She loved the freedom, brotherly days out with "other" men, and conversations with patriarchs over evening meals. But that day, she needed a break. At a swanky hotel — white sheets, bathrobes, and very cold airconditioning — she settled into bed to watch a movie, Boys Don't Cry, for which Hilary Swank won her first Oscar. Ayres in Kabul in June.
During his last months in Afghanistan he was able to live more as a man. Credit: Andrew Quilty. But, as the movie progressed, she began to see how much she had in common with the main character, Brandon Teena, a real-life transgender man who was raped and murdered by two friends once they discovered he had female genitalia.
I am fucking transgender. He is now 49; his hair still short, but with more greys. A double mastectomy earlier this year removed his breasts. He had a hysterectomy 10 years ago, for health reasons. He will start testosterone injections soon. He has a few wispy hairs on his chin and wonders if he can start shaving yet.
Ayres at Band-e-Amir, Afghanistan, in his first week dressed as a man. He also has a new name. Emma Ayres is now Eddie Guy Ayres. Eddie Ayres thinks back to Pakistan. It was, he says, a "total beam of light" moment; where he saw the truth about who he was. But that truth was also a frightening "terrible realisation" — and one that he was entirely unprepared to deal with. It would take Emma Ayres more than 15 years — and a life-changing 12 months in Afghanistan — to pluck up the courage to do something about it.
As a fellow Australian living in Kabul, I contacted Ayres early in , curious to see how a former ABC radio presenter had adjusted to life teaching at a Kabul music school.
We met there for the first time in April. Afghanistan is still a country wracked by poverty, war and suicide bombings. But wedged between kebab shops and dusty side streets, ANIM feels like a genuine beacon of hope, a place where children — both boys and girls — revel in learning music and hold teachers like "Miss Emma" in very high regard.
Watching children clutching violins dash in and out of Ayres' teaching room, a small space decorated with Afghan rugs and pictures of Beethoven and Schubert, makes Afghanistan's progress seem tangible. After all, just two decades earlier, the Taliban forbade music and sent out squads to crush instruments.
But for all the small pockets of wonder like ANIM, where teenage girls conduct orchestras and practise wonky versions of Abba songs on traditional instruments, Afghanistan is still a country where women are second-class citizens; where violence against women is endemic and child marriage rife. For women, socialising with unrelated men is frowned upon.
Although not required by law, women cover their hair, ankles and wrists. The burqa is still common. Some women push these boundaries, but are harassed for it. He also knew that as a woman, he would have to wear a hijab, and opportunities to socialise with men would be rare. Many men wouldn't even shake his hand. For years, Ayres had used androgyny as an escape from the body he hated. That was no longer possible.
Life in Afghanistan was already hard. There were the pot-holed streets, the power outages, the distressed students who screamed in terror when bombs exploded nearby. Then two suicide bombers were apprehended in the building adjacent to ANIM, believed to be plotting an attack on the school.
But the hardest thing for Ayres in Afghanistan, after 15 years of denial, was being recognised every day as a woman. Ayres was surprised how much the kids constantly singing out "Miss Emma" affected him. He began to despise his headscarf. Ayres' housemate in Kabul, Jennifer Moberg, once told Ayres that Afghanistan "holds a mirror up to you" — that living there is so stressful that you learn who you really are. For Ayres, Afghanistan made him finally confront being transgender.
It was time to stop lying — which he had done for so many years — to others, and to himself. Two hours after we first met, Ayres and I sat outside as the kids ran around on their lunch break. Ayres had previously mentioned a recent surgery in Australia, so I asked about it. Ayres paused. He no longer wanted to lie. So he explained he'd had a double mastectomy, and told me, for the first time, that he was a transgender person and he was in the process of transitioning.
When Ayres was eight years old, his mother, Anna, asked him what classical instrument he wanted to play. Ayres answered that he would like to learn the cello. Born the youngest of four children — with two sisters, Liz and Penny, and a brother, Tim — Ayres grew up a true tomboy in Shrewsbury, a small town in the heart of England.
And how could I not have heard of this? The U. It is only lightly invested in serious education, environmental protection, human health, adaptation to the far-reaching ravages of global warming, preparation for the coming destruction of coastal cities, replacement of deteriorating roads, bridges, pipelines, water mains, and other costly infrastructure, and a long list of other urgent needs of the kind it will take hard use of our brains to meet.
Running with my 2-year-old grandson, Josh, has been a great revelation. It has confirmed, for me, how we humans, out of all the millions of species on this planet, came to be the world-dominating animals we are. And what it has confirmed is the very opposite of what most of us were taught in school—the idea that humans became what we are because of our big brains.
I knew this, about the body developing first, long before Josh was born. Then, after a few weeks, he was running laps around the living room. One day he ran 50 laps nonstop before I stopped counting, smiling and clapping and having the time of his life.
I should clarify that Josh is in no way slow in his development of language. His running experience is far more varied, complex, and non-goal-oriented than that. Now, if he sees the moon, I know better than to question him. Up dere! How did he see that? And then it hit me: Josh was instinctively doing what humans before civilization had to do to survive: He was watching, observing, using his eyes and ears with an acuity we modern grownups have largely abandoned.
It struck me that maybe one of the reasons a lot of modern endurance athletes have moved from the roads to the trails is that trail-running or hiking, or mountain biking or climbing both requires and invites more active engagement with the environment—watching the ground for rocks and roots, or pitfalls or cliffs, or adapting to the sun or wind or ice as we go, and getting closer to the miracle of the living world we evolved in,.
As we run, Josh will often stop to examine something: an exotic beetle I would not have noticed, or an ant lugging a twig five times the size of its body, or a crack in the pavement, or a lizard. Had I gone the whole summer without consciously hearing and appreciating them? There are 70 years of life experience separating Josh and me, but running with Josh is teaching me, as nothing else ever has, some important things about how we developed both as individuals and as a species.
That development began and begins with our physical experience—what we see and hear on the trail, or what we feel as we trip on a rock and lose balance. But understanding the meaning of balance had to begin with learning not to fall on your face! Those are metaphors now, but they began with literal, physical, experience. Josh is reminding me of what it is to be young and fully alive.
He makes my heart leap. My heart leaps up when I behold. A rainbow in the sky:. So was it when my life began;. The child is father of the Man.
What on Earth could that mean? The past learns from the future? If that is so, it suggests that we can only survive by having enough imagination and acuity to envision the future—to be alert enough to see what lies ahead on the trail of life. Remember the famous story and later the movie of that title— Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner? As a kid, I was always able to relate to it. I was introverted and drawn to solitary pursuits, such as going off into the woods by myself to look for turtles or salamanders.
In recent years, distance running has become a much more social activity, and I have the impression that there are now millions of people who have never run alone—and who also have a very amicable life with training partners, club members, and Sunday long-run groups. But after high-school and college cross country, I never really got into that. Other than that, I assumed running was for people between the ages of 15 and Today, it would be a different story.
If 74 would be a reasonable composite age for a pair of typical running companions today, then I guess my new situation is right in step. For me, though, this new partnership has been a huge revelation. Soon, he was running all the way around the perimeter of the room, then tackling the couch like a linebacker. His favorite activity was going outside for a walk, and. He flew! I intend never to be a Little League grandfather.
Josh might have the genes to be a good distance runner, but whether he pursues that or not will be entirely up to him. Long-distance runners are a dogged breed, probably tracing to our genetic heritage as persistence hunters. For some, that doggedness is manifested by the gritty way we run races e.
Some people have done it for 10, 20, or even 30 years, which makes my head hurt to even imagine. Last summer, I read with fascination about a guy who happens to live in the next town from me, Mark Covert, who had just ended his streak at a record 45 years.
What motivates a streaker? The Web site of USRSA recently published an article by Herb Fred, who had run about , miles until one day in he collided with a car that had run a red light, and smashed its windshield with his head. When he was released from the hospital 11 days later, he decided to resume his running on a treadmill, where neither rain nor hail nor errant automobiles could stop him.
Since then, as of January, , Fred—now 84 years old—had never missed a day. I could never do what Fred has done—nor would I even dream of trying. I will consider myself very fortunate if I can still be running or even alive!
I have, however, achieved another sort of streak—instead of running one or more miles every day , competing in one or more long-distance races every year. After a few days off, I began training for 57, but as fate would have it, several circumstances prevented me from entering another race in I suppose I could have limped through a 5K, but my streak was never an objective.
And so, after a year of personal travail, perhaps a new streak will now begin. As individuals, we come and go. Older Posts Home View mobile version. The answer is complicated, but here are a few parts of it: In this "information age," we have access to vast amounts of information, but the quality of what we have access to is increasingly questionable. Real news reporting is buried under a landslide of prepackaged news planted by corporate PR, ideological groups and other entities interested in manipulating how we act and consume.
The Wall Street Journal's "Global Warming is a Myth" article, for example, was planted by an Oregon-based front group for the industries that have an interest in seeing the climate treaty scuttled.
Real news is buried from one side by a river of PR and from the other side by a growing pressure from the dominant media conglomerates to select news for its entertainment value. Our sources of belief have become less trustworthy. Once they were mainly our parents, elders, teachers, neighbors, and other people we grew up with and spent time with personally.
Those sources were sometimes right and sometimes sadly wrong, but at least they didn't systematically exploit or deceive us by the millions, for purposes unrelated to our own well-being.
Only in the last half-century -- the last 0. Often the reaction to such stress is to flee -- not just physically, but emotionally and cognitively. People who have money often flee from the pain of their lives by consuming. I suspect that overconsumption on a societal scale may be driven by the same insecurity -- or sense of emptiness -- writ large.
Our world has been turned inside-out by entertainment. EA: Yeah. It's right. And that what you're finding is that obviously we're used to the idea that Texas and Florida which are deeply southern states have attacked a lot of people but today just think of the belt that basically runs from Central North Carolina down through South Carolina to Atlanta and enormous population movements there and basically to cities is where people are moving.
So a lot of rural Southerners, black and white, are moving to town. I think what happened was after the Civil Rights Movement freed the South, the South has begun to flourish.
The Expulsion of Indigenous People, s. WMRA: If there is one thing you think we can learn about American history from studying Southern migration, what do you think it is? EA: People want to keep freezing the South with a certain identity. I think if you look at these maps and think about the story you see the South has constantly been changing, even under slavery, even under segregation, and especially now.
So I want people to understand how fully American the southern story is and how fully Southern the American story is. When indigenous people living in the valley and Central Virginia first encountered Europeans they had already established communities with social and political standards with rich cultural traditions.
In his new book, The Soul of America , Meacham examines times when the country was just as divided.
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