ZMeet Ay. Ay is going for a run. Ay is obese and knows they need to improve their health and is doing something about it. So, Ay is out running: going slow and breathing hard. Then, a car slows alongside. Zee leans out the window and yells: “Ha ha, but you’re still fat, lardass!”
Meet Bee. Bee is at an art gallery. Bee has myopia and can only see things up close, for everything else Bee uses strong glasses. Turning from reading a placard next to a sculpture and Bee pops on the coke bottles to admire the artwork. Zee, standing nearby, sees this and snickers “Ha ha, you’re blind as a bat aren’t you, four eyes!”
Meet Cee. Cee is calling a store on the phone. Cee has a stutter and finds phone calls stressful. To manage the stammer, Cee is talking slowly and deliberately. Zee is on the other end of the line and getting impatient with Cee’s pace. “Speak up! Get to the point! Chop chop.” Cee gets flustered, and, with stutter kicking in, apologises. Zee laughs. “Ha ha, s-s-speak m-m-more c-c-c-learly, dumb ass.”
Meet Dee. Dee is a transwoman. She gets up, gets ready and goes out and about for her mundane day. She takes a seat on the bus, unaware that Zee is sitting behind her. “Ha ha, what are you supposed to be, freak? I can still tell you’re a man. Tranny!”
Four stories. Four similarities. In each case, Zee presumes that these people, who diverge from the “norm” while going about their lives in public, are trying to tell a lie. Zee interprets the target of their mockery as acting in an obtrusive and dishonest way. Further, Zee gets to feel superior by calling out the “con job”.
Despite Zee’s misinterpretations, Ay, Bee, Cee and Dee are just trying to go about their lives and manage or overcome their various burdens. And Zee is denying them dignity in doing this because, in Zee’s world, someone who looks different or acts different is a direct personal threat.
To “miss” gender
Among the various things I do for work, I work in a men’s fashion store. For this, I look professional. Some of my Instagram selfies are of me at work. Most customers have no issue with my gender presentation. Some don’t even notice I’m trans.
In any event, being trans is a non-issue: the customers are there to shop and I am here to help them. Sure, some are taken aback. And once aback, they look me up and down, clocking me in bewildered discomfort before remembering themselves: it is rude to stare, no matter who you are staring at. In doing this, they at least recognise me as a person. And so the “don’t stare” rule applies.
Sometimes there are children who don’t yet understand that they have a choice of honesty and discretion. These kids just look at me very closely: their minds making certain decisions for the first time. (Or perhaps they’ve just never seen a woman so tall). These cases are all understandable and unremarkable, even if being up-and-downed by someone with the result of visible discomfort isn’t a promising start to our retail interaction.
It doesn’t get to me. I give a lot of leeway about this kind of thing because I feel that in changing my gender I’m asking for a lot of leeway from the world. So, no, the kind of misgendering that pisses me off is the kind that people like Zee do: “You’re still fat”, “You’re still blind”, “You s-s-still h-h-have a s-s-stutter”, “You’re still a man!”.
Some of this sort of Zee stuff has a weird anti-apology angle too. A gruff middle-aged man might say “Sorry, didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, mate”. But other cases are outright attempts to reject – or “disacknowledge” – my efforts to live authentically. In an example case like these, the decision to call me “sir” is marked by a split-second pause in which they consciously decide that, yes, they are going to say “sir” not “ma’am”. To do otherwise would be to give in somehow to something that feels wrong to them – “You can play whatever dress-up game you like, sir, but I’m not having a bar of it”.
You don’t fool me
That’s the subtext of the Zee reaction. There is a presumption that your public presentation is an invitation. That your presentation as a transwoman is a comment about them. People like Zee have a hard time understanding that things around them are not about them. How do you tell them that fooling them is not the goal because they’re irrelevant … well, they’re irrelevant to you until they say something like “I can still tell you’re a man”. How do you get across to them that embodying their cultural grudges is not your goal? That you’re not what they imagine you to be, because what they imagine you to be is so far from the truth that it’s not even wrong? (Perhaps like Ricky Gervais joking that all trans people want vaginas – even those who have them already – in order to have sex with cis-men with large penises).
All trans people who’re working through their challenges in good faith (unlike, say, Dylan Mulvaney, who’s transitioning as a publicity stunt) have the same goal: live a life of peace and dignity. (Note: In the woke culture war, there are scores of bad-faith actors on both sides – liberal-conservative, left/right, progressive/regressive. Doesn’t matter what side they’re on, these predators ensnare and radicalise their followers with poisonous charisma).
Why do they bother?
People like Zee, who insist on misgendering you, do it for their ego. Ego is the “little you” chattering away in your brain attaching meanings to things that enter your attention. Ego is what makes a story of the things that happen to the “whole you”. There are just as many people telling themselves stories about how bad they are as there are people whose egos tell them stories about awesome they are. The person who always talks themselves down is just as “egotistical” as the asshole always crowing about themselves.
Zee is someone whose ego is underdeveloped. It tells simple black-and-white stories. Seeing a trans person triggers their ego. Their ego story tells them to make a point of misgendering the trans person. It’s the same kind of ego-reflex impulse that makes children tease, scorn and pick on outsiders in the schoolyard. It’s name-calling. In general, society matures out of one childish “scorn trigger” after another. It used to be acceptable to gawk and laugh at fat people. Mental hospitals used to charge admission so that the average citizen could go in and be entertained by the patients. And so on.
Anyway, Zee has not grown out of schoolyard mockery. Partly, this is because Zee’s personality is not supported from within by strength of character. Imagine a “personality balloon” that is inflated and given form by the willpower of the character within it. Sounds plausible? Sound like you? Well, Zee isn’t like this. Instead, Zee has an external locus of control. Zee’s identity is defined by what’s around it – like one of the wee empty bubbles in a sponge.
Take the stuff of the sponge away and the bubbles don’t exist. (Like, when you eat a doughnut, where does the hole go? And so, the hole is highly invested, so to speak, in the donut staying whole.) Anything that happens to the sponge happens to the empty bubbles that comprise it. Zee knows this and is obsessed about what’s happening to the sponge. If the sponge soaks up LGBTIAQ+ social developments, it means the structure of Zee’s identity is being changed against Zee’s will … and beyond Zee’s control.
Difference noted. Insecurity triggered. Oppression activated.
You may have seen a model called the 5 Stages Of Technology Adoption. It categorises people into classes: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. This model can apply to “social adoption” too. You can guess where the Zees are: laggards. People dragged into the present. They rail against progress even as they succumb to it insensibly, because they’re a bubble in the sponge, they’re surrounded by it. Difference and newness are always scary to people like this. Therefore difference and newness are always “wrongness”.
Diversity means difference
Trans people are not trying to trick anyone. We’re trying to live in a way that reduces the harm that would be caused within us by being conformist, given that there’s a fundamental way in which we don’t conform. It’s poisonous to live against your own nature. It’s constant mental self-harm. To Zee, though, people don’t have an inherent nature. When you’re defined by what surrounds you, it is impossible to be nonconformist. It’s impossible for a bubble to imagine being a balloon. To Zee, everyone is part of a sponge. There is no other possible way to exist. Thus, if someone is nonconformist, it means they’re a bubble enmeshed in a different sponge. A foreign sponge. An enemy sponge. As we’ve seen, difference is “wrongness”.
What does Zee do when Zee comes across wrongness? Fear. Scorn. Hate. Attack. At the very least, Zee uses cruel labels to clearly identify the wrongness – the foreignness – and keep it away from the good sponge. Hence: fatso, four-eyes, dumb-dumb, tranny!
Classification without conclusions
This has been an article of classification, not conclusion. It has a lot of “what”, but little “what now?” Right now, I don’t know what to do with this classification of people like Zee. Conservatism is fascinating to me. Where does it come from? How does it replenish itself when all of history is nothing but the record of its continuous defeat: 10,000 consecutive years of victory for progress? I’m fascinated by the general aimlessness – or visionlessness – of conservatism. It is a void that’s only defined by what it doesn’t want. There is nothing “inside” conservatism. You can only see conservatism by how it pushes things away.
Sadly, the conservative cannot be brought into the present. They’re always laggards. As they drag their feet, they also face backwards looking to the rosy delusions of nostalgia. Back when, with the blinkers of hindsight, everything was in the proper order. When things were better.
When fat people deserved to be teased.
When the shortsighted deserved mockery.
When the stutterer said hilarious things by trying to say normal things.
When trans people drew crowds at the circus.
A turning world
Recently, these past 20 years or so, the world has been turning quickly away from this sort of schoolyard mockery. It’s not quite a revolution proper, but it’s definitely a turning and a welcome one. *TRIGGER WARNINGS* I remember Brandon Teena in the USA. I was alive and living in Australia when gangs in Sydney were kidnapping gay men and throwing them off cliffs. Over years, they killed at least 88 people. The police were complicit in covering. I remember when a man wearing a pink shirt to a pub was an incitement to violence.
Australia has transformed for the better. I hope your world is turning brighter too. Trans people like us will still be misgendered by people like Zee, but the social developments that people like Zee are lagging behind will nonetheless envelop the Zees and change them.
Despite looking back and trying to dig in their heels, being so obstinate eventually becomes untenable for Zee. The change soaks into the sponge and surrounds the bubbles who depend on it to define themselves. And a generally more tolerant society always results.