I'm Glad... to be assigned a gender role of subservience...

Wow. Totally made me gag.


















If you'd like to read the whole misogynistic, heteronormative, patriarchal book cover to cover, go here. Published in 1970, Whitney Darrow, Jr.'s I'm Glad I'm a Boy! I'm Glad I'm a Girl! was 'normal'. Today we still aren't far enough away from these messages about 'appropriate' gender roles to make me comfortable.

This is what I spend my time fighting against. (But the book itself can be used as a great tool of subversion and teaching critical literacy.)

Making space for the truth of family diversity.

I just read a lovely story penned by Jennifer Finney Boylan in The New York Times titled 'Maddy' Just Might Work After All. An excerpt:

[M]y two children and my wife and I were sitting around the kitchen table, eating dinner. I was mid-transition. My older son, Zach, gave me a look.
“What,” I said. He was 7.
“We can’t keep calling you ‘Daddy,’ ” he said. “If you’re going to be a girl. It’s too weird.” ...
“Well,” I said to my sons. “My new name is Jenny. You could call me Jenny.”
Zach laughed derisively. “Jenny? That’s the name you’d give a lady mule.”
I tried not to be hurt. “O.K., fine. What do you want to call me?”...
“I know,” he said. “Let’s call you Maddy. That’s like, half Mommy, and half Daddy. And anyhow, I know a girl at school named Maddy. She’s pretty nice.”
His younger brother, Sean, who was 5, said, “Or Dommy.’
We all laughed. Even Sean. Dommy! What a dumb name for a transsexual parent!
After the hilarity died down, I nodded. “Maddy might work,” I said.

I spend a lot of time with kids, and one thing I am frequently reminded of is the beautiful diversity of who makes up our families and the strength that we draw from those foundations.

A year or more ago I saw a wonderful traveling exhibit called Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People and their Families. (On a side note, the exhibit was sponsored by a church - the Berry United Methodist Church in Chicago, a reconciling congregation and proud member and supporter of the Reconciling Ministries Network. Not all churches are exclusionary of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters.) The exhibit was put out by the great folks at Family Diversity Projects who currently have six traveling shows, including their newest project Pioneering Voices: Portraits of Transgender People. Family Diversity Projects works to use the images and stories of real families to create exhibitions that show and advocate for the true diversity of families, along lines of race, sexuality, gender identity, disability, mental illness, family composition, and so forth.

At the end of the day, it is truly heartening for me to see more and more voices speaking out in love of the community we can build in our differences.

Meatless Monday!

I was just reading about the Meatless Monday Campaign, a non-profit organization working in association with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and with the support of 28 other public health schools and all sorts of knowledgeable folk (including Michael Pollan).

Meatless Monday is a national public health campaign to help prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer -- four of the leading causes of death in America. A simple way to prevent these diseases is to eat a diet lower in saturated fat, found mainly in meat and high-fat dairy products. If Americans cut out meat and high-fat dairy just one day a week, they would meet the government's dietary guidelines.

Our goal -- consistent with recommendations made by the US Dept. of Health and Human Services, the US Dept. of Agriculture, and the American Heart Association -- is to help Americans reduce consumption of saturated fat 15% by 2010. That works out to eliminating saturated fat one day a week.

The intent of Meatless Monday is not to turn folks vegetarian (though that's not necessarily a bad choice either), but to support Americans' efforts to live and eat healthier. The website offers all sorts of health research, vegetarian recipes (as suggestions for yummy, no-meat meals), info on CSAs and organic foods, and a weekly digest of news snippets about health and food issues.

Here's their newest offering, a video called "Meatless Monday - Inspiring a Movement":

Not Yet Rain

If you've got half an hour, watch Not Yet Rain, a short film by Lisa Russell, produced in association with Ipas. (Yes, you can watch it online.)

In their own words:

[The film] explores abortion in Ethiopia through the voices of women who have faced the challenge of finding safe care. Through their stories, we see the important role that safe abortion care plays in the overall health of women and their families.

Every year, millions of women around the world risk their lives to end unintended pregnancies. While a law enacted in 2006 marked great progress toward reproductive freedom in Ethiopia, Not Yet Rain shows that changing the law is just the first step; much more needs to be done as women continue to die from unsafe abortions. Training for health workers and increased availability of care could save the lives of women in Ethiopia and around the world.