I hear you
I don’t know whether humans born with penises should get to compete in sports against humans born without one. But I do know we should at least hear everyone out.
I don’t have many platonic female friends.
I’ve had a few good ones over the years, but we drifted apart. At bottom, I generally prefer male companionship, because complex female spiritual dynamics overtax my uncomplex male brain. I love women, but over the years I’ve observed that “me being me” often deeply annoys them, so these days I tend to keep my distance. While I’m no misanthrope, I’m nonetheless leaning toward adopting my vaguely haughty homey Nick Dawg’s default practice of avoiding even making eye contact with strange women.
At this point, if my SO Jodi ever kicked me to the curb, I’d probably go full monk mode in a cave and perfect my levitation game. Or at least sign up for regular, lengthy silent retreats.
One platonic female friend who still keeps me around is my old lawyer buddy, Alicia.
Alicia is a mega fancy white lady who would probably consider my modest yet adventuresome lifestyle—which I consider ballin on a budget if not borderline self-indulgent—close to poverty. In this regard, she shares a nature with the white women in my life who are so fancy they identified more with my estranged daughter’s “downgrade” in accommodations at my new crib than the fact that my babymama took me to court and cut me out of my daughter’s life.
Alicia’s husband makes good-ass paper as a doctor, and now that her solo law practice is hitting its stride—after she stepped away from the profession for two decades to raise her kids—she makes ballerish bank too. Like most rich whites who’ve got a net worth in the millions, she doesn’t think of herself as “rich.” Perhaps “upper-middle class.” Which would make me somewhere between upper-lower class and lower-middle class, depending on the mood and the moment.
Back when we co-counseled together, Alicia used to think I was being over-the-top when I told her how rough it is out here for the non-rich whites. But after bumping and grinding in courtrooms for years against corporations and institutions who do regular folks duper dirty, she’s come to see what I mean.
Alicia is a very powerful empath—elite at seeing things from others’ perspectives, especially the vulnerable. She’s cultivated her natural gifts to become a fine trial lawyer, and in her own fancy white lady way she’s a dirt dawg warrior. I’ve learned so much about compassion and gentleness, especially toward women and vulnerable people, just from being her friend.
We used to talk shop all the time as fellow solo human rights trial lawyers. But during what I’ve come to view as my sabbatical, we drifted apart because I didn’t want to even think about the law. Our hangs took me back to rough parts of Lawyertown I had no interest in revisiting.
But now that I’ve reclaimed my L and I’m looking to be some kind of lawyer again, we’ve revived our friendship.
Last time we talked, she mentioned a colleague on her plaintiffs’ bar listserv posting about a big win: they helped a human born with a penis win the right to (maybe) compete against humans not born with a penis in powerlifting events. This case has been ping-ponging through the courts for several years, and I still don’t know the current state of that person’s penis. While it has nothing to do with the merits of the case, I still want to know. I don’t know why yo, but I do.
Legally, I’m reasonably confident this was the correct result under the Minnesota Human Rights Act. The powerlifting organization’s policy discriminated against trans folk on its face under the statute, which forbids discrimination based on gender. The ladylike lifter’s lawyers did good work, and the Minnesota Supreme Court properly enforced the state of Minnesota’s law, at least as my middling, dirt-dawg meathead brain interprets it.
Whether it was the right result under God’s law, natural law, spiritual law, or whatever higher-order framework governs the cosmos, I am… less certain.
First off, the conceit of a human born with a penis feeling called to compete in powerlifting against folks who’ve never had one is a tragically comic spectacle. Something I’d expect from a Ben Stiller farce with a silly-ass title like DonkPossible, yet here we are.
I’m joking, but in loving awareness, if someone is willing to swap genders and then fight the system that hard for the right to powerlift, of all things, that person is probably fascinating. I’d be curious to meet that person and I would of course use she/her pronouns in our discourse, or I would grit my teeth and use “they/them” if that’s how they got down even though I strongly believe that doing so is grammatically incorrect. In a lot of ways, they’d probably remind me of myself. Who knows? We might even end up being platonic friends. At the very least, that ladylike lifter is surely some kind of dirt-dawg warrior.
On the one hand, civil trials represent a great triumph of human consciousness—we’re no longer mobbing up and beating each other to death to settle disputes. Instead, we’re using highly complex systems to allow (purportedly) impartial strangers to decide our fate. But for that same reason, trials also showcase a phenomenal failure: we humans couldn’t sort things out ourselves, so now we have to burn loads of public time and resources just to figure out who gets to bench press.
Yet this is one of the rare cases I believe should go to trial. That’s because everyone I talk to about it has a strong opinion about how it should come out, but nobody has actually spoken to the person who wants to do the bench pressing. If it goes before a jury, I intend to watch the trial with an open mind and hear this fascinating human out.
Second, while I’m a law nerd on the one hand, I also watch blood sports like boxing and MMA semi-regularly and I’ve even attended several cards live. Well, at least I used to, before activating my kundalini sent my feminine energy into overdrive. But now that I can once again handle four quarters of football without crying at the big men hurting each other, I plan on getting back into the rougher stuff.
But the visual of someone with “man hands”—which people born with penises tend to have—smashing in the head of someone born without one makes my blood curdle. Even back in pre-kundalini days when I was such a dirty dirt dawg I sometimes left the house wearing a collar, I still couldn’t have rocked with that.
And if someone born with a donk does want to rock hard like that, well now they have legal precedent on their side. If I was a judge, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably recuse myself and spend the day boning up on my Ben Stiller filmography. In any event, the legal result seems obvious: man hands wins.
I find this case just as hilarious as I do spiritually striking and intellectually stimulating. But Alicia does not find any of this funny. Her teenage daughter is a star soccer player, and Alicia knows that the elite girls’ teams she plays on would get bodied up and worked by even the middling boys’ ones toiling at the far-flung AAU tournaments the family frequents—like the one where two Minnesota high-school teams flew to all the way to Arizona just so teenagers could play soccer (to be fair, Alicia also found the notion absurd).
So Alicia worked up the courage to pipe up on the listserv full of yang-talking, self-righteous, supersmart “progressive” lawyers and raise fairness concerns…and got ignored. Everyone else just kept posting congratulatory “attaboy” messages. When I used to pipe up like that, folks loved clapping back—especially fancy white women who (mistakenly, I believe) think I’m “down-punching” because I’m a big, Black brotha who thinks like a fancy white lady and acts like a straight ninja, along with the performative, fake “sensitive” men trying to impress those same women.
Getting clapped back on mega annoyed me. Especially because I thought I was right and they were wrong, and, bless my dirt-dawg heart, I love getting it right and winning.
But getting ignored?
That would be even worse.
And it made me realize that this probably happens all the time to white women in the profession. After all, Alicia is a respected member of the local human rights plaintiffs’ bar and they shut her down. I just never noticed it before because I was too busy being righteously indignant about white women jamming me up.
As to non-white women, oh man, I can only imagine how it goes for them. Now I see why sistas and señoras tend to talk hella loud: it’s cuz no one wants to hear them. Including me, apparently, and I’m a brotha. Well, I blame the white side of me for being like that.
Eventually, one lawyer wrote Alicia back privately, basically saying, “I hear you, but the court got it right, so tough luck.”
And she considered that a win.
What struck me was that she didn’t care about the substance of his message—she just cared that he heard her.
That blew my mind. Because from my perspective, folks usually hear me—they just tell me I’m wrong, which I can’t stand. And it’s not lost on me that my burning desire to be right often robs my peace. As Popeye says, “I am what I am.” Or as my vaguely militant friend and professional mentor who grew up in the ghetto in Kansas City puts it, “you is what you is.”
Later, I asked Jodi if Alicia was an anomaly. She said no—most women just want to be heard. And later still, when Jodi was trying to put me on the defensive and I was dodging her verbal bullets like Neo in the Matrix, she finally dropped the code in simple manspeak:
“I just want to be heard.”
Up to that moment, I was too busy bobbing and weaving like a spiritual Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker (bless his soul) to really listen.
But hearing that shifted something in me and motivated me to raise my game. If you stay with a woman long enough, the game only gets harder—like going from playing 2K on rookie-level difficulty to Hall of Fame.
When someone is on some BS, “I don’t view it that way” is a perfectly adequate response.
But in light of Alicia and Jodi’s wisdom, I’m adding:
“And I hear you.”
And I won’t just talk about it.
