Silence is complicity: or do we need to relearn recent history?

I am not a crusader, or a warrior.  Like most trans women, I suspect we just wish to blend in and get on with our lives. Longing to disappear.

Indeed, being invisible has been something I wished for as a child…to be so normal that I was grey, blurred out, not really noticeable.  Just like everyone else.

For better or worse, that is not my lot, nor has it ever been.  I stand out wherever I go.  Maybe it’s my height.

A dearly beloved friend who has come back into my life recently, the woman to whom I lost my boyginity oh so many years ago, said, “you are a very powerful being…one can’t help but feel your energy, notice you.”

It was a touching thing to say…at least that’s how I felt it.

I saw some video of me tying someone up the other day.  The first time I had ever tied a man.  And I look like a dude in most of it, until I look straight at the camera and smile, and then I am a woman.  It is a very strange place and feeling to know that in many ways I am both.

One of the things that has appeared to me is the reality of hormones.  We can think what we like, but our hormones are the master chemicals of the body—they bathe everything, go everywhere, and while they may not “think” for you, they subtly wire/rewire every single cell in our bodies.  How we feel, think, and do at a cellular level is influenced by our hormones.  Nerves grow new pathways to align my body with my brain, which has been feminized.

I can remember that something was different in my brain about 6 weeks after starting on oestrogen and the total suppression of testosterone with finasteride and spironolactone, the so-called “puberty blockers”.  

The controversy around these drugs would be a storm in a teacup, but the moves to prevent trans teens from accessing them will cost lives, and take a terrible toll on the survivors.  Do I have any hesitation whatsoever that had I grown up in a more permissive and tolerant society, that I would have transitioned at a young age?  Absolutely.  Do I miss the physical beauty that she would have been had she come to life at that age?  Yes.

But I also know her, for she is me.  She just had to hide and suffer in silence in a world that doesn’t like my kind.  This puzzles me.  The idea that it is no longer safe for me to travel to perhaps half of the countries in this world—most of Africa, parts of South America, the Middle East, parts of Asia, are simply not safe for trans people.  To that list I should add the United States.  Once a beacon of freedom, even though founded on the back of a genocide of indigenous people, and racist to its core—ironic consider the self-image of being a “melting pot” and espousing such homilies as “give us your tired, your huddled masses…” –the US is no longer a safe place for marginal people, no longer a beacon. It is a country that has lost its soul.

The current state of affairs in the US is an object lesson in appeasement, and how silence is complicity.  If you do not take to the streets, are not vocal in your opposition, not making your voice heard, not speaking up for the downtrodden, then you are on the side of the proto-fascists, the misogynists, the bigots and racists, the spoiled and impotent little boys who are cos-playing manhood.

What appears to be happening in the US is state capture.  I read a book several years ago called McMafia, about how the concepts and methods of the mafia were increasingly creeping into government, Russia being the scariest example.  The book highlighted the fragile democracies, downplaying the US, but suggesting Mexico was high on the list.  The Economist ran an article in 2004 about how the US was the OECD country most likely to have a fascist takeover.  How prescient.

For those of you out there wondering whether there will ever be free and fair elections in the US again, let us not be naïve.  Civil disobedience is quaint.  Twee.  Noble.  But when someone else is eating your lunch, jailing your people, trampling on your rights, what comfort lies in the higher road?

There are more citizens against the end of constitutional democracy in the US than in support—and there are plenty of angry people who somehow think that a turn to fascism will be good for them, and they are more likely to own weapons.  I fear for the country. But the Second Amendment exists for a reason…and it is the resistance of tyranny that lies at the foundation of this right.

I have written about how as a trans woman I might have a natural fear of the “redneck” and yet, some of the sweetest interactions I have had with strangers, men, have been with people who might have scared the bejesus out of me, but who stunned me with their elegant gentility.

One on one, even bigots can be polite, kind, understanding.  And in truth, to know a trans woman is to love her.  We should be fascinating to everyone…but if you read this crazy propaganda about bathrooms or predatory sexual behaviour, you would want us all rounded up and taken out back.  Sadly, the bigots have the megaphone.

The part that hurts me most is that somehow trans people have been tarred with the same brush as groomers and pedophiles.  When people throw enough mud at you, it is obvious that some of it will stick. And just as there are bad people, there are bad trans people. Even more there are people who want to dump any weird or deviant sexual behaviour into a bucket and demonise it. A specific example I am thinking of was on Twitter recently, and were reposts of a man dressed as a sissy out and about in public, and obviously being sexual and inappropriate in public places. Unsurprisingly there was backlash against this person. But they are also not transgender. And even if they were, there would be no cause to leap from the example of one, to the idea that we are all like this.

If one Republican is a rapist or a felon does not mean all of them are…or does it, when you vote for one? Is that an active and participatory form of complicity? Of saying, the values of my chosen leader are the values I espouse? Hence the glee at the destruction of Civil Society.

I am conscious that being a Sex Worker and also being kinky means that to some people, my credibility is shot. That being a kinky escort makes me unfit to have an opinion.  I am no longer a suitable ambassador for any cause, let alone one as controversial as being trans.  My thought that “I have nothing to lose” is possibly an example of “cutting my nose to spite my face” (apologies for the 2 cliches).  A good girl goes into hiding.  But I just can’t.  I can’t be an appeaser.  Even when it might be in my narrow self-interest.

My divorce is almost complete.  In the judge’s draft judgement there is a section which I can only interpret as anti-trans, a clear sign of bias.  But pointing it out is likely to get me in hot water.  The level of cis-normative privilege which exists in society is alarming.

I am visiting the land of smiling people now, a trans paradise if there is one, Thailand.  At the breakfast buffet there was an American couple, African-American.  They made a point of gendering me correctly when speaking to a member of staff on my behalf.  It was a small thing, but much appreciated.  As I think about how American blacks, and black women in particular, have gone out of their way to show solidarity with me from the very beginning, I cannot help but be touched.

They know what it feels like to face constant suspicion.  They know what discrimination in the every day feels like.  They know violence and its threat.  That knowledge makes their support even more poignant.  I grew up in privilege, not just white privilege, but extreme white privilege.  I believe that I am the only “girl” to have ever attended my all-boys Christian school.  At least known.  

Not coming out was influenced by how far I would have to fall by doing so…and I mean that only in a socio-economic sense.  But I don’t want to fall.  I don’t even want to skin my knee.  I wish to triumph in the socio-economic sphere more now than I ever did as a man.

This book is yet to be written.  The road is substantially more difficult and random than ever before.  I spoke to a former colleague a few months ago about doing some work together.  He worked for me, and his work for me transformed his life financially.  He recently got fired.  I spoke to him, and he said sweet things about my transition, including expressing a desire to work with me again.  But when I followed up with him I discovered that he had unfollowed and blocked me from all platforms.

I don’t get it.  Why not just call me by my name?  Is it easier to just be a bigot in silence?  You can tell yourself that you are protecting your career, that association with me is going to taint you by association?  Disappointing.

But it is my reality.  The stigma that comes with this path.  Did I make a choice to be trans?  I was born this way as far as I can tell.  I am only alive for having come out.  Of that I am sure, and the spectre of self-harm is something I have to live with.  So far, the hate of others, the negative turn in society, is motivating to me.  Why give in?  Why give the satisfaction?

There is corollary to this.  Wanting less, expecting less, and finding increasing ease in my passage through the world.  Enlightened people, kind people, are polite and helpful…and I am motivated to be the same.  I don’t like the narrative that trans people shouldn’t throw rocks because we “live in glass houses”, but I also don’t want to lean into the world with a shoulder chip first.  

I shall be surprised.  And if you are ever tempted to say to a trans woman (or trans man), “as long as it makes you happy,” it is a red flag for bigotry, and you might examine yourself…why would you say something so anodyne?  Why not say what one of my besties said, “I love you even more, because now I finally get to see all of you.”

If you are not going to speak up then you are complicit.  True in all ways.  You have a voice.  Use it.