Miscellaneous

Shame, Pride, Queer Fear

It seems not a day passes that doesn’t take us further back. An eternal violent night of fascism is extending over the world, its shadow cast further and further. Dark days indeed.

I often reflect on how shame, and fear, affect queer lives, or at least mine. It locks us in the closet, hiding nature from the harsh judgement of an artificial construct. It poisons all minds; it enables and reinforces the cruel, self serving bigotries of the selfish and predatory.

Coming out symbolises a conquering of that fear and shame. The imagery could not be more apt – a pure rejection of constraint, expressed outwards into the world. But it’s a common misconception that you only come out once. And just as you constantly come out to the world, the pressure of the world constantly falls back onto you.

The cishetereonormative construct of society damages everyone who exists within it. Those who perform its bizarre rituals are as affected as those who don’t. But to those who exist outside its parameters, the damage inflicted upon them can be horrifying. Murder, suicide, isolation from a complete life. Dehumanisation – transgressors must be terminated.

For me, born into relative peace and privilege at the cusp of history, shame kept me from expressing feminine as a child and teenager. Shame had me denying an attraction to men for over twenty years. A deeply subconscious shame has kept me from Pride. Despite truly living the best three years past.

And I can’t actually explain why I felt such intense shame in a way that satisfies me. Aside from the perpetual message from all of society to conform or perish.

Our society is structured such that every human must perform a precisely designated role, in the service of capital. Our culture is hyper-gendered and fatally cisheteronormative; religious justifications of the essential masculine and feminine have given way to a self-fulfilling cultural construct. And yet, its construction still reinforces the old world.

And I wonder if the only reason why queer shame is beaten so deep into every person because the deconstruction of that system dismantles the supposed legitimacy of extreme power. If queer humans did not stand beneath “straight” humans, but rather we stood together, undivided by artificial boundaries, the force of pure humanity would silence those who exploit prejudice for the rest of time.

The terror of fascism is quickly returning, and no decent person is safe from its march. The only way to win is to purge from your mind the remnants of hopeless tradition, and to see and join a single humanity, united.

The Precipice

When I was in high school, the Catholic school in the area, I heard a rumour that a gay student was receiving “counselling”. I never found out who they were. But that mere thought was just one of the many overwhelming things that successfully pushed a naive, scared trans child further into the closet, not to emerge for almost a decade.

So, you could imagine that I have strong feelings about efforts to create safer environments for queer children and teens to be themselves. I wonder how radically different, and how much happier, my youth would have been had I been free to be me, instead of being forced to present a masculine facade. I remember how conflicted and wrong and ashamed I felt, and I want no one to ever have to suffer that. No one should lose their childhood years like that.

This caretaker government has made clear just how hostile the powerful religious forces in this country are to the very existence of queer people. Skin-curling bisexuals. Gender-whispering educators. Promulgating the right to jeopardise the education of vulnerable children. They barely conceal their hatred with weasel words, squeezing harder and harder as their grip on power slips away.

To call these people Christians is a sick joke. There is no love in what they preach.

But despite the overwhelming public defence from the majority of our society, the fact that our livelihoods and happiness remain the punching bag of desperate reactionaries makes me ill. It’s just a battle in the war. Well funded Christian zealotry is mobilising all around the western world.

It’s a fact that transgender people are their targets, now that their attempt to vilify gay people has completely failed. The United Kingdom is infamous for the moral panic in the media. In the United States, dozens of states are aggressively legislating to constrain trans people. And what happens there is inevitably imported here…

At times like these, like during the toxic survey last year, I despair, I feel overwhelmed, turning numb. But I’m thankful for my newfound security, and the friends I can rely on. I worry about those who aren’t so lucky.

I want to fight this nightmare forming around us. Where bigoted division sets us apart and into hierarchies of dominance. Where the marginalised suffer at the hands of the selfish. Where those who dream of a better world are powerless, condemned to the nightmare of the past.

The precipice we approach becomes starker by the day. We need radical change now. Let’s wake up the world.

Beyond The Horizon

Around this time every year I feel drawn to write about my experience of existing in a deeply gendered and sexist society. The first year I experienced liberation from a cage. The second year accompanied a boiling rage. I think I am finally ready to share some clarity around my journey.

My mid teen years was when I began developing senses of consciousness and courage enough to begin experimenting with my gender expression. Before then, all I felt was a deep fear of rejection, and the internal retreat to safety. I lost my self in online worlds.

I remember this one moment clearly in high school, a random, fleeting moment where I, walking behind some two people, heard them loudly deride me as “girly” and how uncomfortable it made them.

Visible. Recognized. That euphoric delight. I carry that warm feeling in my heart to this day. It’s a little weird, but that was one of the first times I felt illuminated.

When I first moved to the city, my dream was to disappear to a new life, a life re-gendered. How naive I was to not account for life getting in the way.

There was no momentum. My golden years were lost. Lost to weakness and fear. Lost in distractions of my own making. Lost to virtual worlds. Lost to the lower rungs of the capitalist mind grinder. An opportunity made and lost.

I can never get this time back. I can never undo the effects those years had on my body. All anyone can do is move forward.

Despite all that, my life today is luxurious compared to that of some of my brothers and sisters.

I’m white, with a voice and appearance that conforms to expectations. I’ve never been verbally or physically harassed by strangers on the street.

I’m never mis-gendered, never suffering psychic assault from a society hostile to life outside its parameters.

I earn a top-quintile salary as a professional, and my documents are in order. If I so choose, I could continue a life of success and gendered stealth.

But those oppressed brothers and sisters have more courage in one strand of hair than I do in my entire body.

The isolation of a life in comfortable stealth is not something I can bear for much longer. A tragic irony, to turn the mask of your early life inside out. It’s impossible to connect to the world authentically while wearing a mask.

Now, I have successfully transitioned between genders. Within my deepest self, and with a select few, I feel I have transcended gender. Despite that, living a more visibly queer life in a society that does not recognize that as possibility is something I approach with caution. The potential consequences for my career and social status are dire.

And yet, it’s my responsibility to use this privilege granted to me by accident of life to fight for a future where no innocent child, no questioning teenager, no jaded adult is immobilized by fear and unable to live their authentic self.

My only challenge is breaking down my own barriers, again and again. To resist my own fear and trepidation is to resist and redraw the boundaries of society. I hope to meet that challenge and succeed.