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Choose, Chose, Choice
I am not a “woke” person. Up until a few months ago I didn’t even know what “woke” meant. I thought it had something to do with not being asleep, literally. I was asleep, but then I woke up kinda thingy. I am a woke-in-progress person. I have always been a “woke” in progress, and I’m glad I find a lesson in my “un-woke” moments. I may not be “woke” yet, but I am the young woman who, in 1968, decided that my employer, which had a dress code for women and not for men, wasn’t being fair. I shook them up by wearing a pantsuit to work one day. I have to say, I was terrified I’d lose my job, but it had to be done. My action put an end to the Vice President making remarks about how nice it was to watch the women filing documents in the lower drawers of the cabinets. Mr. J. looked like someone’s kindly grandfather, but deep down he really wasn’t anything of the sort. Pantsuits ruined his sly pleasure. Within a week of my rebelling, a lot of the female staff showed up in pantsuits. Filing was never the same after that, for the women or for Mr. J. One way or the other, we all woke up. Unfortunately, I was given a lot of interesting labels because of the “Pantsuit Incident”. I’m not sure how my sexual orientation would have been reflected in my choice to be comfortable on the job, but that’s what happened. And, in spite of two-thirds of the staff of the multi-national corporation being female, it was the males in the swanky offices who made the rules about a dress code. Dress code was one of the written “rules”. The written rules were read to job applicants. The corporation had other rules that weren’t written down. For example, one of the questions I had been asked during an intake interview centred around my “sexual persuasion”. Simply put, I was asked if I happened to be married. I wasn’t. That triggered the question, “Are you dating someone?”. I was dating someone, but said I wasn’t sure if that question had any relevance with regard to my ability to do the job offered. The interviewer told me the corporation didn’t like to hire people who would cause problems. I wasn’t “woke” about what kind of a problem I would cause by dating someone, but I did see it would be to my advantage to say I was dating someone. So, I did. The interviewer asked if my parents approved of the “young man”. I still wasn’t “woke” enough, at nineteen, to understand the line of questioning. However, to get the much needed job, my parents approved of the “young man”. And, then?
And then! Well, and then to say my first job “woke” me up a bit is an understatement. While I worked for big Pharma, I heard a lot of things I didn’t understand about people. Most of what I heard was convoluted bullpucky about how people live their private lives. I heard the hurtful language used to describe people who didn’t play the gameof- life according to the rules made by people like Mr. J and his toadies. I saw people being discriminated against for being who they are, for being themselves. I watched brilliant people hide behind “normal” to live in a world where another person’s normal was the only acceptable way of life. But I also saw what happened to people who tried to show empathy for those who had a so-called “chosen lifestyle” that didn’t measure up to the code. As the years passed, I began to see little changes. Sometimes it was two steps forward and then one thousand steps backwards.
Here we are, decades later, when we have so much information at our fingertips and so many informed people to listen to, we are still choosing to be ignorant of the LGBTQ+ community. The truth is right here, in our faces, every day. Yet we choose to be ignorant even though we know we don’t choose our sexual orientation, or our community. We should choose to learn. We should choose to be informed. We should choose to be respectful. We should choose to be kind. We should choose to ask questions, and actually choose to hear the answers. We should choose not to be ignorant.
LGBTQ+ is an initialism that means: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Transsexual, 2/Two Spirit, Intersex, Asexual, Ally, Pangender, Agender, Gender Queer, BiGender and Gender Variant. This list changes as needs be. This isn’t a menu. This isn’t a style catalogue. It is what it is. Choose to be open-hearted and open-minded.
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