|
||
|
| ||
|
Ars Erotica
August 2004 Double Negative My younger ears were filled with the entrepreneurial spirit of Amway salesmen, via the motivational speech tapes which were ubiquitous in my family's home. These cynical, corn-fed men wearing rolled Van Heusen shirtsleeves churned out all kinds of platitudes and insights, teaching you to take bulls by horns and open doors for opportunity. They loved to lecture about personal challenges, and then work in a whimsical witticism to redux the lesson. The one I hated most was a silly acronym: TANSTAFL, or, "There ain't no such thing as free lunch." I had evidence to the contrary. Since I grew up poor, I was on the free lunch program at school. The food ranged from horrible to frightening, but it was free lunch. The challenge seemed to be in eating it. My abbreviated response: NWIHWIETFL, or "No way in hell will I eat that for lunch." I don't want to spend time here discussing the absurdity of feeding the poor so poorly - but I must tell you that those lunches don't do much for one's inner Horatio Alger. It's useless to pull up your bootstraps when you're praying to the porcelain god. The best part of those tapes is that they were a perfect disguise for sneaking seditious music into the house. My Violent Femmes tape was labeled "Rich DeVos," and "Jay Van Andel" was really The Cure. ("The cure for what?" my mother once asked me.) So not only was my music free, as in "no cost," but it was also free, as in "I get to listen to it without a lecture from my mom." Free as in "the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." So in a backhanded way, Amway was really helpful in giving me faith in realizing a better world during my lifetime. Maybe I should tell their marketing department my story. Anyway, what bothered me most about this "no free lunch" philosophy was twofold. First, "ain't no" is a double negative. Second, they would have sounded more helpful if they had been saying "There is such a thing as a less-expensive, yet tasty and nourishing, lunch." But I suppose that acronym would have been just too long. A Buddhist friend once advised me to consider all the hands and all the tasks involved in working to deliver a plate to my table, from the waitress to the farmer. It's difficult to do this with every meal, but can reveal a simple peanut butter sandwich to be a minor miracle. It reveals that there really ain't no such thing as a free lunch. More importantly, it reveals the failure of "no free lunch" to sway me. It seemed to be a statement more concerned with the commodification of lunch, instead of its existence as a community effort. Moreover, it was fatalistic. That's just the way it is; some things will never change. But I didn't believe it. I couldn't afford to. I needed to believe in possible better world for me to go forward with my transsexual ten-year plan, because it was clear that to do so would be a high-risk investment. There are still places where, if a woman loses her shirt, she can be jailed for indecent exposure. (Jail, so I hear, is another place where you can get a really horrible, but free, lunch.) Speaking of jail - tell your next Amway salesman about someone in a local jail getting treatment for Gender Identity Disorder and see if he doesn't lose his lunch. Or remind him about how the transsexual civil servants of San Francisco won health care benefits a couple years back and see doesn't start saying "TANSTAFL, but if you play your cards right you might get a free sex change." Those of in this know realize this is a preposterous argument. Most folks who get the Gender Identity Disorder wind up paying for hormones and hospital bills instead of lunch, buying lunches for lawyers and electrologists. You probably wouldn't want a free sex change anyway, given my experience with free school lunch. You might wind up with a ketchup transfusion, and it wouldn't even be Heinz. But with hysterics like the Traditional Values Coalition finally figuring out that trannies exist and moving on the issue, what is already an expensive and daunting process is only going to get tougher, thanks to the Patriot Act and the growing disparity between rich and poor and the continuing lack of jobs and paranoia around "identity theft." (By the way, have you noticed how "identity theft," which used to be called "credit fraud," is all about money? I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not made of money. Which is probably why no one has bothered to steal my "identity.") Even though I've been living as a female person for my entire adult life, getting an "F" on my passport takes a lot more than a keystroke. It takes a few thousand dollars, a trip or two to a surgeon to get my bits fixed, a petition to change my birth certificate in the state of my birth, a stop at both Social Security and the DMV, and finally the passport office. Currently, I'm busy freeing up a few thousand dollars. I figure I can get my passport around the time I turn 65, just in time to retire to the French Riviera. But whining about my personal financial crises is not why I've gathered you all here today. The idea I want to leave you with is that part of the trouble we encounter when lunch is commodified is that we lose perspective on the community that created that meal, and it loses a great deal of its flavor. In a similar vein, when our identities are commodified - as some feminist and LGBT organizations have done, and as healthcare providers for transfolk can't help but doing, given current circumstances - we lose important freedoms. Some of us lose the ability to travel, some lose the ability to listen to The Cure, and some of us lose our lunch. Some of us lose families, and some of us lose our lives. But I know that the world can be a better place than this. You wouldn't be reading these words if I didn't think so. Return to Ars Erotica Index |
