Montgomery county¶

I pass as a woman way better on the streets of Baltimore than I ever did when I was working in the wealthy suburbs of Montgomery county. The heuristics of "acceptability" are more inclusive among the lumpen than among the petty bourgeois and labor aristocracy. https://t.co/TfHbjJoig9 There's a lot more condescending "acceptance as a nice thing to do" among the wealthier liberal types, and this is a very tenuous detente. It's entirely up to the social norms among those spheres. They had to be taught that "It's ok to be gay," that "trans women are women," etc. I get a lot of "He -- oh, I mean she --" among these types. People who instinctively want to be accepting, because that means they're "decent people." But the metrics of what it means to read as "feminine" are more stringent. My voice is too deep, my brow too heavy. They aren't trying to have these preconceptions, and I'm sure they feel guilty about having to mentally correct themselves.

You know who's never flubbed it? Who I never had to explain myself to? Mike and Michelle from down the block. They "she" me automatically. Instinctively. In their eyes, I'm not "man who is actually a woman and I need to make sure not to offend her, so I gotta be really careful to use the right pronouns because it would be shitty to make her feel like a freak." I'm just... the nice neighbor lady, who looks and sounds a certain way. This is a community of people who, by and large, are excluded from normative bourgeois European "acceptability" standards already. And it goes far beyond conceptions of gender and "beauty." The vast diversity of the poor leads to instinctive inclusion for disabled people, immigrants, homeless people, drug users, single parents, prostitutes, people of various languages, cultures, faiths, etc.

That's not to suggest that chauvinism doesn't exist at all. It's just far, far less endemic among the poor. Where it exists, it's most prominent among the "dreamers," who hold onto faith in an American Dream™️ that could elevate them above the rest. When everyone is swept into the gutter, you learn to get along with your gutter mates. The conception that "it's more often than not the opposite" is, itself rooted in a chauvinistic, detached view of what constitutes these mythical "poorer people." You're thinking of the mythologized "white working class," those gruff white men who swing hammers and drink beer. Queer people are poorer than straight people. Indigenous people are poorer than settlers. Disabled people are poorer, black people are poorer, immigrants are poorer, etc. The bottom layer of the social pyramid is the widest and fullest. There is simply less room for regressivism.