🎧 Music: “The Killing Type” by Amanda Palmer
It’s definitionally true that the ways in which other people receive us can often be our boon or our problem, but it’s not always our responsibility.
Case in point: at my last serious j-o-b working as corporate security, there was a man… I’m disinclined by my experience of him to describe him thusly and tempted to ridicule him with a description more along the lines of overgrown boy child. That’s between us and frozen in the embrace of the tireless procession of time. But he rendered himself a fantastic case study in the point I’m making.
So, this personal historic figure, let’s just call him Dale Chevy- was a colleague, and a subordinate in the early years of my tenure in the role of supervisor of that security operation. He was of a similar age to me, gregarious and superficially charming in the unsettling way of a serial killer or a legacy politician. He’d profusely broadcast during our shifts together, to everyone and anyone who would listen that he spent years honing his craft as an obscure street magician. Which I respected. Carny trash is in my opinion a reputable grift in the socioeconomic milieu we’re all predominantly just surviving. And he’d do all kinds of mall ninja shit to impress the other people, primarily the younger kids (people in their late teens, early 20’s) we worked with. While it was unsettling for him to pet and talk to imaginary dogs or engage in grabbing your wrist to “show you karate”, it was at best entertaining, and at worst a little annoying.
Where he decided to become a problem for me, and indeed for several other people we worked with, was in how he would engage things he disagreed with or didn’t understand. He’d often express his consternation in deimatic verbal fusillades, or in overt physical gestures of violence. It would ultimately lead to his termination. He was friends and roommates with someone in upper management, and so had to fuck up royally more than once to meet such disciplinary reaction.
But before he was fired, he left me an unpleasant parting gift that wouldn’t (for me) be elucidated until years later. Early into my time on board that particular security crew, he invited me to a housewarming cookout being thrown by him and his wife. His roommate (one of my bosses) who I was sort of friends with insisted I come out of my Daria-esque shell, and attend. The big boss on our site, a jovial Irishman who was fond of me and my work, and my then boyfriend (now husband) all emphatically pressed the same.
The first red flags emerged in online conversation with him regarding the impending event. I wasn’t out as trans at work, and by and large it went unnoticed, and I simply got to live my life, and do my job. (Exceedingly well, I might add.) Despite my irregular stature, other cisgender women who dwarfed me had come through. And that’s often one of the few irrevocably clocky features of my person.
He began telling me his college dorm mate would be in attendance, and that “it too was now a woman”. And that “perhaps we could breed”. He would vacillate between gleeful friendliness at work and weird hostility. But he did that to everyone. It was bizarre, but in an environment and profession that skewed masculine, and socially conservative it was not entirely out of the norm.
I showed up on the weekend of his party with a handle of whiskey (it was BYOB) in a knee length black skirt (with ample, concealed pockets- that I found thrifting!) and a pink, white, and black floral empire waist top with matching sneakers. I sipped it from a glass he’d given me, as he led me to the back deck, and when I later slunk down to the basement to hang out with my superior (his roommate), and another friend- a patrol officer from the job.
When he came downstairs to begin doing karaoke on the setup he had going, and a swath of other attendees began trickling down- he kicked it off with a jocular rendition of “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Only, when he reached the line “You’ll find a woman, yeah, and you’ll find love…”- he fixed a searing gaze on me, and unambiguously belted “You’ll find a woman, yeah, and you’ll find a man.”
Suffering from PTSD as a consequence of the aggregate damages of my complicated existence- I promptly left. In a blind, inwardly panicked blur- I stumbled up the stairs, and out to my car. I drove a block or two away, nursing the all-too-familiar bottle of liquid mental sedative in my custody, and I ugly wept, struggling to snap out of a panic attack. I texted my other boss and told him I didn’t think I could any longer work the site. It’d just been confirmed it wasn’t safe. And I called my boyfriend and slurred through the panicked torment of my condition. I waited a few hours in the car, talking and intermittently crying before I was finally coherent enough to navigate my way home.
In the years following my encounter with Dale and subsequent to his ultimate termination- I calmly and quietly inhabited a professional space of modest antagonistic apprehension from my subordinates. The libertarian conservatives and enlightened centrists would debate me and grew to respect me tremendously despite our ideological differences. They came to know me better as a person, to respect my work ethic and (albeit opposing) opinions, and how much I overtly cared about the fabric of the people who made up the department.
But it wasn’t without the passive-aggressive peppering of ridicule of trans people, and “woke leftists”. The work environment was no stranger to expressions like “tranny”, “shemale”, and so on. They’d casually remark about how “chopping off your cock” didn’t make you a woman, and all sorts of professionally appalling and sordid other things. All manner of alt-right internet propaganda dissemination and discussion wasn’t uncommon. But I met it head-on, without ever once losing my composure or dignity in the face of their antagonism. Without ever so much as disclosing or discussing those facets of my identity. I didn’t take the bait, and frequently met and even bested them on a variety of realer socioeconomic and political issues. To the point where transphobic slurs were slowly replaced with a sort of reverent liberal application of tamer, and nuanced affectionate labels like “dirty hippie”.
It’s so often said that gender non-conforming people are hated because we’re so noisy, and that we’re out to indoctrinate everyone, to trans everybody’s gender. But it’s loud and passive-aggressive, or outright belligerent other people who became hyper-fixated on us and the minutiae of our beings. People who just cannot let go of or shut the fuck up about us. Who cannot abide simply letting us live. The same people legislating a genocide of us in many countries (including the United States) as this is being written.
Dale had been close friends with many of the people who became my subordinates when I got hired. And I would come to learn years after his dismissal (for assaulting a cis-woman- because it didn’t matter quite so much when he did it to me- as had been the case on more than one occasion in my body of professional experiences), that he’d told everybody that I’d put moves on him, and that when he rejected me, I’d grown angry and hostile. He set them against me as an ultimate “fuck you”. And it influenced the respect I was given, and the amount of time (in years) that it took me to build a rapport and get on much better with my colleagues given the antiseptic nature of time and acquaintance. It took 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 by virtue of time and example for them to understand me as I was, and not as the person he painted me as a familiar authority figure, to be. To undo a social damage whose basis was so ridiculously and exhaustingly socially common to my experience, I didn’t even fully know to suspect it to be.
Anecdotally, my encounter with Dale was personally mild as these sorts of things go. But as you can see if you’ve made it this far into reading this- it can be a lot of groundwork to lay to even begin dissecting these kinds of things. More resourced and well-established content creators than me have done far more comprehensive, and fabulously well produced exposés on the topic:
Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia with Lindsay Ellis
I’m now nearly a decade into simply being myself and living my life as who I am as a commonly cis-passing trans woman. And to this day, if and when someone begins to suspect those differences in my identity, or when circumstances become such that disclosing it seems imperative- I’m frequently met with a sort of “Oh…” moment from them. Where everything changes, forever. And seldom for the better. Because on a much larger scale, I’m contending with decades (arguably centuries) of Dales and their prolific work to undo or annihilate people like me before we can even begin.
All of this is to say that real work begins in love and empathy. In patience and determination that those forces can, and will, and always do inevitably win. Not just love for others, or factors external to us, but within ourselves and for ourselves. So much of the hatred we see on the rise around the world at time of writing stems rather nakedly to anyone in possession of the tiniest degree of wisdom from fear and its resultant anger. In an increasingly polarized, and atomized global society that’s constantly ginning up fears of self, and of others- the most courageous and often most difficult decision we must make can be the decision to choose love. Real love. Not brand name love. Not television or movie love. Actual, difficult, profound, and unapologetically indomitable love.
Fear sells. Anger can feel powerful. Familiarity is safety, from an evolutionary standpoint. Ad nauseum marketing and articles, great works of fiction and news media (is there always a difference?) barrage us with input screaming all the ways in which we’re imperfect or inadequate. Alienating us as much from ourselves as our fellow human beings.
I am not alone in my battle for the peace and prosperity of a dignified life. I am simply at the forefront of the greater existential war being waged for the soul of our communal existence. I’ve lived several lifetimes, from a multitude of perspectives, and that makes me a grenade tossed into the trenches of a status quo angrily clinging to its withering, regressive, antiquated glory. A world of stark borders and boundaries, of order maintained through deftly sewn fear and division. At the bottom of it all, there is no “other”. There’s only difference. And difference is not only necessary, but immensely vital to our growth out of social, intellectual, and philosophical infancy.
Voices of authoritative power will roar that people like me, and all sorts of others who challenge it are the danger. They’ll rally their gnarled armies up into conniptions, like so many Dales, to mutate even the things like what I’m saying here into dangerously parallel buzz words for self-oppressive paranoia. They’ll whittle you down and get you to do the same to everyone else- and often congratulate you for paying dearly for the privilege.
The world is chalk full of Dales, on all sides of the ideological spectrum. Some with weightier consequences than others (like fascism or other brands of authoritarianism). All throwing tantrums about anything they don’t like or have the desire or capacity to understand. And it’s noticeably shorthanded on substantive opposition to such forces. It’s no secret the planet’s got a fever, and most people quantitatively are suffering beneath the weight of pointedly make-believe austerity.
One of the primary tools for this self-defeating agenda of eternal conflict and its consequential profiteering (financial or otherwise) lies in how we approach and manage the ways in which we are received. Both individually and collectively, it’s our burden. Impossibly difficult as it may seem, however- it is 𝐧𝐨𝐭 our responsibility. Those are decisions and penalties we must choose to navigate with whatever wisdom we can muster if our determination endures to fashion a better reality.
