Monthly Archives: May 2023

Erring on the Side of Inclusivity

Cultural Stereotypes, human rights, thinking out loud

I was able to spend time with my friend Jen Orr recently and enjoyed talking with her and her husband about books and life and the world in general. She has a new book out–We’re Gonna Keep on Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom–that will probably be banned in Florida so that means we must all read it. I suspect her and coauthor Matthew Kay’s ideas for leading racism discussions will be beneficial for all of us.

Jen has been my blogging inspiration and cheerleader. I have been working on this blog post related to transgender rights since I saw her and am determined to press publish today. Jen, this one’s for you:

When it comes to transgender issues, we live in a noisy, messy world where activists lob social media grenades at each other and finding unsensationalized reporting is challenging. I do understand that cis women of a certain age struggle with opening their hard-won spaces to trans women, especially in sports. I get it: I was 10 when Title IX, banning discrimination in sports, was passed. While not an athlete myself (I earned my varsity letter for marching band), I loved cheering on my girl friends as they raced around the track or scored a goal on the hockey field. We thought we had a clear understanding of the differences between boys and girls in my rural conservative, evangelical community where the slide decks for our segregated sex-ed classes were edited so severely that we were left to imagine how it all worked until we either got married or, in my case, could get our hands on The Joy of Sex or the Kama Sutra, both of which I purchased at Rizzoli’s in Merchant Square in Williamsburg after arriving at William and Mary in 1980.

But despite understanding the concerns around sports, if, in your zeal to take a stand, you attack young people who are discovering identities beyond the baked-in binary biases that controlled our lives, you need to spend some time learning and reflecting. I’m looking at you, Caitlyn Jenner. Jenner, arguably the most famous trans woman in the world, is anti-transgender when it comes to sports, suggesting that it is clear that these athletes have a built in advantage and claiming that transgender athletes are the pawns of radical activists, seemingly ignoring her own use of them as means to her ends. Recently, she turned her ire on a high school junior. We are all on journeys, informed by our biases and life experiences, and Jenner is welcome to share her ideas on this topic, of which as she points out, she has some knowledge. But, making a young woman feel less, and, even worse, opening her to the horrors of the social media crowd, is simply wrong.

What I have learned as part of my own reflections is that, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the jury on the supposed advantage of men over women is very much still out in terms of research, especially related to elite athletes. Yet, various governing bodies from state legislatures to international committees are rushing to severely limit or outright ban transgender athletes from competition. The federal government is updating Title IX in support of transgender inclusion in sports while allowing some wiggle room for schools to discriminate when appropriate, particularly if fairness is at stake.

The goal, then, is a balance between fairness and inclusivity, with the current trend of banning athletes described as supporting fairness as that concept aligns with what we’ve always been told about men and women. But, until there is some definitive research that supports these baked-in biases, I would lean towards inclusivity. After all, in the areas where trans athletes have competed, they have notably not swept the field. And, if all we do is create bans, we lose the opportunity to expand the research that will help support informed decisions. The New York Times, in an article related to swimming’s 2022 transgender ban that occured after a trans swimmer won one race (while losing several others in the same meet, something that was not part of the headlines), discusses the issues related to finding this balance, concluding that it will be impossible to make everyone happy. Compromise rarely does, in my experience, that’s what makes it a compromise.

Perhaps Jen and Matthew might consider a follow up volume that explores how to have meaningful discussion around gender in the elementary classroom. I know we grownups could certainly use it!

Ahead of Their Time

copyright, music

I recently read Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh’s memoir of his career as the base player for this legendary band. It was a fun if sobering romp through the 1960s and beyond. Lesh catalogs the highs of a joyous, free spirited time, and the lows as he watches friends and fellow musicians die before their time, ravaged by drugs. If you are a fan or just want to learn more how this band became legend, it’s worth a read.

But, I’m writing about Lesh today because before I passed the book on to a friend–she is 30 years younger than I am but a stalwart Dead fan–I grabbed the one quote that I noted as I read. It concerned the Dead’s willingness to let their fans tape the show and share those tapes with others. The band not only tolerated it, but eventually let a few of the “tapers” plug into a second sound board. Famous for never repeating the same show twice, the band seemed unconcerned, and Lesh remembers that Jerry said, “As soon as we play it, we’re done with it. Let ’em have it” (p. 174). That’s not completely true, Lesh writes, as the band itself taped their shows for their own review and some of those tapes made it into the trading streama as well.

Lesh muses about the potential impact of those networks: “It’s interesting to speculate about the influence of these trader networks on the programmers who designed such file-sharing peer-to-peer software as Napster, Lime Wire, or Kazaa–software that does the same thing digitally.” I wonder how this sharing culture also influenced new ways of thinking about copyright that led, eventually, to the Creative Commons movement that gets beyond corporate control and back to grassroots connections that seemed at the heart of ideas about the early Internet.

The Internet Archive has become the online library of not just Grateful Dead shows, but also lots of other live music from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones to New Riders of the Purple Sage. The archive describes the bands who allow their live music to be shared via the platform as trade-friendly. The webpage defining this concept includes a quote from Lesh’s memoir: “On balance, allowing taping was maybe the smartest business move we ever made” (p. 266).

I did not have the opportunity to hear the Grateful Dead while I was at William and Mary as I believe the 1978 show, which coincided with Parents’ Weekend, may have been their last, just a couple years before I arrived. Fortunately, I can listen to those shows and lots and lots and lots of others as part of the Grateful Dead collection at the archive. As the band sings in Franklin’s Tower: If you get confused, just listen to the music play.

Old School Tech

books, community, Libraries,

I use LibraryThing to track my reading and connect with a community of readers. I joined soon after it began in late 2005. The site has grown and changed with the times–including recently adding AI search–but at its base, it uses a wiki, built on MediaWiki software (think Wikipedia), for community collaboration. Groups use it to track members as well as communal reading. And, I was reminded recently by a friend, individual users are welcome to create pages.

Turns out I had done so in 2010…and, as with many of those experiments, I wrote some text as proof of concept and then never returned. I didn’t have a purpose in mind.

Today, however, I went back and considered ways I might incorporate those wiki pages into my reading life. I started by creating a page where I could track the various series I read. Like many avid readers, I have started a variety of series, mostly mysteries, but then lost track of them, perhaps losing interest in the character or just forgetting about them as time goes on. There are a few that I do keep up with, something that is a bit easier to do by following authors and getting alerts when new books are coming. I have an analog day book where I have listed the various series but, in an effort to downsize generally, I’m moving the list to the wiki. I track my books on LT, and they have pages for the series that show which ones you have read. I was able to copy and paste those lists into the wiki page for easy editing. It also helps that I know html and wiki syntax.

I have an affinity for wikis, I think, because I was there when they started and have grown up with them, hosting a few on my own server, playing with early ones like pbwiki and wikispaces, watching Wikipedia become an international collaborative community. They can seem clunky with their old school code, but I think the stripped down format helps us focus on the important part: creating and collaborating largely through text. Again, that may seem old-fashioned in a world of multimedia, but at its heart, multimedia is text-based. Someone writes those words that are spoken, and wikis allow us to grapple with how best to put them together to express our communal knowledge and ideas.

Yes, And

books, Meditation, Sharon Salzberg, , ,

I am reading a wide variety of spiritual literature including Yes, And…Daily Meditations, a collection of Richard Rohr’s writings and Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom by Sharon Salzberg. Rohr is a Franciscan priest; Salzberg is a Buddhist meditation teacher. Both of them play with the idea of “yes, and” as a spiritual practice.

Rohr’s idea of “Yes, And…” is expressed in this essay from 2015:

Jesus told his Jewish followers to be faithful to their own tradition. He did this by strongly distinguishing between essentials and non-essentials, and then pushed it even further. The only absolute essential is union with God. We see this creative tension throughout Matthew’s Gospel, but perhaps no place more clearly than in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Then he goes on with six repetitions of the same phrase: “You have heard it said . . . but I say. . . .”  I call this the “yes/and” approach: yes the law, and there is something more, which is “the real and deep purpose of that very law.” For both Jesus and Paul law is never an end in itself. (This is Paul’s primary point in both Romans and Galatians! How could we miss that?)

If you read to the end of the essay, you will get a real flavor of Richard Rohr, a compelling spiritual thinker and writer I have only come to know this year.*

That’s what the Spirit teaches you to do, too: read the same scriptures, but now with a deeper understanding of their revolutionary direction—“that all may be one, you in me and I in you” (John 17:21). Today we are recognizing that that many Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sufis, and Native religions seem to live this divine unity much better than many who call themselves Christians. This embarrassing and obvious truth can only be denied by people afflicted with deliberate blindness.

In the introduction to the book of meditations, he continues this idea of being part of the past but always moving forward: the yes connects Rohr to “the entire force field of the Holy Spirit” while the and is his addition to that field, “that bit of the Great Truth of the Gospel to which we each have our own access.” Rohr believes others can also have an and when it comes to spiritual truths, and I think that gets him in trouble with the authorities now and then.

In her most recent book, Real Life, Salzberg suggests “yes, and” as a way into gratitude practice that might help us see it as more authentic, especially on those days when we aren’t feeling particularly grateful for anything. Forcing feelings we don’t have can be problematic. Salzberg offers adopting the “yes, and” approach from improv theater as a way to deal with the often ambivalent, contradictory places we find ourselves in life. In improv, “yes, and” means that the actor must accept the scenario as given and then move forward. You don’t have to agree, you don’t have to like it, but you must accept it and, only then, can you move on.

*Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987. I recently subscribed to the daily meditations and was pleasantly surprised to see Rohr quoting extensively from Buddhist teacher angel Kyodo williams who I know through my meditation practice.