was younger. I was on several area youth-league sports teams, but I quit once I hit the age when the more skilled players noticed that some of us weren’t very good and got mean about it. It took me a long time to realize that my unhappy experiences didn’t mean that sports were bad or exercise couldn’t be enjoyable.

I don’t talk about it a lot, because I think it might sound like regret to some people and I’m never quite sure how to say it, but I do believe that I probably could have found a way to be happy being a woman, given a different set of circumstances. I didn’t have a real place to explore what that might mean or exposure to environments that felt like places I could fit (at least not at the time when it would have been helpful), so I wound up going in a different direction, but I think that was ultimately more of a reflection of my immediate situation than some fated Gender Destiny that had Been Inside Me All Along. I don’t see my current identity as a fixed point that could never have developed any other way (especially since things are still shifting; if there’s an endpoint to my identity, I haven’t hit it yet), and a lot of the warm & fuzzy feelings I get when I think about roller derby are due to the fact that I see it as the sort of environment could have been a really wonderful place for me.

I enjoy it for its own merits, as I mentioned above, but there is an extra dimension of…. not nostalgia, I suppose, but some sort of potential alternate-universe nostalgia, if I can call it that. It’s easy to imagine a world in which younger-me grew up to be Bruisin’ B. Anthony and now hangs out with a bunch of amazing ladies for hours every week and is trying to be good enough to get on her city’s travel team. And I’m ok not being in that world! The one I’m in suits me just fine! But a big part of my feelings for roller derby come from a place where I’m thinking “yeah, twelve-year-old me would have loved to try this. I wonder what sort of person she would have grown up to be if she had.”

* In a non-scientific experiment, I looked through a list of all WFTDA member teams, and tried to categorize images of women (or occasionally parts of them) used in the team logos.  I found 35 logos that featured what I’d call “passively sexy” poses (pinup-style legs-up poses, hips thrust out, looking coyly over one shoulder, etc.),  51 that struck me as active/aggressive (some with black eyes or other injuries visible; a few of these are sexually charged but with the character looking both “sexy” and active), and 15 that seemed neutral (headshot, nonsexual relaxed pose).