First off, I want to say thank you to Janet for inviting me to contribute some thoughts to her blog. We were discussing a myriad of topics and anecdotes concerning transgender discrimination and transphobia and she asked me to share some of those thoughts in her space. I thought long and hard about this and tried to come up with something I thought might be helpful. I am not transgender, but I do try my damnedest to be supportive and empathetic. There was a time when I was in a community that did not feel this way.
I was born and raised in a heavily conservative environment. I’m no longer a part of that church, a church which has a massive misunderstanding of trans folks. A group who now seems pretty proactively anti-trans. In the early 2000s, when I was still in it, they took a hard line against gays and gay marriage. At the time, I was friends with a gay man, Bobby, who I worked with. He was older than me and shared stories with me about the AIDS epidemic and how gays were horribly mistreated through the 1980s and 1990s. When he had come out as gay in the 1990s, his family kicked him out of the house. I was working with him in the early 2000s, and as a waiter he had to pretend to be straight or people wouldn’t tip him. When the church took a hard line against gays and gay marriage, I was not interested in that. The gay community had already been raked through the coals, and the way I saw it, who they married was their business. I was a teacher in the church (read that as unpaid preacher, we didn’t have bible classes). I can recall thinking at the time that I was going to have to have a sermon on homosexuality, so I thought about it and knew that if I did write one it would have to be very different than what I was hearing from preachers and teachers in the church. I had no desire to cause more harm to the gay community. Years after leaving the church, I realized I never did find a way to write a sermon on homosexuality being a sin that wouldn’t be harmful to the gay community, so I never wrote one and never gave one.
A couple of years ago, a fellow student in the course I was taking at the time made a transphobic post in the discussion board. As an ally, I crafted a response that addressed the transphobia. Before submitting that post, I asked for a transgender student in a Discord server I was on to review it and give me feedback. Right away they addressed my usage of the term “transgenderism.” I had not used it intentionally in a derogatory way, but I also did not realize that it was being used as such by TERFs. Upon being corrected, I was super thankful I asked for guidance, and edited it out before submitting.
One more story, and I swear there’s a point to all of this…
The church I was born into told us not to vote in elections. And I didn’t vote until Trump ran for president the first time. That was the first presidential election after we had left the church, and while I hadn’t been thinking of voting, as I watched Trump in several Republican primary debates and listened to him speak in other ways, I realized I needed to vote. As I put it back then, “Trump can’t be president.” I stand by that statement today. He should have never been president, the harm he has done to our nation’s politics may take years to undo, and that’s awful. People are suffering now and will probably continue to suffer until we can course correct.
But what do these stories have to do with anything? And what do they have in common?
For starters, I don’t vote for what I believe. A lot of folks vote for things or people that support their beliefs. I vote for what’s best for others and everyone. I rarely consider myself in the equation when voting. Because it’s not about me. It’s not about stacking the halls of government and court houses with people that will uphold and enforce my beliefs on others. The same is true of taxes. I don’t pay my taxes because I expect something back from it. I pay my taxes so that people who need healthcare can get it. So that older folks who need Medicare or Medicaid or social security can get it. So that public schools are funded. And the list goes on and on.
Does my body reap the rewards of abortion healthcare? No. Am I gonna vote yes to Missouri Amendment 3 in November, so women have access to better healthcare? Heck yeah, I am.
I also think it’s important to talk to people. To learn from others who are different than you. I think it’s important to practice empathy for others, even if you do not share the same life experiences. I think it’s important to not be a dick. I think we all should go out of our way to make sure we aren’t being a dick on purpose or accidentally. Had I not asked for guidance, I would have posted that discussion post with the term “transgenderism” in it and probably made matters worse. I was learning at the time and still am. Hopefully, I’ll always be learning, because that’s life. “Live and learn,” as my video production mentor used to say.
We need to think beyond ourselves. As opposed to covering ourselves in our beliefs and refusing to pull back that blanket to help and support others.
As I get older, I find myself more and more thinking about who we are underneath our beliefs. I’m not interested in a person’s beliefs near as much as I am in their character. If you stripped away your religion, who would we find underneath that? Righteous indignation without the righteous part often just looks like asshole behavior. Perhaps your religion is covering up who you really are by creating a mask that makes people think you are a good person, when in fact, you are a bitter, angry, and hateful individual.
Someone may read this and think that I’m asking people to be an ally to the LGBTQ community. Maybe. But what I’m really asking is don’t be a dick and don’t use your beliefs to shield yourself from dickish behavior. I was knee-deep in a conservative environment, one that is arguably more conservative than most conservative Republicans, and I still understood that it was important to not be a dick. That’s who I was underneath. I had no desire to use my religion as a mask for bad behavior. I had no desire to treat people poorly.
Music: Daybreak by Barry Manilow.
On my newsletter, I typically finish with a song. Today’s pick is Barry Manilow’s song “Daybreak.” The lyrics seem to fit for this time and topic. It feels dark now, but I’m hoping for a day when daybreak can “shine all around the world” for the LGBTQ community — especially our trans folks.
Be good to each other. ✌️
An Aging Trans Woman 
What a great piece. Thank you!
This struck me:
Someone may read this and think that I’m asking people to be an ally to the LGBTQ community. Maybe. But what I’m really asking is don’t be a dick and don’t use your beliefs to shield yourself from dickish behavior.
I’ve always wondered why we can’t just be allies to our fellow humans because they’re our fellow humans. You said a great deal here, very succinctly. Again, thank you!
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Thank you for your comments. I appreciate them. I’m with you, why can’t we just be nice to one another? Why can’t respecting people be our default? I often say “be good to each other” and I think that’s a good default in general.
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It’s taken me years to undo the xenophobia from my childhood and, even now at 44, despite starting my journey in my late teens, there’s still so much to learn, still so much to unpick and unpack.
One thing that I’ve personally found helpful is desensitisation, actually going out and speaking to affected communities, whether that be on Facebook or in person. It doesn’t matter whether this is about the LGBTQIA+ community or immigrants or Black people or Indigenous communities, disabled people, plus others – xenophobic people react the same to everyone from a marginalised community, that they’re somehow tainted from being different from their supposed ideal. I’ve confronted my prejudices head on, and now they’re nowhere near as loud in my head.
I must admit, the hardest thing I’ve found to tackle is body shaming. It is so apparently “innocently” put forward, all the subtle things about the ideal body, through various media, without specific hate behind it, that most people just don’t see anything wrong with it. Yet when these ideologies are passed on, they are always done so with hate. And I didn’t even realise what I was doing, until someone else pointed it out. And, even though it hits hard, even though it hurts, I am damned grateful for every single time I’ve been called out. It helps me to improve, and to hopefully not pass any hate on anymore.
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