Humanizing Yourself (& Others)

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Recently, when discussing how best to go about helping my teenaged cousin unlearn the prejudices taught to him by his parents, my mother told me “You’re a good example for your sexual persuasion, because you aren’t too in-your-face about it.”

This is something I hear from straight people a lot, when discussing the LGBT community and our values. I hear a lot about those, too; “family values” and, specifically, how they and people like me cannot coexist. As if LGBT people don’t have families and values of our own. As if we don’t consistently step in and uphold those values when our biological families fall short. Values like unconditional love and acceptance and support and equality. But even though LGBT people, individual and communal alike, are just as vocal about all of these things which we hold dear, they never seem to make it to the cis-heterosexual conversations regarding us and our personhoods. To them we are, first and foremost, deviant to their sexual and gender norms. They have no room for anything else in their conceptions of what we must be like.

I don’t say any of this to disparage my mother, or in fact any other cis-straight person with preconceived notions about people they don’t understand. Humans, as a whole, are very talented at stereotyping. It’s easy to do, and in many cases, it’s what we’re taught growing up. Unlearning the impulse is difficult, and a life-long project. Especially when, often, we don’t even realize the impulse for what it is.

I am far from the first LGBT person my mother has known. I’m not even the first in the family. My father’s sister has been openly gay since she was a teenager. Two of my cousins, one older and one younger, are bisexual and pansexual, respectively. Another older cousin has been openly butch and gay since her college years, and married her college sweetheart, another butch lesbian. They are raising their child with neutral pronouns. All of them have various flaws and attributes, as do I, but my mother has not been forced to reconcile the many layers of their personhoods the way she has had to reconcile mine. And I have, it must be said, made it very easy on her.

It amused me that my mother saw me as not being “in-your-face” about my lesbianism, when in fact I live a very openly gay life. I volunteer for LGBT organizations. I am very vocal in LGBT social media. Nearly every single one of my friends is LGBT. I was, until recently, frequenting LGBT spaces regularly. We have a massive Philly Pride flag hanging from the balcony of our apartment. When I write fiction, my stories center around LGBT characters and LGBT issues. Ever since I first came out, I have refused to closet myself for anyone. Not because there is anything wrong with being closeted, especially where one’s personal safety is concerned, but because I simply do not want to.

But my mother does not see this objectively huge part of my life. Instead, she sees that I am feminine. She does not know the history of femme lesbians, or the cultural impact of femininity throughout the lesbian community. She knows only that she always assumed lesbians were butch, and I am not. She sees that I am “fully gay” (her term), which is easier for her to comprehend than pan or bisexuality. She sees that I am relaxed when discussing LGBT issues. I am level-headed when confronting the casual homophobia and transphobia of family members. I am polite when discussing the various mistranslations and loss of historical and cultural context regarding the concept of homosexuality as a sin.

She does not know that I am all of these things because, through trial and error, I have come to realize that it’s the only way I can convince people to acknowledge and attempt to unlearn their prejudices. Of course I feel outrage and sadness and fear when confronted by homophobia. But I am also in a very particular position in that I am what my friends and I refer to as a “gateway gay.”

With the exception of avidly lesbophobic women, of which there are many, and men who are eager to “turn” lesbians, of which there are many more, I’ve constructed an appearance that makes me relatively palatable to homophobes. I am, despite my openness about my sexuality, not immediately assumed to be gay. I am a feminine woman. I am white. I am cis. All of these things lend me a credibility with homophobes that they do not give to gender non-conforming and trans people, or LGBTs of color. I have done this purposefully, so they are willing to listen when I speak.

The cousin we were originally discussing has spent his whole life in a rural farm town in upstate New York. If you aren’t from the rural north, you might not know how intrinsic prejudice often is there. Many northern Americans like to consider the north much more progressive and understanding than the American south. This is, at best, obliviousness at the realities of minorities who live in the rural north. Of course, there is also prejudice in northern cities. Prejudice is everywhere. But when speaking of the prejudice found in many rural areas, it is often borne from ignorance and an extreme lack of diversity.

Simply put, these people don’t recognize the realities of people they do not know.

This is where I come in. Another major facet of rural living is; everyone knows everyone. It does not matter that I have never lived in the farm town my parents now call home. Strangers I’ve never heard of still know me as my parents’ daughter. And, after only speaking with me once, they then know me as my parents’ lesbian daughter. For many of them, I am the first openly LGBT person they’ve ever had a real conversation with. Usually they have questions, but they aren’t sure how to ask. I have to let them know that I am open to answering them. Many times, the questions are arbitrary, or even a little naive. They ask how I know, for sure. They ask “how does it work?” They ask how I can still be religious. They ask, most of all, how I figured it out.

A lot of the questions are dehumanizing, whether they mean to be or not. A lot are othering. A lot are boundary-crossing. A lot are not the sort of thing a conscientious person would ask someone they’ve just met. I answer the ones I’m comfortable with. I explain why I won’t answer the ones that I’m not. Sometimes, at the end of the conversation, I can tell it’s made an impact. They feel embarrassed for not understanding before. Sometimes they apologize. Sometimes, at the end, I can’t tell if I’ve changed their mind at all. It’s always a gamble. I’m not a professional speaker, or a proselytizer. I can only answer their questions — or question their behavior — and hope for the best.

It probably helps that I recognize their flaws in my own past behavior. I didn’t grow up in a rural area, but I did grow up in the south. And while the American south has plenty of positive traits that make it dynamic and worthwhile, the hatred that flourishes there is undeniable. I count myself lucky that I lived and went to school in a heavily Black area, which meant I had many close relationships with Black people growing up. My best friends, my teachers, my neighbors, and several extended family members were all Black.

This doesn’t mean I wasn’t prejudiced; I was a southern white girl growing up in a conservative Catholic household. I remember learning that the Civil War was about states’ rights — in public school, taught by Black teachers, to predominantly Black students. I remember believing that the Confederate flag — always referred to as the “rebel flag” in a subtle effort to divorce it from its roots of racism and failure — was a symbol of southern heritage and pride, not prejudice. I remember being disgusted by homosexuality. I was also, shamefully and secretly, obsessed with homosexuality, which I could not accept for a very long time.

It took befriending an open lesbian in middle school for me to question why I found homosexuality disgusting. It took several friends coming out as trans, genderfluid and nonbinary for me to confront my rigid beliefs about gender. It took the generous time and patience of my Black loved ones for me to recognize and start unlearning my racist thoughts and behaviors. None of these things were easy. It’s difficult to accept when you are the villain in someone else’s story. For white LGBT people in particular, it’s difficult for us to accept that we have so much privilege over others, when we ourselves have experienced systemic and often violent prejudice.

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And for cis, straight, white, rural people, it is difficult to acknowledge their privilege when they often have led poverty and grief-stricken lives. Agriculture labor has always been one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Farmers have one of the highest suicide rates in the country. To them, saying they have “white privilege” is synonymous with saying they have had easy lives. Of course, this isn’t true. The truth is that racism has never been one of the obstacles they’ve faced, and so they’ve never had to put much thought towards the system of racism ingrained in our society and the part they play in it.

This is why, in conversations regarding recognizing and unlearning prejudice, as privileged people ourselves, we have a responsibility to discuss with others why their mentality and behavior needs to shift. White people give other white people a level of respectability and benefit of the doubt that they do not give to people of color. Cis people who will not share space with trans people are willing to listen to other cis people. Straight people are willing to hear out other straight people — or, in my case, sometimes “comfortable gays” — but not “overtly” gay people. Men will listen to men before they will listen to women. For many, this is not a decision that is consciously made. We are taught all our lives to gravitate towards people like us. We are taught that “the other” is bad, or intimidating. It is not always our fault that we hold these beliefs. But that does not negate the effects of them. And it doesn’t mean we are not still responsible for dismantling them, and working to dismantle the system which has put them in place.

It isn’t a simple, easy thing, to take on these conversations. Raging against prejudice on social media is all well and good, but it hardly ever causes real and lasting change within an individual. On the flight to visit my family, knowing I would spend several days plucking at these chords, I read up on the history of racism in America. How the police evolved from slave patrols in the south, and terrorized poor laborers in the north. Redlining; the inability of black veterans to receive housing loans promised by the G.I. Bill; the school to prison pipeline; loitering laws. I memorized statistics and specific sources that I knew would be demanded.

I did not do these things because I wanted to be able to prove my racist family members wrong at the dinner table. I did these things because I want them to be better than they are, the way that my loved ones have chosen to help me become better. The way they still help me everyday. They didn’t have to take the time to explain the realities of the world to me, but they did, and it’s not fair for me to leave them to do all the leg work.

When I sat down with my cousin, who has become entrenched in “country pride” culture, I told him about growing up in the south, and how there are plenty of rural people who aren’t white. I told him that I also used to believe certain things about the “rebel flag,” which is a surprisingly prevalent symbol found in the rural north. My cousin is a fan of country music, so I told him about the genre’s African American roots. I made him listen to Black country artists. I spent three days humanizing Black history and Black issues to him. Eventually, I had to leave. My cousin doesn’t text or use social media — that’s the level of rural we’re discussing — so I have to hope those three days manage to hold up against his daily life surrounded by prejudiced people who have warned him his whole life against “the other.”

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When I explained to my father what I was trying to do, he shook his head sadly. “He’ll either unlearn it or he won’t,” he said. This struck me as a remarkably lazy mindset to have. How could he expect my cousin to unlearn what he’d been taught his whole life, without being shown how?
Before I came out, my cousin had no concept of the humanity of LGBT people, either. He didn’t know our other LGBT relatives like he knew me. I remember the homophobia he had been fed his whole life, which he regurgitated casually without thought. I remember the jokes and the slurs, peppered into our normal conversations. I remember very carefully asking him why he spoke that way, why he held those beliefs. He didn’t have an answer, because he’d never questioned them himself.

The next time I visited him, he tentatively asked me about my girlfriend. Gone were the slurs and the jokes. When his girlfriend made a homophobic comment, he confronted her without pause, because confronting homophobic notions had now become reflexive. So I have hope. I would always rather help someone unlearn their hatred and prejudice, than abandon them to it. I understand it isn’t always viable. Some people have no room in themselves for thinking of others. For compassion and growth. Righteous anger and condemnation have their part in every movement, as well. And some people don’t have the resources to teach someone that they should care about other people. They don’t have the privileges that I do, to confront bigotry safely. It is not the responsibility of the oppressed to humanitize themselves to their oppressors. But it costs me very little to try. Frankly, when it comes to enacting foundational, systemic change, we need as many people as we can get. And who better to convince someone their beliefs may be flawed, than someone who once held those beliefs too?

Some questions to practice humanizing yourself (and others) to bigoted people:

“I’m curious to know why you find that funny?”
“Why do you think this makes you uncomfortable?”
“Have you ever talked to a (gay/trans/black/brown/foreign/Jewish/Muslim/etc) person? Why not? Why do you think this about them?”
“Why do you feel comfortable speaking this way?”
“That’s actually a common misconception! The truth is (correction). You can learn more about it here (cite your sources).”
“I think it’s really valuable and important to hear voices that aren’t like my own, because that’s how I learn about other experiences. Don’t you?”
“Can I ask why you were surprised to find out I’m (lgbt/etc)? Why do you expect all (people like me) to act/look the same?”
“It’s important to remember that human beings aren’t a monolith. No one stereotype will fit everyone. I’m sure you don’t appreciate feeling stereotyped by others, right?”
“Why are you so sure that stereotype is based in reality? Have you met anyone like that?”
(When given any comment along the lines of “You’re so much better than those other [minorities].”) “I know you mean that as a compliment, but I hope you realize there’s nothing wrong with those people and how they choose to exist. Can we agree that everyone has the right to live their lives with a freedom of expression?”