What other games can we play?

A quote from Kate Manne’s Cis Women and Trans Women are in the Same, Overpoliced Boat

In preschool, I already understood that my body was being perceived, assessed, rated, and included in some group. By age three, my response to inclusion was, “No, thank you. Boring. What other games can we play?”

As I got older, the feeling grew stronger. “No, not interested.” Then, “NO.” I don’t want to participate. Leave me out of this shit. Are there other games we can play? It seems like every time I ask for a deck of cards, someone sticks Gender Monopoly in front of me. (It’s not always a man; sorority rush is the obvious example, but the up-down is the most common.)

When I became able to make decisions about my workplace, colleagues, and home life, I began looking for the exit door. “There must be something external to this system,” I thought. There are trap doors and dark corners that provide pockets of peace. Entrepreneurship has been my favorite haven—No Assholes Allowed in My Treehouse.

Many of my clients are concerned about privacy right now. They don’t ask for “privacy,” per se. They ask how to keep doing their work when executive orders prohibit the words that describe their writing, teaching, coaching, or artmaking. They want to keep the assholes out of their treehouses. They want to know where the trap doors and dark corners went.

But even that phrasing…I’ve implied that one is doing something secret, wrong, (a little witchy?) by attempting to escape.

I don’t like this game. What else can we play?