littleskylights

Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.

In kosher practices, not only is there a guarantee that the animal was killed in a humane way, but also that it had a reasonable high quality of life before it happened!

—be fed and watered before you eat

—be put under shelter before you hide in a storm (keep in mind these rules were originally written for desert nomads)

—be given all appropriate medical care

To be kosher, it is ALSO necessary for an animal to be “unblemished.” Means no injuries or diseases, which are best avoided not through battery-farm “just shovel in more antibiotics” practices but rather through good food, clean water, and plenty of roaming space to allow animal-appropriate exercise. “Okay, but Nina, what if they just don’t slaughter until it’s obvious it’s not sick—” Won’t help. That animal was ill and its liver was scarred by the illness? Unclean, must be discarded or sold to a nonkosher butcher (for a price much, much lower than the shochet, or kosher butcher, could have expected to make had the animal been kosher, because now it’s at wholesale). It looked just fine but then you get to the cutting-it-into-meal-sized-pieces stage and discover it had undiagnosed parasites? Theoretically you could sell it to a nonkosher butcher who can use varying procedures to kill the parasites and render the meat edible, but more likely, the whole animal is a loss. You take off the hide and find scarring where the animal was left in a too-small enclosure? Not kosher. Now you’ve lost three animals out of your herd, and you’re a small time butcher with a limited clientele. What has that done to your business? Can you even keep it open? You probably just lost ten thousand dollars or more. You can very quickly see why a shochet has every interest in treating his herd almost better than his children.

So moving on, we’ve established the meat will be well-treated while it’s still on the hoof or wing. (I didn’t touch on this, but—one of the easiest ways to prevent the kind of infighting that causes pecking injuries among chickens is to give them plenty of food and outdoor space. They don’t have to get vicious to have their own territory and they’ll use up some energy gleefully chasing bugs instead of each other.) What happens when it’s slaughter time?

The rules for a kosher butcher are thus: the shochet must be a Jew well-versed in Torah, to ensure the rules for kosher slaughter are being followed; his tools must be kept clean; his blade must be razor-sharp; and he must have extensive training, because if he fails at even one of the next steps, the animal is rendered nonkosher, and we’ve already gone over why that is Not A Good Thing not just in terms of following kosher practice but also in terms of the shochet not having a whole lot of room for loss.

The animals must be kept in an area free from stress, where they can neither see nor hear the slaughter and thus have time to fear their own death. (This is considered to count as animal cruelty.) When an animal is brought to the slaughter block, the shochet must kill the animal with a single stroke of the blade, which must sever the artery, the corresponding vein, and the windpipe. Done correctly, the animal will be unconscious before it even knows it should be feeling pain.

Now the bit that’s probably on your mind: how do you know it was done, and they’re not just saying it’s “kosher” the way some farms will slap “organic” on things?

First, kosher meat is almost exclusively purchased by religious Jews. If you don’t do your job right, you’re causing them to break the mitzvot. (Which, by itself, is breaking a mitzvah. There’s a whole lot of cultural stuff going on here that’s the purview of another post, so suffice to say this is A Really Big Deal and you Just Don’t Do That.) If anyone finds out you haven’t been doing the job right and calls you out on it, guess what: you don’t have a job. Pick up and move to another Jewish community? They’re going to ask who your presiding rabbi was, and you’re going to have to admit you lost your certification. Get slovenly as a shochet and you’re done. Permanently.

Second, that thing about a presiding rabbi: in addition to the local health board doing their thing, you have to get your premises and your procedure overseen by a rabbi. This rabbi, by virtue of the nature of kosher meat, will be Orthodox, meaning “as by the book as you can possibly get.” He will be as serious as a heart attack about you doing this right, and if there’s even a suspicion you’re not, you will not receive his certification—which means even if you do everything right, your meat will not be considered kosher and people will not buy from you. So you have to do it correctly, and you also have to be aware that the rabbi may come at any time he chooses just to check in. You’re not going to cut corners. There’s too much at stake.

Also: if you’re struggling to find a kosher butcher, see if you can find a local halal market. I’ve actually had a couple of Muslims pop onto posts where I’ve explained this before to be like “you literally just described halal slaughter.” The only real difference is the blessings that are said (and halal meat must be butchered by a Muslim, not a Jew).

“Mean girls all go into social work!”

“The mean girl to teacher pipeline!”

Y’all, these are just pink collar jobs. The reason you think there’s so many “mean girls” in these fields is because they’re all like 97% women. Of course some of them are gonna be assholes. There’s assholes everywhere.

While those are all “helper” professions and they very much are pink collar (and are underpaid, that’s not an incompatible idea), they’re also ones that involve power over vulnerable people’s lives. (And I’ve only encountered it as a comparison to, say, male bullies becoming cops, it’s not like men aren’t being mentioned here.)

Secretaries/administrative assistants aren’t on that list for a reason. Flight attendants aren’t on that list. Housecleaners aren’t on that list. Receptionists. Customer service representatives. Dental hygienists. The people who style hair or do nails. That’s not a list of pink collar jobs. It’s specifically (pink collar) positions where if you want to abuse people you’re relatively likely to get away with it.

It can both be true that “nurses who care for disabled people need better pay” and “nurses who care for disabled people have a lot of opportunities to abuse their power and that’s something worth talking about.”

Women aren’t immune from treating people badly because they’re women, or because women are underpaid. They’re sure not immune from specifically seeking out jobs that will allow them to be cruel without any consequences to them, if they get personal satisfaction out of being cruel.

Lucy knows little of Narnia beyond what Tumnus told her in a few furtive visits, and yet it is enough: she gravitates towards the right trees for shelter and follows the deer trails instead of the rutted road. In the end, they find neither Aslan nor Edmund, but return to the Beavers’ Dam with a small army in their wake. Mr. Beaver likewise returns with allies — most of the network he had spent the winter cultivating for such a day.

Mrs. Beaver brings Aslan, the rest of the army, and enough food to feed it.

It is Susan who finds Edmund huddling next to a stone lion for what meager warmth it absorbed from the sun. She asked him no questions (not even about the mustache scrawled on the lion’s face and half rubbed away, nor Edmund’s raw hands stained with charcoal). She only marches calmly into the castle of ice and offers herself as a far more useful prisoner in her brother’s stead.

Amused and crafty, the Witch accepts her bargain and turns the traitor loose — for now — even while planning to use him later.

Susan watches and waits and obeys like the good girl she has always been called, and like the wolves that haunt the gardens. She makes herself a useful pet to the Witch, and she curries favors where she can among the army. Opposable thumbs are relative rarities in Narnia, after all, especially ones that come with small, deft hands that can write, that can work locks, that can mend wounds and clothing alike. Susan learns little of magic but much of Narnia… and of how to cultivate allies.

To the Witch, Susan’s gentleness is a weakness. A sign that she is not a threat. To Maugrim, it is the fleeting memory of the Pack, of warmth and wagging tails. To Skarr the Minotaur, it is a healer’s touch, a gift all but beaten out of his people. To the snow leopards and other snarling, solitary cats, it is something to be ostentatiously ignored yet subtly mimicked. To the Black Dwarves, it is greeted with suspicion at first, until Susan proved that her gentleness went hand in hand with an iron will, proves by the forge-burns of her own that she acquired while treating others.’

In our world, we compare the comings and goings of winter to a lion. In Narnia, winter ends Gently.

When Aslan comes, the Witch tries to claim Edmund and Susan both. But the Deep Magic was already at work — a blameless one had sacrificed herself in the traitor’s stead — and Susan had made herself too useful to kill. When Jadis tries, belatedly, she finds herself facing a phalanx of her own wolves, snow leopards, Minotaurs and Black Dwarves. All around the garden, stone statues stir to life. Edmund stands between a lion and a Lion, ready to reclaim his sister. Lucy is in a tree, and soon roots strengthen and heave up from underground, shaking the very foundations of the Witch’s castle.

The Witch stands still, as if frozen… with indecision, perhaps, but more likely with her own magic turned back upon itself by a Deeper power. Her already pale face drains of all its color. Her arm falls stiffly to her side, her wand leeched of its power.

Peter steps forward. No snarling wolves rush to meet him. Susan walks calmly forward, her army at her back. With their embrace, spring bursts forth in glorious bloom.

There is no battle, only rejoicing — and a peace that thaws from cautious to lasting under the nurturing care of the four new monarchs. Spring reigns, long and lasting, spreading quickly to the four corners of Narnia.

A thousand years later, they still tell the stories: Edmund the Lion-Friend, Lucy the Tree-Waker, Peter the First King of Spring… and Susan the Gentle, High Queen of Narnia.

“There are 3 allergens thought to cause allergic reactions in pomegranates, these are called Pun g 1, Pun g 7 and Pun g 14. Pun g 14 is a chitinase protein. This is a plant derived enzyme made by plants naturally to act as a defence against fungal attacks. Chitinase is a protein associated with an allergy to latex.”

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward. 

Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me: 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”

And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”