To Be Heard and Understood

We must have the hard conversations

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This past week, I watched the documentary, WILL & HARPER. Equal parts poignant, funny, and heartbreaking, this show reminded me what it means to be fully human. It was a lesson in unconditional friendship (Will) as well as one in authenticity (Harper). It reminded me, in many ways, of my own coming out.

I felt it deeply.

There was a scene in a Texas restaurant that was so uncomfortable to watch, I almost had to look away. The judgment from the patrons was palpable, and I could feel Harper’s unease in my own bones. The social media posts that followed that experience were ugly, mean, brutal. Once the two friends were back on the road and the messages read, Harper said, “You can’t underestimate the damage that all that does. When you’re trans, you ingest a lot of that shit, and it sits in your head.”

This, I understand.

I’ve been ingesting a lot of shit since I came out eight years ago. After living a life of heteronormative privilege, after being a traditional wife and mother, after building my white picket fence life and then blowing it all up with my truth, I have been ingesting every comment, every snide remark, every sideways glance.

Shortly after I came out, a former colleague of my ex-husband’s posted something on my Facebook page that she thought she was sending privately to another friend. It was gossip about me, about my coming out, about our family. As soon as she realized what she’d done, she reached out to me and apologized profusely, but her mistake made me realize that I had become fodder for juicy conversations that I wasn’t privy to.

That was during the same timeframe when my ex began dating his current wife, and I witnessed online all the parties and gatherings and vacations they were invited to, which drove home the knowledge that I was not invited.

What was once mine was no longer.

I had become a pariah, an outcast. And in subsequent years, I still feel that acutely in many different ways.

Those who live “outside the norm” feel it acutely every single day.

People who are uncomfortable with my sexuality tend to either ignore me or erase me as best they can. It is easier for them to wipe their hands of me than to sit down, look me in the eye, and talk to me.

To see me. To hear me.

“People want to be heard and understood,” Harper said.

I couldn’t agree more. But I’m finding as a queer, aging woman that very few people want to listen any more. Take, for instance, the community I live in. Most everyone I engage with simply wants to talk about themselves. I can count on my fingers how many people know that I have four children, what their names are, where they live. Most never ask. They just talk.

As a woman, I’ve been talked over, talked above, unheard in many ways for most of my life. I’ve been left out of meetings I should have been included in. I’ve had creative ideas taken by men who claimed them as their own. I have lived within this patriarchal society long enough to know that I have to scream to be heard. And sometimes, even that is not enough.

As a queer woman, it’s even worse.

As a queer, political woman, I might as well be screaming into a void.

But I think we should all be talking about what’s at stake with this election. We should all be discussing. We should all be listening. We should all be learning. We should all be watching and engaging and sharing information—information that’s true and helpful, not propaganda.

It seems many people, however, don’t want to hear anything new or different, they just want to shout their own beliefs louder than anyone else. And when I ask for discussion, there isn’t any. There’s just repetition of their favorite party lines over and over.

Louder.

And then louder again.

I feel the art of conversation is slipping away. My mom used to sit my sister and me down at the dinner table and teach us how to have a conversation, a give and take. She’d say, “How was your day, girls?” and we’d each be expected to respond. Then she’d say, “Now you ask me how my day was.” And we’d go back and forth as she coached us into the give and take a conversation requires. But so often in my recent experiences, many don’t want to give, they just want to take. They take the stage, they take the spotlight, they steal the show.

And a huge percentage of the time, it’s men who are the thieves.

I’m feeling a shift in the universe right now because of our political climate. Men around me are becoming louder, more brazen, and even less willing to listen. They are shouting their stances from the rooftops as if their views were some form of gospel. I believe they feel their male power is at risk with a woman who might potentially become the leader of the free world.

Patriarchy into matriarchy.

It’s a paradigm shift they cannot comprehend. It scares them. And in their fear, they attack like wounded animals backed into a corner.

And women who don’t fit their preconceived notions of how women should behave—quietly, demurely, acquiescently—are the first to receive their backlash, their anger. In recent months, I have been laughed at, I have been threatened, I have been physically intimidated, I have been called a pedophile and a groomer because I am queer, I have been silenced.

I have been made to feel afraid in the quiet of my own home.

And all of those things have been done by men. I realize it’s “not all men.” I have dear male friends and relatives and adult children whom I love with all my heart. There are good, true men in my life and in my world. So, please don’t come at me with the “not all men” argument. Because when you’re a woman who is continually put in her place, it feels like it’s all men. It feels like the patriarchy is rising with a new and violent force. It feels like the Christian nationalists want to put us all into our starring roles in The Handmaid’s Tale. And it feels that way because of the things they say and do. Because of the rights they’re revoking. Because we are moving backwards instead of forward.

That’s the important part to remember.

But I will continue to make my voice heard. I will continue to ask questions. I will continue to initiate conversations in person and online. My kids call me The Interrogator, and I think it’s the highest honor they can bestow upon me.

We should all ask more questions.

We should all become better listeners.

If you can’t listen to someone’s learned experiences, how do you ever truly understand another human? We should be listening to women. We should be listening explicitly to black women. We should be listening to minorities. We should be listening to immigrant stories.

We should stop the willful ignorance that is poisoning our country.

If you can’t hear me say that a vote for Trump is a vote against my own human rights, is a vote against the 20-year-old in me who was raped on my college campus, is a vote against the 10-year-old me who was molested by a predator—if you can’t draw the lines between my experiences and how an adjudicated rapist potentially running this country makes me feel degraded and victimized all over again—how can you ever understand how virtually unimportant it is to me that gas prices are a little higher right now? (And for the record, there are reasons for increased prices that have nothing to do with the Biden administration.) And what about the black experience? The immigrant experience? How can you possibly understand if you have zero empathy? And an unwilling to listen and learn?

If voting for a racist, misogynistic rapist is so incredibly important to you, then tell me why. Say it in your own words. Not in memes, not in easily-shared, altered videos. Explain it. Defend it. Discuss it. Give me something deep and thoughtful to chew on. Give me something to research; something new to consider. Something that is bigger than my own sense of personal safety and well-being. Something that is more important than giving our country away to those who only want white men in charge while their chosen women produce scores of babies. Give me something that is bigger than all of us.

Otherwise, go away. Because if you can’t explain to me why it’s so vital that you vote for this vile excuse for a human and his equally horrific running mate, then I have to believe you must align with their racist, homophobic, woman-hating ideology—even if you don’t yet understand or acknowledge that piece of yourself. If you believe they are representing Christianity, then I have no further need for you in my life. If you believe wearing your MAGA hats and buying branded watches from the nation’s biggest conman is more important than human rights and protecting this precious planet that is flooding and burning down all around us because of the climate change you choose to deny, then there is really nothing left for us to discuss.

And the end of that particular conversation is the saddest part of this entire campaign season and of one party’s horrible, divisive, relationship-ending rhetoric.