Progress is a wonderful thing

Progress is a wonderful thing.

Take the internet. Never in human history has it been easier to not understand what young people are saying, to buy weed off the Upper Hutt community notice board, or to find recipes with just four ingredients that promise to be awesome, only they’re not awesome, not ever, even though you keep telling yourself that this time will be different.

But there are things about progress, about the online world, that aren’t so great. When I was growing up, Freddy Krueger haunted our nightmares. These days, it’s Dunning–Kruger that kids need to be afraid of.

I never expected to be the object of a hate campaign. Sure, I’m mildly annoying. I talk to myself quite loudly, and my habit of involuntarily smearing Marmite on things is difficult to explain.

But I never expected to be hated, to be viscerally hated. Worse than that, infinitely worse, I never thought I’d have to see that kind of hate directed at my kid.

I’m talking about anti-transgender campaigns. This might sound odd to you: maybe the oversensitivity of someone who spends too much time on the internet. I’m going to tell you why you need to take this stuff seriously.

Maybe you’ve heard the term TERF? It stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, and it’s the most misleading ramble of dipshittery you’ll ever hear, unless you listen to Mike Hosking.

These anti-trans campaigners, they occupy a lunatic fringe that is actually more lunatic than the fringe I had in the 80s. But they’re absolutely serious, and they’re organised, after a fashion – in the sense that they band together and strategise, cynically, against the wellbeing of trans people.

The ‘respectable’ face of their campaign dresses itself preposterously as women’s rights. Citing ‘evidence’ that has all the intellectual rigour of a drunken Trump tweet, they talk about trans people as dangerous, especially to cis women.

Dangerous. I look at my 18 year old son: my son, whose passions in life are maths, hugging his cat and his brother, and musicals. And I think to myself, get a grip. The worst thing that kid could do to you is jazz hands.*

I want to be really clear. Reputable evidence that trans people are more likely to hurt others than the average person is nil. Meanwhile, evidence that trans people are more likely to be hurt is overwhelming. For a lot of us, it’s hard to fathom the hurt when these things like our chosen name and pronoun – our fundamental beings – are denied, even though the research is stark.

But the anti-trans campaigners get it. That’s why you’re seeing public meetings spring up, ‘innocent’ discussions about refusing trans people access to toilets. They know the things that hurt most, and they’ve weaponised them. Against trans people. Against my child. When they’re asked to move their meeting venue, they cry Nazism. When they’re confronted with evidence of trans people’s self-harm and mental distress and suicide, they change the subject.

Sorry team: last I checked, ‘free’ speech didn’t mean free from all traces of human decency.

(They also make other batshit claims, including that folks who disagree with them are funded by a powerful trans lobby. I wish I’d known there was a powerful trans lobby giving out funding before I spent all that money on my kid’s orthodontics. CRAP.)

I find dealing with anti-trans hate online to be distasteful, like realising there’s dog poo on my shoe and I’ve traipsed it over the carpet of someone who has carpet that is less shitty than my carpet. But I can’t turn a blind eye to it either. I can’t let someone like my kid see that hate go uncontested. It’s not the person I am. It’s not the person you are either.

Here’s my act of rebellion, my middle finger. I’m going to give you five reasons why I love my trans kid.

Reason 1: The ‘I told you so’ factor. When I was pregnant with E, I knew he was a boy. I just knew it, like a mother knows. And 16 years later, E realised I was right. BOOM.

Reason 2: Hilarity. On E’s eighteenth birthday, we out for dinner. E looked over the mocktail menu and said, ‘A Boy Named Sue resonates with me’.

Reason 3: Sense of right and wrong. I think he would have grown up with it anyway, but I believe that being trans has made my kid more astutely able to see injustice, and braver in speaking out. (What can I say? He was raised right.)

Reason 4: Hand-me-down high heel shoes. It’s not that he’s stopped liking high heels. It’s just that he’s still growing.

Reason 5: Strength of character. Some people will tell a trans kid they can’t be who they are, or that they must apologise for it, accept whatever weak charity is extended in place of full humanity. I want to say that kids can be cruel, but in truth, it’s the adults who are the worst. But my boy gets up every day, and he faces the day. He does it with grace and decency and understanding. And that’s what strong means.

There is so much pride in being the parent of a trans child – so much joy that the haters will never know. My kid is beautiful. I grew him inside me. I loved him from the moment I knew he was there, and through everything that’s happened, from then until now.

I’ve been turning over what I can do in the face of this campaign of hate against my child. As I did, I realised that the best revenge is not revenge at all. It’s loving the shit out of your kid.

And if you know what’s good for you, anti-trans campaigners, don’t bother trying to stop me.

__________

* This post should not be read as in any way trivialising the devastating impacts of jazz hands.