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Interesting Reading


Percy

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Passion is everything, eh? Any topic is interesting when discussed by someone who is passionate about it. Those who tend to drone can be helped by an adroit interviewer and an editor with a light touch, but for the most part the best material an expert has to offer is down in, down in their words, way inside. The best stuff isn’t a quip or snippet or bite of sound. You’ve got to let them get there, talk on, and be willing to follow them to that Eureka moment when you think, “yeah, I get it; I understand why they are so passionate about this.”

 

This is what I like about Specimen magazine. Even when the person being interviewed works in an area that doesn’t initially appeal, there’s something ultimately fascinating about their work. By the end of the interview, I always understand what drew them to their area of expertise, and my world becomes just a little bit larger.

 

One of the most interesting conversations in the last issue was with Michael Oborne, a retired director of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This inter-governmental organization functions somewhat like a think tank. Governments, or government agencies, call on it for analysis that helps them develop their policies on current and developing issues – anything from economic productivity to aging society demographics, healthcare policy, agriculture, etc. The OECD focus is on foresight. They scope problems and map possible futures. What is the future going to look like? What is trending, what can be expected, how can society be prepared, how do these different issues interconnect?

 

Oborne’s conversation was broad ranging. (I will admit I had to force myself to keep reading past his thinly veiled self-congratulatory tone when he recited all his accomplishments.) He and the interviewer covered ground from the role and influence of NGOs to interconnectivity of individuals via blogs and social media to world population levels. He even dropped in an aside on gender.

 

“And even, in the past 15 years, the question, what is gender?

In the OECD, we worked with agencies in governments—not many but

a few—that had six different gender definitions and

there were combinations of gender. At the same time, the idea that

gender was a permanent, at-birth definition,

has eroded…This is quite new, in social terms.”

 

It was just a passing reference. The conversation wasn’t about gender. He was using this to illustrate a larger concept of how the socio-economic environment changes whether society (U.S./western societies primarily) is evolving toward more government or less. I think the fact that it was an aside is what most caught my attention. In my world, I encounter people who talk about gender in this way all the time but they are in the business of gender fluidity. They are transgendered or gender fluid themselves or they work with that population. It’s rare to hear the topic introduced so matter-of-factly and so accurately by someone who doesn’t move in that world.

 

I did feel something when I read that but it’s hard for me to find words to describe the feelings. I guess a sort of contentment, a satisfaction perhaps, that there is a growing awareness that not everyone experiences gender as binary or static. When I started transitioning that was a new concept to introduce to anyone, certainly everyone I knew was hearing it from me for the first time. Now there’s a whole language evolving around gender. Society and society’s institutions are incorporating that language and the reality it describes. Incorporating. Making corporeal? Gender is getting a new body within which to work.

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I think everyone is still getting their feet wet. I have a friend who transistion and still has to deal with people calling her, he. It is usually hard enough trying to find out where you are on the scale of straight, bi, or gay. When you add in gender identity, even among the gay and bi it isn't always understood. I always am grateful for the looks given into this added issue. To me Tammy is Tammy, but I know it isn't that simple.

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I always feel a profound sense of gratitude when someone outside the trans community demonstrates the capacity (or even just the willingness) to understand. For most people, their gender identity is so ingrained that questioning it seems absurd. I am helplessly effeminate and still quite obviously female even when dressed like a guy. When I came out as trans to a new friend recently, he gave me this perplexed, wall-eyed stare and asked, "So do you have, like, balls too?" :)

 

We get very little understanding in the real world, so even brief glimpses of acceptance such as this are nice. Thank you for posting.

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