TW: transphobia and homophobia in the workplace

Last week, I washed a lot of dishes, folded cranes, made a hip-hop playlist, co-lead an unexpected tutor training, and read half of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

To celebrate, I had myself a comfortably scruffy weekend. I only had to wear actual pants like one time.

Because there was company, Saturday. A friend of a my parents’ friend came over for dinner and I liked her because she’s this sassy old Italian lady with a degree in mathematics and a masters in social work and we had things we could talk about.

She’s feeling burned out – because social work – but she said that she doesn’t want to switch to working at a college because conversations about diversity and gender identity and and sexual orientation make her feel uncomfortable.

At which point, my parents, bless them, smiled down the dinner table at us and said, practically in unison, “actually, we’ve got quite a lot of diversity in the room right now. Evie’d be happy to talk to you about any of this whenever.”

And I don’t know if it was the wine and i hope it wasn’t but I heard myself saying, “I mean, I’d happily talk to you about this right now…”

So she got to have a conversation about diversity and gender identity and sexual orientation. With young people.

At the dinner table.

Evie was there, and we kept talking over each other filling in the details and making important points and it helped. Our parents were mostly quiet and listened, but were 100% supportive, and that also meant the world.

I could tell that this dinner guest was trying to meet me in the middle and be receptive, and she kept asking questions, and if she hadn’t been that open I don’t know if I could have done this.

We started with the definitions of binary and non-binary, and we talked about what all the letters stand for, and we touched on what can happen to young people who don’t have support and we covered the prevalence of intersexuality and the nuances of asexuality and the validity of polyamory

and then we talked about how labels are comforting for some people, and how there are probably at least as many different interpretations and combinations of those labels as there are people in the world

but no label is as important as the whole life inside the person who’s sitting in front of you, and no combination of words matters next to supporting their health, and respecting the everliving fuck out of their boundaries, and making them laugh

and we talked about how it isn’t just about the sex, and from 5000 feet up why would you ever judge someone for loving somebody else

and this social worker’s transfeminine patient had just recently asked for support around her decision to get a surgery, and the social worker didn’t feel comfortable with that because – among other reasons – the patient wasn’t consistently presenting “feminine enough.” She’d come to sessions with no makeup, or the shadow of a beard, or wearing grey sweats and a T-shirt. When asked, the patient said she didn’t have enough time to get ready in the morning.

I wondered if she just felt like wearing sweats that day. I wondered what else was going on in her life. And I, just – I asked this social worker if, as a woman, she felt like she needed to dress herself up to look feminine, all the time.

And she got it. I think, for just a second, she had it.

Last week there was a sassy old Italian lady out there working in social work who didn’t get it. Now there’s a sassy old Italian social worker out there with a little more information and vocabulary, and maybe a slightly more inclusive perspective.

Two days later I was working in the kitchen and I overheard a coworker saying that he doesn’t want to say to his little brother that he thinks his lifestyle is disgusting, and all of my alarms went off. I moved closer so that I could hear, and then very quickly felt like throwing up because the thinly-veiled hate and intolerance that was tumbling out of his mouth was like nothing I had ever heard in person

I have walked Auschwitz and am only just beginning to emotionally grasp the kind of hate that has existed in the world before. But I’ve never stood next to that kind of blatant homophobia and transphobia, and heard it spoken so plainly and carelessly out loud.

I’ve been lucky.

I think for a second I wanted to actually wanted to smack this speaker upside the head. I didn’t. I opened my mouth to speak and I have no idea what I was going to say, but it was sure as hell going to be something, except that somehow amazingly another coworker beat me to it

In a surreal way, it was comforting that the person who called him out was the only other middle class white guy on the clock. This other coworker also pointed out that this probably wasn’t an appropriate subject of conversation in a work environment, and he was probably right. It was those words on his part that gave me a reason to step away, and cool down, and not scream at the punk who had said these things that got to me.

Later the original speaker noticed that I was angry, or about to cry, or something, because he apologized in case he’d said anything out of turn. “I didn’t mean to make you feel – some type of way, or anything” he fumbled. And I really didn’t mind telling him that he had, but when he asked me what it was specifically I told him that I couldn’t talk to him about it on the clock.

Because if I had spoken in that moment, whatever I’d been able to say would have been so far from constructive. The story that I’m carrying around in my head was that it could made his beliefs deeper, somehow, because I would have said something from my own place of hate. And you can’t fight hate with hate.

I told him that sometime, off the clock, I’d be happy to sit and talk with him.

“Oh, I don’t mind being enlightened,” he said. “I feel like if you’re going to be against something, you should at least try to understand it.”

And then the shift manager chewed him out for standing around and talking instead of working, and five minutes later he left to go home early and I told him to drive safe because it was all that I could do

I went home to my dad and told him what had happened and told him how heavy other peoples’ hatred is, and he hugged me and whispered that the hardest thing is not to hate them back.

And I am trying.

This week began with four hours of discworld in a waiting room at a dentist’s office and some impromptu hula hooping & hip hop music in my parents’ driveway and a surprise Calc II tutoring session with Anthony in the deli and the construction of roughly seven sandwiches in one shift.

I’m feeling the wind in my face from unexpected directions, and I feel like if I just keep walking for long enough, I am sure to get somewhere.

Thank you for reading.