Flags
Flags. Flags. Flags!! Flags to front of me, flags to left of me, flags to the right of me. Everywhere I turn these days, I see flags. With the new emphasis on patriotism, I am seeing Old Glory draped from the sides of office building, on highway overpasses, on just about every car and truck, on documents and on websites. I even saw the Stars and Stripes on someone forehead.Look around and you will see other flags waving. There are state flags, city/county flags, company flags, organizational flags and a host of others. There are flags the start and end auto races, flags on special trains, flags in football, flags on golf courses and who know how many more. And then there are the yuppie flags that you see outside people’s home. My neighbor has a big flower on her flag (I do not know if she like flowers or spring but it looks out of place in the wintertime). There is one down the street that has a big ice cream cone on it so I guess they have a fetish for Ben and Jerry. I also saw one recently that had a large eight ball on it and I do not know what is behind that one.
So I started to think about what all these flags mean and how flags relate to us. Basically, these flags make a statement; anything from being a proud American to being a location for a MacDonalds (I do not know why they need a flag out front when the building itself must have the word MacDonalds written on it 25 times) to having a love for ice cream. And we as transgendered people also have our flags. No I am not talking about the rainbow flag or the pink triangle, but the gender flags. Gender flags? Sure gender flags. We have each adopted flags that are stereotypical representations of our chosen gender. Hair, clothes, make up, jewelry, deportment, and speech patterns are all flags that we wave (okay if you are an F2M with a buzz cut then it is hard to wave your hair) at society to tell them that we are that gender.
Flags are statements and ours are no different except in how you present them. Like most flags, some are more important than others. At the top of a flagpole you will find the American flag, then underneath the state flag and so forth on down the pole. Like a flagpole, on top we have hair; and for me, I personally feel that hair is the most important flag we have to announce our gender. It was not until I grew my hair out did I start getting “ma’amed” in drab. Of course you can make the argument that gg’s get boy cuts and do not ever get mistaken for guys and that is because they have other flags that outweigh hair in important. Also over time some flags become less important. Clothes are a good example of a major flag becoming less important overtime. How many of us go out now in jeans and slack instead of dresses and skirts? When we began, dresses and skirts were a must flag to tell the world that we were women. Today we have more confidence in ourselves and that flag is not as important as it once was.
So today I salute all the flags. Each one is important to the one who put it there. Our flags tell the world who we are, a nation, a state, a city, a company, or a woman or a man. So I think I will go out and celebrate with an order of McNuggets and I will wonder about that guy who is 14 balls short of a full rack.
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