[cercis]

Grunt,

Unfortunately, for a lot of us, it means giving up our childhood dreams. I will never be allowed to be what I wanted to do as a child. And it sucks. I'm sorry I don't have a penis. Not sorry enough to have an operation, but sheesh.

The only way to work around it was to 1) sell my soul and work for a corporation which rapes the land (I know this to be absolutely true) or 2) be extremely poor and unemployed 4-6 months out of every year for at least 15 years.

I'll never forget we had a gender sensitivity session. And the men got offended that we said childbirth was a negative and a positive of being a woman. How dare we say it's negative. How they wished they could give birth, etc. And they completely refused to listen to us name why it is negative - harder to get hired because employers automatically assume you will be having a baby and quitting, having to put our lives on hold for a good portion of our pregnancy (at least as related to the physical demands of forestry) and at the end of all that, the pain and discomfort of being pregnancy and giving birth. We made a huge deal that the last reason was very, very, VERY minor compared to the first two, but they told us we were wimps, etc.

I've never been so frustrated as at that moment. And the fact that the higher ups were there and were male and were agreeing with the other men, yeah. I saw the writing on the wall. I continued to beat my head on that wall for a while and then finally gave up.

Now, I write letters and make posts and scream from the roof tops. Anything I can do to make men open their little, tiny eyes and see that maybe, just maybe, they should look past a small portion of our lives and see us as equals. I mean, really, they don't look at a man who is clearly tense and say "oh, he's going to have a couple of heart attacks, that'll take months to recover from and he'll probably quit" and how is childbirth any different than that?