Bad Karma: Be Good to Each Other
February has been a long month for trans folks. Anti-trans rhetoric seems to be getting worse. Don’t be a dick.
Welcome to the last day of February, thank goodness we get an extra day this year so I can squeeze this in at the last minute.
A few announcements, and then to the meat and potatoes of deep thoughts:
You may have noticed an audio button that hovers on the lower left side of newsletter pages on the site. I wanted to provide the ability to read the newsletter via audio, that’s what this button does. Click on it to begin playing back the newsletter. You can adjust settings (voice and speed, for example). I hope you enjoy this addition. Let me know if you use it and what you think in the comments.
Submissions! My goal is to take on six authors in the upcoming 12 months. If you are a writer reading this, check out the Submissions page for more details. My most recent example of a collaboration with a writer is Young Hearts Run Free: Friends, the Found Family. The About page now lists contributors as well.
Meat and Potatoes.
I’ve had a heck of a time deciding on a theme or topic for this month. Ironically, I felt pretty good this month as I was crafting a few different drafts on different topics throughout the month. It felt more organized and together than usual. But this morning, I realized I didn’t know what to write. It seems these last few weeks have been both positive and negative, a real damned rollercoaster. One thing I do to prepare myself in writing the monthly edition is gather news articles in the Raindrop app over the course of the month. Each month gets a folder and I dump articles in there all month where I can highlight text and leave annotations. This month has a mixture of positive and negative news stories regarding transgender folks that range from really great to really fucking bad.
As far back as mid-January, I sent a rough draft of an intro paragraph I was working on called “On anti-trans rhetoric and behavior” to a trans friend to get feedback. We had a healthy conversation about it. This month the rhetoric from anti-trans politicians and pundits has gotten even more blunt. I won’t argue that it’s worse, but more honest. The ideas have always been there, it’s just now these folks are feeling more comfortable at just being blunt about it. Often what a terrible person says isn’t even what they are thinking, what they are thinking is far more sinister, but the idea is there and if you are really listening you hear it. This is also why I think it’s important that we are all starting to discuss stochastic terrorism. If this is a new term to you, don’t worry, it is to me as well, but the concept is not new at all. It’s putting a name to something we all know too well. Stochastic terrorism is defined as “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted” (Dictionary.com). In layman terms, it’s a person using their rhetoric to dehumanize a group (trans folks, in this case) that results in their listeners committing violent acts against the dehumanized folks. The word stochastic means “random” and terrorism “violence motivated by ideology” (Dictionary.com). The very term literally says, “random violence motivated by ideology.”
The thing about dehumanizing (or demonizing) people is it takes our ability to see them as human, living, and worthy of empathy or just basic decency. It’s why bad actors like to call people “groomers” who aren’t actually groomers. If you can convince people that a group of people are sexually grooming children, well, that’s bad and makes one mad at an entire group of seemingly sexual predators. And people don’t have much patience or decency in them for sexual predators.
I’ve often felt Pizzagate is a great example of being radicalized on a steady diet of lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. In short, a man was led to believe there was a local pizza place that was sexually trafficking children in their basement. The man had been on a steady diet of that conspiracy theory and lies, and eventually snapped. And this is the thing, understandably so. If you believed, truly believed, that a local business was trafficking kids in their basement and the local authorities and FBI were just ignoring it, you’d eventually become so distraught over this scenario. After all, why won’t anyone do anything to save these kids? Where’s the justice? And you might eventually snap and take matters into your own hands. In this case, the man went with weapons to the business and demanded entry into the basement, so he could save the kids. It turned out though that the business didn’t even have a basement much less a sex trafficking ring.
Be good to each other.
In the title to this edition is the phrase, “Be good to each other.” This is a phrase I’ve been posting regularly across social media for years. I originally began posting it on Twitter at least five or six years ago. I have two mottos that I kind of live by most of the time, which are, “Be good to each other,” and, “Don’t be a dick.” More on the dick one later.
The beauty of being good to each other is that if you make that a point in your life, you will rarely be bad to someone. Showing empathy comes easy. Listening comes easy. And just generally being good to people comes naturally and first in your interactions with people. And people recognize it and will most times return your behavior back upon you. I’ve been fortunate to be able to count on one hand the number of people who may hate me. Because when you are good to others, it becomes hard to hate you.
That said… hate is a nasty fucker. Hate doesn’t care whether you are a nice person, or decent human being. Hate doesn’t care who you are. Hate will always find a way to hate you, despise you, bitch about your good deeds or just generally existing.
A lot of these anti-trans folks have missed my recurring Ted Talk of “be good to each other.” And so, for the assholes in the back, I’m telling you—BE GOOD TO EACH OTHER. Life is pretty fucking lovely, if you don’t go around being hateful.
Don’t be a dick.
This leads into the second motto: “Don’t be a dick.” This one is also pretty easy to live by. If you feel the urge to be a dick, don’t. That’s it.
Don’t mistreat people, don’t talk down to people, don’t talk over people, don’t demonize people, don’t spew hateful rhetoric. Just don’t.
But what does this all have to do with the original conversation about anti-trans rhetoric? Glad you asked. Let’s start with some stats:
“The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey… found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who ‘transitioned’ – were either ‘a lot’ (79%) or ‘a little more satisfied’ (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them ‘a lot’ (84%) or ‘a little’ (14%) more satisfied with their lives” (The Guardian).
“Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault… In addition, households with a transgender person had higher rates of property victimization than cisgender households” (Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law).
“LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers” (Trevor Project).
Most anti-trans folks claim they are protecting kids from grooming, mental illness, a social contagion, evil beliefs, and so on. The reality however is that what anti-trans folks do and say causes harm. If you are an anti-trans person reading this who thinks you are helping kids, know that your words and behavior are having the opposite effect. You are harming and even killing kids. In the very least, that should make you step back and reevaluate your approach. Preferably, it should make you reconsider that you are wrong. People who are good to others don’t cause harm, pain, and even death.
All that said, I am no fool, not all anti-trans folks are duped people who think they are doing good. Some know exactly what they are doing. An Oklahoma State Senator, for example, when responding to questions regarding the death of Nex Benedict, a non-binary student who was beaten by three girls and died the next day, belabored the point that Oklahoma was a “Christian state” and that they didn’t want “that filth” in their state. View the video below to hear his exact comments in full:
This is not the voice of someone who doesn’t realize what he is doing is causing harm. He is fully aware and asking for more people to “fight to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma.” This is a blatant example of stochastic terrorism. This is the voice of a man who is both not being good to others and being an absolute dick. And most assuredly, understand that his is the voice of a type of Christian who does not think anyone, young or old, should be allowed to be transgender. This is the goal. This is the reality. People trying to force their own beliefs onto other people through laws, intimidation, and even violence.
Bad Karma by Ida Maria.
If you believe in hell or some form of it, these folks are likely heading that way. If you believe in karma, these folks are stacking up a lot of bad karma.
