whats in honeybells pockets?

The most recent time, I arrived half an hour before the event as usual, but the building was locked. We don't have a key and the door is normally left open for us. Jim shows up a few minutes later, we can't get in, and we're just standing on the street in a sketchy part of town.

I suggest we message everyone and move the event to somewhere else, a local bar that's very safe, it means we won't be able to do what we had planned but we can at least sit inside and socialise for an hour or two. Jim doesn't like this idea. So we wait on the street as several people walk past giving us weird looks.

After about 10 minutes, Jim thinks he sees someone through a window inside the house. We know there are theoretically people who live above the arts centre, but we've never seen them before. Jim starts hammering on the door, and the people on the street are staring at us even more.

Then Jim decides to stary yelling, not just "Hello", but "Hello we're from the transgender group!" at the door, really loudly. People are really looking now. He keeps doing this for about five minutes until eventually a man actually opens the door and asks "What do you want?"

I can tell instantly that this guy has *views* on trans people, gay people, the usual. But Jim just says, loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear too, "Hi, we're here from the transgender group, we're holding a transgender event in here!" This guy thinks for a second then his eyes narrow and he looks directly at *me* with a kind of vicious disgust that I recognise all too well.

I have to explain that Jim started medical transition very young. He looks and sounds totally indistinguishable from a cis man, to the extent that many people within the community privately doubt that he is trans at all (he is though). I don't mean to imply that he doesn't face transphobia, even the most perfectly "passing" trans man faces a ton of discrimination for that transness. I just mean to point out that this man looked down at us on the doorstep and saw what he would describe as a man in men's clothing, and a potential T-slur in women's clothing, and then heard Jim essentially say "we're transgender", and he knew that he had clocked me correctly, and that disgust I saw in his face was that confirmation that one of *them* was here in his house.

In the end, nothing bad happened, the guy stood there blocking our entry for a minute, but eventually grunted something and wandered off. But it took me a while to realise that I was actually a bit shaken up by the whole thing.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Happy Pride y'all, my beach body is ready for summer 🧡