The American Canadian Dream?

There is a mythology in our culture that industry, in the more traditional sense of hard work, and preseverance lead to ultimate success and prosperity.

The truth of this is that conformity and community acceptability are also very important, if not most important.

Conformity is expected in the following areas:

dress
speech
appearance
gender (both presentation and identity)
sexuality
reproduction
income
housing/decor
vehicle
politics

On some fundamental level, people inherently seem to want to form communities, and at the most basic these would have been family units, whereas now because of urbanization, and generational value changes they are becoming more arbitrary, and more selection, lifestyle, or interest based. We have the queer community and the crip community, and so on, where most of us hardly speak to our families at all.

I live in a suburb, surrounded by families. Most of the people on my street have two incomes. The only people with a similarly small income to us, are the retirees who have the other half of our semi-detatched house.

Recently we went from being a two-income family to being a no-income family, combining disability benefits, and student loans. So, now we're everything that we're not supposed to be, living here:

queer and married
childfree
butch/femme
poor
alternative
kinky
fat
disabled
leftist (green/NDP, in a liberal/PC neighborhood)
atheist (sihks and muslims on one side, jehovah's on the other)
plus, we have a really shitty car...

There was a point where, for a year or so, I imagined a life where I would have enough money that people would be forced to accept me. I realize, in retrospect, that is was a false hope, because no amount of hard work or determination was going to give me enough money to overcome that number of social deviancies from the local norm. Being born into a different social class, perhaps. But then, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Being different is not something that can be erased or overcome, and it is not something that people should have to hide, ignore, surpress, or otherwise dismiss in order to succeed.

This post was brought about in reading some of the writing over at Bilerico regarding the use of cisgendered to mean those whose gender identity matches the bits they were born with.

I agree that there's all kinds of privilege associated with fitting in with the dominant culture, but seeing as having a cunt, and feeling like a girl is the only way in which I do, I have a hard time when people try to talk to me about how much I am accessing privilege.

here's my offering:
cisabled
cisoriented
cissized
cisreproductive
cispolitical
cisfaith (cisreligious?)

i can see the appeal. Getting to label the people who label you and despise you for just trying to live your life as yourself has a certain joy. Hmm.