Month: November 2019

It’s like I’m a Ghost.  I was working with two men and we were trying to figure out what time we had a shift change. We were sitting in a circle, all pretty evenly spaced out. I said that each shift should be 35 minutes, but it seemed like they didn’t hear me. I don’t have a quiet voice and I was sitting just a few feet away from them – they definitely should have heard me. The two of them kept trying to calculate how long the shifts should be and then they came up with the same answer I had just said. There was no difference between our positions, they were fellow students of mine, the only difference was that they are men and I am a woman. This reaffirmed my feeling that I don’t exist in the same space as men. I’m not heard or seen, I’m not respected like they are. I was as if I were invisible to them – that if I went up to them and knocked their water bottle off the table they would think it was a ghost because they can’t see me. 

I was talking to a friend of mine about a time where an upperclassman male student said he wanted to go a meeting where a lot of freshman girls would be so that he could scout out which ones he can hookup with. It was predatory and disgusting, it brought back feelings of times I had been vulnerable and preyed on by men. My friend said that “it’s not like most guys at Davidson are like that”. When my friend said this it felt like he was trying to erase every time that I’ve been made to feel violated and unsafe on campus because “it can’t be that bad, most men here aren’t like this”. What bothers me as well is at the time I just agreed with him, I thought he was probably right and that I was making a big deal out of nothing. He hasn’t lived my experiences and he probably genuinely thought that most men here aren’t like that. If I had validated my voice and told him that that isn’t actually the case, maybe I could have made his understating of the climate on campus more clear. Maybe he wouldn’t say things like that to other women who have felt the same way as me. But I also know that it can be difficult to speak up for yourself when you start to feel invalidated. 

In one of my classes, I was mistaken for the only other black woman in my class. This was done by a student when trying to reference a point I had brought up in the previous class discussion two days before. This point he was trying to reference was said in a twenty minute presentation I had given last class. This other black woman and I have two vastly different skin tones and were sporting two very different hairstyles. When I corrected him on who he was trying to quote, he waved it off and perhaps spared me two seconds of eye contact. I was annoyed the entirety of the class period and looking back, I wish I had stood up for myself a bit more. Your dismissal of knowing my name is simultaneously you participating in the erasure of black women in academia. 

During my visits to the Davidson Student Counseling Center, I have brought up my ex-girlfriend, who happens to be trans. Because I started dating her before she came out as a trans woman, all three of the counselors I have had have either asked what her deadname was, or referred to me as dating her “while she was a man/male.” All five of the six counselors I have seen in the past two years (not all at Davidson) have asked me about my ex-girlfriend’s deadname or used antiquated language when discussing the period of time when my ex-girlfriend was not out as trans. It has made me incredibly uncomfortable to feel pressured to say my ex-girlfriend’s deadname or to be forced to educate my counselor on the appropriate language to use in an extremely vulnerable space of a therapist appointment. I cannot imagine what an actual trans person must go through at the Davidson Counseling Center or with any other therapist who does not understand how to talk about gender dysphoria/dysmorphia and social/physical transitioning in a way that does not cause further trauma. 

I had a professor say that she could tell english wasn’t my first language from my essay, because my sentences “sounded Spanish”. This was a [humanities] course, and I’ve spoken english since age 2. 

My male lab partner constantly invades my personal space, spreading out/scooting his stool over so I have little to no room. One time while I was leaning in to read a measurement, instead of waiting for me to finish, he leaned over too to the point where I could feel his face against the back of my hair. I can’t help but wonder if he would do the same if I weren’t a woman. 

During a science class, we had a class about BMI and health and part of the lab included weight yourself and measuring the circumference of different parts of our bodies. As a fat woman who has always been stigmatized for her weight, this “didactic”  activity was very triggering and brought up a lot of fatphobia i had experienced in the past 

I spent my whole life having to ask permission to celebrate my holidays. As a college student, I often felt that I needed to justify how religious I was in order to have the luxury to have the day off on my major holidays (something that no one is expected to do for majority-group holidays, like Christmas or Easter). As faculty, I no longer have to ask permission — I have control over when my class does and doesn’t meet. But in class, my job becomes harder for choosing to partake in my holidays (having to cram material), and because I’m forced to make the choice either to give up class time or have religious observance, I feel I can’t afford to cancel for any other reason, while my peers can cancel for necessary professional events (conferences) or even just personal reasons.  Rather than being allowed to simply have a holiday, ultimately I’m forced to accept a variety of professional and personal tradeoffs in order to be a religious minority.