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foolish_m0rtalVagina Schmagina. Women Are The Real Victims Of This ‘Culture War’ is a great article detailing some of the truly appalling laws against women that various states in the United States of America have proposed this year. It details some of the bills from Oklahoma, Nebraska, and even my current home state Virginia that would reduce a woman's right to claim her body as her own and make her own decisions.
When I was hired by Fidelity Investments as a software developer, they gave me three locations I could work: Texas, North Carolina, and New England. I chose New England without even stopping to draw breath, and my parents never understood why. North Carolina is much closer to Virginia, it has similar weather, good infrastructure, cheap housing, and I would be living in the Research Triangle, an area of North Carolina comprised of three good universities and a host of high tech companies.
What I couldn't make them understand was that the Research Triangle was just that. A triangle. A bubble. A push from corporations have made states like Washington change its laws on equal marriage, so why not North Carolina? Why not Virginia with its posh and liberal-minded northern Virginia (which calls itself Nova and thinks of itself as a completely different state)? Because the people in those areas live in a bubble, very similar to the bubble college students live in. We are surrounded by institutions and people that are full of new ideas and open minds, and we begin to think that the entire state is like this, that we will have this environment wherever we go. I think a lot of that is due to high school. Many of us who feel left out or alone in high school work through it with the hope that leaving will take us to a better place. But we need to understand that laws of the state affect us too, that we aren't untouchable within the bubble.
Boston was the first city I really fell in love with. It is full of college students and young working professionals, and the city is very vibrant and interesting. Boston was the first city I came out to. It was my second week living there, a week into my internship, and I had secretly looked up all the dates for queer community pride events for the summer. I was so nervous at my first event that I thought I was going to be ill. For the first time in my life, I saw pride events in a city, in huge public places where everyone came to show support and enjoy the festivities, not just people within a college campus. I like to say that my first walking tour of Boston was when I marched in their pride parade and saw the entire city, saw people lining the streets to wave and customers in the windows of shops standing up to clap and hold up posters.
That week, I received a company email to announce the pride month and solicit people to march in the parade and represent the company. They had a gay history quiz that employees could participate in for a raffle and a permanent queer community group that met every month. That was the moment I decided that I would be proud to work for this company. That's the reason I accepted their job offer on the spot.
My parents aren't quite pleased with my decisions. They urge me to apply to other jobs and tell me that New England is expensive and distant and cold. They tell me I'll hate it and come running back eventually. But living in a state that just passed a bill that would require a woman to have an ultrasound (the original was a transvaginal, but Democrats were able to squeeze it to an abdominal) before she could have an abortion, an ultrasound that is not medically necessary and would probably come out of the woman's own expense. Well that scares me, especially because it only takes one bill to set precedent as an excuse for other states to create similar bills. We've seen this before with Virginia's old forced sterilisation bill in 1927 and the waterfall effect it had on other states. I will endure a lot of things to live under laws that I accept and that accept me.
Speaking of accepting me, Virginia's tagline is wholly fictitious.
YES, if you are heteronormative lovers that plan on getting married and popping out children. Virginia is so painfully behind on equal marriage laws. Four years ago, I attended the Equality Virginia conference when it was held in Charlottesville, VA. Equality Virginia is a statewide non-partisan coalition for outreach and education for queer rights in Virginia and also seeks to bring together LGBT members and their allies within the state. Their website hasn't updated for a year, and the only relevant thing I can find is UVa's LGBT Resource Centre listed under Central Virginia resources in their directory. Admittedly, the conference did have some very cool workshops, and I got to meet Virginia's resident badass Colonel Leonard, a military-political badass who had retired, come out of the closet, and then worked tirelessly for years on a DADT repeal. But Equality Virginia hasn't come back. I still get emails from them, most of which seem to be invites to fundraising dinners. Maybe not so much for a college student. But where is all this money going? How can we measure the change we're having? And do you think North Carolina will be any better?
I believe that corporations and businesses will be the main players in effecting change in the future. Many Washington-based companies such as Starbucks, Niken, and Amazon came together in support of marriage equality and helped push the bill to success. Microsoft said it was losing a lot of smart people who didn't want to move to Washington because their partners were not legally recognised, and Microsoft could not give them all the same benefits. (We seem to have a large presence in the code monkey community. Or maybe we're just more out about it.) Now look at all the corporations and high tech companies that Virginia and North Carolina often boast of. Why are these states so far behind? Why aren't these companies also demanding changes to unfair laws that force them to deny all of their employees equal rights?
So until I can be guaranteed that change is happening, I will move away as far as I can and as fast as I can to make sure these laws don't touch me. I am not moving to Texas or North Carolina. I am moving to states that will let me make my own decisions about my body and let me be with who I want. I will even move out of the country if it comes to that. Because being cold and distant and a little more poor is nothing compared to feeling like you belong, that you are a person, and maybe that's all high schoolers ever want.
When I was hired by Fidelity Investments as a software developer, they gave me three locations I could work: Texas, North Carolina, and New England. I chose New England without even stopping to draw breath, and my parents never understood why. North Carolina is much closer to Virginia, it has similar weather, good infrastructure, cheap housing, and I would be living in the Research Triangle, an area of North Carolina comprised of three good universities and a host of high tech companies.
What I couldn't make them understand was that the Research Triangle was just that. A triangle. A bubble. A push from corporations have made states like Washington change its laws on equal marriage, so why not North Carolina? Why not Virginia with its posh and liberal-minded northern Virginia (which calls itself Nova and thinks of itself as a completely different state)? Because the people in those areas live in a bubble, very similar to the bubble college students live in. We are surrounded by institutions and people that are full of new ideas and open minds, and we begin to think that the entire state is like this, that we will have this environment wherever we go. I think a lot of that is due to high school. Many of us who feel left out or alone in high school work through it with the hope that leaving will take us to a better place. But we need to understand that laws of the state affect us too, that we aren't untouchable within the bubble.
Boston was the first city I really fell in love with. It is full of college students and young working professionals, and the city is very vibrant and interesting. Boston was the first city I came out to. It was my second week living there, a week into my internship, and I had secretly looked up all the dates for queer community pride events for the summer. I was so nervous at my first event that I thought I was going to be ill. For the first time in my life, I saw pride events in a city, in huge public places where everyone came to show support and enjoy the festivities, not just people within a college campus. I like to say that my first walking tour of Boston was when I marched in their pride parade and saw the entire city, saw people lining the streets to wave and customers in the windows of shops standing up to clap and hold up posters.
That week, I received a company email to announce the pride month and solicit people to march in the parade and represent the company. They had a gay history quiz that employees could participate in for a raffle and a permanent queer community group that met every month. That was the moment I decided that I would be proud to work for this company. That's the reason I accepted their job offer on the spot.
My parents aren't quite pleased with my decisions. They urge me to apply to other jobs and tell me that New England is expensive and distant and cold. They tell me I'll hate it and come running back eventually. But living in a state that just passed a bill that would require a woman to have an ultrasound (the original was a transvaginal, but Democrats were able to squeeze it to an abdominal) before she could have an abortion, an ultrasound that is not medically necessary and would probably come out of the woman's own expense. Well that scares me, especially because it only takes one bill to set precedent as an excuse for other states to create similar bills. We've seen this before with Virginia's old forced sterilisation bill in 1927 and the waterfall effect it had on other states. I will endure a lot of things to live under laws that I accept and that accept me.
Speaking of accepting me, Virginia's tagline is wholly fictitious.
YES, if you are heteronormative lovers that plan on getting married and popping out children. Virginia is so painfully behind on equal marriage laws. Four years ago, I attended the Equality Virginia conference when it was held in Charlottesville, VA. Equality Virginia is a statewide non-partisan coalition for outreach and education for queer rights in Virginia and also seeks to bring together LGBT members and their allies within the state. Their website hasn't updated for a year, and the only relevant thing I can find is UVa's LGBT Resource Centre listed under Central Virginia resources in their directory. Admittedly, the conference did have some very cool workshops, and I got to meet Virginia's resident badass Colonel Leonard, a military-political badass who had retired, come out of the closet, and then worked tirelessly for years on a DADT repeal. But Equality Virginia hasn't come back. I still get emails from them, most of which seem to be invites to fundraising dinners. Maybe not so much for a college student. But where is all this money going? How can we measure the change we're having? And do you think North Carolina will be any better?
I believe that corporations and businesses will be the main players in effecting change in the future. Many Washington-based companies such as Starbucks, Niken, and Amazon came together in support of marriage equality and helped push the bill to success. Microsoft said it was losing a lot of smart people who didn't want to move to Washington because their partners were not legally recognised, and Microsoft could not give them all the same benefits. (We seem to have a large presence in the code monkey community. Or maybe we're just more out about it.) Now look at all the corporations and high tech companies that Virginia and North Carolina often boast of. Why are these states so far behind? Why aren't these companies also demanding changes to unfair laws that force them to deny all of their employees equal rights?
So until I can be guaranteed that change is happening, I will move away as far as I can and as fast as I can to make sure these laws don't touch me. I am not moving to Texas or North Carolina. I am moving to states that will let me make my own decisions about my body and let me be with who I want. I will even move out of the country if it comes to that. Because being cold and distant and a little more poor is nothing compared to feeling like you belong, that you are a person, and maybe that's all high schoolers ever want.
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Date: 2012-03-13 03:43 pm (UTC)I had no idea that ultrasound bill passed. I thought it had died after all that transvaginal controversy, but apparently not. Jeez. I wonder how many people here know that it actually went through in a slightly altered form, because I certainly didn't. Thanks for the heads-up.