i sthlammed my penisth in the car door

Their mother picked up after them. They were not required to take plates the kitchen or do the dishes or anything like that.

My mother, who would tell you she is for equality, came home one day, sighed at the mess of dirty dishes scattered about, and said, "Gayle, help me pick up."

"Those aren't my dishes," I said. "I picked up my dishes."

My mother sighed again. "Just help me pick up."

"No," I said again. "I didn't make that fucking mess."

She never approached my brothers and said, "Boys, in this house, you take your dishes to the kitchen." She did not tell our dad, "Hey, tell the boys they need to pick up after themselves."

It was, "Gayle, pick up the dishes."

And when I refused because it was not my fucking mess, I got lectured about being difficult.

See also: My brothers--in a classic dick-move of all siblings--figured out they could pop the lock on the bathroom door and throw it open, and I would freak out because I was in the shower and trying to get five fucking minutes of peace.

When I tell people this, they always, ALWAYS, assume I have sisters. They say shit like “oh I’d love to do that, but I have boys” and when I tell them I only have brothers, “oh you must have eaten a lot of burned dinners then!”

Like, no. To both of those statements. Sure we burned stuff when we were younger but we all learned to cook before 13, that was just the age where it became a scheduled chore. You know who did burn everything? My MOM. My Boomer dad did all the cooking because my mum didn’t want to and he was the one to help when we needed it, though my mum did help with prep/chopping things.

Fast forward to now, middle brother can make the best risotto I’ve ever had and my youngest brother is vegan and makes almost all his own meals because his partner isn’t and he doesn’t expect her to make two meals so he can eat.

The worst part of this social conditioning is how bullshit it is. I know this is not ingrained, I know people are teaching their sons to be assholes, and I look at my middle brother in his immaculate apartment with tasteful decor that he picked out himself and I look at my youngest brother who does all the clothes shopping for him and his partner because she struggles with it and it makes me want to just start biting people.

A lot of people know about the very first piece he did when he left the post which was the The Problem We All Live With which depicts Ruby Bridges walking to school under federal protection.

But I don’t think enough people know about Murder in Mississippi which depicts three real civil rights activists who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and sherriffs. The magazine ran the sketch instead of the finished piece because they felt it had a more striking statement to accompany the article. Norman Rockwell would finish that version after publication which is here

Rockwell’s legacy is sanitized because he decided to maintain his job at the Post for so long despite his frustrations with not being able to express himself. The civil rights movement was just his final straw to change what he could with the little time he had left. Look magazine received a lot of hate for Rockwell painting these as well.

Another favorite piece of mine is The Right to Know which depicts an integrated populace questioning their government. In 1968, the year of Vietnam and the year the Fair Housing Act only just got signed in months prior:

But I think it’s important to include the caption Rockwell originally wrote for the piece as well. I think it represents how a 74 year old Rockwell felt about the America he believed in and the people in it:

likely the most famous picture of a Thanksgiving dinner ever painted and you see it all the time.

What you may not know is its actual title

“Freedom From Want” it’s a part of a series of 4, including this now famous meme

“Freedom of Speech” These paintings were illustrations of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech where The President laid out a vision that would become what the Allies were fighting for in WWII universal human rights that became a part of the UN charter.

So this homey American Thanksgiving scene was also a bold statement that no one in the world should go hungry

A well known piece but one that resonated with me as a kid for showing that girls can fight (or fight back) and find joy in aggression, while also hinting that consequence exists for those who do so.

A girl unhappy with her role as babysitter, who isn’t naturally nurturing or well suited to taking care of children. This one resonated with me as a girl, and resonates with me as a woman who feels no natural inclination toward babies or mothering. I feel honored to have seen the original in person.

On a similar note to the previous one, a toy saleswoman who is obviously fed up dealing with children, rejecting the concept of an inborn affinity for caretaking.

This one from the 1960s exploring women’s changing role in society, quite literally contrasting one woman (and her daughter) looking back on a traditional model of femininity vs. a woman looking toward modernity. (As an aside, I personally love the fan interpretation that the two women are the same person, and the painting represents the choice between the traditional and expected life path, and something new and uncharted.)

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-denial that so many of us once learned to rely on.

so many of my siblings, especially those who are awaiting or beginning transition, step into transgender life as fragile, apathetic beings who have spent their lives being coerced, beaten, and tricked into winnowing themselves to nothing, doing the work of the murderers for them, because they have been taught to believe that trans people deserve to live suspended, half-dead lives as punishment for their abhorrence.

they do not. you do not.