English
Nederlands
2005-12-11
Twenty-eighth Column
Tonight my twenty-eighth column was broadcast in Gendertalk #540.
You can find the complete program in the Gendertalk archive.
Or you can find just my column at:
http://eveliensnel.nl/audio/POOR01.mp3
A full transcript of the text is below:
Poverty
Last week I got a very surprising email from someone I have never met in real life. I have only met this person online. The first time I met her was twenty years ago. That was long before we all had access to the Internet. Back in 1985 we did have computers and we did have modems to make these computer communicate over telephone lines.
In those days, people who were interested in electronic communications used their modems to dial in to Bulletin Board Systems. And I was running such a system in my own den. I was very enthusiastic about electronic communications and even then I realized that this was a way to publish the things I wrote to the outside world without having to find a publisher interested in my writings.
Bulletin Board Systems were the state of the art at that time. They enabled people to create a user profile and exchange messages about any subject they liked. It is similar to a forum on the Internet. My system has been online for about seven years and there were more than one hundred regular users who dialed in at least once a week.
The email I got last week was from one of those users and it brought back a lot of memories to me. I suddenly remembered that this user sometimes called himself Peter and sometimes called herself Petra. I can remember I was suspecting this might be a man who had an urge to act as a woman. Well, I had no problem with that. I was even secretly thinking: "I wish I had the courage to do the same!"
From her email I finally learned the full truth about this person. She is indeed a transsexual, just like me. Only she had her operation done twenty years ago! I was so amazed! And initially I was very jealous of her. Imagine me struggling to live as a man for twenty years while she was able to live happily as a woman all that time!
We proceeded to tell each other the stories of our lives in some more emails and I have found out that there is no reason to envy her. Oh yes, there are many similarities in the way we feel and in many more details. But again I have learned that in this life the cards are not dealt in an honest way. My friend has never known her real parents and was raised in boarding-schools. Her foster parents have never believed her story of being born in the wrong body, because "God does not make any mistakes".
All those twenty years while I was going to university, got married and built up a successful career, she was struggling with lack of acceptance from her environment and unable to find a decent job! So when you listen to my columns and start to think: "I wish I were living in Holland, where there is so much more acceptance", think again: It may have to do more with the difference between rich and poor than with the difference between the USA and the Netherlands.
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You can find the complete program in the Gendertalk archive.
Or you can find just my column at:
http://eveliensnel.nl/audio/POOR01.mp3
A full transcript of the text is below:
Last week I got a very surprising email from someone I have never met in real life. I have only met this person online. The first time I met her was twenty years ago. That was long before we all had access to the Internet. Back in 1985 we did have computers and we did have modems to make these computer communicate over telephone lines.
In those days, people who were interested in electronic communications used their modems to dial in to Bulletin Board Systems. And I was running such a system in my own den. I was very enthusiastic about electronic communications and even then I realized that this was a way to publish the things I wrote to the outside world without having to find a publisher interested in my writings.
Bulletin Board Systems were the state of the art at that time. They enabled people to create a user profile and exchange messages about any subject they liked. It is similar to a forum on the Internet. My system has been online for about seven years and there were more than one hundred regular users who dialed in at least once a week.
The email I got last week was from one of those users and it brought back a lot of memories to me. I suddenly remembered that this user sometimes called himself Peter and sometimes called herself Petra. I can remember I was suspecting this might be a man who had an urge to act as a woman. Well, I had no problem with that. I was even secretly thinking: "I wish I had the courage to do the same!"
From her email I finally learned the full truth about this person. She is indeed a transsexual, just like me. Only she had her operation done twenty years ago! I was so amazed! And initially I was very jealous of her. Imagine me struggling to live as a man for twenty years while she was able to live happily as a woman all that time!
We proceeded to tell each other the stories of our lives in some more emails and I have found out that there is no reason to envy her. Oh yes, there are many similarities in the way we feel and in many more details. But again I have learned that in this life the cards are not dealt in an honest way. My friend has never known her real parents and was raised in boarding-schools. Her foster parents have never believed her story of being born in the wrong body, because "God does not make any mistakes".
All those twenty years while I was going to university, got married and built up a successful career, she was struggling with lack of acceptance from her environment and unable to find a decent job! So when you listen to my columns and start to think: "I wish I were living in Holland, where there is so much more acceptance", think again: It may have to do more with the difference between rich and poor than with the difference between the USA and the Netherlands.
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