Today I want to talk about a touchy subject. …Gender expression. My granddaughter is in her 20’s and talks with me about friends that want to have as a designation “they.” I have no problem with people expressing their gender any way they want but I do think that there is a problem with they and them.
In our society we tend to divide ourselves into groups of us and them. This definitely puts a negative spin on those designations. Are them and they on the outside?
How people see their gender is only a small part of who we are. I am multiple people. My gender is important for me but the other aspects of ME are just as important. I think of myself in many different ways. Today my persona may be an artist or a writer. I may be functioning from a male perspective. I may be childish and not 82 years old. I may look at people as people I need to help from my years of nursing, or taking on my passion for expressions of God. I am many things, many people, multiples. I am not they or them. I am definitely WE !!
So if people want to address me as something other than she I want to be called WE !
WE and WE
Yesterday I talked about living (as a child) through WW2. My husband’s experience was much more noteworthy than mine. He was four years old living in Hawaii behind Diamond head in army quarters when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He remembers waking to lots of planes flying overhead. He got up and told his father who told him it was people training and go back to bed. A few moments later his father was called about the bombing. His father was in charge of the Coast Artillery that was actually in the volcano.
My husband, his mother and sister, lived in a bomb shelter in the yard that day expecting the bombers to come back. Later they moved into the volcano and stayed there for several weeks before being evacuated to the states. The ship that took them to the west coast went back for more people but was bombed and sank before getting there.
worry-less-journey 