There are times where social media is magnanimous and gracious, in the case of HB2 for NC, this has been the case, mostly. People have rallied, not just LGBT, but Cis as well. It is a good feeling that we aren’t forgotten, that we aren’t left to fend for ourselves. There are truly good people in the world and to a point it gives one hope that things will change. However, my heart always drops when I see the comments that attach themselves like leeches. Angry, heartless comments from cis men and women, who are sure that we are only wearing dresses to be “special” or to get into bathrooms to be perverts. They are vile, senseless comments, designed to make the reader who is trans, feel exactly how I feel. I feel attacked and it adds yet another reason not to be out in public, for fear of meeting one of these pillars of the community. In short, I feel terrorized, in a most profound way.
I don’t know how this kind of hate is generated in a person. I don’t understand why who I am is a problem for anyone else. What is more, these people feel no chagrin, no remorse about the words they use. They feel justified in their hate, even righteous. I was reminded at one point, of a time, not too long ago when a larger group of people were told they could not eat in certain restaurants, drink from public water fountains, or allowed in certain schools. A burning cross, with those around it celebrating over the pain and anguish of those they victimized, is not far off from what we face now. We have been murdered, raped, treated as animals, as less than human. We are unprotected, easy targets, with even the police looking the other way when attacks happen.
This treatment is based in fear, we are what they don’t understand, and we can’t make them understand. We can’t force them to be insightful, to look within themselves, they only see the threat, they only see that we represent to them a fracture in the bedrock of their paradigm. It is far easier to attack than to understand, reply in anger rather than with love.
I have weeded out a lot of facebook “friends”, I have always been strict about who I allowed access to my page anyway. Not everyone has to agree with me, they don’t have to like what I say, but if they want to remain on my page, they will not reply with vile garbage. And if they post ignorant, mean posts about others who are different, I have every right to unfriend them, and I exercise that right with no mercy. I wonder if I encounter this now, how it will be later. How will it be when I am their active target, when I am out? I don’t mind losing facebook friends, I just don’t want to read their comments about me. Like I don’t already know I have a man’s body, like I don’t know that I will never be a “real” woman, physically. I am already imagining the worst and that is the point. They terrorize with their hate and we are left imagining the worst. It leaves little good for us to imagine, little peace in our choices.