The last few weeks have been rough. Rough in such a variety of different ways that I feel like my skin’s been ripped off by the coarsest sand paper. Like my inner core is bare and unprotected. Like I’m feeling everything new and pin point. Like it all fucking hurts.
I said last week that sometimes it feels like I’m being honed into a vicious knife. And sometimes it feels like that knife is made of glass. And sometimes, like this week and weekend, it feels like that knife has shattered and I’m suddenly covered in sharp broken shards.
And I’m not going to pretend there haven’t been moments of joy. Even in the depths of distress at the state of the fucking world — at the harms being unleashed on my communities – those of immigrants, people of colour, the queer community, and of the queer community, specifically the trans community — I have felt cared for and loved by my wife. I have seen my friends and eaten good food, and drunk good drinks, and felt whole and reveled in the fact that I am me, and I have friends and community and live with the woman I love.
I have a house, and 5 extremely entertaining chickens who amuse me with their chickeny antics.
But at the same time, I’m clinging to keeping myself intact. I’m desperately fending off the thousands of tiny and not so fucking tiny cuts the world is seeing its way to inflicting.
Work – the nursing work – has been unutterably vile. The department has been busy, beyond that, it has been packed. It has been a constant battle to keep actually seeing patients as rooms clog with patients who should be admitted, or who’re waiting for investigations, and who have no-where to go. I cannot express the degree of exhaustion the flu season has wrought, and the change in attitudes that happened through COVID where people seem to feel obliged to have their respiratory viruses diagnosed.
Every day I hear “Well, I’ve been unwell for a few days and I’m not better.” And while I don’t think we have a specific policy that disallows me screaming at them, “No, of course you’re bloody not.”, I strongly suspect it would be frowned on. And so we work them up, and swab them and then tell them that “No, you have rhinovirus. Go home. Drink fluids. Rest. Take antipyretics and fucking grow the fuck up.”
But on top of that the flu vaccine not being a great match is an onslaught of patients we wouldn’t normally see. Patients who still need assessment, and who often this year seem to be developing post-influenza pneumonia. And on the march goes, patients pouring in, with us still having nowhere to put them.
So every shift has been that way.
No.
That’s a lie.
Some haven’t, but they’ve been filled with patients who’ve been rude, abrasive and entitled. Who’ve expected to be treated like they’re the only patients in the department and that I’m some kind of serf, there to meet their every need. It’s exhausting.
Frankly, it’s been disorienting when people have been polite. Someone was actually friendly and I was left wildly confused for several minutes. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It’s always been the case; at least for the two decades I’ve spent in the ER; that nurses in the ER get abused. We get sworn at, spat at, hit. We get kicked, insulted, and denigrated. It’s ‘part of the job’. It shouldn’t be. I still push against it, but at the end of the day if a patient is sick they still need treatment even if they’re being a shit. And so you still have to treat them. You don’t have to be nice. You don’t have to go the extra mile to make the ER visit less traumatic. But you still end up around them and it wears at you like sand in grease.
So there’s that.
And then on Thursday last week Tumwater School District had a meeting about trans kids participating in sport. I was never so naïve as to imagine that the festering rot of bigotry around trans people wouldn’t come to our side of the state. Wouldn’t encroach from the rural areas where its seeds are frequently sown in the fertile soil of republican hatred. I wasn’t so stupid as to think that we wouldn’t have to address it here.
But listening to the middle-aged white woman justify exactly why she had to pass fascist rules and harm trans kids both made me angry – a rage I cannot express because I can’t be the angry brown tran lest I get utterly excluded from society – and cut into my core in a way that I cannot really contain. I don’t know why I hoped for more. Why I hoped they might listen to the kids or the adults or the fucking research.
I don’t know why I hoped they might have some moral core.
I learned at school that the vast majority of nazi’s were ‘normal people’ who just looked the other way or excused their behaviour as simply following the rules. Who allowed terrible things to happen — supported and engaged in the terrible things happening — because, well, it wasn’t affecting them.
But still I am a creature who persists in hoping. Sometimes I want to crush that hope and burn it and excise it and fucking stuff it down into the molten centre of the earth. Because every fucking time that hope has led me to this despair.
Anyway, eventually, after insomnia that made me utterly feckless on my shift on Friday (I literally dropped something pretty much every time I opened an IV pack. I forgot things. I fucked up stupid little tasks) — in the hope of allowing me to actually sleep, last night I submitted a much trimmed letter to the editor of the Olympian. Last time I did this I got a fucking bigoted headline, but maybe someone will read it.
The original letter was too long:
Last week I watched bigotry and discrimination’s direct transition from our leaders to the community without input from congress, or the rule of law.
That’s because last week I witnessed Tumwater School Board passing into its rules discriminatory anti-trans-student policy. In the process the board chose to violate both existing state and federal laws. They stated that their new segregationist policy for trans kids was necessary because, they claimed, executive orders require it. Apparently having failed to take high-school civics, where you might learn that executive orders are not laws, and are instead, mostly just how the president wants existing laws to be interpreted. So even when President Trump is allowed to play with his best crayons, what he writes on the toilet paper isn’t a law.
When they passed the rule, the board ignored student and public testimony, the scientific consensus that trans students hold no athletic advantage, and that trans students face abuse and harassment overwhelmingly more often than they perpetrate it. Most alarmingly, they dismissed the well-documented harms of such policies, including skyrocketing rates of self-harm and suicide among trans youth in states with discriminatory laws.
Instead, they endorsed a “Separate and Unequal” policy, prioritizing an illegal executive order over the well-being of their students.
Beyond my anger and disgust at their behavior, I’m left with a burning question: Will they ever draw a line?
If the administration demands trans students be identified with markers – perhaps pink triangles – will the board comply?
If they demand lists of trans or gender-nonconforming students, will the board say yes?
If they demand segregated classrooms or drag them to camps, will the board cooperate?
Because based on the cowardice demonstrated by the board, and the unwillingness to protect every student, the answer is they will acquiesce to any demand, however illegal or immoral. However harmful and damaging.
The job of the board is to protect every student, and Tumwater’s District School Board failed utterly to do so. I encourage other districts to boycott games with Tumwater until such time as they rescind this illegal and discriminatory policy and allow trans girls to play sport. And if they fail to do rescind it, I urge the parents, families and students of Tumwater School Board to call for a vote of no confidence in the board. They are manifestly unfit to serve.
It’s a small thing. I was there, when they protested, but had to leave to attempt to sleep for work — hence the first night of insomnia. I’m going to speak at the next meeting if I can get a slot. I have words for them. They’ll be polite, because I’m good at that. I’m good at crushing my anger and vitriol into polite words that can be said to people without being thrown out of a room.
They’re not the raw throat shredding wail that I feel like giving them. The scream of anguish for the pain of all the people they’re hurting. They’re not the torment they fucking deserve. But they’re here.
Anyhow. So there was that.
And then to round off the week – this weekend Kathryn and I were scheduled for a business workshop. I’m thinking of starting a business and Kathryn is being amazing and supportive and wonderful. Unfortunately, the workshop “did not go well.” I’d been looking forward — I’d been really excited about doing the 8 week workshop that follows it, in which you build your business plan.
But instead I’ve come away from it angry and frustrated and having to e-mail the organizers to say “This person should not be teaching this class.” Given that it’s for underserved minorities — explicitly for People of Color, Women and Queer folks having a white guy with no fucking ability to adjust his teaching style, no respect for anyone who’s not white, and utterly patriarchal in his world view is… Well let’s say it’s problematic. And so between that and my ongoing distress from the whole Tumwater thing, I got a whole 3 hours of sleep last night.
Which didn’t make today’s class any better than yesterday’s, let’s say.
So now we need to find some different resources to help with business planning and I have to find some more superglue to stick myself back together again. Because I am so fucking tired, and this week has been too fucking much.
