Living With Trauma: The Healers, 27

If we are going to produce a generation of healers then there is a lot that we are going to have to change concerning how we perceive gender. I have always been a feminist, even before I knew the word. Unfortunately, my involvement with the fundamentalist Christianity of my teenage Jesus Freak days made this rather difficult. I was surrounded, and influenced by, braindead Biblical literalists who believed firmly everything that Paul the Apostle wrote about women's roles as being subservient to men. I still struggled with this and at the end I had to discard it. When I was twenty-three I was simultaneously living next door to my good friend, a radical lesbian feminist, while attending a radical Mennonite house church where we were exploring feminism and gender roles and equality. Here is what we figured out: that it isn't simply a matter of women having equal rights, equal pay for equal work and having all the opportunities in the world for turning into men with vaginas. Rather, it was men who needed to learn from women, especially to learn how to be human. The issue was less about gender and more about becoming complete and fulfilled human beings. I have never swallowed this fatuous fiction that female political leaders are likely to be kinder and more merciful than their male counterparts. Remember Margaret Thatcher, anyone? Indira Ghandi? Golda Meir? How about Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State and approved the massacres in Libya that took out Gaddafi and created a barbarous chaos where people are being openly bought and sold now in slave markets! (I still would have much preferred seeing her as president instead of that deplorable clown now in the Oval Office! but let's stay on topic, shall we?) It isn't just testosterone that makes us violent. It is position and power. I am not going to oppose equal rights, not even if that equality includes being equally assholes and douchebags between the genders. So, you have women, in the name of equality, breaking the glass ceiling to become every bit as powerful, rich and psychopathic as their male counterparts of the .01 percent. And women in the military? Now, just like their dumbass male counterparts, they also get to kill other human beings who have the misfortune of being the enemy, as well as mindlessly obeying and following the murderous orders of their superiors. It has long been my concern that an authentic feminism has absolutely nothing to do with women turning into men without penises and everything to do with the genders meeting each other halfway. That's right, Gentle Reader. Men need every bit as much, even more so, to become more like women as women need to become more like men. Not entirely. There will always be differences between the genders. Whether this is due to nature, nurture, or both, I would be the last one to know. My own tendency is to believe that gender is a social construct with a minor bit of biological basis and that this gets all twisted and mutated out of shape with the way that children, boys and girls are raised. We are never going to have men who menstruate, except perhaps for transmen, but men definitely have more to learn, and emulate from women than vice versa, if we are to move forward in our healing from collective trauma. I see promising signs of this happening, but we still have a long way to go. We need to get beyond competition and power plays and learn increasingly to focus on cooperation and working collectively and in harmony with one another. That's right, ducks, we are going to have to oppose the very toxic process of capitalism if we are really interested in saving ourselves and our planet. Women hold the key to our healing and it is my hope that as we move more towards full equality that, rather than lose their empathy and compassion, men come to also absorb these qualities so that we can grow, function and celebrate together a healed and restored sense of humanity. I think we might be on our way, but these are baby steps forward and the obstacles ahead of us are formidable. I don't expect to see a lot of change in my lifetime but I am holding out in hope that we will survive long enough to see some strides forward made in future generations. Time is running out.