That time I randomly became a belly dancer

In December of 2008, I saw something on Facebook that would change the trajectory of my life. An acquaintance from the local music scene shared a video clip of herself performing in a burlesque version of The Nutcracker. I saw her running around the stage in mouse ears, a bra, and fishnet tights and thought, That could be me. But first I had to learn how to dance-- or at least move gracefully.

    Shortly thereafter, while temporarily living in Israel, I went on a mission to find a gym or studio that offered any kind of movement classes. One gym sold sketchy diet supplements. Another was 7 floors underground. The third had a papier mâché figurine of a fat woman, which was my cue to stay. I had to take two buses to get there and I did not have any exercise clothes. I took yoga, Pilates, and belly dance classes wearing jeans or pajama bottoms. I did not understand a word that was said in those classes.

Upon returning to the glorious United States of America (we have burritos!), I moved to San Francisco and, in 2010, started taking yoga and belly dance classes at Spring Pilates (RIP) in Noe Valley. The best yoga class was immediately before belly dance, and I had to build my stamina before I could do two classes. I loved the belly dance teacher, Sharon. She made us choreograph pieces, even just a few counts of 8, and perform them for each other. She’s the one who made me buy finger cymbals 6 months in. There was a core group of dance students who came every week, one of whom is now a full-time dancer. The safe and supportive environment gave me confidence.

Sharon left a year later and I studied with a series of teachers in various studios around the Bay Area. After a few years of training, I realized that I no longer thought about switching to burlesque. Maybe it was the fallout from getting raped around the same time I saw the Nutcracker burlesque, maybe it was just getting older, but showing off my semi-nude body for an audience of men sounded less and less appealing. I know burlesque audiences (at least here) are not only men, that the men who see burlesque are not necessarily creepy, and that women are very enthusiastic supporters of burlesque. But belly dance audiences are very heavily female and the performances are not overtly sexual-- more like coy, flirtatious, bold, sassy, dramatic, or romantic. Outsiders may think of burlesque and belly dance as being similar (I certainly did), and there are certainly performers who do both, but belly dancers do not strip. The vibe is totally different. Go support your local burlesque revue and your favorite Middle Eastern restaurant when they have dancers to find out!

It took me a few years to make friends, but I enjoyed the challenging technique and woman-dominated environment so I kept showing up. Eventually belly dance became a serious hobby and I even joined a dance company. I can’t help wondering what the last 10 years would have been like without belly dance: 

• My body would be different. I get muscular over the summer, when I have time for loads of classes and intensives!

• My relationship to my body would be different. I’ve learned a ton about physiology. Belly dance celebrates jiggles!  And it’s been a joy to be around embodied women.

• I’ve sunk a lot of time into this! It’s very fulfilling. I wonder if I’d have picked up something else if belly dance hadn’t come along.

• I’ve stayed in San Francisco. SF is the hub of American/Western and fusion belly dance. People come from all over the world to study from the teachers here. When I travel, the teachers I meet all name my teachers as their inspiration. It might be easier to find a nice Jewish boy elsewhere, but this is where the belly dance is!

• I made a lot of friends locally and around the world!

• Last but not least, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time and energy learning about Arabic cultures, peoples, traditions, and music. I am so grateful for how this connection has enriched my life.

I’ve had a Facebook account for 15 years. I see hundreds of posts a day-- pets, vacations, marathons, socio-political issues, food porn-- and somehow it was Nutcracker burlesque that launched me into the world of belly dance 10 years ago. Go figure!

Patriarchy, Nov 1, 2017

This was recited as a 6.5-minute monologue into my phone while driving on November 1, 2017, immediately after #MeToo started. Reading dozens of stories or rape, abuse, and harassment left me raw, infuriated, and clear-sighted. I made minor edits for clarity and used the punctuation I felt conveyed my expression, rather than making it strictly grammatical.


Patriarchy is a system that gives more power to men and allows men to control women's bodies, money, power, legislation, and so forth and so on at the expense of women. Patriarchy-- and its sibling misogyny-- is part of our culture. If you've grown up in our culture, you've participated in this system whether you like it or not. Even if you're a woman you've participated in it because it's part of our culture and how we understand the world, how we expect things to be. It takes quite a bit of uncomfortable work to realize that this is what's going on. It takes even more work to undo those patterns that we're accustomed to. I don't want every guy to give some mea culpa of "I did this, I did that," or --alternatively-- "I've never done anything to make a woman feel unsafe." I don't want to hear some list of "I thought she was into it but then she said she didn't want it," "I don't know, why is she lying?" Instead of all of that nonsense, I'd rather have men acknowledge that we live in a misogynistic patriarchy that (whether they like it or not) they have participated in-- to the detriment of half of our society. Because of patriarchy, women have not been believed, they haven't been listened to, they've been silenced when they've tried to speak up about it. They've been told: you're a slut anyway, you're probably just lying for attention -- all of these tired tropes are thrown at us in an effort to discredit the way that we've been describing our actual existence and our actual lives. Even though one woman isn't considered believable, now that a million women have spoken online, now we're credible; it's harder to ignore.

Since this is a society-wide issue, it is more than just looking at your own individual actions. I think it's incredibly important and instructive to look at your own actions and be more thoughtful in your actions moving forward, but it's not just what you do, it's also what you don't do. If you see someone being harassed, do you ignore it? If you hear your friends making disparaging comments about women, do you say anything? If you're watching my favorite movie, Beetlejuice, with your kid and you see Beetlejuice trying to kiss and grope Geena Davis' character while she is literally pulling away and saying no, do you just let that go as a normal 'some people are creepy' type thing, 'this is a thing that can happen,' or do you pause and say 'in 1989 when this movie came out, this was more normal in our society. But nowadays that's actually considered a sexual assault and it's really damaging and traumatizing to experience that. So while we think it's funny that he's doing it, it's actually really not funny when someone's doing it in real life.'? Do you comment on cultural things that are oppressive, or do you let those things slide by? So it's not only "what have I done?", because then it's too easy to say "I haven't done anything." You have to look at the culture that we live in because patriarchy is a cultural phenomenon. You have to do your part to change the culture that overwhelmingly benefits men. Part of that might be changing your own behavior, but as long as men are the ones who are the majority of syndicated journalists, op-ed writers, newspaper editors, publishers, translators, filmmakers, etc, as long as that power imbalance is in place unquestioned, then patriarchy is still going to have our society in its grasp.

Snow Falling on Cedars

Snow Falling on Cedars is a book that was lauded in 1995 for its smooth narration between present and past, charming descriptions of a small island, and its message of the folly of racism. Some at the time objected to the book because it included some sex scenes. Of course, nowadays modern readers are not at all shocked by a few explicit details.

But this modern reader does not have time for casual rape. Most people still hold a limited understanding of rape: a crazed man jumping out of the bushes and attacking someone. But there are other, more subtle forms of rape. There’s date rape, where someone you know makes sure that you get too drunk to consent and then takes advantage of you. There’s raping someone who is already unconscious. There’s begging and threatening someone until they relent and let you have sex with them. And there’s casual rape. This is a term I coined to describe surprise penetration from a familiar partner. Because it’s someone you trusted and you’ve been intimate with, because there was no violence, it’s hard to immediately understand that you’ve been violated. But it comes down to this: do women get to decide when they are penetrated?

Seriously, do they?

As #MeToo has brought sexual assault into everyday conversation, some people have expressed confusion about how to know if your partner wants sex. After all, women are mysterious and finicky creatures who are incapable of human communication, right? Do we need to always ask, wonder these naysayers, for every single thing? If you suck that much at human interaction, then yes, you do need to ask. Inviting someone back to your room, taking off their clothes, etc. are all indicators that they are interested in some sexual contact. However, they may change their minds at any time. They may want sex but not at that very moment, they may want sex but not in that way. Maybe she did want to have sex, but after talking or cuddling or kissing for a while, or whatever she needed to want penetration. If you penetrate someone when they are not ready or expecting it, you just put your desires above her needs. And I’m not talking about her need for cuddling, I’m talking about her need to determine what goes into her body and when.

Here's the scene in question. Hatsue and Ishmael are two teenagers in the 40's conducting a secret interracial affair. Hatsue is about to leave for an internment camp, and had been feeling guilty about doing something that she has to hide from her family. It describes their foreplay, in which Ishmael's hands and genitals do all kinds of pressing and traveling, and Hatsue "lets" him. She does take some action but it is primarily Ishmael who moves things along.

"Let's get married," he said again, and she understood what he meant. "I just... I want to marry you."

She made no move to stop him when he slid his hand inside her panties. Then he was peeling them down her legs, and she was still crying silently. He was kissing her and pulling his own pants to his knees, the tip of his hardness was against her skin now and his hands were cupped around her face. "Just say yes," he whispered. "Just tell me yes, tell me yes. Say yes to me. Say yes, oh God say yes."

"Ishmael," she whispered, and in that moment he pushed himself inside of her, all the way in, his hardness filling her entirely, and Hatsue knew with clarity that nothing about it was right. It came as an enormous shock to her, this knowledge, and at the same time it was something she had always known, something until now hidden. She pulled away from him --she pushed him. "No," she said. "No, Ishmael. No, Ishmael. Never."

He pulled himself out, away. He was a decent boy, a kind boy, she knew that. He pulled his trousers up, buttoned them, and helped her back into her panties. Hatsue straightened her bra and clasped it again and buttoned up her dress. She put her coat on and then, sitting up, began meticulously to brush the moss from her hair. "I'm sorry," she said. "It wasn't right."

"It seemed right to me," answered Ishmael. "It seemed like getting married, like being married, like you and me were married. Like the only kind of wedding we could ever have."

"I'm sorry," said Hatsue, picking moss from her hair. "I don't want you to be unhappy."

"I am unhappy. I'm miserable. You're leaving tomorrow morning."

Ok, so to recap: girl is crying, boy penetrates girl, girl is “shocked” and moves away, girl reminds
herself that boy is good, boy is shown to be good by “helping” her get dressed as if it’s easier for two people to put underwear on than one, girl apologizes. Cool.

To be clear, I’m not against rape in literature. Rape has been a common part of life, although it doesn’t have to be. What I’m against is including a casual rape and then acting like everything’s OK. This is exactly what normalization looks like. These are the instructions for boys: no means no, but silence, other words, crying mean yes. These are the instructions for girls: at some point a boy will surprise penetrate you, and you should do whatever mental gymnastics are required to accept that he has control over your body and you don’t; and no matter what don’t let his feelings get hurt.

Casual rape was the most unacceptable part of this book. But there were other little bits and bobs of misogyny. Here’s 3 more BONUS packs of bullshit.

• Ishmael stalks Hatsue. He literally watches her house and follows her around. Because he “likes” her. She never finds out. He never thinks about whether his actions might be problematic.
• A female character gets introduced, and the author tells us all about how she hit puberty and got boobies, and what her boobies were like, but even though she was a naughty girl who could “shape the behavior of men,” she “never flirted.” And then, her boobies changed after breastfeeding her kids, and it was a little sad. Can you imagine a female writer introducing a character’s backstory with “SHE GOT TITTIES!”?
• After the war, Ishmael still has a thing for Hatsue even though she broke up with him, went to an internment camp, got married, and had kids. He longs to have physical contact with her, which she rebuffs when he’s stupid enough to say something about it. After Hatsue’s husband’s murder trial, Ishmael finally reveals the exonerating information and sets him free. Hatsue tells him she’s grateful and kisses “him so softly … like a whisper against his cheekbone.” So, in case you missed it, the lesson is that if a woman says no to you, rescue her from something and then she’ll give you what you want! Because she OWES you.

Ishmael is a creep but he is the hero in the end who brings justice to Hatsue’s husband and teaches the local racists a lesson. His choice was to exonerate an innocent man but lose his last chance at his crush who already rejected him, or let an innocent man go to jail and have a chance at finally controlling that which asserted its own agency.

I understand that heroes can be complicated-- when they’re male. Ishmael can be the hero even though he was garbage. Fine. But women protagonists never get to be complicated. The patriarchy cannot tolerate a women it doesn’t like or doesn’t understand according to its concepts about what women are. Don’t believe me? Look at Hillary Clinton. People lost their minds at a female politician who made hard choices in her career. Male politicians are seriously considered even if they’ve said or done the wrong thing before. But female politicians must be some hybrid superlady of motherly benevolence but not remind anyone of their sexless, nagging mother. Part of the reason, as Rebecca Solnit says, is the stories we tell. Complicated male heroes are in all our stories--the Bible, the Odyssey, Snow Falling on Cedars. But complicated female heroines are absent. This reinforces the patriarchy.

I found Snow Falling on Cedars in the English department bookroom at my school, which means someone used to teach it. And I’m sure it’s still taught at other schools. But in the era of #metoo, it’s time to take a second look at what we’ve accepted as literature. If we want the children to grow up in a less-rapey world, we need to change the stories we tell them; or at the very least revisit them through a feminist lens. It makes my skin crawl to think of students reading and discussing this text without taking a hard look at the male creepiness and sense of entitlement therein; teachers who glossed over the problematic passages, inadvertently teaching the students that this behavior is unremarkable, expected, mundane. I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach any controversial, problematic, or complicated texts. I’m saying we shouldn’t teach texts that reinforce systems of oppression rather than challenge them. “Doesn’t encourage casual rape” seems like a pretty low bar moving forward, but it’s a good place to start.

Israel and Palestine: Cognitive Dissonance Required

I can’t find the right Facebook group. I’m Jewish, I’m progressive, I love Israel, but I hate where it’s going politically and I think the Occupation needs to end. I’m in a group that purports to be Zionist and feminist, but they hedge away from anything relating to Palestine or the occupation. “Progressive Zionists of the California Democratic Party” has a damn essay as their mission statement, with a 9-point list of their affirmations and then a compare-and-contrast section of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. But I’m not a Democrat. I’m definitely not in the “Cool Jews” group whose picture is the Palestinian flag. 

All these spaces seem so fraught. People go bananas. I questioned some of the claims in an article critical of Linda Sarsour. Someone posted a quote on my comment saying “Please stop telling people to respect others’ opinions. That’s for things like “I don’t like coffee” not for “I don’t like black people.””  Hey, thanks for woking me up, bro. I said reasonable people could disagree about this, and a lady responded with “#nope.” Turns out that lady owns the studio I exercise at. She’s perfectly nice in person! When it comes to Israel-- People. Lose. Their. Shit.

This was around the time that people were on edge because Israel was protecting itself and then Hamas launched hella rockets in defense, or at least that’s how most people were describing it, depending on which “side” they’re on. But I don’t believe in the idea of sides anymore. Both “sides” can be right at the same time. It’s possible for someone to look at information from one “side” and justifiably condemn the other side. People speak from their truth. The predicament comes when you see both sides as humans who want to live in peace and dignity. For some reason it seems as though there is no room for moderation, balance, or reason. Well, actually, I think I know what the reason is.

In The War on Peace, Ronan Farrow explains how diplomacy prevents military involvement-- military intervention is an indication of a failure of diplomacy. It’s possible to make a case for Israel that is rooted in facts and history. It is also possible to make a case for Palestine that is rooted in facts and history. All of those facts can be true at the same time. However, a lot of the violence that has occurred in the Holy Land could have been avoided with effective diplomacy. No matter which “side” you take, we should agree that the diplomats have failed. I know many pro-Israel folks insist that they have no one to negotiate with, but that is nonsense. A skilled diplomat will be able to negotiate with anyone. Both “sides” seem to lack them.

It’s easy to lay blame at your enemy’s feet. In this conflict, you can keep going back and back to say who started it. I don’t think there is a point to that. Israeli and Palestinian leaders are relying on military solutions because they do not have the courage to negotiate an end to the conflict in which they won’t get everything they want. I know that one day there will be peace, even if I don’t yet know the leaders who will deliver it. 

Real people have experienced profound loss, pain, grief, terror, and suffering over the last few decades in the Holy Land. I want that to end. Israelis and Palestinians have put up with enough bullshit already, and I’m tired of arguing about whose shit stinks more. I want the people engaged in these conversations to keep their eyes on the prize: no more Occupation; no more violence; self-determination, safety, and dignity for everyone.

I'm Coming Out (against the occupation)

I attended a K-8 Jewish day school in the 90's. We had daily Hebrew class, celebrated all the Jewish holidays, and had many Israeli families and staff. Israel was portrayed as an underdog state, born from the desert, surrounded by enemies. I didn't have animosity against Palestinians, maybe because some of my earliest friends were my Palestinian neighbors. Dedication to Israel was a given in weekend Hebrew school, but I started to have questions about why Palestinians hated us. My Junior class Israel trip was cancelled because the Second Intifada had just started.

Israel/Palestine was a hot issue on my college campus. There were two groups: AIPAC and Students for Justice in Palestine. Both distributed inflammatory literature. Given a choice between two noxious organizations, I sided with AIPAC. I went to a few meetings and protests. I took a History of Modern Israel class with a popular professor. There was some anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias on campus. I once found a sketch of an airplane hitting the World Trade Centers with Jewish stars around it on a classroom wall. My Community Studies professor was appalled. The University briefly offered one year of Arabic (which I took!), but there were no other Arab or Muslim studies classes. On campus, the Israel-Palestine conflict looked very black and white. Both sides felt the other had wronged them and should be held accountable. Both sides were mostly telling the truth, but neither was telling the whole truth. AIPAC talked about wanting peace more than SJP, and I thought it was a no-brainer that AIPAC was the right side. Peace is good, violence is bad. Palestinians should stop being violent toward Israelis...but then what? Just keep living under an occupation? Lay down their nationalist cause? Part of me wished they would, but part of me knew that if the tables were turned I wouldn't stop fighting for my homeland. And wasn't the Occupation itself a conduit for violence? But on campus, the attempts at dialogue consistently failed, so we were left with a polarized understanding of a complicated topic.

After graduation I visited Israel for the first time on Birthright. I cried when we landed. It meant a lot to be in the place I'd studied and supported all my life. I later came back to live in Jerusalem. Living in Israel moderated my views. Instead of seeing Palestinians as my adversaries as they were on campus, they were just everyday people working, shopping, going home. The Conflict seemed to be less on their minds than it was on mine during college. They were just people living their lives. Rather than being different from me, they were the same as me because we were on the same bus, or doing business together, or sweating together in the heat.

For years after, I continued speaking out in favor of Israel. Whenever the Conflict would erupt into violence I would explain why Israel had to defend itself, all of which is technically still true. People would condemn Israel for high Palestinian death tolls, and I would blame Hamas or their leadership or other Arab states for promising but not delivering help, for supporting terrorism, for putting innocent lives at risk. That is a legitimate debate to have, but not one worth having.

Everything boils down to the Occupation. Military occupations are bad. People want to live in freedom and dignity. The Israeli military paints itself as humane, but that is an oxymoron. The Occupation can not be justified, and it cannot be improved. It's going nowhere. As long as the Occupation continues, the Conflict will continue. If Israel tries to expand the Occupation, the Conflict will get worse. If Israel ends the Occupation, maybe there will be peace. Many people would say then the Palestinians will try to destroy Israel. Is that a likely outcome? We have an advanced, established military. Israel itself is established. Even if people talk about wiping Israel off the map, they can't. That's not a real thing that will happen. We all know the Palestinians are going to have their own country one day, why are we fighting against it? They're not going to give up. The Jews were expelled from that land for 2000 years and we did not stop praying to go back. Some anti-Palestine people try to argue that Palestinians aren't even a real people, they could go elsewhere, etc. They're mad at the UN. They have 1000 complaints. But none of that matters. Palestinians also have 1000 legitimate complaints against Israel. "Pro-Israel" folks are trying to stall by resolving every little issue, throwing up roadblocks. That's not how negotiation and compromise work. The elephant in the room is the Occupation. Nothing can move forward while the Israeli military has its foot on the neck of the Palestinian people. The Occupation is wrong, it is an embarrassment, and it goes against Jewish values.

For years I supported Israel, right or wrong. I still love and support Israel. But it's my love for Israel that wants it to be a peaceful country. It hurts to see my country harming others. I've kept quiet for years, but now it's time for me to come out against the Occupation. What about the Israelis living in the West Bank? Israel encouraged people to move there, they can encourage people to move back. If settlers can only be "safe" by making everyone else's life a living hell, then that is a problem. Obviously undoing a vast military occupation comes with risks and will be difficult. Those risks and struggles are worth it in the long run. We must end this unjustifiable military occupation so that both nations can move forward in peace and dignity.

Neutralizing the shit out of my rape with EMDR

I just wanted to forget about getting raped. It was too much to process. I did my best to move on so that I didn't feel overwhelmed. At 22, that seemed like the best option. The problem is that when you don't adequately process an emotion, you can get stuck there. I didn't know how to process that much rage and betrayal. I had never known so much distress, and I didn't know if I would recover or how. For me, being stuck looked like projecting my anger and fear of my rapist into anger and fear of men in general. Rape was always right under the surface when interacting with men, especially strangers. I still wanted my rapist dead. I hated him. I felt a righteous anger that I channeled into activism. I made it productive. I saw myself as wise-to-the-world rather than traumatized. I mean, who wants to be traumatized?

I did a great job coping, I think, but that's not the same as healing. I started dating someone 7.5 years after being raped. It wasn't a very good relationship, and soon anxiety got the better of me. I'd always been an anxious person, but I had found ways to manage my life so that it didn't interfere with my functioning. But once the relationship started, my anxiety escalated. So I went to therapy.

I knew anxiety is often a side effect of sexual abuse, but I wasn't able to connect the dots at first. I'd been living with extra anxiety for so long, I just thought that's how I am. After I resolved the relationship issues (by getting the fuck out of that relationship), my therapist suggested addressing the rape with a therapy called EMDR— Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a treatment for PTSD. It was tested on combat veterans. (Fun fact: the majority of people with PTSD are rape survivors.) The idea is that you can enter into a deep state of your memories, and then remember them differently, or with a different understanding. So instead of remembering an event as making you feel worthless or vulnerable or ashamed, you can remember it as an unfortunate event that happened to you— a valuable or safe or innocent person. Your memory is still there in the end, but it’s like someone else’s memory, or foggy, or blurry around the edges, or just far away. It made me think of Professor Slughorn’s altered memory of Tom Riddle.

Here’s how it went: I closed my eyes. I used headphones to listen to a beeping noise. I could adjust the speed and volume. At the same time, I held a little vibrating pad in each hand, which corresponded to the beep. I could control the intensity. I used the thoughts of a calm place and support people as resources. My therapist guided me back to a disturbing memory, and I thought about my support people telling the younger me what I needed to hear at that time. I pictured a shield that deflected the event from hitting me. I focused on the more neutral or positive lessons that I’ve come to understand, instead of the harmful one that I absorbed in that moment. That was the practice run, on a slightly disturbing incident.

I did EMDR for the rape in another session. I re-remembered getting raped as just leaving his room safely. I can describe being raped because I've told it many times and it's written in my diary, but when I try to remember it I see myself leaving over and over again. I have to force myself to remember the rape itself, and even then it's a bit fragmented. It's like I can remember the story more than the event. When I think of my rapist I still generally wish he would just get hit by a bus already, but in the way that we're hoping Bill Cosby (or your nemesis of choice) would just drop dead to save us all the headache. During the EMDR session, I felt so sad for 22-year-old-me. How unfair that she had to go through that; she didn't deserve that. She doesn't deserve to carry all that trauma for years. But present-day-me is OK, is safe.

I did EMDR a total of 3 times. They were all intense. I was weepy for a few weeks each time. But now when I remember those events, I see the alternate memory. I can still tell you what happened; the memory is still there, just its effect has changed. I can see those events as things that didn’t damage me. Or, they did, but they don’t anymore. They memories are no longer disturbing or emotionally-charged. I didn’t even realize (or I didn’t want to admit) how traumatized I was, even though I had a lot of good support from some of my friends (and people who became friends), even though I see myself as strong and resilient, even though I had more or less moved on. Recovery is possible. That little trauma monster inside you can turn into the emotional equivalent of a house plant.

Redemption: an embarrassing story about me

My first teaching job was as a long term substitute for a teacher on maternity leave. I started at the second semester. I taught 7th and 8th grade English at a public school. Fresh out of my credential program, I had a vision of establishing a classroom culture where all students felt safe and respected, and no one got bullied for being different. Hold on, I need to go check the mail for my "Teacher of the Year" award.

I planned to spend the first day talking about bullying, particularly for LGBT kids and kids with learning disabilities. I didn't get through everything, so my speechifying took 3 days. Is talking to middle schoolers for 3 days a good way to set classroom culture or teach anything? No. It is not.

I talked about how some kids have ADD or ADHD, and also that it's wrong to call each other "retarded" because everyone is different and we should help each other, not put each other down. The kid who actually had ADHD heard "ADHD" and "retarded" and ran out of the room. Crap.

As the semester went on, a group of kids kept calling things they didn't like "gay." Teacher training taught me that you have to enforce your rules, and at this point I was running out of options. So I got creative. I decided that if you continued to misuse "gay" after being warned, you'd have to call a gay person and read them an apology. Some students were up in arms. They asked if the principal had said this was OK. On the spot I said yes, even though I hadn't run this by the administration. Some students went to the principal to ask about this, and I got called into his office at the end of the day. I got scolded. I had to go back to my classes the next day and say that I was so proud of my students because they spoke up against something they didn't like, and I heard them and changed my policy.

I was so embarrassed. My principal thought I was an idealist idiot, and my students thought I was a joke. Some students later came to me and said that they wanted to talk to a gay person. No one was happy with how this turned out.

I was hired back the next year for a temporary position, but they still interviewed others for it. The next year I did not receive another position, and I left feeling like a failure. I knew I'd grown a lot as a teacher, and all teachers make mistakes, but I knew I wasn't yet the teacher I wanted to be. I still feel uncomfortable when I think about my time there. The embarrassment at my futile attempts at teaching for social justice has not yet worn off.

Fast forward four years. I get a Facebook message from a name I recognize from that school, but the gender is wrong. Well, I should say, the gender was wrong, and now it's right. It was a student who is a trans woman, and she said that I was one of her favorite teachers ever! How generous! (Or most of her teachers were worse than me? Yikes.) I was so proud of that student for living her truth, and becoming an outspoken advocate for trans rights. I have no idea what-- if any-- impact my 3-day anti-bullying speech had on any of my students. (Except the one who ran out. Clearly he wasn't a fan.) But I feel a measure of redemption knowing that some trans child felt safe in my class.

I don't generally regret things, and I don't regret that incident, as embarrassing as it was (is). I saw it as an ill-executed attempt at making a safe learning environment for all. Now I see my embarrassment as the price I paid for making a transgender 14 year old feel safe, important, and deserving of respect and protection. I believe that good intentions do not override bad results. But sometimes it takes a while to see the full result of your good intentions. And maybe it's not as bad as you thought.