Justify

On the lifelong task of undoing the hierarchy of whose work matters.

By Janet Thomas

When Emma was not quite three, she upended her toybox and scattered every toy across the floor. Her mother, Gayle, stood in the doorway, one hand resting lightly on the frame, watching. “Emma,” she said, “can you justify your actions?”

Emma, clear-eyed and certain, replied, “The toy I needed was at the bottom.”

Gayle nodded. “Fair enough. And when you’ve finished playing, what will you do?”

Emma’s expression mirrored her mother’s — measured, intentional.

“I’ll put them all away.”

Gayle left the room satisfied. Speak to a child, she believed, with respect and the child learns respect. Teach logic, and she becomes logical. Teach a child to explain herself, and she will grow into someone who can justify her actions.

For many years, Gayle believed this until her child too casually justified her departure. At seventeen, Emma left home. No argument, no slammed doors, just a note on the kitchen table.

Emma drifted for a while: a commune on the edge of the desert, a band that played long nights in hot rooms, her voice turned raw from singing, the cheap wine to celebrate their single album - pressed in small numbers and mostly lost — but selling now, when it appears, for half a million dollars.

Years later, the country would know Emma as the architect of the Gender Enclosure Act, 2052. In her famous address to the Women of Australia, she said:

“We have asked men to justify their actions — the sexual assaults, the wars, the exhaustion of land and water, the insistence that their impulses be excused as nature. We have listened. We have reasoned. We have waited. Their arguments no longer hold. Therefore, the referendum stands: men over the age of fourteen will relocate to the Western territories. Women will govern the East. It is a separation made for the long-term stability of the nation and to protect our women.”

Standing before the cameras that day, Emma remembered being three, gazing at her toybox, her Barbie smiling, and Ken rigid and irrelevant, lying at the bottom. She had wanted to throw him out. She remembered that clearly. A smile rose now, but she did not let it fully form. Even triumph, she had learned, must be justified.