Maëlys McArdle

Category: Life

Every other post.

Capture Enthusiasm
I love helping others learn to code. My approach is to preserve the enthusiasm people bring to the table when they first show up.

Enthusiasm is easy to squander. When people feel lost, they lose enthusiasm. When they’re told that they’re doing something wrong over and over, they lose enthusiasm. When they feel embarrassed about what they don’t know, they lose enthusiasm. When they can’t see the end in sight, they lose enthusiasm. When they face constraints peers don’t seem to have, they lose enthusiasm. And they especially lose enthusiasm when they are made to feel like they will never be okay at it. A lot of this can be prevented by the educator’s approach.

Learning anything new is hard, and with that comes an inevitable loss in enthusiasm. To counter that effect, I try to:
- Keep new information to absorb to a minimum and revisit what they already know
- Structure learning so participants can make regular and visible progress
- Encourage experimentation and making mistakes
- Show genuine enthusiasm yourself – how you visibly perceive the content has an effect on others
- Align content to other interests they have as to leverage their enthusiasm for that other subject
- Create my own teaching material which prioritizes the reader’s feelings over quantity
It’s much easier to preserve enthusiasm when there’s no fixed deadlines. Still, no matter what the context, I place as much importance on listening as to speaking. It’s also important to the participant’s success and those of others for there to be boundaries, but I am very selective about which constraints are necessary. I don’t offer unsolicited advice, instead keeping the pace commensurate with the learner, checking in regularly, and showing genuine interest in the questions they ask. Anything new tidbit they glean is great so no question is ever too rudimentary.

Bringing this into the real world, I’m currently mentoring a comp sci student. They chose the problem they wanted to solve. They drew what they wanted the ideal app to look like. I helped them identify the MVP and reduce the scope. This brings the deliverable into something tangible, which reduces the chances of getting discouraged to the point of wanting out later in development. We then broke the project into three discrete parts: the front-end, the back-end, and the data store. We focused on each component starting at the data store. Isolating the problem space to one component gives a light at the end of the tunnel and reduces how many new concepts they have to grasp. They created the repo on GitHub. I gave them small assignments that could be done in 30 minutes.

For the two-part workshop I gave at Algonquin college, my approach was “less is more”. I wanted participants to come out of the sessions being able to say that they could code. I wanted their computer screens looking like that of a professional developer. I also wanted to impress that they already had many important skills relevant to this type of work.

I showed them what software developers actually do (Google things a lot), covered what a programming language is, went over the emotional intelligence aspect of software development, before finally getting into a bit of coding. I selected a programming language with real-world applications (Python) and IDE (Visual Studio Code). The format was alternating between showing a new little thing they could do, and then having them experiment, with one mentor per four participants. They learned about showing text on the screen, doing simple math, using functions, getting user input, creating functions, and reading files. I omitted a lot of content that’s usually in introductory lessons for the sake of keeping it as simple as possible while covering a lot of functional ground. So I didn’t go over the difference between an integer and a float, or cover index-based loops, or ASCII vs UTF-8, etc.

The workshop was free. They didn’t have to come back for that second session if they didn’t want to but they all did, safe for one. They were enthused and wanted to learn more. That’s exactly the emotion I had hoped to elicit and what we should all strive for.

When approaching instruction, center how you want people to feel. You want them to feel like they can do this. Like they’re making progress. Like what they’re learning is relevant. You can pull all of that off in a way that’s honest with them. I think too often the enthusist’s emotions isn’t considered at all, and that this is to the detriment of all.
May 6, 2019
Change requires vulnerability
You don’t measure vulnerability by the amount of disclosure. You measure it by the amount of courage to show up and be seen when you can’t control the outcome.
Brené Brown, The Call to Courage

The dominant narrative in contemporary Canadian society is that prejudice is a thing of the past. That racism ended with the U.S. civil rights movement, sexism with sexual liberation, and colonialism with confederation. These myths prevail even as the facts disproving them shout in our faces.

This dissonance between perception and reality is of little surprise given that these narratives around prejudice are driven by the political landscape, executive boards, and media – all of which are currently dominated by affluent white men*. Theirs isn’t a malicious role so much as reflective of the smallness of their shared experience. But it takes more than affluent white men increasing awareness to change things; it takes institutions and organizations looking like the people they serve in substantive numbers at the highest echelons. There can be no tangible improvement as long as affluent white men make up the majority of decision makers.

In the end, a lot of prejudice isn’t fueled by hate, but by discomfort, and only with vulnerability can it be addressed meaningfully. Though discomfort is more innocuous-sounding than hate, actions (or lack thereof) rooted in discomfort can be indistinguishable in their cruelty and harm done to those motivated by hate.

Discrimination is normalized

Before going further it’s worth listing some of the discrimination that is normalized in the current climate. The threshold for acceptability into unacceptability seems to be the point where today’s affluent white men* would immediately benefit from its resolution.

For some examples of marginalization, let’s look at how women are excluded from positions of influence:
- In the 42nd parliament (2015-2019), only 26% of MPs are women. Male perspectives define the legislature.
- In 2018, of the top 100 companies on the S&P/TSX Composite, only one of them had a woman CEO. Men dominate executive boards.
- In 2018, 148 women and girls are killed in Canada. 90% of their killers are men. In Toronto, a self-proclaimed incel targets women in a mass murder. Women are harassed by men for simple activities like walking down the sidewalk.
- As of 2016, women in Canada earn 69 cents for every dollar earned by men. Men are paid more for doing the same job with the same qualifications as women.
- In 2019, only 11% of Canadian software developers are women. The story is much the same across all high paying jobs.
- In 2018, less than a quarter of Oscar and BAFTA nominees are women. Speaking roles are disproportionately given to men and films continue to fail the Bechdel test (do two women talk to each other about something other than a man).
- In 2016, the US President is elected despite taped admissions that he sexually assaulted women (“grab them by the pussy“), cheated on his wife multiple times (also caught on tape), and openly hurled misogynistic insults to prominent women (“blood coming out of her wherever“).
Muslims in Canada also experience significant hardships:
- In 2018, 25% of Canadians believe that the country would be better off with no Muslims. They are openly vilified by mainstream Canadian politicians, news organizations and on radio.
- Anti-Muslim groups La Meute, Proud Boys, Northern Guard, Worldwide Coalition Against Islam, and Soldiers of Odin are openly demonstrating in major cities like Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Halifax and Edmonton. One major political party is courting their votes and some local politicians share their ideology.
- In 2017, a mass shooter kills 6 worshipers at a Quebec City mosque.
- In 2017, the Quebec government implements a ban on face coverings, designed to prevent women from accessing public services and obtaining jobs in the public sector if they are visibly Muslim.
- In 2017, the United-States implements a “Muslim ban”. The official explanatory statement: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States“.
- In 2019, a mass shooter kills 50 worshipers in a Christchurch mosque. The killer praises Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose“. On his firearm’s magazine, he writes the name of the Quebec City mosque shooter.
Then there is the genocide of indigenous peoples in North America perpetrated by successive governments. We are still in the middle of that story:

Take-over of indigenous land by colonial powers. Source.
- Indigenous people had their land invaded and taken from them by successive colonial governments across North America. The Canadian government operated in bad faith to further take land from indigenous people, and in 1927 made it illegal for indigenous people to challenge the government in court including over land claims. Through disease, starvation and warfare directly stemming from European settlement and practices an estimated 75-95% of indigenous people were killed by the time of confederation.
- For the indigenous people that remained, the Canadian government had a policy to extinguish their culture by forcibly taking indigenous children away from their parents for assimilation, using law enforcement to ban ceremonies, and legally mandating the band system of governance for the purposes of assimilation. The Potlach ban lasted for seventy years until 1951 and residential schools for a century until 1986. Though residential schools ended, children are still forcibly taken by the government. In Manitoba, 10,000 of the 11,000 children in foster care were indigenous.
- The actions of the government have had a devastating impact on indigenous communities. 80% of reserves have median incomes below the poverty line and two-thirds of indigenous communities have gone without clean water. In 5 years, 582 indigenous women were murdered or missing. Police in cities like Thunder Bay ignore these deaths even as the settlers that kill indigenous people to amuse themselves walk free in their municipality.
- Meanwhile, sports teams are named after slurs for indigenous people and the Liberal prime minister cracks jokes in the face of indigenous advocates speaking their pain. Conservatives are no better, with their politician on Aboriginal people’s committee praising the residential schools, denying that racism exists, and blaming indigenous people for poor outcomes.
- To this day, the Canadian government refuses to treat indigenous peoples as equal partners. In 2007, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is adopted with 144 nations voting in favour. Canada was one of the only four nations to oppose the declaration. In 2018, the private member’s Bill C-262 is introduced by NDP Romeo Saganash to harmonize laws with the declaration. As of the time of this writing, it looks likely to be killed by delay.
This does not have to be our reality. We could be on the path to reconciliation, work to end sexism in a tangible way, and treat all faiths with equal respect. It just takes people in the right positions choosing differently. They do not.

The reasons are twofold: the affluent white men* in decision making positions don’t have to and don’t want to. The don’t have to part is easy enough: they are not personally negatively impacted by this discrimination, the people they are accountable to don’t ask for it, and there’s no legislation to mandate it. As change carries risk of losing eminence, maintaining the status quo is more desirable.

Then there’s why they don’t want to. There is one class of people who don’t believe there are widespread experiences of discrimination. They persevered and were able to make it, and so if others did not have the same outcome, it’s attributed to character. They are not inclined to appreciate the additional barriers specific to separate groups. This class is not the focus of this article.

There is a second class of people who do believe discrimination exists but are unwilling to make the decisions that would challenge it. Members of both classes share the belief that they personally would be worse off were they to push for this change. The former because they don’t want the world this change would bring. The latter because pushing has consequences. Either way, the end result is the same.

It is this second class which believes prejudice exists and is morally wrong but make successive decisions to uphold it that is the focus of this article.

Acknowledging the cost

For affluent white men*, doing the right thing has a cost. Money spent on accessible entrances, washrooms and spaces means less money spent on them. Inclusive hiring practices means more restrictions on how they behave. Respecting indigenous sovereignty means they can’t operate unilaterally. Gender balanced executive boards mean less job openings for them. They give up something.

Even smaller gestures, like friends speaking up when hearing a joke that belittles a group of people, or teachers openly vocalizing for a GSA in a Catholic school that’s opposed them, lose something by doing so. Maybe it’s the esteem in which they’re held. Maybe it’s the work environment. They feel uncomfortable.

Bearing these costs is a very difficult proposition for affluent white men* to accept when doing so is entirely voluntary. It predisposes them to stand back, be silent, and presume others will carry out the change in a kind of bystander effect.

Change requires losing control on outcomes

It’s difficult for affluent white men* in decision making positions to accept a cost when they don’t have to. It’s even harder to accept when they can’t predict what the cost will be. What would their life look like if decision makers in the government stopped perpetrating this slow-motion genocide against indigenous people? What would their life look like if decision makers in companies decided that half of managers should be women? Or more immediately, what would their work environment look like if they spoke up when their colleague made a sexist joke?

For tangible change to happen, these men need to be okay with being vulnerable. As Brené Brown put it in that opening quote, that means doing things knowing the outcome can’t be controlled. It’s scary and a reality that those on the receiving end of discrimination know too well. They have no choice. That vulnerability is foisted upon them every day.

Discrimination will continue for generations because decision makers preserve their sense of safety by keeping to insignificant changes or voicing support only in the company of like-minded individuals. Only when they accept to be uncomfortable and assume the cost of doing what they know is right will they be able to say that they stood up to prejudice.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King, The Trumpet of Conscience

*Specifically affluent, Christian heritage, white, settler, able-bodied, straight, cisgender, men who own a car and a house. Or individuals who fit eight out of ten criteria.
May 1, 2019
Laser eye surgery

I had laser eye surgery two days ago, one month after my vaginoplasty. I had Intralase SBK (Sub-Bowman’s Keratomileusis) done. So now I’m doing post-operative care for two surgeries. When it rains.

The procedure to correct my vision was quick and painless. There wasn’t even any discomfort. I wish though I would have known that ahead of time, because the machines looked very intimidating and I was trembling in fear. That shaking knocked off the suction device they put on your eye twice and audibly frustrated the doctor. They gave me 1mg of Ativan before the procedure, but it might as well have been a placebo. It wasn’t at all like the vaginoplasty where whatever drugs they gave me kept me very calm despite being operated on while conscious.

I had the laser eye procedure at 1pm. It was done in minutes. A few hours later, my eyes were constantly watering and it was hard to keep them open. I could see, but my vision was blurry. Also, my sinuses were acting up as if I had had a terrible cold. I also had to put eye drops every two hours, including through the night. Come the next morning, all that had stopped. I could see far better than I had without glasses, though I had difficulty focusing on things closer to me. It’s as if my eyes were shaking in minute oscillations, making it difficult to see things sharply.

In the follow up appointment the next day, the ophthalmologist told me the blurriness was expected, it was a product of swelling inside the eye as a result of the laser. The hemorrhaging on the surface of my eye was also normal, a product of the suction device that had been put on during surgery.

Visible hemorrhaging on the surface of my eye.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the outcome of this surgery so far. Even if this were to be it, and my vision weren’t to improve over the course of the next week as it’s expected to do, it would be fine. It’s amazing not to need glasses that tint the world and constantly need cleaning, to gain peripheral vision, to gain my sense depth.

How glad I am that I got the courage to do this. In other news, I finally stopped bleeding from my vaginoplasty yesterday! I also wore jeans for the first time yesterday, and I can sit on hard surfaces like wooden chairs now without too much pain. Progress!

March 10, 2019
Growth

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
Richard Rohr

The greatest transformation in my adult life has not been around my transition, coming out, or shifting from school to ten years into a career. It’s been around my emotional literacy and mental well-being.

It didn’t come easy

This transformation was never assured. There were a few pivot points, all of which occurred in my first intimate relationship in my mid-twenties.

The first pivot point was the night where I had a panic attack and vomited in bed. I had had these every night since I was fifteen, which my boyfriend would help me through. But this night was worse than the others. “This has to stop,” he told me. Those words got me to see my GP. My doctor prescribed me SSRIs and within months the panic attacks ended. It’s been almost ten years since then and they’ve never come back.

The second pivot point was when my boyfriend and I decided to see a relationship counselor. My fights with him were ugly but also all I knew given my upbringing. I would say the most hurtful things. He might pin me to the floor and threaten me. I thought arguments had to have a winner and a loser. The therapist transformed my understanding of conflict from something to fear and avoid into an opportunity to grow closer with my partner. I learned about the toxicity of indirect communication like my passive aggressive comments, got to practice being direct about my needs and desires, learned to listen to the feelings underlying expressions of hurt instead of getting defensive, and came to express my own anger constructively using fill in the blank sentences. The therapist also provided a safe environment to share difficult words. Thanks to her help and hard work from my partner and I, our relationship metamorphosed into a deeply intimate friendship.

The third pivot point was over a longer stretch, but it had to do with my boyfriend affirming his boundaries, and making me aware that I was entitled to my own. In so doing he helped give me words to what bothered me so much about my parents then regularly disregarding my agency. It also later protected me when subsequent partners wanted me to give up my reproductive choices, job, and/or church community to align with their values. It gave me a path forward to make my life a more enjoyable one.

The slow path forward

More than anything, these pivot points distanced me from the values of my parents. Had it not been for the life-changing encounter of my first boyfriend, I think it’s quite possible that I would have hurt a lot more people that I care about. Not out of any desire to harm them – quite the contrary – but out ignorance, entitlement, and insecurity.

As time went on I saw a number of therapists, each of which helped me become more like the person I aspired to be. One of them introduced me to Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) which helped me gain the emotional regulation skills that I had never acquired growing up: mindfulness to notice when my feelings were snowballing, distraction to defuse them in the moment, and time boxed delay strategies to address the underlying conditions at a more propitious time. These tools put an all but end to the self-harm that had initially started in adolescence to avoid getting beaten at home but then became an automatic response to all mental health crises. I found the DBT Skills Workbook tremendously valuable to continue on the work of my therapist.

Beyond the workbook, I also found reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Children of the Self-Absorbed and Toxic Parents to be of great help. Likewise with Taking Charge of Anger, Codependent No More, and Trans Sexual Violence Survivors: A Self-Help Guide to Healing and Understanding. I realised through them that there was a body of knowledge to address the specific maladaptations I had acquired over my youth, adolescence, and young adulthood.

Having friends and family model possibilities was also important. I had felt a lot of shame for taking the actions I needed to do in order to protect my mental health, like not having any contact with my parents for a while. Seeing my friends do this, and later my step-sister and sister, gave me the strength I needed. I also admired my sister when she nonchalantly brushed off the news of my parents considering legal action against her so they could see their grandchildren more often. The ground breaking work of those around me was helpful to establish new norms for my well-being.

Pivot points or not, the path forward would still be bumpy. When two men in their fifties sexually assaulted me on separate occasions in my twenties, I took it, because I felt shame for saying no – the shame my parents have kept trying to instill in me to this day. I’ve also had a number of relationships end due to my own attachment issues. I have much work to do, but I do not lose sight of all the progress I’ve made thus far.

I also let go

For a good while, I was angry at my parents. As I came into my own, my negative experiences growing up and a recognition of how it had shaped me overshadowed more and more of my pleasant memories. This despite my appreciation for their making sure that I was housed, fed, clothed, had plenty of extra-curricular activities and was supported in my creative expression growing up. By the time I approached the age my parents had me at, I lost the excuses I had made for dangling me over a stairwell as a child asking me if I wanted to die, hitting me regularly in frustration, threatening to beat me as a teen, or the numerous heartless comments as an adult and the unwillingness to apologize for any of it to this day.

In the end I let my anger go. Anger is an important emotion that wants things changed. But the past can’t be changed and there gets to be a point where that anger erodes the present. My parents were the product of their own life experiences and they have come out of it with an under-developed capacity for empathy and introspection. They are not going to change and so getting frustrated is without benefit. What I can change is me. I have full agency over my life and can become the person I want to be. The parent I want to be. I don’t need to forget the past to live in the present and let go of that hurt.

Part of that also means letting go of the anger for how they treat me and my siblings in the present. That one was harder but it went away when I realized that all the work I’ve put into myself enabled me to have emotional intimacy with those I love. I was angry because I felt like their actions had been without consequence, that they could say and do hurtful things and dismiss its impacts when brought up. When I realized that they were missing out on emotional intimacy with me, and that there had been consequences all along, those feelings went away.

I still love my parents of course and I spend quality time. They are generous and loving people. But that quality isn’t from our conversations, but about sharing space with some mutual unspoken affection. They’ve established that they aren’t safe to open up to and be vulnerable around. It took many deeply wounding moments to accept this. Instead, we talk about the weather and other pleasantries. I don’t engage when they get to subjects of personal sensitivity. They were my only family not to know about my bottom surgery. They have not met either of the two people I’m currently dating or my ex. I ignore the passive aggressive remarks by realizing that they disregard my feelings to meet their emotional needs. I’ve let go of hoping they could change. It’s not up to me. I accept the reality of this situation.

That might sound sad, and I was for a while. I wanted to have a relationship in adulthood like my friends did. Someone I could turn to for support when I was sad and gush to about my partners. But life moves on; I found a way to be around my parents and I’m content. Like the opening quote says, I have learned to transform my pain. I will break the cycle. I will continue on this messy life, to make mistakes, to listen, and work to become better than I was.

That reflects my values.

March 2, 2019
One month since surgery

It’s been a month since my vaginoplasty. The time since has passed extremely quickly and been uneventful.

I learned rather quickly that despite having some mobility, I needed to do far less than I had initially felt I could do. Nonetheless, I had no problem taking care of myself solo. I had bought a bunch of groceries in anticipation of my recovery, enough to last me a few weeks, I had meal prepped ahead of time, and for everything else I was mobile enough to go to the grocery section of the drug store across the road from my apartment.

I got a bunch of visitors in my second week back. It was really nice to get guests, especially as I was more or less in bed all day, and I appreciated the food they dropped off. It was also reassuring to have other pairs of eyes on my healing wounds.

Some of the lovely visitors I received.

As far as my healing went, I’ve been bleeding all month. I had been wearing adult diapers and GoodNites, and I’m just now able to switch to pads. My surgical site has also been extremely swollen. Like the bleeding it has steadily decreased over time but it’s still sore, limiting the length of time I’m able to stay standing, walking, or sitting. If you get this procedure done you should get a bag of frozen peas.

The only contact I’ve had with the surgeon’s office since coming back has been two follow up emails. I’ve sent them photos so they can evaluate if I need to be attentive to anything obvious. They have yet to reply to the second email. On my exit from the recovery center they issued me the opioid-based painkiller Tramadol. I used it the one time to handle the journey back Ottawa. Otherwise I took Tylenol twice a day during the first few weeks, plus the antibiotics that they had prescribed.

In the past month there’s been continual signs of progress. Whether that’s being able to tie my shoes for the first time a few days ago, or sitting at a coffee shop without feeling constant pain, or being able to lay on my stomach. I’m very pleased. In terms of care, I currently spend about two hours each day bathing and tending to my wounds. I no longer apply ice to my groin area.

I’ve given myself two estradiol injections since my return. I’m slowly feeling back to my estrogen-based normal, after having been through a challenging intermediary period where my body was back on testosterone. I haven’t taken spironolactone since my return, which has been lovely. Not having my nights interrupted by multiple trips to the washroom is alone worth the discomfort of surgery. By body’s insatiable appetite for salt (pickles!) has also gone along with the diuretic.

My only dismay is that I went back to work a week after coming back from the recovery facility. It’s too soon but I had little choice. I lost my last job with less than two week’s notice after an unexpected change of corporate priorities. I found another position weeks later, but by that time surgery was less than two months away. I just didn’t feel like I had the flexibility to take more than two weeks off. Luckily, I’ve been working from home. But I’m still exhausted all the time. I really could use more rest than I get.

March 1, 2019