#i feel like despite being on polar opposite ends of the unhinged spectrum

[sentfromwolves]

ok but like. which of your ocs would unironically listen to hatsune miku. that's the real question

[usamyzonians]

Duality

Content warning: I’m going to be talking about life experiences that involve homophobia, transphobia, general bigotry and White Feminism.  Though I suppose that last part is redundant.

So my grandmother has been on my mind a lot lately.

We’re getting up to the one year anniversary of her death.  She lived to be in her 90s, so it’s not quite a tragedy.

Thing is, the reason I’ve been thinking of her has more to do with the sort of compartmentalized way I think about my family.

See, what started this whole thing was a not-so-pleasant memory.  I was in the ballpark of 10 and at my grandparents’ and my brother and I were watching Look Who’s Talking.  Complain about our bad taste, but I was 10 and he was 8 and pretty much everyone we knew had seen it.  So ostensibly there’s a problem with us watching a PG-13 movie, but we’d watched worse.  And my grandmother, walking in and out of the room the whole time, was fine with the content.  Until she walked into the room when one of the characters said “lesbian” or some other word that meant lesbian, because I haven’t watched the movie since maybe a couple years after this movie and I don’t really remember.  It wasn’t the first time the term had been used, but when my grandmother heard it, she lost her shit.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen her as mad as when her grandkids heard the word lesbian.

My grandmother was a massive homophobe.  And not in some mild, esoteric sense, in the sense that even the slightest reference to gay people was completely unhinging.  And, in my family, I was encouraged to not fight (this only went one way; one of my aunts had called me a Nazi multiple times for my ‘liberal’ beliefs by the age of 12), so my solution was to avoid the topic.  Actually, I tended to avoid anything even remotely political with my family, because they tended to be close to the polar opposite of me.  My mom and dad were both hippies who were arrested for standing up for civil rights and held all sorts of commie pinko ideals, so that probably insulated my brother and I, but my mother was also the biggest voice of appeasement in my life.

Over the years, my grandmother would make some offhand comments that fell into transphobia, as well.  Thing is, trans individuals weren’t on their radar as much, so I didn’t get as much on that front as their LGB phobia, but I knew it was there.  That’s the environment I grew up in.

I was raised to think of my grandmother as a nice, sweet woman.  And she had all the appearance of it right up until you talked about that one subject.  A subject which probably doesn’t seem so bad to the rest of my family, but impacts me.  The rest of my family weren’t quite so extreme, but there’s quite a few homophobes and transphobes kicking around.  I remember back when their state voted to not change the state constitution to redefine marriage as between one man and one woman, multiple family members freaked out because “the gays are getting everything they want!”

Note that same-sex couples actually didn’t.  Same-sex marriage was not legal in the state, it just hadn’t been rendered further beyond residents’ reach by making it a constitutional proposition.  Admittedly, this is important if you’re LGBT, but it’s nowhere near “getting everything we want.”

When same sex marriage finally became legal, I avoided them for months.  I’m not supposed to fight, but they will take any opportunity to pounce on me and my ‘liberal’ ways.

This wasn’t too hard, as I’d learned to disconnect from my family.  As much as I can think of my family in loving terms despite their bigoted mentality, I think part of the reason I can do that is that I started not being involved with them.  My brother and I have radically different relationships with my family, and this is at least a chunk of why, I suspect.

I don’t know if all my family’s like this.  I’d think, statistically, there’d have to be some other people in my family treat who weren’t total bigots, but I don’t trust them because the pattern leads towards hating at least LGBT people (my family tends towards feminism--white feminism, anyhow, because women of color and lesbians and anyone else who is not them is insignificant--despite skewing towards Fox News on most other subjects).  I have one openly gay family member and any talk about her when she wasn’t present has been horrible.  And I wonder if she even knows that that’s the way they talk, because they’re nice to her face.  Which is the other issue: even if they came off as nice or loving or tolerant or accepting, how can I ever trust people like this when there’s a known history of them saying one thing to a gay person’s face and another behind her back?

This comes to mind quite often for reasons not directly related to my grandmother, but more to my SO.  My family loves Tal.  They’re always welcome at Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mom actively asks about them, we’re supposedly an adorable couple, and even the people who only met Tal at my brother’s wedding have had nice things to say.

Except they think Tal’s my girlfriend and we’re in a completely heterosexual relationship.  And I’m pretty sure there’s no combination of the two of us that translates to a straight couple.  So really, they don’t necessarily love us, but the idea of us in their mind.

It seems like this is part of a larger trend.  The “conservative uncle” is a cliche for a reason.  But--and I’m likely surprising nobody here--it’s really difficult to reconcile the concept of “is a good person” with the concept of “hates people like you, perhaps violently.”

I can superficially hold the idea of my grandmother or my aunt or whoever as a good person, but when I think on it, I no longer can.  These people are full of hate.  Even if they didn’t hate me (or my SO) specifically, they have a blanket hatred of people like me (and my SO).

At the same time, because I am presumed straight and cis (and on both counts, I swear it’s because they are determined to see it), I’ve seen exactly how they conduct themselves towards gay family members, so even if they’re totally awesome to my face, I don’t know that I can ever trust that reaction as genuine.

Kind of makes me wonder how many other LGBT family members I might have who are similarly disposed to not want to deal with this crap.

When my grandmother died, part of me was relieved.  She was the most vitriolic homophobe in my family.  At least, she was the most openly homophobic.  It’s hard to really tell when so many homophobes are “not homophobic, but....”

Even still, I feel bad.  I live in a culture where we’re told to appease the bigots, that it’s just an alternate opinion.  I mean, you can’t hate someone for an alternate opinion, right?  Hate is wrong.  Except, you know, somehow for the people who are actually hating.  I grew up in a family where I was not to get “political” while existing as someone whose life is automatically considered political.  And where family means loving someone who hates you, someone who would deny you rights, or even someone who would do you harm.

This is my normal.  This is the family I grew up with, the only reality I knew.  People who expect love and support unconditionally while spewing bigoted crap and putting conditions on their own reality.  And that’s still entrenched in my mind, decades later.  So I end up feeling bad for having hostile reactions to people who, even if they don’t hate me specifically, hate people like me.

That’s not a good place to be.

Ironically, my grandmother was easiest to deal with, because at least I knew where she stood.  On the other end of that spectrum remains my mother.  I have doubts as to whether or not she’d support her trans daughter, but somewhat worse in my mind is that she has spent decades playing that “apolitical” appeasement card.  Sitting back while her family (and my father’s, to some extent) go on the attack and encouraging the other party to be quiet.

“It takes two to tango,” the logic goes.  Unfortunately, years of dodging my family’s barbs demonstrates this is complete and utter garbage.  It just encourages them to continue attacking.  Because they went unopposed, they got the idea that their conduct was acceptable.

These are the people I’m supposed to love, and it’s my fault if I let pesky things like hate get in the way.

So I generally don’t deal with them.  Since I don’t know who’s actually a bigot under the surface, I tend to not engage any of them.  I literally can’t trust these people, and that’s the funny thing:

They raised me this way.  I am as they made me.

But it goes beyond that, because there’s this idea that ‘if you can’t trust family, who can you trust?’ and since I can’t trust family, well, who can I trust?  I feel borderline paranoid, but I have very good reasons to not trust people and it starts at home.  Granted, I’ve got a long history of people demonstrating they’re not trustworthy outside of my home life, but I had a solid foundation before I really started dealing with the outside world.

This rambled to places I hadn’t particularly intended.  I’ll just end this by saying that the longer I deal with this, the more untenable, toxic, and simply intolerable it is.  I very much resent the way the feelings of bigots are sacrosanct at the expense of...well, in this case, me.  But in general, too.