Don’t Believe Everything You Think is a helpful tool for Preemptive Radical Inclusion. We most often talk of it when talking about how we have internalized cultural misinformation, bias, marginalization, and oppression.
But it also includes what we think about ourselves.
This is a time of year in the northern hemisphere when there is little sun, much weather, and holidays full of compulsory family time, or conversely, the loss of not being able to be with the family we want. Reflecting on the presence and absence of family can lead us to reflect on our history. Who we are, and from whom we came.
This might be accompanied by grief and reminders of how our family was or was not present and healthy in our lives.
This is a time when old messages, put in our psyches and sense of self by people who may have been intentionally evil or may not have known better, arise as if they have a life of their own.
I call them the lying liars, those who put these negative thoughts about my worth or competence into the very core of my being.
Some of the lying liars were the ones who lied to us about our worth, our value, our strength, and our capacity.
Other lying liars told us how much better we were because we were white and/or men and/or straight and/or Christian and/or able-bodied and/or …
Other lying liars told us how we were unworthy because we were women and/or femmes and/or queer and/or trans and/or BIPOC and/or…
Other lying liars told us we were unworthy because we were bad, failures, unable to fit ourselves into their mold and follow their instructions for control. Those lying liars assessed goodness according to compliance and competence by obedience. They were wrong.
There is little limit to what the lying liars might have implanted in our minds.
But we can interrogate them, those thoughts, and check out if they’re true.
The first move to determining if a thought or idea is true is to figure out where the idea came from.
Did it come from those we have now been able to identify as lying liars? If so, they are automatically full of reasonable doubt. We can assume they are wrong and make them prove they are right instead of the other way around.
Did these old messages of shame or unworthiness (ours or others) come from those who thought they had our best interest at heart and did the best they could but who passed on mistaken and harmful ideas and beliefs which they had inherited from their own lying liars? We need to extend our curiosity and limit the power of those thoughts. We can assume they might be wrong and explore other possibilities.
One of the core lies is the lie of individualism, the idea that we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps even if the boots are worn and the straps are broken. Getting healthier and whole does not have to be self-care as a solo experience, but we can care for one another in community. We share and repair bootstraps.
Truth be told, I don’t think we can become whole without community care. Individualism itself reinforces the old lies by limiting our access to new messages, access to meaningful, honest, vulnerable, supportive relationships with others.
We can support one another and hold up what is good, strong, and beautiful in one another and replace the words and ideas of those lying liars with love and accurate reflection. This can come from those who know and love us and have our best interest at heart now. We can replace the words of the lying liars that lead us to make our own mistakes and cause our own accidental harm with a more accurate representation of reality, of how the world works, how it can work when we join together and collaborate. We replace those words by the practice of becoming more whole while helping others be more whole as well.
Seemed like the lying liars couldn’t stop squelching your goodness. But you can stop letting them live in your head unchallenged. As quickly as you reach out to a child or beloved to tell them that the harmful idea they have about themselves is not true, let others reach to you.
We can choose to help one another, love one another, lift our individual and collective goodness, replace false thoughts with curiosity and positive reflections. Then we will discover new truth, and then develop wisdom.
We can apply this tool of Preemptive Radical Inclusion to ourselves, too. We do not have to believe everything we think about other people, making space for them to be themselves, authentic; and we also don’t have to believe everything we think about ourselves. We can seek out and uncover our inherent worthiness.
We can claim a benediction, a blessing, as our birthright, to
love your people, and let them love you.
***
CB Beal (me) has been writing and teaching using the framework of Preemptive Radical Inclusion for over a decade. Would you like to read more about this here? Let me know.
Do you have ideas about how we can engage the lying liars in our heads in a way that grants grace for growth and takes the power out of old, lying, shaming messages to begin to replace them with messages about the wholeness of your heart and capacity to do good? I would love to read them here.
As always, respectful conversation. My blog posts here are like we are sitting around in my living room. We engage one another with kindness and curiosity, seeking to bear witness, not to win points. And on posts like this one, we are careful, if we name harm, not to describe it in detail so that we don’t cause further harm to others.
“If we say “inclusion” but we mean “We have something that’s perfect exactly the way it is, so you should come join us and fit right in,“ that’s not inclusion, that’s colonization.
Dear my people, especially (but not only) my white people, my cisgender people, my heterosexual people, my neurotypical and ablebodied people,
Yesterday we honored Indigenous People’s Day in USAmerica. I hope you noticed and learned some new things that we were not taught as children, that we were not taught about the truth of our own history of USAmerica and Canada. I invite you now to anchor yourself in the feeling of noticing a new perspective and truth and to reflect in an adjacent way.
For this post, I sized images for a handheld device. Right click to open in new tab if your desktop displays this too small to read. ~CB
When those of us who have privilege and positions of responsibility and control within our institutions, congregations, and organizations mean to be inclusive, we must carefully examine what we mean by that word.
Too often we mean that we are excited to share This Thing We Have™ that is absolutely fabulous, lifesaving, and meaningful exactly the way we have crafted it, and mean that people should come fit right into it with us. It is generosity that leads us to want to share it because other people should have it too! So we put out a call that if people would just come join us, they too will have their life saved in some way.
But, when we are part of the majority culture and are leaders (formally or informally,) we or people like us were likely in charge of the original creation. Because of this our default is to have already created This Thing We Have™ just the way that is most perfect and comfortable for ourselves.
But.
Inviting others to fit into This Thing We Have™ is not inclusion. People who join an organization or group should not be expected to leave their whole selves at the door and Become Just Like Us.
They should not be expected to enjoy everything about the way we do things in order for us all to be together. People need different things to be present, to feel welcome, at home. People need different kinds of structures and ways to make meaning together and ways to serve.
The ones who need This Thing We Have™ just the way it is now are likely already here.
If, at the core of This Thing We Have™ there is something truly lifesaving, we must sift and sort what is necessary for This Thing We Have™ from what is just habit that privileges us within it.
As we go about this sifting and sorting, we may learn that some of the ways we do things or speak may be hurtful to these others to whom we generously wanted to reach out.
For those of us who have worked so long and hard to create and sustain the incredibly meaningful This Thing We Have™, finding out that some things we do hurt others, causes harm…well, that *feels* some kind of way.
Sometimes our thinking and feeling response goes like this:
We know we are not the kind of people who intentionally hurt others, so that can’t be right.
We react quickly and reject the implication that we are people who cause harm.
And if we didn’t mean to hurt or exclude them, it must, our thinking goes, be their fault.
After all, This Thing We Have™ is amazing and lifesaving.
It takes only an instant for us to become sure that those people just aren’t right for our group, they are mistaken, they misheard what we said, or misinterpreted what we did. Because if we are not the kind of people who would cause harm to others, it must be them. But it is we who are making that decision. Can you tell the problem here?
Or some of us react with shame and freeze, or try to push the feeling and the situation away. Or we feel awkward, confused, bereft, agitated, or generically “upset.”
It is uncomfortable to realize that something we did hurt people. Many of us were never taught how to be still with the discomfort of finding out that we actually hurt someone else just by doing what we always did and saying what we were taught to say. So maybe to avoid that awful feeling we believe our intention more than we are able to take in and believe someone’s articulation of the lived impact of our words and deeds.
People come with their own values, experiences, practices and perspectives. Our responsibility—if we truly believe that what we offer is lifesaving—is to learn, grow, and change to make space and flexibility. That means we must start that learning and changing now. Even as we put out an invitation, we start to learn what is necessary and begin to change what we can in order to prepare a way.
If we who hold authority and responsibility in our organizations and congregations expect people to give up core parts of who they are (their values, cultural practices, patterns of communication, even the validity of their human experience) in order to fit themselves into This Thing We Have™ and demand people do it our way, well, historically we have a word for that. Colonization.
***
This reflection can be challenging, I know, especially for a lot of us who have lived our lives with the social structures that support our lives being more right than wrong, more helpful than hurtful, more majority culture enforcing than marginalized.
If you follow me, you know that I’m all about the invitation to curiosity, noticing, breathing into a moment, and moving forward one move at a time. Notice not just your thought-full reaction, but your emotional one as well. If your reaction to this post was immediate denial and rejection or the also unhelpful feeling of shame, and it’s a natural reaction, notice it. A feeling is just a feeling, but also, it is information. So don’t stop there.
Don’t abandon reflection simply because you had a reaction.
***
I invite you to take a breath and remind yourself that it is a commitment of the practice of Preemptive Radical Inclusion that we reject the shame which freezes us and instead lead with curiosity.
So roll the post back and just wonder about it. Ask yourself a few different questions:
“What are the specific points that I’m uncomfortable with?”
“If it is true, what would that mean?“ and
“If it is true, and I am just now realizing it, what can I do next?
What are the ways my actions and speech in my congregation or organization cling tightly to The Way We’ve Always Done It and how can I loosen my grip?”
And for all of us, this:
“What would it mean if the way that we cling to control of the patterns and processes of our institution was on the continuum, not of democracy, but of colonization?”
~ CB Beal, Justice and Peace Consulting
(this is lightly edited rerun of a FB post from this day in 2019)
“Yea, Yea. Fine. Ok. I know your people have been oppressed by mine and it isn’t fair and it hurt you, but What about —?”
“What about —?” is never the right response in a discussion about harm, marginalization, or oppression. It signals that you intentionally want to change the subject, make it be about yourself, duck the original comment, or generally be an ass.
Stay present.
Your presence is essential to meaningful dialogue, to bearing witness and letting someone bear witness to you rather than to your posturing or reactivity.
It’s a present to yourself to give yourself a chance to learn or grow or both.
What about —? employed to win a point in a moment has a net loss to communication, integrity, relationship. It’s ok to not have an answer in a particular moment.
Defensiveness is a distraction.
Instead of What about —? maybe just say, “Hmmm, I’m going to think about that.” Or, “Thanks for bringing it up.” Or, “That point took me by surprise. Can I get back to you?”
Lean in with the values you hold dear. For me, that means Integrity. Honor. Relationship. Hard Truth Held Gently.
When hard things come, don’t duck or deflect. Accept and reflect.
And again.
Reflect. What values do you lean into when having a difference of perspective, opinion, or conflict over someone’s experience of harm?
People will talk about many things in the next days, like whether or not the Republicans changed or just saw the power shift, though we have known them for who they are and in the absence of repentance and repair we will remember. And more people will talk about how our government, designed for (theoretical) stability, can increase both stability and liberation.
We should be clear what the work is before us: liberation. Many other people will be worried about and working on stability. But stability alone is always built upon the broken bodies of marginalized and oppressed people functioning as the foundation for what is above, providing the mere appearance of stability.
We can’t permit that to continue. We must all get free, together. So let others tend to stability, as we answer the call to work for liberation.
This is an update of a piece from my occasional series that I write for my Facebook friends, “Dear my people/Hello good people/Dear my white people.” It is a longish read. Settle in, reflect, ponder, respond.
Dear my people, especially my Gen X and Boomer white women people,
I find this a useful entry point to assessing how open we are to being “called in” to do the hard work of liberation on behalf of others:
If one’s first response to accountability is a sense of loss of autonomy, that’s the voice of privilege.
It’s essential to learn to identify for ourselves when that is what is happening, because while it’s evident to more marginalized people, it’s our work to do. Join me below in exploring this.
I start with the premise that you, good reader, like me, are liberal/progressive or radical in outlook, in congregations, social groups, and political organizing movements, and that you are in favor of equity and justice and opposed to racism, homophobia, transphobia and other hate and control based social and political problems.
I want to make an invitational point relative to a defensive practice I’ve seen among us a lot, especially on the internet.
If one’s reaction to being invited to correct an action that is based in an oppressive structure is to deflect or defer to the past, that’s defensiveness. If, instead of clearly naming and immediately countering white supremacy culture, homophobia, and transantagonism our reaction includes the lines “In my day…” and/or “We simply warned and protected each other from the worst of them,” [predatory bosses or men with power] and/or “We sucked it up [when men/straight people behaved badly to us,]” and/or “It took decades to get liberals to stop calling God ‘He,’ be more patient and stop pushing us“ and/or “We still don’t have the ERA,” the only thing that really tells the rest of us is that there is a pecking order to liberation.
Much like the grad school professor who expected students to study 18 hours a day and suffer mightily to pass her class/their thesis or dissertation because she had lived for days on end on cans of sardines smuggled into the far corner of the library to make it through the nightmare of being one of the earliest women in the field, this suggests that liberation only comes after doubled down suffering. That wandering for 40 days and nights in wilderness is a requirement for freedom.
Reactions like this suggest that we’re not quite there, that our sense of justice is more based on our own suffering than ameliorating the suffering of others, and indicates that we are not as far in justice making as we think we are or want to be. Our ideas of equity and justice have not yet included enough clear examination of our own power, privilege, and responsibility. These above caveats offered in response to calls for justice (whether we deliver them in writing or in our mind) suggest that we’re not doing the work, ready to do the work, or maybe even prepared to recognize how much work is yet to be done.
Almost all of us bear identities and experiences that are a complex mixture of privilege, marginalization, and oppression. None of us get a pass from working on our privilege and dismantling systems of oppression that benefit us simply because we have spent so long bowed down beneath the oppression and marginalization we ourselves bear and which we have already been opposing. And none of us, including myself, are free from the kneejerk reactions.
I’m addressing all of you who have or want to have the commitment to wholehearted justice for all.
It’s hard work. It is painful. It often involves unfamiliar pain of new learning or even pain that touches on some old shame that ought not to have been ours in the first place and becomes all muddled together. There may be a particular challenge for people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s who fought literal, philosophical, and activist wars for justice only to find out now how short we have fallen.
We share neural pathways of belief in the fundamental fairness of most everything that are decades deep. From elementary school through the end of our schooling, from churches and politics and the media, we have been trained to perceive and believe that except where we notice we are oppressed, everything else is relatively fair. But where our privilege used to be something we did not have to notice, it’s now becoming unmistakable. And often jarring.
It used to be that we might or might not choose to pick up the liberation ‘zines and pamphlets on the street or coffee shop, or history and social policy books, or newspapers. We could easily go years with only what Time and Newsweek and Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley offered us. Or maybe something was delivered to us in one sermon a week, or a documentary we chose to watch, neither of which usually had built-in structures for reflection and processing. We could go years without being meaningfully faced with our participation in systems of oppression. Now, because of newer media where people are now making these calls to do the work to dismantle systems, it’s impossible to miss. It shows up in our online magazines. It shows up in our social media. Every day.
When I notice responses to these invitations to do the work of dismantling oppressive systems in ourselves and our society that say things like, “Be patient,” or “Don’t you understand how far we’ve come?” or, “I got called Miss and girly and patted on the ass by my supervisor for two decades, you can deal with being misgendered or a racial microaggression or whatever, now and then,” I can’t help but wonder if we are leading with our discomfort rather than our curiosity and commitment.
I don’t know that people are identifying privilege any more than they used to. Really, how could I measure that? I do think a big difference is that invitations for repentance and repair did not used to get delivered to us on a daily if not hourly basis in our social media feeds on devices we hold in one hand while stirring the spaghetti sauce with the other.
So what used to be pretty easy for us to remain ignorant of relative to our privilege, how our USAmerican/Western cultural roots created a structure within which we were pre-designed to be biased and bigoted, pre-designed to perceive the world in a way that would be to our benefit, we can’t miss it anymore.
So it feels as though people are bombarding us personally with calls to action. And we have feelings about that.
But here’s my invitation. We already know how to do this work, my Xers and Baby Boomers, we simply have to decide to bear the weight.
If one is a woman who ever expected a man to learn to use inclusive language for people and God, to learn not to say stewardess anymore; that person can now learn and practice new pronouns and meaningfully apologize and correct when they are mistaken.
If one is a white person who ever explained to another white person that they should stop using black as a euphemism for evil; they can now acknowledge that idea as but the tip of our inherited cultural iceberg that is white supremacy and unpack it further.
If one ever expected a wealthy person to not try to split the restaurant check four equal ways because their social rule of not talking about money was more important than equitable distribution; they can now start to recognize that reparations for slavery and native genocide must be part of a justice movement forward.
It is part of the role of cultural conditioning to make us believe this conditioning isn’t real, or isn’t as powerful as it is. Extra points if the culture that has formed us and defined our values, beliefs, ethics, and framed our perceptions makes us prize individuality, a powerful defense against the idea that a white supremacy culture could impact us so much. This internal resistance is built into the code.
Our white supremacist, colonialist, patriarchal cultural heritage means we have been designedto believe our ancestors were heroic defenders of democracy for all, to bristle at the idea that many of our ancestors were pretty monstrous, and outright reject the idea that this cultural and economic heritage means we ourselves are saturated by and participatory in it today.
But our ethical and religious commitments call us to notice that internal resistance, to turn away from it, and face reality.
My favorite short-lived TV series is Firefly. Its culminating movie, Serenity, has a special place in my heart. There’s a point in the movie when the captain of the renegade band that has been trying to stay under the radar of the oppressive government announces, after facing the reality that the government is more evil than they knew, that there will be “No more running. I aim to misbehave.”
Although I have an engaged in justice work my entire adult life, there was a turning point when I turned 50 when I doubled down. I put those words on my arms – literally. No more turning away from my responsibility. No more avoiding the impact of what has been done to or for me, acknowledging that both are unacceptable. No more shirking from the responsibility that our government represents me and makes decisions that benefit me and others of my race. Regardless of who I actually voted for. I don’t get a pass.
No more evading the truth that most of the ancestor people who I was taught in school were brave heroes may well have been brave, but they were not heroic. No more running from the wrong words that come out of my mouth, or their impact; from not only the ways I experience marginalization and oppression in our society but the ways I bear privilege. Every single time these things appear in front of me.
There are two things true at one time. Point one: Those of us who are older have neural pathways in our brains that are set and rooted and automatic. That’s actually a thing. Point two: We can simultaneously acknowledge point one as a true state and accept our responsibility to create new pathways, to perceive what others are desperately trying to get us to perceive. We can accept responsibility to learn and do less of that which perpetuates the status quo and more of that which creates justice. We can not only acknowledge the ways we bear privilege, but to start dismantling the structures that create it.
It’s hard work. It’s much slower than people want it to be. It’s not solved with a single two-hour workshop. It’s an ongoing intervention, part of facing a spiritual crisis of recognizing that a fully embodied liberation must be embodied for all of us, and it can’t be when so many people’s bodies are not safe and whole. It can’t be avoided by making our ethical path into something insular, looking out for our own. It can’t be avoided by retreating into a desire for individual spirituality as a reaction to our feelings when we are faced with the hard reality that part of bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice includes acknowledging we are not as awesome as we thought we were. As we wish we were.
But we can do it. Our cultural heritage and programming make it painful, and our religious or ethical commitments make it necessary. This is not unlike our experience of working on many other social, cultural, and family issues.
We all have choices about how to turn our attention. We can turn our attention in a way that amplifies our own pain, or in a way that lessens others.
We can focus on how personally painful it is to face the realities of our lives within this system, and suffer trying to deny, avoid, or dull that pain, or we can recognize that pain for what it is — the dying of white supremacy culture as we dismantle it within ourselves and the world around us. Like chemo for cancer, the cure is painful, but that’s no reason not to do the work.
We start where we are. We can simply start each day by saying, “No more running. I aim to misbehave,“ or “No more resistance. I aim to misbehave,” and then see how much misbehavior we can fit into a day.
My Gen X and Boomer white women and adjacent others can acknowledge and celebrate the noticing and correction of mistakes instead of expecting oppressed people to suffer as much as you did in the early days of feminism or the nascent gay rights movement.
We can follow people on social media and buy books by those who write critically about race and gender and sexuality. We can follow people who are leaders in movements for justice and learn from their words without arguing back at them. When we notice that we resist or reject an idea they put forward, we can ask ourselves, “If this were true, what would it mean for me and my life?“ and follow that thought process wherever it takes us. Instead of expecting people to suck it up as we did, or to stop pushing so hard, we can choose to make that path better. To make their days and nights wandering in the desert fewer.
Because we don’t actually believe that the people who should bear all the burden of dismantling oppression are those who are oppressed, do we? When we don’t do the work, we guarantee that that work remains on the shoulders of people who are marginalized and oppressed.
We can choose to right size the load we carry. We can choose to be brave and be heroes.
When someone says something on the Internet that upsets me, my first thought is usually a judgmental one. I make an assessment about the writer based on how I interpret their words. Where I put inflection as I read. Or perhaps inflection doesn’t matter and there is no room for nuance in what they write, and then my judgment is about their intent, and extends to what else they might believe.
I don’t mean trolls, people who intentionally attempt to cause emotional and political harm, but regular people who are speaking from what they have been taught, even when it is harmful. Who speak from a corner of the internet where they are surrounded by people who tell, and repeat, lies that uphold their understanding of their place in society, their privilege. It’s often the smallest bit of privilege they have – white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege. People are taught to perceive through a lens not of their own making, and they write things on the internet, and then I get to decide how I approach them.
With these “regular people” the smallest misunderstanding, misreading of a word, or assumption of who it is that speaking can lead me to make mistakes, to be impulsive, or to abandon my own commitment to articulating clear truth with love, and take action balanced with self-care.
I have not yet learned how to not have that instant assessment. I think that it is part of how our brains work. Evolution favored humans that could notice danger and not daydream while the danger ate them. It’s a natural process that we assess situations for comfort and risk, similarity and difference. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. We don’t have to believe our assessments.
Instead of trying to stop myself making those assumptions and assessments and judgments in the first place, I make myself notice the assumptions I have made. And then try to not believe everything I think just because I thought it and I generally believe that I’m a smart person, therefore I am right (the worst kind of circular logic).
And then I ask myself, “What else do I need to know to find out if I am right about these assumptions. What questions do I need to ask? And what will it mean if I am wrong about who this person is, or what they meant by what they said?” This curiosity must be pretty intentional, as my reactive brain would prefer to barrel along.
Once I have done this, and sometimes it doesn’t even take very long, then I am in a better position to respond to the statement that upset me in the first place.
I will have a reaction, that is natural. But I do not have to react. I can reflect and be curious. I can ask questions, of myself and others both.
I can slow down.
There’s a lot going on in our world and our country.
A.
LOT.
And we need to be socially and politically engaged for the long-haul, and that means we need to be mindful of how and when and where we interact with people and ideas, relationships, and actions. It is self-care not to let our brains go into emergency mode every time someone says something harmful and/or untrue on the internet. I don’t mean we don’t call people on it, I mean we try to do so from a place that is grounded in our own well-being, in their actual life/context (as much as we can tell) and grounded in what we need in that moment to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. Those three things are in balance, yes? And we have to take a breath to notice what we need.
The owners of programs, apps, and products on the internet make money from our using it. It’s in their interest, not ours, when we think, process, and react at the speed of the internet and not the speed of our own minds and hearts and lives.
So, I regularly practice my own personal #SocialMediaSlowDown. I invite you to as well.
Content Note: This essay discusses terminal domestic assault against/murder of trans people, street harassment of gender non-conforming individual, and discussion of forms of interpersonal violence and our individual right to ask for and receive help, and our responsibility collective to respond.
[This post should be dated both Feb 1 and March 1. It is an updated version of something I wrote on a private social media account.]
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February 1, 2018
Last Saturday I attended a memorial service with a hundred other people for Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien, a local trans woman who was murdered by her husband. We sang and cried and bore witness to one another’s pain. Some of us who knew her well and personally, others of us who’d crossed her path and who considered her part of our community were there to respect her life and the lives of those who loved her. We mourned simultaneously in the collective solitude of a service in a Unitarian Universalist church.
Two hours later, still wearing my white dress shirt, grey vest and tie, I went shopping for my parents. A 20-something white man was walking toward me on the sidewalk as I stepped my carefully polished dress shoes around a puddle and moved toward the grocery store entrance. He first stared at me, then snarled, hocked and spit.
He turned his head to spit, before he again met my gaze, so I guess that’s something.
***
I recently spent some time on sexuality, consent, and puberty education with some older elementary school students, one of many schools I work with. We talked about consent and bodily autonomy every single day. There was a particular day focused on sexual harassment and assault. The news about the behavior of famous people and #MeToo has made it impossible not to talk about this with 4th graders. Or rather, it was always necessary, but now it’s nearly impossible for adults to deny that reality.
They had been working on the music from Horton Hears a Who to present to the younger students, so I tied it into the lesson. It’s not what problematic fave Dr. Seuss meant when he wrote it, but that’s why I love reinterpreting material in new contexts. The students sang the song through, and certain segments of the song several times through the lesson. I used it to break up the anxiety and difficulty of the lesson, to engage their vagus nerves to help calm and ground everyone, and made Horton into a giant ongoing metaphor.
(If you are unfamiliar, or don’t remember it, here are two options for experiencing this work. A narrated abridged version with music and the pictures onyoutube, a version that is a read version of the whole text with audio but no pictures on youtube here, and a text only versionhere.)
We talked about how the Whos in Whoville told and told until someone heard and helped them. We talked about Horton, the elephant who heard the Whos and carefully bore witness to them, tried to rescue them and keep them safe — he tried and tried to help them until he figured out how. They told and told and told.
The students asked things like, “But why would someone *do* that?” about sexual harassment and assault. They were mystified. Elementary students I work with aren’t always as mystified as this group was, sometimes that question comes more from hurt than surprised confusion.
This group believed me when I said to “tell and tell until someone helps you, because the grownups will want to help.” All of the students I work with don’t always believe this. They have not always experienced grownups helping, and have all too often experienced grownups being the ones doing the hurting.
This is why we have to say “tell and tell and tell until someone helps you.” I didn’t tell them that a lot of people like Horton’s jungle neighbors don’t believe there’s a problem, or don’t do anything, or contribute to the ignorance and pain. As they age they will learn this truth. They did not need to learn it as part of this particular lesson.
***
Last week someone said, “What does domestic violence have to do with trans issues?” The question is often asked the other way. “What do trans people have to do with domestic violence?”
One answer is that violence against any women, trans or cis, (in fact violence against anyone) is a trans issue because we oppose a world that is made up of systems and structures, of powers and principalities that say that there is always and only one right way to be or do and the punishment for noncompliance with that one right way is death.
One answer is because we oppose world views that identify power as something that should bewielded for coercion and control, rather than shared and nurtured for community well-being.
We understand that the impulse to spit over someone’s non-traditional gender presentation is on the same playing field as sexual harassment of an employee is on the same field with the impulse to strike a child who talks back is on the same field with the impulse to injure someone because of a lack of compliance over the dishes or laundry or sex or gender identity.
Another answer is that relationship violence, intimate partner violence, domestic violence have to do with trans issues and vice versa because research clearly shows that transgender people are disproportionately affected by the violence in intimate partner relationships, and if they report, they are disproportionately not served or are even harmed by those who should help.
***
Today we receive word that two trans women in Albuquerque may have been murdered. They have been missing for two weeks and are currently listed by police as “endangered people” after blood but no bodies were found in their home. They would be the third and fourth trans women this year identified as such to have been murdered this year in the US. Or perhaps the third, and a surviving roommate. Or perhaps two injured people. Police are still investigating. Money is being collected for either funeral expenses or healing expenses. Was this an invasion? A domestic situation? We don’t know. But we know that harm has happened, to one or two people who are members of one of the most vulnerable populations in North America.
We’re only a month into the year.
[March 1: The two trans women’s bodies were found two weeks after I wrote this. A man who had access to their home and may have been a housemate was arrested two weeks after that, and charged with murder on March 1.
The press is reporting about their identities in inconsistent ways, but local members of their community indicate they both identified as trans.]
***
Street harassment, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault. It’s all about the same stuff. It’s about a system of power and control that makes some people believe they can and should decide what other people should do with their lives and bodies, and that these people can and should replace the will of others with their own, by force if necessary. A system of power and control that makes some people believe that if others won’t indicate compliance by forcing their own identity or behavior or gender into rigid scripts and boxes that have been defined by that person who has more power, then that powerful person ultimately has the right to harm them and even take their life.
Whether those powerful people in any given situation are adults, or men, or cis people, or wealthy partners, or white people, or generic high-powered bosses with all or some of these intersections of privilege might vary circumstantially but the underlying problem is entitlement to decide that their desires and ideas are more important than someone else’s and that they have the right to impose their will to enforce that.
We can talk another time about what I mean about the system, there’s certainly lots to say about that, but today I want to say that almost all of us at some point in our lives are Whos in Whoville. That’s a given. And when that was you who was hurt and needed or needs help, please hear me that I’m sorry that harm was done to you, you did not deserve that, that shouldn’t have happened, it wasn’t your fault, and let’s find help.
And some of us are Horton, and some of us are the uncaring, disbelieving neighbors. We might not mean to be, and it might be because we did not understand, but our behavior has too often been underwhelming or even outright harmful. We get to make a change now.
And some of us are all of these characters in this accidental metaphor at different times in our lives. We live with the complexity of interpersonal violence and advocacy and help, of self care and care for other.
And we all have choices about which character to be and what to do when someone tells and we are asked to respond.
What we have to do – what I am calling us to – is refuse those impulses to exert power over others when those impulses appear in ourselves, and resist and oppose them when they appear in others. It’s simple but not easy. We can bear witness to people’s lives, and deaths. We can bear witness to the collective grief of a people who are targeted both within and without their homes. And we can interrupt beliefs and behavior that contribute to that vulnerabilty and violence.
Horton did not know the Whos. He did not understand the ways their lives were both similar to and different from his. He did not need to fully understand them to help them. He only needed to decide that they were worth helping, and that he himself was worth being a person who helps.
Let me say that again, k?
We can take a deep breath and recognize that none of these things stop happening if we don’t talk about them. In fact, adult sexual, intimate partner, and domestic violence, (as well as child abuse,) these are all forms of interpersonal violence that thrive in silence, in pretense. These gain power in the brief but clear thought many readers had a few paragraphs ago that it must have been in [a “bad” neighborhood] that someone spit because of my gender presentation, that it wouldn’t have happened in [my “good” neighborhood.] They lose power every time we tell the truth and believe survivors. And we can intervene in many different ways in situations where control and violence are harming someone near us. We can make these choices.
If someone is hurting you or someone you know, you can anonymously call 1−800−799−7233, or go to www.thehotline.org if internet use is private and safe for you. They can help you and help you get in touch with your local organization dedicated to helping people who are not safe in their homes. There is help available for you to help figure out your options. Tell and tell and tell until someone helps you.
The rest of us are going to be like Horton.
Right?
No really, I’m asking. Right?
We are all going to be like Horton, the elephant who heard the Whos and carefully bore witness to them and kept them safe and tried to rescue them — he tried and tried and tried to help them until he figured out how.
Sometimes when I’m teaching Awesomely Awkward, my puberty education series, a young person will say that there’s something wrong with their/someone’s body. It’s too fat/thin/tall/busty/flat/short… all the things young people have been taught (already!) about what society says bodies are supposed to be like. I thank them for saying that, because “oh my gosh, people say stuff like that all the time, right!? And now that someone’s said it, we can talk about this! Yay! I love this part!” And I whip out these photos of Olympic and Paralympic athletes. In class, I have many versions of them both on projector and printed on card stock they can hold in their hands and look at. When I pass them out, they know that I really do love this part.
image credit Howard Schatz. Click for larger image. Learn more about his work and buy the amazing book here https://howardschatz.com/books/athlete/
I tell the young people to “find a body that might have been similar in some ways to yours when they were your age. Don’t tell us which one you’re thinking of. Imagine what that person’s body was like when they were your age. Remember, puberty is only maybe starting to happen.” I tell them, “just think quietly inside your head right now.” [If there is someone in the class with low-vision or who is blind, I ask the children to describe the photos in detail, and I supplement their descriptions to fully demonstrate the entire spectrum of bodies displayed and substitute accurate and appropriate language when needed.]
Then I ask these questions:
Now think about all of these bodies when they were your age. What do you think people said to them? About them?
What do you imagine that felt like? Why do you think that’s what it feels like?
What would it take for them to decide to be strong in their body, maybe even to be an athlete? What kind of thinking would they need to do?
What kind of friends would they need around them when they were 11 and they wanted to do something strong with their body? What would those friends say? How would those friends behave?
Would what the friends said and how they acted be any different if these people, when they were 11 or 12, had bodies that weren’t ever going to be world class athletes, but they still wanted to do something strong and brave with their bodies? What would be the same? What would be different?
What kind of friend are you? How can you be that kind of friend for each other, the kind that says encouraging things about bravery and strength, and doesn’t talk about whether a body is good or not?
Bodies are awesome. Everyone should get one. Oh, wait.
That’s my favorite line I ever made up ever.
All bodies can’t do all the things. Some bodies move easily, some bodies move slowly or with discomfort and pain or in directions that weren’t intended, but all bodies can experience pleasure and can do something strong and brave. Our job as good grownups is to support young people to find out the ways their body is strong and brave.
Perhaps your child is not in my class. You can do this with children in your life. Look through these pictures and talk about all the different types of bodies that athletes have, how different they are, what people might have told them about their bodies when they were your child’s age, how powerful they all are. All of them. Give your children an image of something different from what the media gives them. These are real people with really strong bodies that all appear and move differently. Obviously we aren’t all world-class athletes. Almost all of us are not world-class athletes, I’m certainly not. But we all have bodies, and we all live in a world that assesses our worth by what our bodies look like based on a bogus standard of body that doesn’t actually exist. (I’ll talk about body image and air brushing photos in another blog post another time.)
And when your child is 5 or 8 or 13 and says their body is wrong because it’s too skinny/too fat/too tall/too short/too disabled, haul these photos out and remember with them that bodies are awesome. All the bodies are all the awesome, and we don’t know when we’re 5 or 8 or 13 what amazing things our bodies will learn to do as we grow.
