It seems lately that the most hardened opponents of freedom and democracy come from the “once tolerant left”. Old friends that used to greet me for coffee and call me brother no longer so so, and yesterday I was publicly humiliated and ridiculed by a group that I used to participate in, the Rhydderich Havel barony of the Society For Creative Anachronisms.
It started with a joke my wife posted on Facebook about Invitro Fertilization. I thought it was funny that she posted about it and wondered, why is it that people are complaining about wanting fertility treatments and gender reassignment surgery but also refuse to stand up for mental health and other lifesaving treatments? The joke I made involved waiting on a vagina like a heart transplant.
Someone posted to my wall asking what I meant. I had forgotten who she was and mixed her up with someone else, honestly. Rather than admit I wasn’t at all sure about how I feel about trans people and say I don’t know, I said, “it’s really not my business.”, “I don’t understand it personally, but I’m not against it.”
This person took screen captures and posted it on her wall for her and all her friends to pick apart what I said, read into words that weren’t there, etc. Suddenly, the pitchforks and torches are out and people are calling me “ignorant”, “toxic stupidity”, and worse, dragging my wife into their toxic mudslinging as well.
The fact, that I dated someone whom I care about greatly and is undergoing gender reassignment surgery be damned, what they equated me to was a Nazi, someone who’d rather see transgendered people, or anyone queer for that matter, be sent off to a concentration camp.
Their words hurt, the fact that they showed no compassion or benefit of the doubt hurt. They know nothing about how I suffered at the hands of abusers, or that I have PTSD and depression. For a group that supposedly prides itself and pats itself on the back for being tolerant towards others, they are not advocates for the LGBTQ+ movement, they’re conducting witch hunts.
How do is really feel about trans people? If someone had actually taken the time to ask me, I hung out with transgendered people in Club Marcella’s because I liked the music sometimes and they’d closed the Continental. They used to treat me with respect and knew that I was a straight man, not looking to come out, and that was it. People in makeup make me nervous in general and it goes back to clowns and my fear of clowns as a child. That’s not a transphobic thing.
But they never asked, they assumed the entire time that they found a transphobic person, indeed, truly as bad as any Klansman in the robes. They even equated what I said as hate speech as offensive to blacks. The irony is I never see any black members of their group, so, I don’t know where they get their ideas from.
The true irony of this is that my wife and I were having the discussion earlier in the day about how the United Methodists are tearing apart the church by not allowing LGBTQ people in it and that maybe we should seek out another church, should our church go that way. I believe that everyone deserves to live happy and respected. The real Nazis are already within our walls. They’re taking notes about people. They’re so far left, they might actually be on the right now.
The Topic Cafe 