If I don’t have a man, who am I?
Do you see that beautiful bird?
It’s a Red-Winged Blackbird.
Yes, really!
No, it’s not black.
No, it doesn’t have red wings.
But guess what it does have?
A mate that is black with red wings.
The photo I took is of a female Red-Winged Blackbird.
The one above from Pexels is a male Red-Winged Blackbird.
Another example.
What do you see here?
Describe this bird using words. What would you name it? A Crested Red-Beaked Fluffball?
That’s a descriptive name, right?
Guess what it’s really called?
It’s a Cardinal.
BUT WAIT YOU SAY IT’S NOT EVEN RED ALL OVER!
Nope.
Because it’s a female Cardinal.
This, my friends, is a male Cardinal. Notice how he is actually – red?
My sweet raised in a different time grandmother always referred to women by their husband’s name: “Mrs Don Schmitz ” instead of “Sally Schmitz.”
She didn’t stop there. She called entire families by the father’s name: “The Jake Jacobson’s sold their farm.” “The John Staab’s had us over for sheepshead.”
She was a product of her time and I guess so were the scientists who named the birds. But – did it ever occur to the bird namers that their names were inaccurate?
How do you look at a male Bluebird and a female Bluebird and decide that the name should be “Bluebird?”
I bet you can’t guess which of these is the male?
Hahahaha. I joke. Of course you can!
When I got married, I changed my surname because I wasn’t philosophically opposed to the idea.
And then I learned more.
And I became extremely philosophically opposed to the idea.
Like – furiously philosophically opposed to the idea.
So I changed back to my maiden name. (With all the disclaimers that this, too, perpetuates The Patriarchy and “maiden” has implications that are just gross, etc, etc.)
I changed because I had grown to hate the practice, because I missed my old name, and because I knew it would anger Mr T’s parents, who by then had become my sworn enemies.
I knew they would see it as a rejection of them and indeed it was.
They continued to call me “Mrs Mr T.”
But my own mother, whom I love and who loves me in return, also continued to address envelopes and refer to me as “Mrs Mr T” and “Texan Mr T.”
She had a really hard time with reverting to addressing me by my maiden (ick ick ick) name.
How do you look straight at something and give it a name that doesn’t describe it?
How do you change the mindset that only men and males matter?
(My mom now refers to me as “Texan” and she has grown to hate the president. I guess I did inherit the ability to change from her.)
Texan in Exile 