On Dublin and the personhood of women.

So, a long time ago, I lived and worked in Dublin (Ireland) for a couple of years. I made some good friends, did some useful academic work and rather lost my heart to the city itself, which is the perfect size for a capital, in my opinion, anyway. Phil came out for a year, too, and it was good.
Our flight back from Dublin after Worldcon didn't go until late afternoon, so we spent the morning wandering around old haunts. My old flat on Leeson St (Upper) is still there, and, I learnt from a friendly neighbour, my former landlady, who was lovely, is still alive and doing well. The neighbourhood has gone up market, though -- fewer clubs and bars and dodgy tenements, more accountants and posh flats. Then we walked on round past the Institute where I worked, and I realised something.
I was 25 when I moved to Bublin. I'd spent the summer beforehand writing my first full novel, and the job was my first academic job. I had hopes of becoming a real person, in all sorts of ways. People told 25-year-old me that it was possible, that I might well become a respected academic, a novelist, all sorts of things.
And I did, in a sense. I worked for another decade or more in academia, published a string of books and articles, taught many many great students. I wrote another novel and a bunch of stories, three of which later sold. But none of them sold then. None of them sold until the 2000s and that was partly my fault and partly down to culture.
Because two other things happened, back then, back when I moved to Ireland. Many many people, I will stress, including all of the Irish sff fans I met and most of my colleagues at the Institute, treated me like a real person. I had many good days, many good experiences (including helping to run the first two Octocons).
But then there was the colleague who slowly, continuously, determinedly undermined my scholarship solely on the grounds that they had decided I was English. (Nota Bene: I'm not English. I'm Anglo-Welsh, and yes, that's a real thing.) There was the senior academic who attacked me in public at a seminar not on any detailed of my work but on my inherent unfitness to do that work to begin with, because, well, Insufficiently Celtic.
Now, I get it completely about how important it is for cultures that have been colonised and derided to own their own history and lore. I come from one of those myself, in part. But this person did not do this to my male, fully English colleague, only me. Because I am female, and female is not quite the same as person. And women are the soft underbelly of the perceived antagonist.
I already knew that when it came to writing, women weren't quite people in the eyes of many. I'd been in two writers' groups where this was made perfectly clear. (Not the one in Dublin, which was uniformly lovely and produced at least two other professional writers from this period.) But it was while I was in Dublin I took the first steps towards writing seriously. And fandom in the UK told me not to. Someone I trusted lit into me in public and yelled at me for daring. Someone else I trusted told me never, ever, to speak to an editor or agent at a con because I was not the kind of person who should be doing that.
And I realised that, for all I had been told up to that point, that I was only partially a person. I gave up writing (apart from fanfic) for a decade or more, and I accepted the negativity I received in academia. I did more than my fair share of admin and pastoral care, published regularly in good journals, looked out for my students, and had some lovely colleagues.
And some appalling ones.
Up until around 1998, though, I still thought I was going to turn into a person some day. I worked hard, I got good feedback from my students (students are absolutely the best thing about academia). I wrote some important articles, including one on Denmark that helped to change the field  and a book on Wales that did change the field (warning: Kari speaking well of herself. Guilt incoming). I still had two novels in a drawer and I thought about them from time to time (but didn't write original fic, because, well, I'd been told off for doing so).
Then it all came down. I was nearly 40, and I broke. It was already too late for me as an academic: I would never climb high enough, due to my gender and to that drip-drip about my insufficiency due to that English blood. Most of my colleagues were lovely, I stress, but there were one or two who made sure I knew my place. (This looks like whining, I know. All I will say is: ask me in person about what happened. I am not prepared even now to write about it where it might be seen. I will note, however, that the union were so horrified they wanted me to sue.)
And I broke, and lost my academic career. And I ceased to be a person. I had no real job. People have jobs. People without jobs... well, they not quite the same thing as *people*.
By the time I was able to start over, I was over 40. I went back to writing, and, y'know, in many many ways I succeeded. I sold a novel and it won an award. I sold a second one. The thing I had day-dreamed about since I was 6 or 7 came true and I remain profoundly grateful for that. I have been very very lucky. Twice over, because I was in the last tranche of Celticists to find any kind of job at all.
And yet, looking at the Institute in Dublin, I realised something. I realised that somehow, between then and now, I have come to accept that I am not quite, not really, a person.
Women are not fully people.
Older women are definitely not fully people.
And women are told, over and over, when they are young, to be good and wait our turn, and many of us do.
And then, one day, while the white men of our age climb up and up, and are welcomed and praised, we are told: get out of the way, it's too late for you.
More so if, like me, those women are from the Lower Orders.
Even more so, if the woman is a woman of colour.
Even more, if she lives with a disability., if she is trans or gender non-conforming or queer.

I have a fifteen  year old niece, who is smart and talented and lovely. Right now, she knowns she's a person. I want her always to know that. I want her never to wake up and realise that she no longer thinks of herself that way. Not ever. I never want her stand outside somewhere where she started out with dreams and realise that even when they come true, people can make you feel you don't deserve them.

We all should get to be people.