anyhow, just wanted to thank your for posting. i’m downloading open office right now.

happy really cold october day, hopefully see you soon…

rachel

I expected to fight off disbelief and doubts from my family, and the heterosexual comunity in general, but from everyone? Even my girlfriend? The guilt I am supposed to feel for not being visually outspoken?
I don’t like being constantly taken for a straight/available woman. Especially by men. As soon as they find out I am gay they treat me entirely differently, sometimes a lot better. Why is this?
I wear mascara and I am learning to be a farmer. I get approval for one and disgrace for the other. The gay community (for lack of a better term) wants me to be a farmer and the others tell me I can’t work that hard.
I had no idea about other femme-identifying women. I am tired of how much stock other lesbians put into looking gay, and how incredibly insulted they are if someone doesn’t realize. Tell them and get over it.

I, too, intend my performance of femininity — in my case, as a queer high femme — to be subversive, to challenges stereotypes and assumptions, and to encourage dialogue.

Everything from changing tires in evening gowns to coming to seminar in magenta miniskirts to talking back to harassers on the street is an act of feminist defiance. I refuse to be denied power and recognition solely on the basis of the way I dress or the intonation of my voice or the fact that my eyelids are painted purple. None of this should interfere with whether a person is taken seriously, is heard, can contribute.

But it does. And that’s what I try to challenge every single day with my performance of queer femininity.

Being unemployable because of being a plain-looking, overweight middle-aged Jewish woman in an image-oriented, appearance-obsessed society that worships youth and thinness, I am VERY poor – because no one would give me a chance for a job (despite having an education). I was also orphaned at 13, so I didn’t have the family support network that so many people take for granted. I never got to have a bat mitzvah, never mind make aliyah. And private college with a degree beyond a Bachelor’s; forget it. Not even within my reach.

Instead, I had to “make do” with incurring unaffordable student loan debt after reaching a certain age where my “Expected Family Contribution” would be based solely on my own resources – just to go to a state college..graduating at the age of 34 in May of 2001 and then having to compete with 22 year olds for jobs in addition to IT workers my age who not only had Masters degrees, but also had experience in the field (whereas I never got the chance to get any). I was a disabled woman trying to re-enter the workforce and had a 10 year gap in my work history (no recent references, nothing) and that gap is now 17 years. But I’m not “disabled enough” to get the meager $600/mo in SSI benefits, yet am too disabled for any employers to accommodate me – even for a sub-poverty level minimum wage job as a clerk in a video store.

It has been my experience that to be poor, white, and Jewish in America is to be invisible, to be a non-person, to be “white trash”…and even worse, to be not welcome in synagogue; or if welcomed superficially, to be unable to afford to participate in activities commensurate with Jewish community tradition (the Passover community dinners, bar mitzvah luncheons, etc.) and to be made to feel ashamed and humiliated for my conditions of poverty (even though we’re taught about tzedakah and the fact that it is a “nevere” to humiliate someone).

That said, ALL poor (Jewish and non-Jewish poor alike) are basically not wanted in society. We’re expected to be on hand when needed and to go away and suffer quietly when not.

When we try to explain that we can’t get jobs because we are walking around missing teeth at a young age from not being able to afford dental care and have to face job interviewers looking like that, we’re dismissed as “complaining”. Middle class people think all poor can get free medical care under Medicaid. But that’s not true and yet, no one wants to hear it.

The few select poor who CAN get Medicaid can get their teeth fixed. Not true. Medicaid won’t pay for dentures – they’re considered “cosmetic” and not “medically necessary”. I know – I’ve suffered the loss of most of my teeth before age 30 (while struggling to better myself in getting an education).

When we have to explain to those who’ve never been poor that if we have to do without a home/phone/Internet (is if those are all luxuries we don’t “deserve”), we can’t even register at the local state Career Link Offices – never mind have a venue to tell our stories, we’re told that we’re just “making excuses” and we’re dismissed as persona non grata. No one wants to hear it.

We’re constantly assumed to be druggies, uneducated, lazy, stupid, and lacking in work ethic. If we have teeth rotting out of our head that we can’t do anything about, middle class and rich people accuse us of being “too stupid/lazy to brush and floss properly.” The fact is that you can do all those things and still have your teeth go bad anyway – especially when you can’t afford to get bi-annual cleanings, check ups, fillings, and root canals and crowns.

Every day we are silenced and our experiences are invalidated by everyone else. We’re told to “shut up and stop whining” and how far “worse off the poor in 3rd World nations have it” than us.

We’re told by those who have never done without basic needs that being poor is our own tough luck; that we made all the wrong choices…age/sex/disability/appearance/social class discrimination is never, ever acknowledged; nor is an ever-shrinking pie of job opportunities thanks to globalization which has given us a “No Pea” shell game of a job market in a Serengeti economy – a global rat-race to the bottom.

I have written a book on classism. I am a self-published author (being a poor “nobody”, no major publishing firms would pick up my manuscript or even look at it). I can’t afford to advertise my works which are sold through online e-tailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble online (brick and mortar stores won’t carry any inventory of self-pub books, but their online partners don’t have “inventory issues”).

But when I try using the Internet to do so, something as simple as adding links to my web page w/ info about my books to my blog/message board/email signature, I am berated and begruded the meager $30-$50 a month I earn from book sales because according to the “haves”, people like me are “only out to make a buck shilling our books”. Being poor means that no matter what you try to do, you can never win.

Being poor is being judged every minute of every day by those who are better-off, because they’ve had opportunities and luck that we didn’t have in our so-called meritocracy. And they’re biggest concern is that if they are forced to understand what being poor really is, that we “undeserving” poor people will demand that they give us some of their resources that they have ZERO intention to share. Everything is always all about them, you know.

The commonality of being poor is that it is hard to be surrounded by those who are better off who judge you and look down on you for having less. They think that those who might not have to struggle as hard as you do are living off charity of others and that they have absolutely earned everything totally on their own.

The “haves” know they’ve benefited from unfair advantages in a rigged system; a system of imperialism, sexism, and every other ism imaginable; a system of social class bias and an unfair distribution of opportunity and resources. And they don’t like having to face up to that fact because in doing so, they might have to agree to making some changes in our society that might result in losing some of their privileges – and they don’t want to because they’re selfish and don’t want to share – and they know it, but don’t want to admit it – so instead they blame the victim because that lets them off the hook. Since most middle class and rich people “don’t get it” when they’ve been told what it’s like to be poor, when they’re asked to read our experiences (they balk at doing so), I guess the only way they will “get it” is if they have to slum it temporarily – which does not come close to an accurate rendition.

As far as the articles using “transsexual”, rather than “transgender”, it was because the articles were about transsexuals. Not every transsexual appreciates being lumped into an umbrella category of “transgender”, and the article was sensitive to that. I know that I object to being called TG myself, and I made a point of that to the author of the articles.