Category Archives: Ethics

Fairness and Other Myths

Published July 2, 2022 / by rmaddy / 1 Comment on Fairness and Other Myths
1 Reply

I ran cross country with heart.  I never dogged a workout, and I pushed to the end every meet, not infrequently staggering or passing out as soon as I crossed the finish line.  One muddy race, I lost a shoe a half mile from the end and still eked out second place.  

Second place was my wheelhouse.  I never won a major competition.  Most days, I wasn’t even the best on my team.  Nevertheless, I scored well for my team every single race, and we made it to States during my high school senior year.  I was far more proud of that than of the academic record for which I was much better known.  I worked hard at my sport, and though I barely cracked the top 50 in my state, I think that I managed to be the best runner that I could be.

In my midfifties now, I know that I will probably never race again. Part of is is purely physical—the pounding of pavement extracts a price, and I ran for decades. I find it harder to run at all, let alone push myself for the speed that I once enjoyed. Beyond that, however, I am restrained by the realization that should I run competitively, the next price I paid might be far worse than the aches and pains.

America celebrated Pride 2022 by writing, copying and pasting bills to degrade and demonize transgender people. 35 states proposed anti-trans legislation in the first half of the year. Having failed for the most part a few years back to codify where trans folk can use the bathroom, Republicans are doubling down, finding in anti-trans issues more gasoline to pour on the fires of the culture war.

Their favorite flavor this year is the prohibition of transgender participation in athletics. The gambit is not new, but this year they have found willing accomplices in athletic associations, well-amplified pundits and even among LGBT notables. The formula, “I am (insert queer identity) here, and I don’t think transgender women should…” flows directly and profusely to op-ed pages and online news outlets.

Nobody medically transitions to win a medal, and nobody emerges through medical transition unchanged. And, despite assertions to the contrary, no spate of domination of athletics at any level by transgender women can be demonstrated. One person’s good performance does not a pattern make. Sometimes a good athlete transitions and continues to be a good athlete. Most of the time, I suspect, they do not. When they do, I would think it something to celebrate.

I personally began the process in relatively good shape, knocking out 8 minute mile splits for an hour or more at a time on the treadmill. Within 6 months, those splits had lengthened to about 11 minutes. Would I be exactly as good a runner in my new demographic as in my old? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t really matter, or at least that it shouldn’t.

“It’s about fairness”, goes the swindle. Incumbent in this notion is the idea that one person can deserve to win an event more than someone else, piled on top of the idea—so strenuously denied—that whether one wins or loses really does matter more than how one plays the game. Anyone who has ever waited for the gun on the starting line of a 10k knows that almost everyone participating will not win, but, I still dare to hope, that it is worth running anyway.

On Bravery

Published April 2, 2020 / by rmaddy / 2 Comments on On Bravery
2 Replies

It’s happening again.

I first encountered the phenomenon during the early days of transition–basically once people were starting to notice and process the changes that they were seeing in my appearance.  I refer to the ascription of emotions to those going through an unusual process.  The two most commonly mentioned in that case were happiness, as in “I’m glad you’re happy”, or “As long as as you’re happy,” and bravery–“You are so brave!”  That I felt neither in those moments often seemed not to register.

“Happiness” missed the cut in the face of Covid19, but once again I hear with some frequency how brave I am, how brave my co-workers are.  I cannot speak for them, but I know that I did not feel brave in transition, and I do not feel brave now.  

Truth be told, I live with anxiety, and it was not improved either by gender transition or the current pandemic.  Those who experience it know that it can be managed more or less effectively, but it tends to persist lifelong, sharing more commonality in that sense with chronic conditions–heart disease, hypertension, diabetes–than the acute but transitory distress of a broken arm.  I do give myself some credit for doing relatively well under the circumstances–continuing to work and thrive in a broad sense, maintain a disciplined connection to the resources necessary to do so, and becoming, on balance, more adept at managing the day-to-day stress.  If I linger to write my autobiography, I fancy that the subtitle will read something like “My Life as a Well-Coiled Spring”.

I suspect that the attribution of bravery, at least in my case, owes to a lack of familiarity on the part of the observer.  Most people have no idea what it is like to experience an identity not conferred upon them by society or biology or both, and understandably feel a bit flummoxed by seeing someone act decisively in the face of such experience–just as I might wonder at the oft-cast image of a soldier in a movie grabbing a nothing more lethal than a flag and charging headlong at an entrenched, well-armed opponent.  Inspirational, yes, but not just a tiny bit crazy.  Lest any other person, particularly my transgender brothers and sisters bristle at such a word, let me propose that “audacity” is a probably a more apt description, and remind that I am speaking merely of my own odyssey.  So too the plight of the present-day healthcare worker, watching the merciless eruption of a deadly epidemic, wondering not whether but when, as the news is framed, “needs will surpass resources.”  Why would the general public know what that is going to look like when from the inside I barely grasp it myself?

At any rate, suddenly I am brave again.  I find myself in a situation over which I have little control, no genuinely good choices, and ample reason to expect a miserable outcome.  I do my job knowing that it is my job to do.  I desperately need my family, but fear becoming the vector that silently, invisibly, brings the pestilence home.  Aragorn’s “Not this day” speech at the Black Gate bubbles up from somewhere in my subconscious, bringing with it both a flood of both tears and welcome inspiration, but so too does the image of the soldier at Dunkirk dropping his weapons and walking into the waves.  I know which figure I more closely resemble.  

“Superheroes”, a New York Times editorial called us today, although to be fair, the author made largely the same point that I am.  I wonder–is it audacity to set my feet against an onslaught requiring more people, more protection, more resources that I have on hand, or just plain crazy?  Will my training, experience and well-honed sense of moral duty be sufficient to hold back the relentless tide of anxiety and despair?  The only way to know is to pass through, and I don’t want to.  Would that we could linger forever in these last moments when normality is still at least a vivid, recent memory.

No, I am not brave, but perhaps it is not mine to say.  One could posit that bravery is a word which must be externally applied–an observed quality as opposed to an experienced internal state.  Countless are the times I have heard a parent or a healthcare worker tell a frightened child how brave they are while getting their blood drawn, getting a vaccine or some other immediately unpleasant intervention.  Has that not always felt like the right thing to say?

Maybe we celebrate phantom bravery because it is comforting, or simply more comfortable to do so.  It is hard enough to see one person in distress; harder still for that distress to spread like contagion to those around.  Let there instead be bravery, and heroines, and hope, for so long as there is, the story still seems worth telling.

The Abominable T-girl

Published December 5, 2014 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
Leave a reply

Xenophobia:  the irrational fear of that which seems strange, different or foreign.  

Emphasis on the word irrational.  Despite cherished fantasies about our adventuresome natures, most of us have no real appetite for uncharted waters.  Odds are pretty good that if you set me down in a new restaurant, I’m going to order the fish tacos.  This is not because fish tacos are my favorite food, but rather because they occupy a  safety zone in my subconscious.  Unfamiliar place.  Crowd noise.  Two columns worth of culinary descriptions on a piece of laminated cardboard that accomplish little more than making my eyes unfocus.  Server pressing to get the show on the road…

“What’ll you have?”

“Fish tacos, please.”

“Excellent…a bold choice.”

Some might be less inclined toward the comforts of familiarity than I am, but I doubt I sit too far off the curve.  One barely notices when a dog brushes past, but let a mouse into the kitchen and all hell breaks loose.  Other things being equal, a 25 kilogram canine is a greater potential threat to life and limb than a 25 gram rodent, but one of them is unexpected.  More nightmares involve the first day of school than the 147th.  Traffic will predictably slow in front of a house with diagonal green stripes painted on the side.  We all have an unstated concept of the ordinary against which we measure our experiences.  Inevitably, various things fall outside the parameters of “normality”.   A horse-drawn carriage on an urban street.  A mouse in the kitchen.  A trans-woman in the breakroom.

The subconscious registers surprise and generates alertness, bringing the unusual sighting to conscious attention.  Additionally, the alert triggers a cascade of effects pre-programmed to preserve the individual.  The pulse quickens.  The pupils dilate.  A wash of chemicals flood various pathways in the brain producing the emotional content of anxiety.  Is this xenophobia?

No.  The preliminary sub-conscious processes are non-rational, not irrational.  Up to this point, the perceiver has not even begun to do that which we would generally label “thinking”.  Although we certainly have the capacity (and, I will argue, duty) to condition our reflexes, our reflexes themselves are not culpable.  Noticing difference is morally neutral.  Heck, I’m probably nearly as surprised as you are when I encounter another trans person.  It is what we do after our programmed defenses kick in that constitutes moral or immoral behavior.  Xenophobia occurs when one or more of the following things happen:

1.  Assignment of moral value to phobias.  Suppose the color blue makes me anxious.  A stranger approaches me in a brilliant blue shirt.  The fear that I feel is real, but it is not a moral principle.   It does not follow ethically that wearer is doing something wrong merely because I feel anxious.  Indeed, since he can scarcely anticipate my phobia, the wearer has no real opportunity to make a moral decision.

Even if the scenario were altered such that the person knew that blue terrified me and wore it in my presence anyway, the moral offense would still have nothing to do with blue itself, but rather to the act of deliberately causing discomfort, that is to say, being an asshole.  At various times I have been told that my gender expression is a metaphorical blue shirt with which I set out to offend.  If this were indeed the case, I would be hard pressed to defend it.  However, my experience of being transgender, and that of others with whom I have spoken, would be more aptly analogized by reworking the scenario yet again to where it was my skin, and not my clothing, that was blue.  Regardless of what fear it provokes in others, it is not something I can simply discard in favor of a more soothing color.   If this seems dubious to you, perhaps you can at least accept that I found no way of doing so despite decades of genuinely trying.

2.  Codification of phobias through appeal to unassailable principle.   “It’s not natural,” I have been told.  I have yet to hear this sort of statement backed by a coherent argument.  If being transgender (or gay, or left-handed–yes, people really used to believe that too) is unnatural, how can one make sense of the fact that it regularly occurs in nature, albeit in a small minority of persons?  Does the uncommonness prove the thesis?  Being transgender is 10 times more common than having multiple sclerosis and more than 100 times more common than albinism.  Both, last time I checked, were considered to be natural phenomena.

In my experience, the “not natural” argument is always underpinned by the concept of sin.  In theory, one could hold that being transgender is unnatural without appealing to religion, and yet every person from which I have heard the line is conservatively religious.  How can transgender identity be morally neutral when the Word of God declares:

“A woman shall not wear man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”

Never mind that fundamentalist Christians don’t keep Levitical law.  They’ll keep this one, or at least demand that I do.  And, to be fair, I concede that the biblical proscription against crossdressing is pretty damned unambiguous.  There are lots of silly things which the Levitical codes say should be abominations to us.  This is one of the few which invokes abomination to God himself, putting trangenderism in the elite company of pride, lying lips, dishonest measures and foreign gods.

Of course not all Christians think this way.  If you are one of those fortunates with the capacity to reject hateful bits of scripture, I congratulate you, and wish you the best of luck going forward.

3.  Cultivation of narrow horizons.  If your friends throw you a surprise birthday party, it may catch you completely off guard.  If, however, they throw you a surprise party five years in a row, your capacity for shock rapidly dwindles to nothing.  In fact, at that point the only thing they could do to genuinely surprise you is to not throw it.  The unexpected has become expected.  So it goes with the initial anxieties that might accompany first encounters with diversity.

Human beings have an amazing ability to acclimate.  The process requires nothing more than a little time and a certain degree of exposure.  However, it is possible to maintain such closed-border, monolithic social circles that the process of acclimatization never occurs.  If all your friends are similar in appearance, beliefs, culture, family structure and so on, you might just be too insulated to grow.  The iron bars that keep others out are just as certain to keep you in.

Step out of the cage.  Embrace difference.  Set yourself free.