I Need a Barf Emoji Sign for Zoom Meetings

TW: sexism, transphobia

Vita is astonished.

I just recalled something worthy of a vomit emoji and countless eyerolls an old cis straight white male said in my writer’s group’s latest meeting. It’s every Tuesday, and I’m referring to this Tuesday. If only I were articulate and ready for shit like that. I think I need to read a hundred feminist and gender studies books as cleansing.

The discussion topic was “writing from different perspectives.” The group focused almost entirely on writing from different gender perspectives — and from a cisgender binary perspective. There were so many things I came close to saying. I often struggle to get a word in.

Eventually someone else — laughingly, as though transgender perspectives are a joke —brought up the question of whether any fiction writer has had “a sex change” (more properly, sex reassignment surgery and/or hormones) and is therefore better at writing from the perspectives of both men and women. Even after I used the term “transgender,” someone used an archaic term. Nobody mentioned genders such as nonbinary or intersex, though they were on my mind. (Slap, slap. Speak up!)

The cishet male I mentioned in the first sentence delivered a willfully ignorant and clichéd monologue claiming that women are a mystery or something like that and even used the trite and absurd…