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sorcyresswriiiiite the words
I am very tired and don't wanna write the words.
Work today was pretty good but also hella unsatisfying because there was Serious Bullshit with classroom assignments and needing to last-minute move the classroom. I had like......fifteen minutes of warning in order to pack up my everything I would need for class five and move down to a computer lab. It was awfullllll and I'm not happy about it. Blah.
But focusing on the good stuff...uh....the kids seem to grok the Pythagorean Theorem? That's nice. Tomorrow we're moving into our special rights triangles and it's not totally rubbish as a lesson --we did good work last year! I had a good long talk with my mentee last week about his future (and need to send some networking emails on their behalf). Even though the kids are being forced into super dysregulating situations, they were mostly fine?
And yesterday I got a bunch of things done and also had a nice evening with a friend/comet. I didn't sleep enough, but that's Unfortunately Normal, and at least all my sleep hours were in a bed with the lights off, which is Unfortunately Abnormal right now. I'm working on it?
Went to demo team on Sunday, which was fine, and then dance tonight which was...like...it was pretty decent, both Keira and Beth pick good dances and stuff. But for one of them I was dancing on the larks side with my buddy DJ on the Robin's side. And one of the other dancers made some comment about how we had "switched sides just to confuse her". Which like. Fuck off. Fuck off fuck off fuck offfffff.
I understand that I need to be gracious and kind and help people slowly understand in a non-threatening way but also fuck offff. I know I don't pass. I know I will never pass. I know you don't see me as anything as a woman. But you're wrong and you will never know how absolutely hurtful it is to be told that there is an obvious gender box you think I should be in and therefore if I'm on the lark's side it's "wrong".
It was intermission after, so I didn't have to dissociate for that long, and I could go and sit with my knitting and talk to all the various people who came and sat by me and then Sharon asked me to dance. But it still feels bad. I appreciate that the teachers here are trying to normalize larks and robins1. But the class does not actually get it, and as long as the dancers as a whole are just treating this as "weird names for men and women" nothing is actually going to change.
There's no wrong side to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for me, a nonbinary person to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for anyone to dance on when the role terms are Lark and Robin and have nothing the fuck to do with anyone's gender.
Oh hey, I figured out why I am so tired and draggy and don't wanna write the words. :/
Anyways, I will continue to quietly dance when and where I can with people who are willing to ignore conventions based on what genitals a doctor thought you had when you were born and instead take into consideration, like, who's taller if the dance has an allemande in it. And even that is negotiable.
I'm gonna snuggle Austin and go to bed.
~Sor (they/them)
MOOP!
1: (I am _genuinely thrilled_ that Beth is restating the terms every evening, and also that she is doing a much-better-than-average job of not using gendered pronouns with ungendered role names. Unfortunately, better-than-average means "occasionally says "their partner" instead of "her partner"" but baby steps!)
I am very tired and don't wanna write the words.
Work today was pretty good but also hella unsatisfying because there was Serious Bullshit with classroom assignments and needing to last-minute move the classroom. I had like......fifteen minutes of warning in order to pack up my everything I would need for class five and move down to a computer lab. It was awfullllll and I'm not happy about it. Blah.
But focusing on the good stuff...uh....the kids seem to grok the Pythagorean Theorem? That's nice. Tomorrow we're moving into our special rights triangles and it's not totally rubbish as a lesson --we did good work last year! I had a good long talk with my mentee last week about his future (and need to send some networking emails on their behalf). Even though the kids are being forced into super dysregulating situations, they were mostly fine?
And yesterday I got a bunch of things done and also had a nice evening with a friend/comet. I didn't sleep enough, but that's Unfortunately Normal, and at least all my sleep hours were in a bed with the lights off, which is Unfortunately Abnormal right now. I'm working on it?
Went to demo team on Sunday, which was fine, and then dance tonight which was...like...it was pretty decent, both Keira and Beth pick good dances and stuff. But for one of them I was dancing on the larks side with my buddy DJ on the Robin's side. And one of the other dancers made some comment about how we had "switched sides just to confuse her". Which like. Fuck off. Fuck off fuck off fuck offfffff.
I understand that I need to be gracious and kind and help people slowly understand in a non-threatening way but also fuck offff. I know I don't pass. I know I will never pass. I know you don't see me as anything as a woman. But you're wrong and you will never know how absolutely hurtful it is to be told that there is an obvious gender box you think I should be in and therefore if I'm on the lark's side it's "wrong".
It was intermission after, so I didn't have to dissociate for that long, and I could go and sit with my knitting and talk to all the various people who came and sat by me and then Sharon asked me to dance. But it still feels bad. I appreciate that the teachers here are trying to normalize larks and robins1. But the class does not actually get it, and as long as the dancers as a whole are just treating this as "weird names for men and women" nothing is actually going to change.
There's no wrong side to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for me, a nonbinary person to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for anyone to dance on when the role terms are Lark and Robin and have nothing the fuck to do with anyone's gender.
Oh hey, I figured out why I am so tired and draggy and don't wanna write the words. :/
Anyways, I will continue to quietly dance when and where I can with people who are willing to ignore conventions based on what genitals a doctor thought you had when you were born and instead take into consideration, like, who's taller if the dance has an allemande in it. And even that is negotiable.
I'm gonna snuggle Austin and go to bed.
~Sor (they/them)
MOOP!
1: (I am _genuinely thrilled_ that Beth is restating the terms every evening, and also that she is doing a much-better-than-average job of not using gendered pronouns with ungendered role names. Unfortunately, better-than-average means "occasionally says "their partner" instead of "her partner"" but baby steps!)
no subject
on 2026-03-17 04:48 am (UTC)(I am very very glad to hear that the restating and so on are helpful. I think you know this, but just to be explicit about it -- if I slip up on something without noticing, or if there's anything else I can do to make dance an easier and more welcoming experience, I am always open to hearing about it. I'm sorry this continues to be an uphill slog too much of the time. It sucks!! Yes, I too came to ungendered role names with 30+ years of habit to break, and it took me a while to break those habits, but making people comfortable and welcomed matters a whole lot more, and some folks could stand to remember that.)
no subject
on 2026-03-17 06:03 am (UTC)no subject
on 2026-03-17 11:19 am (UTC)So I (as someone small and long-haired and irreparably assumed to be a gender I'm not) dancing with a woman is unremarkable, and it doesn't draw comment. If I am dancing with a man but with him on the Left(Lark's) side and me on the Right (Robin's) it is unremarkable. The second I dance with a man with him as the Robin is when the tongues start clucking.
DJ is a good dude, and actually did give a fairly gentle joke of "well, we're not doing it _just_ to confuse you" in the moment. It didn't totally end the grousing, but it did set the boundary, and we could move forward with the rest of the dance (which turned out to be a slightly persnickety strathspey where role mattered very little overall.)
Coming home and writing about it, I remembered and tracked down a previous time I had danced on the "wrong" side with this same person. I might try and do a commentary/reply to that post just because it's such an interesting snapshot of how much things at dance have changed since 2010 (while still also so very not)
~Sor
no subject
on 2026-03-17 06:15 am (UTC)For the record, that strikes me as an incredibly rude thing to say, full stop. Especially if the sides are intended to be gender-neutral and danceable by anyone. I understand what you are saying about the fossilization of gender roles in the previous terminology/choreography, but once it has been established that the sides are chosen rather than inherently divided, then any confusion experienced by J. Random Dancer does not license them to make it other people's problem.
*hugs* if useful.