Social Justice in a Time of Cholera
This is the first post I’ve ever written for my blog that I was afraid to post publicly, and ironically its the only post I’ve ever written that actually shouldn’t be kept to myself. Life really just does you dirty like that sometimes huh.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering exactly what I wanted to say about everything that’s been going on, and I’ve rewritten this post multiple times because everything I’ve written before this has felt… not quite useless, but unhelpful. To be fully honest, I’m a white, masculine-presenting person from an upper-middle-class family in suburban Canada, my childhood, although fraught with personal struggle and a laundry list of mental health problems, wasn’t outwardly challenging. Every difficulty I’ve faced in life comes from the inside, and how I react to the things around me, I was never afraid for my well-being at the hands of someone other than myself. I was never a victim of the system I was born into, and because I could ignore and hide the more unusual aspects of myself, I remained safe from the realities other people like me faced, people who were born a certain way and abused because of it.
In the spirit of honesty, I knew very well what I was doing when I decided to hide who I was from the world. I was sensitive to the way people around me were treated, even as a young kid, and I saw how the world treated people who were seen as different, or “not normal”, and included in this were queer people and people of color. I was afraid as a kid of speaking out because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, I never wanted to draw attention to myself and I still very much don’t. However I’m not a kid anymore, and I will not sit idly by while I see injustices perpetrated across the world, and I see people suffer and die at the hands of a system they didn’t choose to be a part of. I can’t let fear rule my life anymore, and I refuse to continue to hide in my privilege and hope the world can right itself without me. I am no longer a passive participant in my own life.
Having said this, however, I am still learning about the state of racism in Canada and the US, and I don’t think anything I have to say hasn’t been said already by people more educated than myself. I’m going to compile a list of resources to educate myself and others as well as charity funds to support the BLM movement at the bottom of this post, and I hope you go through and take a look at them if you haven’t already at this point. The bulk of what I have to say here is going to be about something I have more of a footing to stand on, the LGBTQ movement, and specifically the plight of trans and gender-non-conforming individuals.
I first publicly referred to myself as non-binary in the lounge area of my technical college where I was studying film. I told my friend at the time that I wanted to get the transgender symbol tattooed on my arm, to which he replied flippantly something along the lines of “I don’t know, tattoos are permanent you know”. It took me a few days to realize that what’d he’d said to be had stung, but I was so wrapped up in the glow of admitting to someone else I wasn’t cis I hadn’t noticed until it felt too late to bring up. I don’t think he’d meant anything dismissive about it but it stung nonetheless as if who I am should be temporary, like committing to a permanent lifestyle as a non-binary person would somehow be a mistake. I don’t think he even meant it the way I interpreted it, but it’s beside the point. I was comfortable enough in our relationship that I opened up about something that had been weighing on me so heavily I couldn’t sleep through the night, and in the end, it was dismissed and the topic was changed.
Years later I was taking a walk with a friend of mine at the time and his girlfriend as we were on our way to play some board games at his friend’s apartment. While we walked and talked his girlfriend began to talk about her ex-partner, a transwoman who’d come out during their relationship. The girlfriend talked about how she felt lied to and betrayed, as though she was a victim of a spiteful lie designed to hurt her. My friend at the time laughed about it and made some more hurtful comments and they laughed at the girlfriends now ex-wife, about their perception of her as a liar and someone deserving of scorn. Not once did they refer to her a woman, and throughout the conversation, they referred to her as the girlfriend’s “ex-husband”. I bit my tongue and stayed silent, changing the subject as quickly as I could, and when I left to head home it was the last time I saw them.
After I left film school I didn’t tell another soul about myself until the past few months, where I changed my pronouns on twitter and pronounced myself as a queer person to my tens of followers. It was because of this I was contacted by someone who I knew back in school about why I never talked about it publicly. She asked me if I was afraid, or if the space she’d set up didn’t feel inclusive enough for me to live publicly as who I am. I’d said I was just a guarded person and didn’t like talking about myself, which is the truth, but there’s more to that story than that. In truth, I wasn’t technically hiding it and would have told anyone who asked the truth about my identity, but I didn’t correct people’s use of pronouns and although I pretended I was ok living as a man, it always scratched at me in my head just a little. In truth, I was afraid of being public about it, and I was afraid of losing the friends and connections I’d made. However inclusive the space I was in, and even if it changed my life for the better, it would still be a change, and I was still afraid of things changing. I had long ago convinced myself that living my life in a sort of “half-truth” was better than risking everything changing for the worse, I was still letting fear decide how I’d live my life.
Growing up the way I did, with the family I had and the unfortunate brain I was given, having the experiences I did, seeing the brazen violence towards people who weren’t “normal”, it all coalesced into a belief that hiding who I was would be better than risking all the obvious repercussions. I didn’t want to be seen as a freak, I didn’t want people to try and “cure” me, I didn’t want attention because people saw me as abnormal. I didn’t want my identity to be waved away with a snide comment or laughed about because people felt like I’d betrayed them. I decided I would lie, and a part of me deep in my heart believed I was a good enough liar I could even convince myself it was true. That the idea that I was non-binary was the lie the entire time, and really I was a perfectly straight, cis man. Somewhere down that path though, I realized I still thought about it, in the dark hours between twilight and dawn, it would keep me awake until blue started to crawl it’s way back into the sky. It haunted me, my lies started to pile up and they began to bury me. I wasn’t sleeping at all anymore, I was tired all the time, I lashed out at friends, distanced myself from everyone around me. It would be easier to maintain the lie if there wasn’t anyone around to lie to besides myself. I stopped leaving my apartment. I would distract myself watching tv shows I’d already seen twice before and listening to podcasts just to have someone else’s words in my head. But every time the quiet came back, the thoughts would return, and with it the fear. Except now those fears, influenced by deep paranoia and at least one personality disorder, started to ruin me. My brain deteriorated, I lost my grip on what was real and what I was lying about. I pushed everyone around me away and ate microwavable mini-pizzas for every meal in between calling into work and playing video games for 20 hours a day until my exhausted brain finally turned off and I could sleep for two or three hours before calling in sick to work again. I thought about killing myself a lot.
Everything I mentioned here is just to add context to what I’m about to say. Trans men, trans women, and non-binary folx do not get to choose who they are. Some might be able to live their entire lives never being public about it, some might feel so strongly about who they are they leave everything they ever knew behind to start their new, authentic life. The world doesn’t want us here, it kills us, either through direct acts of violence or by passively driving us to suicide. Trans women are seen as predators, as threats to people’s children, as liars and betrayers of the expectations of men. They are seen as men in dresses who are trying to take away from the struggles of “real” women. Trans men are seen as girls in dress-up, tomboys, girls who are just in a rebellious phase. They’re expected to “grow out of it” and eventually conform back to the limitations society has set on them. Non-binary people are seen as fake, attention grabbers, or trans people who just “can’t decide”. They’re overly sensitive and just want to make everything about them. Outside of the communities we build for ourselves we are ostracised and abused, or at best ignored.
People like J.K Rowling perpetuate the idea that trans women are just trying to take away from the struggles of “real” women, that being trans is just a choice and that any struggles they face are by their own choosing and thus less important. Even within the LGBTQ community, trans people are the first on the wall, and many people refuse to acknowledge them for similar reasons as J.K.R, that somehow they had less of a choice in their own truth than we do ours. Like my old friend joking about his girlfriend’s ex “husband”, it’s the small things that contribute the most to a world in which we are not safe. The little things, the dismissals, the waved hands the “you’ll grow out of it”s, the “I thought you were normal”s, these are the things that allow the man behind the gun to pull the trigger when he finds out the woman he “loves” has a penis (Jennifer Laude), these are the ropes that hold us inside a burning car as we immolate (Bee Love Slater). The little things are the bullets and the matches and the clubs, they are wielded like weapons by those with dark motivations to justify the crimes they commit.
To some people, being trans is a crime punishable by death. They see themselves as heroes, or saviors, righteous warriors in the fight against corruption and evil. This is the world I was afraid to enter when I was a kid still in high school, seeing friends of mine kicked out of their homes at 16 because their parents saw no value in them if they couldn’t just be “normal”. This is the world that prompted me to slowly lose my mind in 2016/17, and still haunts me, as well adjusted as I am (sarcasm). It’s the reason why I’m still hesitant to be public about who I am, despite overwhelming support from friends and my wonderful sister (who definitely should not share this so the rest of my family can read it). It’s why I still haven’t told my parents, despite moving out and being able to support myself on my own. I am afraid of losing them. I’m afraid of no longer being able to go get a cup of coffee with my mom, and although my relationship with my dad is strained at best, I’m afraid of giving up the possibility of being close to him. I’m afraid of losing my grandparents and having them live their last few years ashamed of me. I’m afraid that without me there to guide them through the process, they’ll never be able to understand who I am. I’m afraid.
The world has a long, long way to go in order to be a place accepting and healthy for people like me who live outside of the accepted bounds of “normal”. Social justice often invokes scorn as a concept, that the need for social justice and societal change is somehow a reflection on the weak temperament of women, LGBTQ, and POC. That if only we had thicker skin like the straight white cis men of the world we wouldn’t need to campaign for equality, equity, and justice. To those people, I just want to say a few words. This world was designed for you, by people like you, and it supports you in ways you’re not even aware of. You don’t have to worry when you see the police coming down the street, you don’t need to cross the street when you see a group of people walking towards you. You don’t need to be afraid to step out your front door, you don’t need to be afraid of meeting a Tinder date, you don’t need to be afraid. Sure people might need thicker skin, and maybe there are some in this community that are too quick to claim victimhood, but in truth that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is changing a system that by its very design devalues the experience of people who aren’t straight, aren’t white and aren’t cis. At the end of the day no matter how thick your skin is, the bullet will still go through, the knives can still cut, and the ropes will still choke us.
Still, I’m overwhelmingly happy to see the world shifting towards a brighter future, and I’m immeasurably proud of my queer family that has been campaigning for this future long before I was ready to join them. Yes I’m still afraid, and there are things that I am not ready to do yet, but I will not let the world pass me by anymore. I will not wait for my problems to be solved by someone else. I will not let fear strangle me to death while I deny who I am. I am a queer person, I am a trans person, and I refuse to hide away for the convenience of others. 2020 for all its tragedy and suffering is a time of change and awakenings. The world is changing dramatically, and I will not sit idly by and watch it happen. I am an active member of my own life.
Thank you for reading, I love you.