No To Homophobia

I'm pretty impressed with my home town, today.  Some pretty solid community groups, with government support, launched a national TV campaign against homophobia yesterday. I really like the ads - they are ultimately targeted at non queer folk and their complicity in homophobia, which is a necessary shift, I think.  There is an argument that these ads promote the GLBT community as 'victims', but homophobia is not a victimless crime.  

I also like that it's not trying to say lesbians and gay men blend in and you might not know someone is gay.  The dykes in the ad look like dykes and they're treated badly because of it.  I, of course, love that they have a woman being singled out for bring butch.  It's actually validating to see it on TV, even though it's a 'negative' ad.

I have no doubt it will polarise some, but you can make up your own mind:

Hiatus

Work.  I have limited excuses beyond working as to my silence.

And in that work, I again find myself confusing teenagers and now even my boss.  Well, he knows I'm female (and a dyke), but I ended up in a class with him where kids were asking if I was a boy or a girl.  I handled it with my usual smooth skills (hold your breath for that post) but it was interesting thinking about it later.  My boss is a nice guy, no dramas there.  But normally, if a conflict like that arose about anything else, he'd want to talk about it.

Not this.  How would he raise it?

'Do you know the students thought you were a man?' or perhaps

'How do you think your haircut affects your work?'  (not a good idea, HR doesn't like that kinda talk)

'How do you feel about your gender presentation at work?'.  Nope.

Even the most politically correct boss isn't going to find a good way to mention gender presentation with 'clients', even if it's just to see how you feel about it.  Of course, I could have raised it, but I have no clear answers to give and he's not going to someone who will have them.  So it would have been me exposing my lack of clarity and him feeling like he should help but being a bit out of his depth.

We've never spoken of it.  And of all the dilemmas for a butch looking dyke in education, this is a pretty mild problem.  Just not one with an answer.