Say no to hatemongers
IT WAS discussed at Christmas lunch, to much eye-rolling from some of the oldies. The topic again came up at a family friend’s barbecue, this time without anyone over 70, or a conservative in sight.
But it wasn’t the barbecue causing the sudden heat.
Over a few wines with the girls after a healing circle (that’s a whole other column) the weekend before last, the conversation again pivoted to trans people and pronouns.
The hot topic always seems to start with email signatures, then to confusion on getting pronouns right and the predictable “but they is a plural, it’s all sooooo tricky”.
While that issue has grown tedious, surely we are educated enough to just move on now. Yet there seems to be a growing fear to the conversation of late.
Topics around the trans community have leapt from confusion to bigoted tripe. From gibberish around children in the US wanting to reverse their so-called forced gender assignment surgery, to hyperbole about trans women in female prisons.
What isn’t discussed over wines or Christmas ham is the alarming suicide rates in the trans community, or how two teens were charged last month in the UK for stabbing to death a 16-year-old trans girl in a park.
It was shocking to hear so many deep-seated fears, microaggressions and phobias from some of the women in what had seemed like a likeminded space. Wanting to speak up, the tongue was bit down on instead.
A friend and I eye-rolled to each other, but for different reasons to the oldies at Christmas lunch. Neither of us said a single word. We later told each other we didn’t want to make the other women feel uncomfortable.
The following weekend a bunch of Nazis chanting anti-trans hate marched the streets of Melbourne giving the Hitler salute.
Tears still well at the fear and isolation people within the trans community must have felt around Melbourne and beyond on Sunday.
Then comes the realisation that fear and isolation is felt by trans people around the world every minute of every day, a community which is statistically 15 times more likely to take their own lives than people like you or me.
Biting my tongue the weekend before last suddenly feels so wrong.
As a young child, movies like Tootsie, Some Like It Hot and The Rocky Horror Picture Show were always on high rotation on the VHS. Dame Edna Everage was throwing her gladdies. Robin Williams was being Mrs Doubtfire.
As a pre-teen, we marvelled at Guy Pearce’s costumes and giggled at Terence Stamp’s facials in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert.
While the mockery and belittling jokes around cross-dressing from films like Tootsie has certainly aged, the issue around trans people never seemed contentious growing up.
Parents weren’t ejecting the videos for fear we youngsters might suddenly decide to don a moustache, or the lads would start dressing in stilettos, or that we would be magically manipulated into being queer.
Is this the reason people get in a lather about drag queens reading story books to our kids in libraries?
But after seeing Nazis march the street and the conversation conveniently skewed by the mainstream media to some MP getting ejected from the Liberal Party for attending a Let Women Speak rally, there comes the realisation that not speaking up is tantamount to being complicit.
But what to say?
Surely the debate doesn’t need some white woman weighing in has always been the first thought when contentious issues, like race and identity, come up.
But what a cop out.
Often I find myself defending the newspaper I have worked at for most of my career. “You must get censored all the time?” and “Do they dictate what to write?”.
Everyone is always surprised to find it is a resounding “no” to the above. So why not use the platform now to admit I don’t know what to say about many of the issues the trans community is facing.
And, yes, sometimes the political ra-ra around trans issues, especially involving language like “birthing person”, can seem confronting.
But deeper than the extreme rhetoric is that humans are decent and want the best for people, whatever they choose.
Most people these days know someone, or of someone, who has transitioned, whether that be a family member or a school friend’s kid. The journeys of those who transition are inevitably touching, poignant and so, so tough.
They aren’t waiting for the slip of a misplaced pronoun to jump on. They don’t want to be treated as victims.
When Nazis march down the streets against an already maligned and scared community, it is time to stand up and say this is not okay.
Sure, we might not understand some of the language we are being told to change. But surely we are decent enough to say that hate speech or Nazi salutes of last Sunday are never okay. Otherwise shame on us all for biting our tongues.