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Part I: Push
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in This Is How It Always Is, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender and Binaries
Secrets and Misunderstanding
Violence and Discrimination
Storytelling
Family
Summary
Analysis
One night at the hospital, Rosie sits down with a peanut butter sandwich. She figures the sandwich is safe at a hospital, where there is plenty of medication to treat allergies. A nurse pops her head in and says a gunshot wound is coming from the college campus. Rosie sighs and finishes her sandwich. It was a nice four minutes, she thinks. When the ambulance brings in the victim, Jane Doe, she is swollen and covered in blood. She doesn’t look shot; she looks like she was beaten. Rosie strips her down, quickly assessing her, and finds a small bullet wound in her shoulder, as well as a penis. “Jane Doe’s a John Doe,” someone yells into the hall.
Rosie’s thoughts about the peanut butter are obviously a dig at Miss Appleton. If it was necessary to ban peanut butter for the safety of others, it would likely be done by hospitals. Clearly, Jane Doe is a transgender woman, and she, too, is a victim of violence and further reflects the extreme hate members of the LGBTQ community face.
Themes
Rosie finds out later that Jane Doe is a new student at the university, and she met a boy named Chad at a fraternity party. Chad sat with her and flirted. He offered her a beer, and he put his and on her leg. Before she could object, his hand moved up and instantly recoiled. Jane opened her mouth to explain, but Chad hit her, and then he called his friends over, and they all took turns hitting her. They also kicked her and spit on her, and when they wouldn’t stop beating her, Chad got nervous. He grabbed a gun, meaning to shoot it into the air and scare his friends off, but he accidentally shot Jane instead. Chad almost killed Jane, and at the same time, he almost saved her life.
Again, Jane Doe is evidence of the violence and assault the LGBTQ community, especially transgender women, face. In 2018, 26 transgender individuals were murdered in the United States, and most of them were transgender women of color. Chad is clearly transphobic, and he beats Jane because he views hitting on a transgender woman as some sort of threat to his manhood and sexuality that he tries to recover with physical violence. Like Nick, Jane’s gender makes Chad so angry he responds with violence, as do his fraternity brothers, who likely would have killed her if given the chance.
Themes
