Looking at the political landscape can be a bit depressing these days. It’s hard to look at it and not feel at least a bit of anxiety about the future and the direction the country is heading in.
Or at least the direction it appears to be heading in.
Part of navigating this for me has been equal parts acceptance that some problems are bigger than what I alone can change, and while looking at the big picture, understanding the parts that equal the sum of what we see.
What I mean by that is there are many factors that contribute to the outrage cycle we are being presented. What we are seeing is an amalgamation of those parts.
It’s a machine mostly run by ignorance. That ignorance can be fueled by a lack of education, lack of exposure, religious indoctrination, and lastly, it can be no more than a dishonest grift that’s financially incentivized.
News outlets are run as a business. Like all businesses, they need to sell either a product or a service. Their product is fear, and they sell advertising slots to other companies to present to those they can rope in with that fear.
And what’s one of the hottest topics for either side of the political spectrum right now?
Trans rights.
I know the political spectrum is much wider than what media would also have us believe, but for the sake of simplicity I’ll narrow it down to the way they view it.
For the left, they largely view themselves as defenders of human rights. They want everyone treated equally. Since there’s a hyperfocus on trans rights right now, that’s where a lot of their attention goes.
For the hard right, they are enraged by our existence and don’t believe we should be treated equally as human beings. Many of them don’t care to learn more about us, they don’t care to extend any degree of sympathy towards us.
Putting it simply, they don’t think we should participate in society as equal members of it.
We’ve seen this time and time again from the right, all the way from the confederacy and the war they waged for the right to enslave human beings, all the way up to modern day. And they will lose just as they always do, but it will take time and effort. More on that later.
To the original point, news outlets know that if they feed a right wing base any content about trans people, they will rage scroll and give them all the ad revenue they could extract and then some. It plays right into their algorithms too.
There’s a financial incentive to keep the hamster wheel of hate moving, and the first step of this is understanding that a lot of the negative press we see is manufactured.
The right says something edgy about trans people, the left wing outlets report on it, it riles up both sides of the political spectrum. We all lose, and they make money from it.
Great system, right?
The truth is that a lot of people, both on the left and right, are indifferent to trans issues. Trans kids being political punching bags isn't even popular with a lot of the base. Most people regardless of where they land politically, are largely “Live and let live” types.
If you look in the dark corners of the internet it may look a bit different, but publicly? Most people are just trying to live their own lives and don’t have time to focus on something that doesn’t immediately affect them.
Despite it not being a majority, it's still an issue to be addressed.
One of the more recent fights for rights against the more conservative extremists was for marriage equality that started back in 2013. For those of us old enough to remember the rhetoric, there are a lot of parallels between what we saw then and what we see now for trans rights.
“But the children!” “The nuclear family unit!” “It’s against my religion!”
Sound familiar?
Despite the right’s best efforts, slowly but surely, it simply just became the norm. There were mountains of pushback, mockery, ridicule, bad faith debates—the same things we see now for our own rights. Yet we marched on, and here we are now a decade later, and very rarely do you hear anyone speak negatively about gay marriage.
This is the way rights are won. It’s never just a battle, but a war of attrition. A war that can span over several years at that. But a war that we can, and will, win.
The second part of this is at a personal level. Controlling what you can, and not allowing things largely outside of your own control to cause you debilitating mental distress.
In one of my previous posts, I wrote about stoicism and how much it’s helped me personally. This is one of the key tenets of stoicism.
Now, that doesn’t mean to just go belly up and let bigots trample us since we “can’t control it.”
That’s not what I am advocating at all.
By all means, protest, have good faith debates, engage where you can and have a real possibility of changing the minds of the ignorant.
But understand that those things, despite your best efforts in the city and state you’re in, might not change the minds of folks in deep rural Alabama who have no idea who you are or the message you’re putting out.
This issue is simply bigger than you or me individually. But we all, in the best way we individually can, do our parts.
Understand this isn’t a fight that you will single-handedly win, but you’re not alone either.
This is a group effort, and as long as you are doing your part, the pendulum will continue to swing in our favor.
This very blog you’re reading, is me doing a part of what I can. I’m sharing my story, I’m being public about my transition, so that others may see they’re not alone. I am pushing back, but I understand my limitations as well.
I can only control what I can do, which is let my voice be heard, and actions be seen.
The rest is up to the readers and onlookers.
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