Marcy's Musings

Special Thanks to Cora Ohara For her badass hakery  that brought us the foot notes and for the help she gave me in wrapping my head around my thoughts   Music in the lodge is more than sacred. It is medicine. It is the center of the ritual. Jerry, who pours the lodge (he is clear that the lodge itself is Bear Boy's lodge) says any song sung in lodge is sacred. Even if it is "row, row, row your boat." There are times in lodge that I have sung Sikh prayers. This is always meaningful and powerful for me. When Jerry held a small lodge for my children, I sang the Grateful Dead song "Ripple" which is sacred to me because it was one of the few lullabies I sang my children that was not an LDS hymn. There are times in lodge that certain songs will come to me; a personal form of medicine. I've taken time to mentally collect these to see what I could learn. During ceremony, women wear long skirts as a way of communing with mother earth. Our skirts tickle the gr...

One of my favorite parts of my job are the opportunities I have to teach and train. One of the first aspects of therapy I teach people I supervise is the difference between content and process. Content is the overt subject of the conversation. For example, a patient/client might complain that they are always doing things for their partner and their partner never seems to reciprocate the kindness. Paying attention to the content only, I might provide some validation and sympathy. “That sounds so hard, you must resent them.” This is great if you are someone’s friend but it is not entirely therapeutic. A good therapist attends to the what is going on in the background. What are the needs being met by this behavior? What patterns are being repeated? For example, a good therapist might ask questions to see if there is some co-dependance in the relationship. One might explore what unspoken expectations this individual has and perhaps work with them on assertiveness. Perhaps they do not feel ...

Throughout this series I have discussed a wide range of philosophies and attempted to create a framework of intellectual humility in which faith and science could co-exist as separate things. There is a certain bit of the practicality of the matter that I feel has been left untouched. My initial goal of starting this blog and this particular series was to stop debating anti-trans folks online and channel my thoughts and energies into something more worthwhile. In the time since I started, I have made a determination that as a trans academic, I am the very opposite of what the anti-trans crowd respects and listens to. In fact, I am the very embodiment of the woke groomer they fear. I also find that engaging in this type of “debate” is too emotionally draining.  Trans denialists and endorsers of “conversion therapy” end up looking at me and accusing me of being “too angry” or “overly emotional.” There is a primary difference between me and them. For them, a “debate” is an intellectua...