#19 ‘GenderLess’

ELEMENTARY

19.

‘GenderLess’

This March, once again, we celebrated Woman’s Day. When I was a child, it was a sort of day where we made handy artwork for our mothers and gave a red flower to all our female teachers at school. Every year we listened to the stories about the brave Clara Zetkin and the political movement, which led us, women, to have the right to vote, work and be equal to men. All women at home, on the streets and most importantly at work, got a red carnation. The flower that represented the power of our ideology…

… I am standing in a bathroom. It is white. I am trying to breathe while the feeling of numbness in my whole body is making me paralysed. Everything is white around. The water is still running from the tap. It reminds me of the reason I am there. It is running but I don’t hear it. All I hear is the blood flowing in my ears. Breathing in and out is a goal. I suppose I am scrubbed in. There is a mask on my face, a blue garment, scrubs on my head. 

It is moment zero. 

There is life until then and I can only hope, from then on. He is asking me to follow him. I don’t understand the words since the blood flowing in my ears is still creating silence in the outside world. I follow His gestures. He is not looking at me anymore. I can’t remember what I did after He approached me with inappropriate use of power. Did I hit Him? Did He get what He wanted? I am following His gestures now. I don’t remember what I did during my blackout. I have to make an effort to peel myself off the wall to which I was pushed.

We are going out of the bathroom. We are entering a sterile area of the Intensive Care of the oncology ward. I see my father lying naked on a bed. He is not yet awake from the seven-hour-long surgery. Tubes and monitors around him. It is cold in there. As promised, He, the best surgeon in our little country, took out of my father every body part that might have contained the opportunistic cancerous cells. All the organs, bones hosting them… It is a big question if he will wake up. Will the body be able to adapt and go on living like that? But that was my father’s wish. He didn’t want to wake up with cancer in him. All out, even if he dies at the table was the deal I had to make with the doctor.

He, the doctor, is telling me something and I am trying to remember the facts from before the white passage of the moment zero. Trying to remember the purpose of me being in this cold room. Trying to let the love towards my father warm me up again. Trying to realise that being here is a privilege. Being operated on by this doctor is a unique life-saving chance. He is the best, the top of the bill. I am grateful, or at least that’s what I was until that passage of time at moment zero. I am trying to pretend that I still am. Sounds are coming back and as they do, I hear beeps of the monitors, measuring the heartbeats of all the other motionless people lying in the room. The sound of evidence that they are alive and well. My heart will calm down eventually and I will be fine. I will pretend this never happened. I will be grateful that my father is saved for now, and that we bought some time. Let’s focus on that! I will be fine! In a couple of days, I will be on a plane, back to my new life and it will take me far from this cold room. I will pretend this never happened. And that’s how time starts moving on. The monitor of my heart starts from beat one again. Sailing away into oblivion...

I walked out of that hospital and from then on I am hoping I kicked him properly at that moment which I don’t remember. I hope I hurt him. I hope the reason he didn’t look at me afterwards was that he was confused by the ungrateful reaction I gave him. But I am equally overwhelmed by the worry that, if I did, it might have consequences on my father's future treatment. We will never know. What I know is that after that, I never missed a chance to kick. I kicked before it was even necessary...

I remember the waiting room where I said the good news to my father's girlfriend who was sitting patiently and all that time waiting, lovingly. ’He woke up. It will all be fine.' We walked out of that door and it was spring. We had hope. 

Years later, that doctor finished his career as the best surgeon and renowned head of the clinic. I suppose He saved the lives of countless patients. As for me, I went on with my life far away. It was not the first or the last assault I have been through as a woman, but it was the most confusing since it involved so many life deciding elements. I never went back to that hospital again. I never mentioned what happened to anyone, and I believe I haven’t been back home for six years after that. 

Recently, a female campaign leader of a party I am considering voting for in a couple of days, reminded us on a television programme that there is a special place in hell for women that don’t support each other. She also mentioned that it is a quote from another woman of once upon a time high political power.

Suddenly it makes me saddened. She shines a light on all these movements around me and gender wars. I try to see it in a context and I want to understand it. It is only a century ago that Clara walked hand in hand with Rosa. Those two revolutionary women were fighting for the far-left Communist party, Marxism and equality of genders in the light of the proletarian movement. The right of women to vote. They were banned, exiled, jailed. All that what men were as well. 

Funny, that already then, Clara was deeply opposed to the concept of "bourgeois feminism," which she claimed was a tool to divide the unity of the working class. Feminism inside the existing social structure. Utopia...

‘The working women, who aspire to social equality, expect nothing for their emancipation from the bourgeois women’s movement, which allegedly fights for the rights of women. That edifice is built on sand and has no real basis. Working women are absolutely convinced that the question of the emancipation of women is not an isolated question which exists in itself, but part of the great social question. They realize perfectly clear that this question can never be solved in contemporary society, but only after a complete social transformation.’ - Clara warned us, in one of her speeches a little more than a hundred years ago.

I wonder if Clara is in that special place in hell too? 

I suppose that many of the women that nowadays congratulate each other on the 8th of March in the western world do not know her name, nor the real picture of the emancipated world she stood for. They are getting roses from their husbands as if it were meant to be a romantic gesture. I don’t think the majority knows what the real celebration is all about. All I see is women asking for justice, kicking, and the inevitable commercial aspect.

My father used to openly announce that he was the feminist in our household. I never gave it a lot of attention back then, but realise now, that I was brought up with a luxurious and progressive idea of all the rights and that I was given the tools without knowing it. I don’t expect to be anything else but a little dot on a canvas of social transformation and looking back in perspective humbled, I continue my own search for my place in this world being a woman. 

I hope to be invited to a certain position for my qualities and not for a purpose to fill in the empty proportion of gender correctness and feel we should see that we are being let down when they call us a successful female. I wish the day will come when we don’t emphasize gender but the qualities of an individual. I wish we would also realise that there is a difference in the qualities that gender can offer and nurture those as well. 

Nowadays, I am trying to be happy for the women that freely can rejoice in their motherhood and still consider themselves successful in their careers. I would have been ashamed of even speaking about a vision of having a family back in my youthful days. Maybe the women of my generation were the ones that got the opportunities, but that came with a price tag. My choice of not having children soon enough was a wish to be taken seriously at my job. Showing total dedication…

I wish the day will come when we will stop fighting for our rights and just take them with the power that we truly have. I wish we would stop kicking for the sake of the genetically transmitted trauma and go on walking just because we offer quality. Not because we are women, but because we are a logical chain of life, which, it feels to me, at the moment is a battlefield. But maybe that will serve the purpose? A transformation of social reality into a new world is anyway inevitable. 

Looking at the parade of all the gender choice possibilities, I can’t help embracing it, because I realise that only when people are free to express themselves I will live in a better world myself. Still, I just wish I would see fewer people kicking and more of them really dancing in joy dressed up in dresses or trousers, with or without beards, I don’t really care…

I wonder when God will become genderless?

See you in hell ladies?