I recently started volunteering at a super cool organization called FODAC, which stands for Friends of Disabled Adults and Children. They provide free medical equipment to folks in need: wheelchairs (manual, power, and pediatric), shower chairs, canes, crutches, beds, power assists, portable toilets, you name it, they can provide it (and they do overseas disaster relief, too!). Many of the items they provide were donated and previously used. The equipment undergoes a rigorous cleaning and sanitizing process, then they get repaired or stripped for parts. This is what I’m doing. I’m repairing manual wheelchairs.
It’s a little outside of my normal ken, but I’m crafty and a quick learner, and it’s fun to take things apart and try to figure out how to make them work again. Today I was taking some worn armrests off some side rails (which are the large metal plates on either side of where you sit), and replacing them with better ones (and sometimes new ones if we couldn’t find a pair of used ones that fit). The screws on these armrests were visibly rusted, and I got both out of the first armrest with no problems. The second armrest, however, was less obliging. One screw came out. The other was stuck. It was either rusted stuck or cross-threaded or both, but I could not get it out. I dug in with the screwdriver, and watched the metal cross of the screw start to mush. I was stripping the screw, and it still wasn’t budging. I was going to have to ask for help.
Reader, my stomach sank. Not because I needed to ask for help, because I’d already asked for help plenty of times. Where can I find something? How does that work? Should I do it like this? Where should I put this? All the sorts of things you normally ask when you’re learning a new set of skills in a new place. But needing help to remove a stuck screw? Reader, I dreaded asking for help with removing this screw like I dread having a cavity filled. And the reason, Reader, is because I’m a girl.
Now, if you are a girl, woman, female, she-ish, however you identify, then you probably have experienced the absolute soul-deadening condescension of having a man (and, to be clear, it’s usually a cis, straight man) help you with something like this. It’s never “she can’t do it,” it’s always “SHE can’t do it,” because SHE is too weak, too unknowledgeable, too soft and delicate, and it must be done for her. It’s okay, SHE can’t help it. Let me, the man, make sure it really is a problem, then I’ll set about fixing it FOR HER. And it makes me want to scream with frustration and failure, because it’s never about the object being broken or difficult, it’s about the woman being unable because she’s a woman.
And it was only my second week at FODAC. And I was going to have to ask for help removing this stuck screw, and all of the yucky murk that swirls in my heart when my stomach sinks but I don’t want to deal with it began to swirl, and I put down my screwdriver, went to work on a different wheelchair, and waited for Paul to come back.
Paul is the guru of manual wheelchairs. This is his area. He does so many things that I don’t even know the full extent of all the things he does yet. He does stuff on the computer. He does stuff with paperwork. He knows where things are. He knows how to fix things. He is the master of the chaos that is this repair shop. He is very nice and has already answered many questions and has shown me how to do many things. He had just run off to go do something when I encountered the rusted screw. So I worked on a different wheelchair, and when Paul came back, I squashed my sunken stomach feeling, and showed him the stuck screw. I explained the rust, my inability to remove it. I automatically held out the screwdriver for him to try it himself, to verify that it was stuck, to somehow unstuck with his very masculinity.
Reader. He did not take the screwdriver. Instead, he took the armrest, still attached to side rail by the stuck screw, looked at the screw, and said, “Yep. That happens. Here’s what I do. The other one is out, right?” I nodded. And instead of trying to get the screw loose himself, he proceeded to literally rip the armrest off the side rail. The armrest cracked and he paused to say “It’s worn and broken anyway, so if that happens, it doesn’t matter, right?” I nodded, eyes wide, and said, “Yeah, that makes sense.” One more pull and he had the armrest and offending screw off the side rail, which he handed back to me. “Don’t worry about breaking stuff,” he said, “there’s plenty more parts laying around somewhere.” And with that, he vanished into the warehouse (from which he would emerge about ten minutes later, with a pair of footrests to try on out the wheelchair that no longer had a stuck rusted screw).
As I stood there, holding the side rail, I realized that this was possibly the first time in my life, at 46 years old, that a man had not “checked” to make sure the screw really wouldn’t come out, had in no way condescended that I couldn’t remove the screw, and who had shown me a removal technique that assumed I had a certain measure of physical strength. Reader. I stood in that repair shop while the rest of my being soared completely over the moon with joy.
It was the joy, actually, that made me realize what the dread I had been feeling was. It was the dread of experiencing, yet again, the mundane, ordinary, and completely taken for granted sexism that happens in every day life. I expect to stand in a repair shop and experience condescension. I expect to go for a run and get honked at (Reader, I get honked at nearly every single time I run. I try to tell myself that I’m being cheered on, because otherwise I’ll be too self-conscious to continue.). I expect to be interrupted. I expect to be told how to do something I already know how to do. I expect to have to prove my intelligence, my expertise, my fandom, my worthiness. And I expect all these things because I was born in 1977 and a lifetime of casual discrimination created these expectations and the sunken feeling in my stomach when I realize that I am in a situation where I’m about to get the girl treatment. And to NOT get the girl treatment when I’m expecting it, Reader, is such a singular experience that I’m writing an entire Substack about the moon-leaping joy I felt in that moment.
Which means, of course, that the transcendent happiness also contains within it a kernel of sadness, because this moment of extreme joy? Should never have had to exist in the first place.
And while both the joy and the sadness and dismay will just have to co-exist for now, I can take solace in the fact that FODAC remains an incredible place to volunteer, and that Paul, like everyone I keep meeting there, is truly of the most awesome and nicest folks that I have ever met. And the places where everyone is equal do exist, Reader, and they are FANTASTIC.
This is so good! I kinda want you to submit it for publication.