I bought this pencil at the Penland School of Crafts for a hundred bucks. It’s made of steel–pure art. You can’t write with it.
It is quite an extravagance for me to buy a piece of art, but beyond its gorgeousness it has a purpose that I dreamed up while gazing at it in the school gallery. I have a desk in my bedroom where I never work. It is used as a place to stack things and for my cat’s water and food dish. Buying the pencil gave me resolve to repurpose my desk as…a desk.
I’ll still read the NYTimes and do Wordle in bed, but I want to have a place that I can at least play like I’m focused on writing and editing.
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I was at Penland to deliver my friend Alice who was taking a jewelry making class. She flew into Knoxville to visit a few days before and we spent some time working on the land. Our first day there was auspicious.
We had just loaded up the cart with tools for trail blazing and were about a hundred and fifty feet from the shed when we heard the whoosh of leafy saplings, brush and sticks breaking like the clackety clack of a speeding train. We turned toward the sound just as a young bear shot into the saddle at the base of the knoll, its downhill momentum making her appear slightly out of control. She braked to a stop twenty five yards from us.
I was of the opinion that she had been chased. Alice thought she was exhilarated from her downhill run. Whatever the case, the adolescent bear seemed slightly dazed. She had run toward noise, not away from it.
Poor Valley Road runs parallel to the trail here and is close enough to see through the woods. The neighbor’s black lab was on the blacktop oating at Alice and I. The couple’s twelve-year-old was buzzing the road and fields on a dirt bike. I lifted my hands and yelled at the bear not wanting her to come at us in the confusion. (Bears are known to have poor eyesight.) She turned and ran toward the shed disappearing in the dense brush.
I can’t say whether this was the same bear that I had in pictures from a previous post. Her coat looked less mangy and more fluffy and full, but otherwise she was about the same size.
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It’s always nice to have other opinions when working on a project. Alice and I used some logs to line the trail toward the memorial site and then Alice had the notion that instead of trying to build steps up the knoll to the top, it would be easier to make a trail that followed a gradual curve along the less steep side.
My chainsaw, newly out of the shop, was exhibiting the same problem of being impossible to start so we didn’t do clearing then but more reconnaissance.
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I didn’t appear anywhere in work boots and a yellow dress as I suggested I might to protest Tennessee’s anti-drag law. However, I did wear my rainbow t-shirt on numerous occasions which is about as much courage as I could muster to be an ally to LGBTQIA2S+. A rainbow shirt that wasn’t advertising for the clothing maker would be cooler but I bought it on impulse after listening to a speaker at a teacher conference in Long Beach. He talked about how we need to be active allies to communities under attack. (When I was in Raleigh I noted signs that said “Black Lives STILL Matter.”)
A t-shirt or sign may seem insignificant but can make people who are targeted feel safer.
The idea that people in drag are sexual predators grooming the young is as absurd as the Boy Scouts of America saying that there is no place for gay men to be scout leaders or that queer folks should not teach in public schools. There is no correlation between sexuality and predation. The majority of child sexual predators are heterosexual as is the general population.
First off I should clarify that drag is performative whereas transgenderism is about identity. Drag performers are often not transgender. Dressing in drag does not denote any specific sexual identity. And neither drag or transgenderism denotes preference in sexual partners. Anti-drag laws are as silly as telling people they can’t celebrate halloween or put a cheese wedge on their head at a football game.
While I’m appalled by Tennessee’s “Adult Entertainment Act” and see it as an attack on self-expression. I’m not sure all anti-trans laws are actually anti-trans. The issues are more complicated and plenty of people are jumping on board to create a polarizing atmosphere. Controversy and sensationalism sell. They are a cheap way to get a platform. A thumbs down is as good as a thumbs up when it comes to sponsorship and advertising. If anyone proved that the last U.S. president did.
One of the more controversial issues in transgender rights is transgenders in sports. But I bet if you asked if transgenders should be allowed to participate in sports, most people would say yes. The question is how can this be done in a way that honors their accomplishments and feels fair to everyone?
Strict regulations guide the thickness of foam that can be used in the running shoes of marathon racers. Why do people expect there to be easy answers to how transgender people participate in sports?
Some state laws allow female athletes to participate on male football and baseball teams. I think the idea is if no program exists then the unrepresented sex may join the gendered team. I assume this would allow males to join female teams if there was not a male gendered team.
Male transitioned females wanting to join cis female teams or compete as individuals is new territory. While many transgender advocates would like for society to believe we all are who we say we are and who we change ourselves into with hormone replacement and surgery, much of the public is not in agreement, especially when it comes to bringing home trophies and medals.
It’s one thing to identify at work, on the dance floor, or in the bedroom, but it’s another thing to say, “I am what I am” on the competitive sports field.
There are compelling arguments on whether transgendered females have an advantage or not. On one side, some say the hormone replacement mutes any advantage male-born people might have in lung and heart capacity and size. But how do you measure this?
Stories about transgender males competing don’t make the headlines as much because they aren’t usually viewed as having an unfair advantage. It is commonly thought that males are superior in almost every sport due to speed and strength, but we haven’t had a level playing field to accurately make that assessment. I don’t think we can downplay our history which until recently did not include programs for instructing females in sports. When those programs became available, they were usually second string and underfunded.
A girl that could throw a ball was a rarity when I was a boy…as rare as a girl that wanted to throw a ball…as rare as opportunities and encouragement to throw a ball.
As a side note, the tallest and fastest person in my fifth grade class, indeed in the whole elementary school, was a bucktoothed, gangly girl named Patty. I viewed her with equal parts admiration and freak-a-cation.
Short, but not yet far outside the bell curve, I would go on to become the shortest boy in school until an amazing growth spurt hit during the summer between 10th and 11th grade. As a self-defense mechanism I got very good at picking out the slightest imperfections in my classmates.
Why am I saying this? Because I believe that our societal obsession with difference is stopping us from making good choices. I don’t agree that the transgender female, Lia Thomas, should have been awarded the women’s championship in the NCAA Division 1, 500 meter free style. However, I do think she should be allowed to participate in competitive swimming.
New rules push the controversy into an even more heated area. The international Swimming Federation (FINA) effectively wipes their hands by barring all transgender athletes from competing in professional women’s swimming, with the exception of athletes who “can establish to FINA’s comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 (of puberty) or before age 12, whichever is later”. (Wikipedia) This does seem to allow the possibility for trans women to compete with men but it also encourages twelve year olds to manipulate their bodies before they mature.
In the future perhaps more sports teams will be divided by weight class or height like wrestling and boxing and not by sex. How much does football—as it is now—serve a high school boy who is short and under 120 lbs or the vault in a gymnastics competition for a six foot tall girl?
My guess, is that when all is said and done there will need to be rules for each particular sport at each level of athleticism from intramural to professional, peewee to senior league. There will also be new sports developed. We’ve already seen an expansion of sports in the Olympics. Is it mere coincidence that pickle ball has become the most popular sport in the United States. What’s next?
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I celebrated my 58th birthday with family who took me to El Toril Mexican Restaurant in Kimball, TN for fine dining and Karaoke. This might have been a safe place to try dressing in drag or maybe a more urban area, like nearby Chattanooga. Of course, protest isn’t about being safe.
Direct action protest where people are confronted with their prejudice and fears takes incredible courage. I think the early 1960s Freedom Riders and Lunch Counter Sit-ins that protested racial segregation are great examples.
The San Francisco Castro District is widely considered the mecca of gay culture and activism. I was just in the branch library and there was a display of drag history.
Asheville, NC seems to be similarly loud and proud. On my recent drive back from Penland I went through the town. In that brief visit, I encountered a half dozen or more transgender people.
I will leave it to the beefy, well-groomed bearded man wearing a halter top, sandals and a flowing ankle-length skirt to say whether he was dressed in drag or transgender. Maybe gender fluid is a safer description for everyone I saw: a lanky red-haired teenager with a light kilt and bordello/pirate-style puffy sleeves; a pretty Whole Foods worker with long, dark hair and a short, plaited maroon skirt, black leggings and undershirt topped with a white crochet cover-up; a group of four youth evenly matched of each sex, bending genders toward the other.
Minority and non-conforming groups need allies everywhere, not just in the south. On a recent community bike ride that featured a lot of low-rider and chopped out bicycles I hung toward the back of the group at the start of the event going from Pleasant Hill BART to Todos Santos Plaza in downtown Concord. Some young homies at the back were playing sexually explicit rap music and drinking 40-ouncers as they rode. A man driving in a Miata waited for us all to roll through an intersection and one of the young men looked back at everyone riding behind and smiled saying, “You know they say gays drive Miatas.”
I wasn’t sure if this was meant to denigrate gays or Miatas or both but it didn’t sound like it was just a statement of fact — as in Gays love their Miatas. Not that that would be much better. Generalizations are offensive but people do them — especially members of the group being generalized. Paul Lynde could get away with saying that better than Johnny Carson — if either were still alive.
Anyway, I’ll wear my rainbow shirt on my next ride and pull up next to the homies.
Here are pictures of what I’ve been doing on the land:
I used logs to line some of the trails.
I started clearing new trails. The first set is going east near the shed. The ones after that are for the proposed trail that winds around to the top of the knob.
Spotty West Goes East 