A big part of my sexual fantasies involve forced feminzation. Now there is of course a lot of variation in that particular fetish, but for me a big part of it is a power transference. I'm a 'big powerful man' and I'm reduced to a 'small weak woman'. The classic 1950s housewife and/or the classic 1960s office secretary.
So on one level, I get it. But that's at the childish, base, me-tarzan-you-jane, me-hunt-you-gather, type level. It's the same level that's racist and homophobic and just ridiculous. For a sexual fantasy, it's fine. For reality it's just stupid. How does this apply to work? Simple. Nurses with years and years of experience still look to me for help. They look to me to lead. They automatically and regularly defer to my 'expertise', which in reality is limited to the fact that I have a penis.
Seriously.
There are two other male RNs where I work. That's out of eleven. Eight Women, three men. Two of the female RN's are my supervisor and the Health Unit Manager (HUM). In other words, my bosses. As an RN on the afternoon shift, my team is three other female RNs and for much of the time my supervisor. For the purposes of this write up let's call my Supervisor Ch, and my team mates St, Su, and Ca.
Ch, my supervisor, has been a nurse for years. When I transferred to my current facility we were team mates but I had more experience as a state employee. She far outweighed my state employee experience with nursing experience though. When our current at the time supervisor was shipped off and promoted, Ch took on that job responsibility. She didn't really want it and doesn't like the supervisory role, but as no one else was stepping up to fill the void she did so not wanting some 'outsider' to come in and play at being our boss. So she's been my boss for about a year now.
Ca has been at our facility for just about a year as well. She started as a contract nurse and has just recently been hired on as a full state employee. Ca has been an RN at least as long as me, and I honestly believe a few years more. Again, she's fairly new to this facility and this type of nursing so I have experience on her there, but she's a more experienced nurse than me. Ca is the youngest RN working here and is probably in her early 30s. For comparison, I'm in my early 40s along with Ch, while St is in her late 40s, and Su is in hear late 50s (maybe early 60s?). Ca is a great worker. She's a modern woman in nearly every sense of the phrase. She does defer to me on occasion, but after a year of working there we're more or less team mates. We look at each other as equals. I'll ask her questions just as often as she asks me questions.
St was brought on about two months ago as a contract RN. She is just in the process of being hired on as a state employee. I don't know how long she's been an RN, but it's many more years than me. She has her BA, she's worked in hospitals, ICUs, and correctional facilities in the past. She's worked at a nearby facility years ago for a couple years, so she's certainly not new to working with inmates, but she's been away from it for awhile and is still finding her feet. Like Ca, I have more correctional facility experience, but less nursing experience. And now we add in the fact that I have less life experience as well.
Su transferred from a nearby facility about a month ago. She was at that previous facility for about 3 years which gives me all of maybe 6 months of experience on her in that regard. I'm still getting to know her, so I'm not sure how long she's been an RN, but I get the impression that while it's a second career for her, she's been an RN for a long while. In fact she mentioned having to wear 'Nursing Whites' before, and RNs haven't done that for decades. So, she has years and years of nursing experience on me, years and years of life experience on me and is just about my equal on correctional nursing. About the only experience edge I have on her is experience at this particular facility.
Now with Su, I've obviously only worked with her for a short while. I also was responsible for her orientation so there's a natural sense of her looking to me with any questions. So for now, I'm going to set her aside as I think it's natural that she defer to me on many things. That's been our relationship so far and I believe it will change. Just one thing though... she doesn't defer to me on nursing skills. She knows she has me there and about the closest she comes to asking me questions is in how we operate specifically at our facility. I.e. when do we go to the MPs (Medical Practitioners... Physicians, Physicians Assistants, and Nurse Practitioners... the Docs) for something and when do we just send them a note with what we've done.
Ca, as I said above, looks upon me as an equal. At least that's the impression I get. Sure, she comes to me with questions but she doesn't defer to me... she just asks. I do the same with her... I ask her questions but I don't defer to her.
St and Ch are different. Ch, before becoming my supervisor, would come to me with questions. Hell, she was orienting me when I first transferred in and would still ask me questions. Now that shes my direct supervisor she doesn't really ask me many questions as I simply don't have the knowledge base of what she needs to know. Like how do we process this new inmate with a particularly difficult disease process. I have no clue as that's a supervisory issue. But in more subtle things she does seem to listen to me and I get the impression that she still sees me, in a way, as her equal. I've have never hidden the fact that I'm going to eventually go into a supervisory role myself. I'm looking at her role (the technical term is she's an RN-13), and the HUM role above her. Our current HUM is helping me out by giving me every opportunity to grow those skills sets, which in some tasks puts me on an even keel with Ch. I've actually been sent to be on the Nursing Advisory Committee. There's about 30 of us on this committee. There's one LPN, and three RN-12s (I'm an RN-12). There are a handful of RN-13s, and the rest are HUMs and higher (the four Director's of Nursing are of course members).
Now I know some of Ch's attitude toward me is just the knowlege that I've been in supervisory positions before while she hasn't. I carry the attitude of a supervisor and think about things both from my perspective and a supervisor's perspective. But at the end of the day, I respect the chain of command. I am NOT anybody's supervisor (except for the medical/nursing hierarchy where I technically supervise all LPNs and RCAs), and I am most certainly NOT Ch's supervisor. I often refer to her as 'Boss', and am always clear that I ask her things and don't tell her things.
But Ch and I still have chats where we'll talk about supervisory styles and how to manage people. I am a firm believer in a supervisor supervising their people in individual ways. Some people are best handled by telling them what to do. I'm one of those people. If you ask me to do something, then I take it as me answering 'no' is acceptable. I often answer no to questions (see my post about being the 'No Man'). But if a supervisor tells me to do something, I'll do it without any back talk. My boss told me to do something, I do it. It's that simple. Some people are best handled by asking them. They will bristle at being told to do anything. They'll do it either way, but asking makes them happy and telling makes them angry. At the end of the day, as a supervisor, I just want the task done so asking them isn't taking power from me or anything. It's just getting the job done in the most efficient manner. And then there are people that fit in between those two poles. Ch, at least initially, was my most hated type of supervisor in that she wanted (or at least acted like) to be everybody's friend.
Now that's not to say that Ch looks at everybody that way. I've seen her have a big bad backbone and stand up to RNs that have far more experience than her. But she still in a way will defer to me.
And finally we have St. The whole idea of this post came from interactions with her yesterday at work. Like Su, I oriented her. So it's natural that she still come to me with questions, but she absolutely defers to me on almost anything.
A quick aside, as this is important to how I reacted in this next bit. I have the utmost respect for anybody that has a nursing degree and carries a registered nursing licence. It's a difficult education, a difficult task based job, and a job that requires assessment and quick thinking in just about everything they do. They have to simultaneously take Doctor's orders, review them, and either perform them or feel comfortable going back to the Doctor and tell him/her how they are wrong and to write the order correctly. Being an RN is difficult and getting to be an RN is incredibly difficult. So when someone tells me they are an RN, they get automatic respect. I respect their thinking and their judgement.
Yesterday, St was handing out medications to inmates. It's a fairly basic task that doesn't require nursing skills (at most facilities this is done by a pharmacy tech and not an RN). But it does give the RN doing it a chance to see the inmate. Now this isn't a full assessment, but it can lead us to performing a full assessment. If we see someone that's having obvious breathing problems, who's color isn't quite right, who is acting strange, we can pull them aside and perform that assessment. All we have to do is get another RN to take the position of handing out the meds. So, St has her licence and I have worked with her enough to know that she's earned it so I don't watch over her. I'm behind her doing my own thing (in this instance I was catching up on some late charting), when she interrupts me and asks if she should assess this particular guy or if I want to do it. I look up and see... just another inmate. He means nothing to me, in the sense that I haven't just recently treated or assessed him. If I had just seen him earlier in the day I would assume that she meant I should continue to treat him. But I don't even know what's wrong with him, so how could I possibly be better suited to treat him? I don't know what the situation is, so I tell her to go ahead and assess him and I'll cover her on the med line.
All goes well for several minutes when she comes back and asks if she should send him to the ER. I give her a questioning look as, again, I wasn't watching over her. I have no idea what's wrong with the guy. She sees my confusion and explains that he has a loud crackling in his breathing, his lungs sound fluid overloaded, he was treated earlier in the day with a breathing treatment, he's new into the facility (i.e. no previous medical history to see what's going on), and has a breathing test come out with bad results (PFTs of 200, 210, and 190). Now I know that most people will look at that and wonder what the hell is going on, but to any nurse that's been practicing for more than a few weeks, that's an obvious case of getting them to an MP for further assessment and treatment. Treatment being the key word there as he'll almost surely need another breathing treatment and a nurse can't order that. It's not that we'd be sending him to a doc because we don't know what to do, we'd be sending him to the doc because we don't have the legal ability to prescribe medication. So... why is she asking me?
Because I'm a man.
That sounds awful, but it's the only conclusion I can come up with. And it's not just based on how she treats me. She'll easily and quickly defer to our male MPs (our Physician, our two male PAs and our male NP), but she doesn't defer to the female MPs (two female NPs) unless he absolutely has to. In this particular instance she also didn't ask Su who was closer to her. In other words she wasn't just seeking out another RN's opinion... she was seeking out my opinion. Or rather, she was seeking out the opinion of a man.
I can't tell you how much this disgusts me. And I can't tell you how much I see of it on a day to day basis. Now I get some of it... I DO have an air of command to me. I do act like I know what I'm doing at almost all times. It's what makes me a good supervisor. But I am NOT a supervisor and don't ever tell people what to do outside of an emergency situation where I've taken on the lead role. And even in those situations, it's rare for me to take on that role as I'll quickly defer that role to the most experienced nurse in the moment. But I've seen women with the same air of command as me, defer to men. This has happened at my current facility, my previous facility, and even in my clinicals during nursing school.
Some of it is just the pure sexism that's baked into our society. Most patients, unless informed earlier, will refer to me as 'Doc'. That's a distinction rarely given to a female nurse and in fact is often denied to actual female MPs. I can be standing next to a female surgeon, and most people will look to me when asking questions. Some of it can be given to a misplaced sense of compliment. Some people will look at a Doctor as being better than a Nurse. All the Doctors and Nurses I know would argue with that. A doctor may be upset at being called a nurse, but only because they aren't a nurse and not because a nurse is something to be looked down upon. In the same way, I'm insulted when someone calls me 'Doc' as I'm not a doctor. If I wanted to be a doctor, I'd damn well be a doctor. But I'm a nurse because I want to be a nurse.
I mentioned earlier how my sexual fantasy will often include feminization and the transfer of power. Of becoming a 'small weak woman'. But that's my fetish... my fantasy. Whenever I've looked back and considered if I'd rather be a woman (considered if I was truly trans-gendered) I have a big problem... I don't see where the difference would really be. I'd still be 'me' if I was a woman. I wouldn't defer any decision making ability to men simply because they are men. Men have no extra special abilities here. Testicles and Penises do not imbue their owners with any special powers.
That's it for now. I just had to get that off my chest.
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