1437. Are we all alone?  Is life just one big futile exercise for connection?

I am blessed by active and supportive friendships, family, and generally, random strangers.  Most of my life is lived within a bubble of kindness and joy.  This is by design.

But every now and again something happens, someone reveals a truth previously hidden, and it’s like I am standing in a room of curtains and they all come crashing down, revealing the shadows all round me.

It is often said that middle class straight white women are the most common shills for the patriarchy.  I hate to criticise as I was married to one, am friends with many, and am very often attracted to them.  

Generalisations can often offend.  So, cheers to those exceptions out there.

My summer has been colossally weird.  All of my carefully laid plans for a blissful summer of beach, seclusion, writing, and Sapphic flirtations have been utterly annihilated.  Never mind that it was at my own hand.  The things we do to pursue “the future”.  

As I think back on my former professional career, so much of my success was down to a willingness to drop everything and just go somewhere and own a problem for my clients.  Friday afternoon conversation in London: 

“Hi, listen, we have a problem with a subsidiary in [insert country].  Do you think you could go and sort it out?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Well, the HR director got thrown out of the window at the plant by some of the works.  Hospitalised, so there’s that.  I think it could use your calm bedside manner.”

“Sounds a bit dangerous.”

“We’ll give you a body-guard and driver.”

“I’ll take the driver, but no guard.  Let me look at flights, but I can be there Monday.”

True story.  When they complained about how expensive I was I would suggest that one of them go themselves.

This summer, I have been surrounded by Christians.  As a “reformed” Christian, who grew up in an intensely religious school system, yet one which allowed for some level of rational debate in-between the proselytizing, I am not at all at ease with the “faithful”.  Ironic, as I am profoundly spiritual, and possess faith, just deeply suspicious of organised religion.

Amid tense negotiations with a Christian group I was doxxed by one of them and outed as a whore.  The doxxer has maintained a position of open hostility to me and to the word FLINTA (Female/Lesbian/Intersex/Non-binary/Transgender/Asexual).  I love the term.  Not least because I feel affinity to every one of those markers.  I love the term even more now.

While the Christian doxxer outed me to the group I am working with, the rest circled the wagons and protected me, thus demonstrating true Christianity.  I was surprised.  Their leader said, “I know what you do.  And I know you’re a healer.”  They went on to describe the individual who had attacked my reputation as someone with many sexual demons.

Much of this blog has explored my love of Sex Workers.  The acceptance I have felt from the community has drawn me in.  And I guess that as marginal people, many sex workers see things in ways that the general populace does not.  But what surprises me from time to time is when someone from this community takes a stance of intolerance, or bigotry.

One of my early mentors in this business has been a write-off for her toxic views.  So has one of my best friends.

I practice a zero-tolerance policy towards toxic people.  Life is too short.  I’ve always been this way.  We don’t owe anyone anything because of blood ties or former friendship.  To go on as a friend and love means to be respectful and to continue to invest.  What I am struggling with is how many women, no matter how much they dress it up, or even consider themselves tolerant or enlightened, are deeply and profoundly prejudiced against transgender and intersex women.

You might say that this is more broadly true.  But I don’t really care about what men think.  They aren’t women.  It’s a bit like non-members having something to say about members of a private club.  Who cares.  But when other members of the club snipe at you, you notice.

Some of my very closest friends post transition, both in the profession and out, at times, mainly of anger or some form of emotional heat, reveal their true feelings and thoughts.  It’s funny how intense emotions strip away politesse.  Just at that moment when we need it most.

One dearly beloved has associated certainty with toxic masculinity as a vestige of their broken marriage.  To have the toxic trait of someone’s ex thrown in your face because of a snippet of conversation between you is colossally weird.  Not because the person is wrong in their judgement, but that they would take the minute, turn it to the general, and throw it back at you with intent to wound.  That is double trouble.

And because I tend to absorb what people say to me and then spend time thinking about it, I got to chew on an incident until a woman in my family showed up, and evinced this. same “toxic masculine” trait I had been accused of at levels which were off the charts.  I could see the trait as unpleasant, or worse, but found in conclusion that it is an individual behaviour not a sex-based one.  So, when my friend made the comment, it was intended to say, “you are still a man.”  Or “I don’t accept you in this club of women.”

And in that moment, it shows a deeper truth about beliefs, values, and also about her own core wounds.  None of which has anything to do with me. For some reason, I am the trigger for these perverse feelings.

And I might disregard it as a standalone, but when it is delivered with intent to hurt, it is genuinely something which gives pause.  In her case, because of many other reasons, I am keeping the friendship but upping the vigilance and have raised the issue with her.  I have accepted that what I revealed in that short interaction is something which I wish to stamp out, but have yet to say how it feels to hear the full meaning of her words, and will expect that she make a similar commitment to root it out.

There is something important here.  So many women seem to define womanhood through trauma.  That it is their suffering as women which makes them women.  And because my suffering is different than theirs, it is dismissed.  And because their suffering largely stems from female-male dynamics, or male indifference to the feminine, it is very easy to trigger a sense of distance, and to have this transform into something worthy of being attacked for.

I had a group of house guests recently.  Some knew each other, some did not.  A man present was prying in a sexually suggestive way, and it made one of the women very uncomfortable.  I hadn’t been there at the time, but was informed of it later. I asked him to think about things, and that I wanted him to be able to articulate himself having thought about these things.

But over lunch, two women guests were being quite aggressive towards him.  I happened to agree with much of what they were saying, but I did not agree with rudeness.  I shared their dislike of him, but as a host of all present, I felt a duty towards calm and balance, and call me old fashioned, but an invited guest does not get attacked, they just don’t get invited back.  

His English wasn’t fabulous, so I reframed his words in perhaps better language, and that triggered a guest who decided to leave early.

I didn’t like the man any more than anyone else and did eventually asked him to leave.  Despite this, I did not appreciate the rudeness shown, and the default expectation of the two women, who are (or were) friends, that I would simply back them against this man because of his views, or that I would join in the toxicity of attacking him and putting him down.  I am happy for disagreement, but not for rudeness.

As a result, I got blasted too.

The nature of the blasting was to chuck me out of the “women’s club”.  It made me realise that for them, I was never in it.  We can be inclusive or politically correct because we are taught to do so, even when we don’t mean it.  But that kind of thinking and behaviour is how toxic bigotry takes root in a society.  That is the fertile ground where racism and all forms of othering exist, where Nazis become possible, where MAGA becomes possible.

And while I think of most white women who voted Republican in the last US election as turkeys who vote for Christmas, the parallels are real.  And yes, in feminist circles it is said that having proximity to privilege, collecting the table scraps is better than accepting the truth, which is that not even a pretty white woman is accepted in a male dominated system other than “to the victor the spoils”.  On an individual life, it can be quite cushy, and she need never wake up, but it is a life of dependence.  And if she’s lucky, she will be with one of the good ones, a good man, who will keep her comfortably numb.

I would put this general feeling down to aberrant individuals.  But it is all too common.  In many trans circles there is often a feeling that lesbian women are more trans exclusionary.  This has not been my experience, I wonder if it is because the term transgender is so wide as to become somewhat meaningless.  To say that, though, do I then become guilty of the same disease?   When I catch myself thinking that there are degrees of transness, is that another form of bigotry?  Do you have to take hormones?  Do you have to live out?  Do you have to have a sex change?

I know that I am not alone in my community.  Many of us have taken back the word “transsexual” to distinguish those of us who have taken the step of becoming outwardly anatomically female.  And I cannot vouch for someone else’s internal landscape.

I wrote a post once about just this issue, and ended up taking it down later because it felt wrong.  But there are the things we say in public and the feelings we have in private.  And does that make it any better.  My beloved voice coach educated me on trans-medicalism—that we might exclude someone because they hadn’t had surgery.  That is frowned upon, and I understand that we cannot conclude.  After all, surgery is inaccessible to many, and not even desired by some.

But the point here is that tolerance takes work.  And when you see one of your closest friends throwing “not woman enough” in your face at so many different junctures…because I am confident, because I don’t bleed (I actually do, but for different reasons), because I don’t have a pronounced cycle, because I still look a bit like a man (especially on a bad day or from the wrong angle), and my voice is nearly always in the male register unless really concentrate.

And I can accept it, as a truth, and accept my “difference”.  But I can’t accept it when it is served up to me with intent to exclude or hurt me…and I know that it is always served up for that very reason.  And as much as it pains me to say it, someone who sets out to hurt, has no place in my life.  That might mean an active rupture as it did with my bestie, when I told her that her views were toxic to me and that I had no place for them in my life.  With others, however, generosity, kindness, me reaching out, are simply withdrawn.   It is amazing how quickly someone reads the tea leaves when you just disappear, and I don’t mean that physically.

As a light being, and someone who works with the healing arts, and as a witch, I know this to be true.  When my light goes out in relation to someone else, it’s just gone, never to return.  We cannot unsay things, we cannot fix that which is broken, life is too short.  Your work is not mine.

There is something strange in all of this.  It seems logical that a lesbian or bi woman might be quicker to dismiss me than a straight woman friend.  And I am speaking of friends generally, as romance is another mystery.  But why am I not seeing this kind of toxicity from my gay and bi women friends?  Why do they seem more understanding?  Why are they more masters of their own feminine selves?