JOUR 4250

The behavior of people is the product of the signals provided to them by the society they develop in. Garbage in, garbage out. The ideas and lessons that we learn as children affect the people that we become for the rest of our lives. In recent years, modern society has devoted much attention and thought to the ways we socialize girls to become better women. Teaching them to be confident, to strive towards their own success, to not define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. Not as much attention is paid to how to raise boys to become better men, and this matters because the modes of masculinity that we learn otherwise do real damage to our development. The traditional mode of masculinity we learn is to seal ourselves off from others; that to come to people about our problems is to become like women, and therefore to become lesser than "real men". That being a "real man" means not showing emotions other than anger, to impose your will upon others, mak...

In the 21st century United States, most forms of identity have become bound up in an ongoing polarization that started in the realm of electoral politics but has spread out into almost all aspects of society. Identities that already carried a political meaning; race, gender, sexual orientation, became more rigid as groups that historically did not have the clout to make their demands heard got it, and historically dominant groups responded negatively to having to listen. At the same time, identities that hadn't carried that same weight started to gain it; most notably the shift of college-educated white people into the liberal bloc. But, one type of identity has managed to avoid being bound up in that polarization; disability remains, somehow, independent of other identities. The reason why seems obvious when you write it out; ability changes over time. Unlike race, gender or sexual orientation, it is possible, even likely, that you can be born able and become disabled later in l...

When my brother came out as, well, my brother, I didn't find out from him. Instead, I found out from my mother. He had come out to the parents first, and it didn't go very well then, especially with her. I had come home from my first semester of my freshman year, and one day she's venting to me about my brother, and him having come out to her is just kind of casually thrown into it. He and I never had a big discussion about it, he just sort of gradually realized that I knew. He's told me that he never thought I wouldn't take it well, but that he was so focused on how to come out to the parents that the idea of coming out to me just hadn't crossed his mind. Over the past few years, he's learned that he can trust me to not freak out about it. I had no real idea what being trans meant at the time, but I could tell that this mattered to him, and how the parents had reacted to it was causing him real distress. So I was willing to listen, and to learn. And to be...