Who Owns Your Gender Identity?

            The Serge Gainsbourg song that I’m memorizing is so difficult because it’s more like prose than a simple song. Plus I still can’t anticipate where the singing comes in after each instrumental space.

            It was snowing during song practice on Monday and I was thinking that I might have to put my winter boots on for my ride downtown. But the dusting melted on the roads and so I figured it would be okay to just wear my Blundies. The only part of my trip that was slightly precarious was traversing the block of Maple Grove Avenue from O’Hara to Brock because it looked a little more slippery there.

            I left a little later because I knew there would be another class ahead of ours but I arrived just as the Biology class was getting out seven minutes early. I had time to arrange the tables a little better than last time and got three rows set up. I curved two tables out at the right side of the front row so they faced the podium better. Professor Weisman thought that was a good idea.

            In this class we looked at Shelley’s pastoral elegy to Keats, the poem “Adonais”.

            The pastoral is traditionally a harmonious space of beautiful nature with internal harmony. The pastoral was later seen in pejorative terms as a status quo of the imagination.

            With “Adonais” Shelley draws on many motifs he’d been exploring throughout his life.

            An elegy is an articulation of grief that results in an ultimate consolation involving some principle of permanence. That principle could be religious or in the cyclical regeneration of nature.

             The most famous pastoral elegy is the Christian elegy “Lycidas” of 1637 by Milton. Its famous consolation ending, spoken by the shepherd reads, "Tomorrow to fresh wood and pastures new". There are allusions to "Lycidas" throughout "Adonais".

            Shelley uses poetry to try to grasp illusive concepts.

            The myth was that Keats died of a bad review but he died of tuberculosis and Shelley knew this but he appropriated the hyperbole of the myth.

            In a pastoral elegy the tradition is to describe a coffin decked with flowers.

            “Adonais" is the extreme end of Shelley's self-reflexivity. He is writing about death; he recognizes that he is writing about death; and he recognizes that he is writing about writing about death.

            “Adonais" is a composite of the Greek god Adonis and the Hebrew name for god, Adonai. In a pastoral elegy it is common for the dead person to be given a pastoral name.

            The tears in the poem are ineffectual.

            Keats died unrecognized and in poverty at the age of 25.

            Urania, the mother of muses is addressed.

            “Pierced by the shaft which flies in the darkness" refers to the anonymous review that dismissed Keats’s work.

            In calling for the most musical of mourners to weep he is calling for artifice. Professor Weisman seems to think he is talking to artists but it seems he is addressing only Urania.

            The poem is written in Spenserian stanzas. Spencer wrote “The Faerie Queen”.

            Samuel Johnson said of “Lycidas”: "Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief. I commented that is the reason it’s being written: to make grief small.

            The first line, “I weep for Adonais – he is dead!” is atypical of a pastoral elegy because it is unsanitized and not pretty.

            The consolation in this poem begins with stanza 39 but it confirms the inefficacy of consolation. He undermines consolation in this anti-elegy.

            I told the professor that Mick Jagger had read stanza 39 and 42 at the memorial for Brian Jones, but she corrected me that it had been stanzas 39 and 52. The professor had thought that Brian Jones had been the drummer for the Stones. I corrected her that he’d actually been the guitarist but that he was a multi-instrumentalist who was also experimenting with sitar. She asked, “Are you sure?” I answered, “Absolutely!” She said, “Okay.”

            I didn’t stop at the supermarket on the way home because Nick Cushing was coming into town and he’d agreed to let me take him to lunch. When I got home there was a message that he was around and seconds later there was a call from him. He told me that he’d already had lunch though, so he just came up to visit. He’d found me a memory card for my Sony camera that used a small memory card inside of an adaptor instead of the more expensive Sony card. I tried it out in my camera and it worked, I took a few photos, then I tried fitting it into the universal memory card reader and that worked as well. I was able to upload the photos to my computer with no problem. I copied my download of the 22^nd season of South Park onto a flash drive for Nick.

            Somehow our conversation drifted to the tech gender gap, which he insisted was based on biology rather than societal conditioning. I said that women often choose careers outside of tech because of societal expectations. When I brought up the gender wage gap his voice got louder as he declared it a myth and accused me of buying into a formulaic liberal argument. But even among those women that have higher marks than men in math and science, they tend not to go into technological careers. When gender is hidden studies show that code designed by women is accepted more than that designed by men but when the gender is known, code by men is favoured. In some parts of eastern Asia female students make up 50% of computer science graduates.

            Nick argued that statistics about the pay gap between men and women don’t take into account differences of hours worked and men tend to work longer hours. Almost every statistic I found definitely takes that into account. Obviously equal pay for equal work is the law in Canada and most developed countries. But a lot of places of employment, especially those that aren’t unionized, pay wages on an individual basis according to what they think an employee is worth and what they think they can get away with paying them. I've had jobs where I was discouraged from telling my colleagues the amount on my paycheque. High achieving men are called back by companies twice as much as equally high achieving women. It’s just a statistical fact that for what is considered exactly equal work women get paid two cents less an hour. It adds up. But women are forced into jobs that are not equal and so the pay gap is actually much higher.

            Then Nick started shouting even louder and declared that it’s wrong thinking to accept the claim by someone born with a penis that she is a woman.

First of all, for more than 99% of the people you will ever meet, you will never see their genitalia.  Probably at least 1% of the people you’ve seen you could not tell their gender and have even been mistaken in assessing their gender. It’s a fact that some people are born with ambiguous genitalia but that is really of little concern to most people since most people have no real reason to care whether someone is a woman or a man unless you are a physician or specialist treating them for something that relates to their physiological sexuality. Even if there were nothing but two cut and dried, easy to distinguish sexes in our world, how most of us interact with each other is a communication between identities. When you meet me you may decide that I am a man because of associations you’ve accumulated in your life, but you may meet a woman who, without surgery, looks more like a man than I do. Should people walk around with gender symbols sewed to their clothing like Jews wearing stars of David because you want people’s identities to be clearly defined for your own peace of mind? Or do you think that it's a matter of appearance and if someone looks like a man or looks like a woman they should be called a man or a woman? What if a female with no breasts and whiskers identifies as a woman" What if a male that looks better in a dress than any girlfriend you’ve ever had identifies as a man? Should it be up to you to decide what someone else’s identity is, or is identity what I tell you about myself? If someone calls me Chris that is not who I am. My name is Christian. I tell people about myself and that's how they know. You can also tell me what you’ve observed about me and I can learn about myself that way but chances are you will never be able to tell me that I should have a different name. Gender is even more personal than a name. Does your gender belong to me or to you or to society? Who gets to name something so personal as your own gender? There could be factors in the brain that determine how we identify in terms of gender. Even if someone has female genitalia and looks conventionally like a woman they may identify as a man The brain is a physical organ, so someone's gender could be a physical reality beyond what someone for whom it's none of their business observes.

            When Nick was leaving I walked him downstairs. Instead of saying goodbye he declared, “Feminism is cancer!” and stormed away.

            I had a late lunch of cheese and trisquits and took a siesta.

            I typed my lecture notes from earlier that day.

            I had an egg with toast and a beer for dinner and watched two episodes of the Big Bang Theory.

            Spoiler alert!

            In the first story Penny and Leonard throw a Halloween party. Earlier that day Howard shows up for work dressed as Sheldon. At first Sheldon thinks that suddenly Howard is being intelligent and sensible until he is told that he is being mocked and everyone is laughing. Amy goes to talk with Bernadette about it but Bernadette argues that it’s funny and besides, Sheldon is always insulting Howard. So Amy comes to the Halloween party dressed as Bernadette and imitates her high voice quite well. Bernadette is offended. The next day Sheldon apologizes to her.

            In the second story the friends all help Penny and Howard set up a playhouse in their back yard. Bernadette is so stressed that she begins to hide there.

            Meanwhile Leonard has been appointed to allocate some funds to a deserving project and so suddenly his colleagues and friends are on his back about funding their projects. He takes his appointment very seriously and is being very firm about turning down proposals. Penny is finding this take charge attitude very sexy until Leonard narrows the proposals down to three and becomes frustrated with indecision. Penny begins hanging out in the playhouse with Bernadette. Amy senses they are doing something without her and wants to join the secret clubhouse. Meanwhile Howard knows that Bernadette is hiding but he doesn’t say anything because he knows she needs a break.

            Leonard finally decides to spend the allocation on a special laser for his own lab. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with it but he’s excited that he has a laser.