Those are stay-big-picture days: paint, write, read, think about language. If gender is fluent, so are the other language markers which assert us. What if I don’t always identify as a first person? I may feel like a you, for example, besotted with empathy for us. How many I am can also be in flux, neither singular nor plural quite doing the job, leaving me like a numberless child, forsaken by the grammar that traps me.
This isn’t one of those days. I flaunt a tenuous Scottish heritage today because of this news: Period products are now free in that country to anyone who needs them. My mother’s husband’s forebears’ home was Scotland, saving contrary evidence. If men in skirts be fable as some claim, / long live of fabled men in skirts the fame! (It’s hard to talk of Scotland without metre.)
The initiative makes Scotland the first country in the world to provide free sanitary products, part of a global effort to end “period poverty” — or a lack of access to tampons or sanitary pads because of prohibitively high costs.
(Remy Tumin, “Scotland Makes Period Products Free,” 8-15-22)
Northern Ireland is considering a similar measure; New Zealand and South Korea offer free menstrual products in schools. I was deprived of a girlhood by the fact of my birth, but if I could have one, I know where I would choose to be born: Edinburgh, Belfast, Wellington or Seoul.
I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.
EthicalDative 
Some Days I’m Angry AND Disappointed
Those are stay-big-picture days: paint, write, read, think about language. If gender is fluent, so are the other language markers which assert us. What if I don’t always identify as a first person? I may feel like a you, for example, besotted with empathy for us. How many I am can also be in flux, neither singular nor plural quite doing the job, leaving me like a numberless child, forsaken by the grammar that traps me.
This isn’t one of those days. I flaunt a tenuous Scottish heritage today because of this news: Period products are now free in that country to anyone who needs them. My mother’s husband’s forebears’ home was Scotland, saving contrary evidence. If men in skirts be fable as some claim, / long live of fabled men in skirts the fame! (It’s hard to talk of Scotland without metre.)
Northern Ireland is considering a similar measure; New Zealand and South Korea offer free menstrual products in schools. I was deprived of a girlhood by the fact of my birth, but if I could have one, I know where I would choose to be born: Edinburgh, Belfast, Wellington or Seoul.
(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
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About JMN
I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.