Our Secret Hate

I've been thinking a lot the last few days about discrimination against transpeople, and the LGBT community as a whole.

It occurred to me that on a whole, we tend to expect the worst from people. Our life experiences have shown us that when we out ourselves to family, friends, religious people, work, etc., things tend to go badly. We're met with hatred, misunderstanding, miscommunication and ignorance. Because of this, we are guarded around "outsiders" - people who aren't members of the exclusive LGBT community. We expect to be met with these negative reactions, and prepare ourselves to lash out. We wait, ready to strike back and defend ourselves.

What happens when the blow never comes? What do we do when someone stops, and steps forward, reaching out in an attempt to understand, us with our fist held back ready to strike at an attack that doesn't exist?

I've noticed in some cases, people in the LGBT community will lash out anyways, perhaps some manner of "preemptive strike". Maybe it's just easier to start swinging and keep them at an arm's (or a fist's?) length than to meet them halfway. It's possible we're just sick of dealing with it, and would rather not bother with the effort of helping them understand. Why would we? They never listen anyways!

Considering all of this made me come to the conclusion that sometimes we bring homophobia and transphobia upon ourselves. When people respond in this fashion, all we're showing them is that we're unapproachable, angry people who don't want acceptance or understanding. We don't want justice. We want revenge. We want the "str8s" to just go away. It's our own little form of separatism. It's our secret hate.

If someone is trying to understand us and we chase them away, we've lost another ally. We've made that person less likely to try and approach another LGBT person on friendly terms. We've potentially added another notch to the Bible Belt. We've lost another vote against Proposition 8, or Amendment 2.

If people outside the LGBT community are willing to step forward in trust and understanding, I'm willing to meet them halfway. It's not easy, and it's not supposed to be. You can't change a millennium of programming in one blog post, but maybe you can change someone's mind for just a few minutes. Even a moment of reconsideration is worth the effort. It's possible that our actions are futile. It's also possible to change someone for a lifetime. We'll never know until we try.

I'm going to end the cycle of hate, starting with me. I hope you do the same, because no one will accept us if we are unwilling to accept them as well.

"No, she's a girl, she's just living transgender"

In the few years that I've been out, I've been lucky enough to only face a few instances where my being transgender was responded to negatively. I lost a friend over it.

Tonight I was faced with a tremendous amount of hostility for being me, from people who I thought were at least acquaintances, if not friends. People who will so willingly accept and learn new things and accept restrictions from people within their subculture, but who adamantly refuse to learn about anything outside that little comfort zone. Even if it's just to foster some kind of mutual respect or understanding.

What's bothering me is when a subculture that wants to be respected and taken seriously can't respect or take seriously other subcultures, or minorities who are different from their own. People seem to think their minority, or their subculture is the only viable one, and there couldn't possibly be any overlap.

Like a transgender person can also be gay, or straight, but in many cases neither the gays nor the straights want to accept them into fold. A transgender person can be into BDSM, but the BDSM community may not accept a transgender person.

Walls built on top of walls, all it ends up doing is dividing us, whether we are LGBT, BDSM, or any other manner of subculture. There's no love and there's no cohesiveness to our goals if we are constantly finding more reasons to exclude people.

All this leads to is hurt feelings and lonely lives.

They don't have to accept me. No one has to accept me. In the end, acceptance is entirely their choice. I'd at least like people to give me a chance, offer me at least the benefit of the doubt, before automatically discounting me as not worth the effort. Yes, my feelings are hurt. This isn't the first time, and I know it won't be the last.