If You Want to be Heard

You have to speak. No one can hear you if you don’t or won’t say the words, do the thing, make your presence felt.

I follow a lot of blogs because I find what they have to say is interesting. And, being a compulsive creature of a clean nature (that’s bs, by the way), I check up on them even if I don’t see a post for a while.

Gone. Disappeared into the ether. More silent than night.

Why? Was it so hard to say your piece?

After a few moments (and doing other things, when it frees the mind to do such fossicking), I discovered a pattern.

People let it all out. Once. Sometimes twice. And that’s all there is, all she wrote, all that’s necessary.

It’s not.

One post the other day talked about where the bullying mind-set came from, why people do it (can’t find it now, unfortunately).

We know where it came from. It came from the silence of the parents when the grandparents said things that made the ‘boy child’ special. More special than the girls. Treated differently. Better. They get more. All the girl children see this, absorb it, take it into their reality. It becomes.

That silence is a lie. It has to stop. You have to stop it. Every single person. When you hear someone say something like ‘what a special boy,’ or ‘he’s special because he’s the only boy,’ or ‘only boys can do that,’ you need to step in to change that scenario.

There is no difference between special when it comes to gender (lots of other things too, but we’re talking about one thing at a time, okay). You can say ‘Men have more muscle mass so they can do this or that or the other better than a woman.’ If that statement were true for every single male, maybe you could say it. You can’t. I can’t. No one can. Some men can lift a lot of weight, but many, many more can’t. Some women can lift a lot of weight (I used to throw hundreds of 70kg bags of wheat from the ground up onto the back of a truck in a few hours), and some can’t.

Some men can run faster than some women. Not all. Some women can run faster than some men. Not all.

Are you getting some of the point?

A man isn’t more intelligent than a woman. A woman isn’t more bitchy than a man.

It’s all a made-up paradigm that needs to change, and the only way to make that change happen is to do it yourself. One word at a time. One ear at a time. One interruption at a time.

I don’t care if you settle into a routine where ‘he does, she does’ because that’s what you’ve chosen. I’ve done it, I do it, it makes life easier. I do this, he does that. We’ve come to an agreed arrangement (pity he can’t cook better than me, though).

But there are too many times I’ve been dismissed, shat on and disregarded simply for being ‘not male’ and therefore, not good enough, not smart enough, not [you see it, don’t you? The pattern?].

I still hear people say it (Christmas seems to bring it out). They say ‘I have to get a special present for him; he’s the boy; he’s special.’ And when I ask ‘Why is he more special than her/the girls?’ I get this funny look, like I don’t understand the rules of the game.

I do understand. So I keep saying it until it sinks in. I say it louder if there are young girl children close, or young women, or young men who are about to become entangled with young women. In fact, I’ll say these things any chance I get.

I have no reservations about being the only one in the group to question the status quo – because it doesn’t belong, and it never did. I will never see a difference between what is physically represented and the concept of that physicality (gender, shape, size, colour, hair/not hair, etc.) being the thing that limits their capacity.

A man can be what he wants to be, and so can a woman. A man can be in a single-sex relationship and still be a man. A woman can be a parent, but not be a nurturer. A genius doesn’t need dangly bits to have a brain. A musician or singer or writer or politician or swimmer or soldier or [any person in any profession, trade or skill group] isn’t there because they are male or female. They may be ‘special’ in terms of following their dream, or their path or their destiny, but it’s not because of gender.

It never was.

To stop the bullying, the groping, the undeserved entitlement of one over another, you need to speak up when it happens. Immediately. You need to make your voice heard. You need to do it consistently, constantly, and with everyone you meet.

My name is a concatenation of two names, because if I write under a female name (please don’t tell me this doesn’t happen), I get treated differently.

I am Cage, gender undefined female, married to a man (even if I call him ‘researcher/guru’), a writer of stories and novels (and pack-leader to a dog), ex-foster carer to almost three dozen teenagers and a couple of toddlers and dozens of animals. I’ve built a shed and a house and a farm. I’ve fixed up several old cars (vintage and veteran). I’ve competed in horse shows from endurance to dressage. I’ve competed in triathlons and marathons and finished them. I’ve travelled almost every bit of dirt in Australia. I have something to say and it isn’t my gender saying it; it’s my humanity.

My stories are my voice; my blog is my voice. Where is yours? I’m willing to listen, all you have to do is be part of the conversation.

Yes, it’s off the cuff, unplanned like a lot of my posts, but that doesn’t make it less serious.

If you want to be heard, you have to speak up.

That doesn’t mean what zealots or extremists think – basically, I think they’re brainwashed as badly as people who follow a political party as blindly as a mole in a deep, dark hole and not thinking of the future that might bring to their descendants. That’s not enlightenment; it’s not freedom; it’s not the path to an open and enquiring mind.

I’d like it to not be the future, but it will take a lot more voices than mine alone.

Care to join in?

Bits of my journey ’til now.