Essay-writer Has Reached Crunch-point
I’m so fucking tired. Tired of being the Well-Behaved Trans, just as I was tired of being the Good Girl, the Obedient Crip, the Properly Masked Neurodivergent. I am sick to the back teeth of trying to explain that equal rights aren’t unfair rights, that equity isn’t subjugation of those for whom the status quo has always worked.
(Yes, writing this post was impelled by the recent EHRC guidance; no, there’ll be no further explicit reference to that in this long fucking post.)
I used to think that the system was fine, and it was me that was broken. Then I decided that the system must be broken. Of course, now I’ve come to realise that the system – feudalism rebranded to capitalism – is working EXACTLY as intended.
(Yes, I use n-dashes; no, GenAI hasn’t even been anywhere near this.)
I am a polite, white, middle-class, “well-spoken”, highly educated person who was christened in a Presbyterian church in the 70s at a very young age. I was also assigned female at birth, am disabled, intersex, trans (nonbinary), pansexual, neurodivergent, pagan, and a migrant (but that bit doesn't count for most bigots because I’m white and English is my first language) who isn’t English.
So the fun upshot is that I know prejudice from various angles. I was trained, from an early age, to look down on working class folk (especially those who couldn’t actually “find” work), those with fewer academic qualifications, immigrants and others for whom English wasn’t a first language, people of colour, non-Christian folk (and Catholics), and (visibly) disabled people. (Fun fact: I was told, repeatedly, that I wasn’t disabled for most of my childhood.) Queer people didn’t even exist in this system – or, once they did, they were to be feared and shunned as “unnatural”. And all of this prejudice was to be manifest, you know, not in a slur-slinging way, but in a “kindly”, gentle, patronising fashion. I was also taught to despise both posh people and the English – i.e. those who were seen to have more power than us.
And women? Oh, poor women – not being men… However well-educated, ambitious, successful, well-rounded, powerful, we were still less than men, and that was sad, but fine, and God help those who were single, or not mothers, or too femme, or too butch, or who couldn't, essentially, define themselves by what they were to the men in their lives. Feminism was okay, but oooh, some of them were going too far.
See, my folks were absolutely wedded to the notion of hierarchy, that there was a structure, and you could strive a certain way up, and fall/ fail a certain way down, but everyone had their place, whether or not that was a good place, and God help anyone who stepped outside that. I’ve come to realise (explicitly) recently that it’s not just those in power pushing us down, but the rest of us reinforcing it, because it’s all we’ve known, and anything else would be some scary manifestation of chaos.
I remember having this revelation, sometime in my late 20s (possibly early 30s – I was on a bus in Milton Keynes, that’s my only reference point) about how even sticking with the status quo you were handed as a kid is still a choice, that, past a certain age, if you have sufficient cognitive ability, your ethical standpoints, political persuasions, moral cut-offs, all that… are a choice, and you can’t say that anyone forced them on you. Now, obviously, I’m in my 50s and have read more widely (hooray for the internet and social media and wider social circles), and also worked in prisons, and absolutely recognise that that was a fairly privileged position to be able to hold, and that poverty, generational trauma, and a desperately inequitable system can more-or-less funnel people into e.g. crime, and isolation (boo to the fucking algorithms) robs people of the information needed to make better choices – to even know those choices exist.
(There are people out there who think the Holocaust was a hoax, and that Donald Trump is a good man and a powerful leader. There are people who don’t know how many of their beloved authors are straight-up monsters – show them the evidence and they’re in shock… we need to get into the habit of seeking our information from multiple sources…)
The thing is, though: I do not currently have the energy to try to politely educate people who’ve had access to the same information as I have about how a take of “I’m all for [equal rights] but [marginalised group] is demanding more rights than us normal people” is inherently fucked. I remember about twelve years ago or so sharing a Janelle Monáe video (the fabulous Tightrope, if you’re interested) with my then girlfriend, mostly for the sake of the lyrics, who stared at it, stony-faced, then spoke up halfway through: “I’m all for representation but…” oh shit… “why are there no white people in this video?” She felt uncomfortable. She thought that a mix of ethnicities would make a better point. What point was that exactly? That white people belong everywhere? Dumbfounded and lacking vocabulary, I couldn’t think of anything to say except to keep gently interrogating why it made her uncomfortable. That was the day I realised that there is an outwardly polite and seemingly liberal version of “I’m not racist but…” that is part of the crab-bucket mentality (thanks, Terry Pratchett!) of “Well, it may not be nice, but you’d better stay in your place [so I can clamber on your back].”
How the fuck do we explain this to people who are invested in not listening?
Something else I realised explicitly about four years ago is that patterns of abuse manifest the same way on different scales. An abusive partner or parent uses the same tactics and strategies as an abusive community leader, who uses the same ones as an abusive employer, who uses the same ones as an abusive political leader, as an abusive political party, as an abusive social class. That the patterns of generational trauma are identical whether it’s familial or intercontinental. And that no amount of explaining will give people who are unwilling to sacrifice even the slightest feeling of superiority for the cause of true equality anything other than better information on how to hurt vulnerable people whose advancement would make them feel lesser.
True equity isn’t chaos – I firmly believe that it’s possible for everyone to be free, and get what they require in terms of the full hierarchy of needs, without impingeing on the rights of others. A bunch of us would need to give stuff up. That’s fine. That’s natural, in fact. But mostly what we’d have to give up – all of us, fully and completely – is the notion that anyone is inherently better than anyone else purely due to the circumstances of their birth and their knock-on effects. And I don’t know how to make a diagram to get people of good faith to realise that. Hell, I struggle to recognise good faith a lot of the time, but I’ll still give people plenty of chances to prove me wrong.
Just a lot fewer than I used to.
