The silence of my "friends"
I saw this meme on Facebook yesterday and immediately knew what I was going to write about next.
I mentioned in a previous post that we had social media back before it was called social media. I’m kind of an old hand at it. I started using LiveJournal, a social blogging site, in the early 2000s. Ran into all sorts of interesting people there, even at one point becoming LJ-friends with the author Dr. Suzette Haden-Elgin. Some of you old-school feminists will be familiar. I also encountered this interesting individual who went by the handle “ginmar” and who first went viral — before we called it “going viral” — for her account of being an Army soldier at Fallujah and also being a female Army soldier who got urinary tract infections in the field because male soldiers would harass her on the way to the restroom facilities. She had a refreshing working-class perspective on feminism which was in short supply then and is even scarcer now unless you know where to look, and most women don’t. And, generally, when someone wasn’t starting drama, I enjoyed my LJ friends. We had some good conversations. I like good conversation. It was a heady time.
Trans-identified woman Thomas Beatie, the “Pregnant Man [sic],” first stepped into the limelight in those years, turning up on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in April of 2008. I had not yet sorted out my views on transgenderism, but after mulling over Beatie’s situation and claims of maleness and manhood for a time, I posted something to the effect that if we accept the argument that men can get pregnant, that’s going to have serious political implications for women. I mean, one of the bedrock arguments of serious feminism is that women are discriminated against for being women and that that discrimination happens in part because we’re the ones who get pregnant. If we decide that men can also get pregnant, it becomes harder to see why discrimination against women happens or whether it even happens at all. This should have been a no-brainer.
Should have been.
I first sensed trouble when people started unfriending me without warning. They weren’t close friends. Not then. And they didn’t say why they were dropping away, but given the timing it wasn’t hard to figure out. The real disappointment was when I commented on one of ginmar’s recent posts and she snapped back with, “What are you babbling about?” She had never been rude to me before. It was a slap to the face. Which is probably exactly how she intended it.
I hadn’t even taken a hardline terf stance. I still accepted the idea of trans and, in those days, argued that men could be women because all human cultures have social rules about when a girl becomes a woman, so why couldn’t we expand that practice to apply to men too. It would be well over a decade before I began to think differently. I just set one toe out of line that one time.
It was all downhill from there.
You know, I notice the words of my enemies in this war, because they have the ear of government and also influence over the economic giants determining the very course of society and culture. You have to notice that. But I don’t have any special feelings about any one particular genderdork. It’s all noise that just happens to inspire assholes to harm women and children. Doesn’t really matter who’s making the noise; the noise itself is the problem. So except when I want to offer a counterargument, this bullshit doesn’t really take up many of my mental or emotional spoons. I see something stupid, I laugh at it or dispute it, I move on.
The silence of my “friends” has been something else again. You’re damn right I will remember their silence.
All the people I buddied up with from my low-carb social media days who suddenly went quiet when I started connecting the dots and talking about the gender thing. And some of them were more conservative than not. You’d think they would have celebrated finding a political common denominator to share with me.
You would think.
Sam who would rather go break up a marriage, and then have a falling-out with her and not even be speaking to her now, than stick around for me and what I was handing him on a silver fucking platter because I know women are real and that embarrassed him.
Barry who sat there on his complacent ass and watched my developing awareness of the gender identity issue, saw me spell out my logic, and then delighted in telling me of our former high-school classmates who were poisoning and mutilating themselves and then lecturing me that they were “real men” (the women) and “real women” (the men). Friendship since 1991 means nothing to you, huh, asshole
(He’s dead now anyway and can’t reply. It’s almost like pretending biology isn’t real won’t actually save you from the effects of AIDS.)
Nicole, also from high school, who I watched triumph over her infertility in her forties — twice — and who commiserated with me about some of the miserable sonsabitches we both dated Way Back When and who used to send me actual, physical Christmas cards through the actual fucking postal mail, suddenly going silent only to turn up years later with her daughter draped in rainbow flags on her Instagram during fucking Pride Month. Not seeing any signs of “transition” (it is not transition) yet. Wonder if I will. Maybe I’ll check in next year to see.
Jim, an allegedly happily married man I’d known from Memphis and mutual friends, who still called me “sexy” in Facebook comments and used to be quite chatty (nothing more untoward than the “sexy” comments, though), only to go silent and not speak to me for years even when I would tag him in Godzilla posts. I finally unfriended him this year. There’s no point.
My daughter’s homeschool gym coach Chris who knew about Althea IDing as trans before I did, because she emailed him. Not a peep to me. When I called him out on his shocking dismissal of safeguarding standards (he is a licensed teacher!), I got no reply. The last time I saw him in person, he she/her’d my daughter and pretended nothing had happened.
My daughter’s then-girlfriend Willow’s mother who was oh so sympathetic when my daughter’s father started going off the rails, then turned around after I left and had thanked her for being there for my daughter when I couldn’t be and, in her reply to me, called my daughter by her trans name and they/themmed her. I haven’t heard from her since. No questions, no request for clarification, no “how are you doing.” Nothing. I had thought we were friends.
Vicki who watched me go through hell with my daughter’s father and who tried to help by buying one of my art cards and, at another point, lending me money (which I paid back) when I hit a snag after leaving Matt’s house. I’ve known her since at least 2010. She wasn’t quite as silent. She finally took me aside in Messenger and proceeded to prove that she didn’t understand one single fucking thing I had been arguing but boy, she was going to tell me I was wrong. We stayed Facebook friends for a time afterward, and then I gave up.
Every single one of these people played these games with me after watching me present reams and reams of evidence and argument after argument about how this whole movement is fraud and it’s harming women and children. They have access to the same information I do about how harmful cross-sex doses of hormones really are and how “gender” surgery so often goes horribly wrong. They saw all that, they have the same access to information, and then they decided to skip to the end and desert me for being a monster. Me. The one NOT poisoning and mutilating kids and NOT perving out in women’s privacy facilities. Really.
I wonder if they think I’m going to forgive and forget, just like they decided to forget me, when the lawsuits and congressional hearings begin.
I think at that point I will identify as never having met them in my life and as completely deaf to their apologies.
I mean, I’m a monster, right?
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A postscript: I have one friend who seems to somewhat disagree with me on the trans issue, and who has engaged with me in conversation about it and who clearly does not 100 percent understand where I am coming from. She presents it as me “having issues with trans,” as if none of the things I just mentioned are actually happening.
And yet I think our friendship will survive this stupid war, because she’s still willing to talk with me and engage the argument, even if she’s not quite equipped for it.
I look forward to that. This was never about alienating people. I’m trying to save people. Maybe someday that will actually fucking matter. Hope I’m still around to see it.