Don't Take the Hate Bait, Folks
Don't let them punk you like that. We're all just humans trying to live.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop in a large American city — a city that some people say is FULL OF HOMELESSNESS AND DANGER.
(“It’s not America anymore,” sniffed a non-resident woman in a Reel that Instagram tried to show me. But I live here in Seattle and can tell you that this city is most definitely American. Also, the high cost of living sadly confirms that fact.)
And my breakfast sandwich (sausage, egg & cheese!) was just served to me by a … transgender person.
Gasp.
There’s More!
A sign on the front door politely requested that people use gender-neutral language with the staff.
Politely. Evil motherfuckers, right?
Seriously, this coffee shop is just another joe joint full of kids and cappuccinos. My girlfriend and I come here to write almost every Saturday morning. It’s our favorite coffee shop in Seattle — and I won’t name it because I’d like to keep everyone safe.
Why Am I Telling You This?
Because the hysteria over transgender folks is so cranked up right now in America.
Recently, our rather misguided government took the T and Q out of Stonewall, where the T and Q folks started the riots that led to gay rights. Huh? It takes a special kind of stupid to remove the T and Q from LGBTQ. (Whoops, guess I go on a watchlist now!)
These fears about transpeople are unfounded and we need to stop spreading them. Transgender folks are 1% of the population in America. How about we just leave them alone — and instead go about fixing stuff that needs fixing?
Still, I Can Sort of Understand How Folks Don’t Understand
I can understand that most people don’t have interactions/relationships with transgender folks (or don’t realize they do).
I get that.
I hadn’t interacted with many transgender folks when I started volunteering with the Triangle Speakers at the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz in 2014 — and it was there that I met a very nice transwoman named Angel. She was former USAF and we hit it off right away. I totally enjoyed her gentle nature — and she was waaaaay more feminine than I am.
I also met an intersex person named Sara on those speaker panels. She was intelligent, witty, and surprisingly tall.
Local schools would invite our little group to talk to students and share our experiences (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex). This was no indoctrination or scary shit that some folks dream up. We were asked to sit in a classroom for an hour and talk about our lives — how we recognized we were different, how we coped, and how we live now — so that kids could learn we were just human. And maybe not be so scared if they were humans like us.
Human.
That’s the key part here.
Human.
Nobody scary there. All kind and gentle humans trying their best to work, pay taxes, support their community, help kids, and be good people.
And, if you’re wondering, that’s Angel on the lower left in the photo. The tall person in the orange jacket is Sara. She never knew she was intersex until she was in her 50’s. (Read her interesting story here.)
We’re All Just Trying to Live
Now I live in Seattle and I know more transgender people than I did in 2016 — and every one of them is sweet and wonderful. But, because the U.S. is a dumpster fire right now, I won’t name any of them or their relationship to/with me. It’s not safe.
And that’s sad.
Because I want to tell you all about them and how much I love them … because you would love them, too.
Instead, I’ll just tell you that my breakfast sandwich in this ridiculously polite coffee shop was handed to me by a transgender man who didn’t just yell my name and slide the plate across the counter, but walked around the counter and halfway across the shop to hand me a sausage, egg & cheese — hot and fresh — and wish me a good morning.
Just one human to another.
Interested in learning more on this topic? Try these options:
I Never Understood the Transgender Stuff Either (I wrote this in 2016 but it’s still fresh today.)
Watch the bathroom scene from Transparent.
Click and see for yourself how ridiculous the Stonewall National Park page looks without Q and T.
And maybe in the near future, I’ll tell you what happened to me in the locker room at my gym recently. Everything ended up okay but it was a bit unsettling. Still ruminating on that one.