Tim's journal

Yesterday, an apparent attempt to assassinate US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords left her gravely wounded and several other people dead. The accused, a young man named Jared Loughner, evokes the Time Cube guy for many of us who know our Internet crackpots. Of course, Loughner has not been convicted of any crime. But folks like him are quite convenient for the political cabal that marked a map of the US with gun-sights to denote the locations of Democrats who they wanted gone. If Loughner hadn't been born or hadn't grown up to be who he is, then the right wing (let's not waste adjectives like "radical" or "violent", as they're wholly redundant) would have to invent him. If you can blame an apparently unstable person and claim he acted unpredictably, you can escape responsibility for creating an environment of violent discourse that finds work for the idle hands of the unstable. The advantage of blaming acts of political violence on random, unstable people is that random, unstable people will always be with us. Hence, nothing need be done, and no guilt or blame assigned except to people who were marginal to begin with. The problem with that argument is that if it were sound, political violence would be just about equally common in every culture and at every historical moment, yet cross-cultural differences show that some cultures encourage erratic people to turn to violence, while others might steer them towards, say, collecting bus transfers. (It might make a difference whether it's easier to get a gun or a bus transfer, for one thing.)

I felt similarly after reading a Wall Street Journal article that a friend linked to, deliberately-provocatively titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". It's written charmingly and with a certain amount of irony. I admire the author, Amy Chua, for being willing to state controversial opinions in plain language that makes her intent clear, free from weasel words. I also think her opinions are wrong and destructive; not so much for how she describes raising her own daughters, but for the kinds of behavior she's rhetorically endorsing in other people.

I'm not really qualified to address whether there's something intrinsic about Chinese culture that produces what I'll call, along with Chua, "Chinese mothers". She acknowledges that various people who are not Chinese exemplify the same paradigm. My mother, who grew up in Indonesia with a Northern/Western European background, was one of them. I am qualified to talk about my life, and the effect that being raised with some of Chua's "Chinese mother" behavior characteristics had on it. So that's what I'm going to talk about.

(By the way, there is a discussion to be had here about racism, or about cultural generalizations, or about attributing personal pathologies to larger cultures or vice versa, or all of the above. But I'm focusing on something else in order to emphasize what I have experience with rather than to ignore racism.)

Do you ever read something in a non-fiction piece that makes you think that the author wouldn't believe you existed even if they met you, as they are so invested in a certain point of view and your own subjective experience undermines their point of view so much? So I did when I read this paragraph in Chua's article:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something---whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet---he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Chua's claims here are so stunningly counter to my own life experience---and she states them with such certainty---that I nearly started to wonder whether I am just a figment of my own imagination. My mother, similarly to the "Chinese parents" Chua describes (among whom Chua counts herself), started me on violin lessons when I was three. I was finally allowed to switch to the cello when I was a few years older. Playing the violin was physically painful for me; the first hundred times or so that I said so, my mother ignored me, but eventually I was allowed to play the cello if I would continue with both instruments, and even later I was allowed to stop playing violin. My mother, and most of the music teachers I had that I can remember (there was a succession of them, especially I got older and showed less and less willingness to be present in mind as opposed to body), emphasized the value of "discipline" and would ask me why I didn't have any, when I was eight and nine and ten. I learned that "discipline" is a word adults use when they don't know how else to get you to do what they want you to do that serves their needs rather than your own. I had a teacher when I was 12 who was more honest than most. I said it hurt me to sit up straight while I played. He said, basically, that life was pain and you had to suffer to be great. (Later it turned out I had scoliosis.) I don't remember the joy or fun of playing an instrument being talked about much. I hated lessons and I hated practicing. My mother thought intonation was all-important, so both to stress that, and to make sure I couldn't escape, she would accompany me on the piano while I practiced. I don't mean that she would play the accompaniment part that the composer wrote for piano---she played the solo line in unison with me. So she got to set the tempo and I'd think about the book I wished was reading as my hands moved mechanically. The main thing I learned from enforced music practice is to get really, really good at doing one thing with my body while my mind was somewhere completely different. I learned that skill so well that I use it all the time even now that I'm thirty, involuntarily, whether I'm having sex or trying to listen to a lecture.

I never started to enjoy playing music, the way Chua claims all children will if they're coerced initially. Maybe that's because she's right about how you can't enjoy it unless you're really good at it, and maybe you can be passable---like I was---but not good if you're not paying any attention to what you're doing. The question remains as to how being forced to play could possibly ever have caused me to enjoy it, given that all evidence suggests I was either born with the kind of mind that doesn't allow me to take pleasure in something I'm being forced to do, or developed that kind of mind at a very young age because of the environment I was in.

I quit taking lessons a little bit before I started college, and although I played some chamber music in college, it was out of a hope that maybe it would magically start being fun. It wasn't. I stopped. That was eleven years ago. In the past two years, I tried again. I played in a community orchestra for a couple of months. Playing cello had become physically painful the way that violin once was, and I just couldn't make myself sit down and practice enough to feel good about what I was contributing to the orchestra. I quit. I tried singing, because that was something I was never coerced into as a kid (my mother didn't think as highly of voice as of instruments when it came to ways to make me someone she could use to impress people, I get the impression). That was more fun, but I still couldn't practice. When I tried, I felt the way I'd imagine a claustrophobic person feels if locked in an Amtrak restroom.

Being forced to practice for what in retrospect seems like hours a day (although it was probably more like half an hour or an hour) not only didn't give me the ability to do that freely as an adult, the way Chua claims it does. It destroyed my ability to do that, to enjoy playing music, and to some extent to enjoy listening to classical music. It makes me angry that although I still retain some technical skills that might make me a serviceable amateur player, the chance to use those skills for my own pleasure was taken away from me. I had to turn off the Spike Lee movie "Mo' Better Blues" after about five minutes because it shows the protagonist, a jazz musician, being bullied as a child by his mother into practicing the trumpet, then cuts directly into him giving a great performance as an adult, implying a causal relationship between coercion and excellence. That isn't my life: if coercion worked, I'd be the next Pablo Casals by now. (If you asked my mom why I'm not a successful musician now or even an adult who enjoys playing for fun, she'd probably tell you it's because I never had enough discipline.) And I suspect it isn't the life of any of my friends who are professional or serious amateur musicians, either. I suspect nobody could have stopped many of them from making music, on the contrary.

As an aside, it's interesting that Chua picks music as an example, because human beings have made music for about as long as we've been human beings, so far as I can tell, and contrary to the tale she spins in which no one ever enjoys music unless they're perfect at it and no one ever gets perfect at it without a bullying parent behind the chair, it seems to be something that you need violence to stop people from doing. Why have a number of repressive religious movements seen fit to proscribe music and dancing? You'd think it would be easy to keep people from doing something that requires that much preparation and discipline. You might as well say that kids will never enjoy peeing unless they're good at it, and that someone has to force them to be good at it. I wonder about the connection between a social climate in which her example looks reasonable, and the one in which we've been taught that nothing is valuable except that which we buy and pay for, so that we have to listen to recorded music produced by expert musicians rather than making music for ourselves. If that's the premise, it might look reasonable to conclude that becoming one of those experts is the only way to glean any happiness. What are people trying to sell you when they tell you that you can't satisfy your own needs, that (whether you're 5 or 85) pleasure isn't something you can create for yourself, but something that you have to depend on someone else to give you (whether they're a parent or an advertising agent)? But I digress.

The only things in life that I've ever truly enjoyed are things that nobody wanted me to do, nobody initially asked me to do, that in some cases my mother actively tried to stop me from doing: reading, writing, and computer science. She hated that I read all the time and would unscrew the light bulb from a walk-in closet in our apartment so I wouldn't hide in there reading late at night (I had bad insomnia as a kid, and she thought I should lie in bed awake rather than read). When I got interested in computer science, she kept telling me I should study neuroscience instead, because that's what she wanted to do. I got interested in computer science in the first place because I read about the Internet in books or magazines that I got from the library, so I got Internet access through classes I was taking, so I took an intro computer science class so I could understand hacker culture. While I had supportive teachers later on in college and grad school who encouraged me, nobody had to coerce or push me to get interested in it in the first place, and I have never been as enthusiastic and motivated about computer science (or anything, really) as I was in the first two years, before I matriculated, before I'd even been seriously evaluated on that work or paid to do it. I've never worked as hard on programming as a grad student or as a professional programmer as I did when I was 14-16 years old and doing it almost entirely for pleasure.

My point here is not to complain about what a rough life I had, because that would be the whining of a privileged youth. My point is that I'm dismayed that people like Chua are advocating harmful and borderline abusive parenting practices in a forum---the Wall Street Journal---such that some people will take her seriously. Moreover, my experience shows that her claims about what's good for all children cannot be substantiated.

Okay, well, you say, what is good for all children? All children are different, so there's no advice that will be helpful for raising all of them. So what's wrong with Chua giving her particular perspective? Let a thousand flowers bloom, right? What I think is harmful about Chua's perspective---and about the legitimacy that her position as a university professor writing in a highly respected publication, rather than just another mom on the playground, lends her---doesn't have to do much with music in particular, or any other of the pastimes people foist on their children. What I think is harmful is the hidden curriculum of the "Chinese mother", or of my own: the lesson that adults know what's best for you because you're a child, so you must let them do to you whatever they want. That's what kids really learn when they get told that adults get to decide how they spend their time and their life. An adult who uses their child to live out vicariously all the things they wanted to do when they were a kid themselves, or who uses their child as a status symbol to brag about to other adults (my kid won the concerto competition at age ten! Well, mine won the science fair when she was seven! Well, mine joined the NBA when he was four!) is using their child to satisfy their own needs, just as an adult who sexually abuses their child to satisfy their own needs is doing the same. The main difference is that the latter is illegal. And if you're a kid who's been taught to allow yourself to be used for one purpose, you'll also allow yourself to be used for the other, should anybody ever take advantage of the opportunity.

What other kinds of needs might an adult use their child to satisfy? Chua writes:

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable---even legally actionable---to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty---lose some weight."

The ways in which this makes no sense are manifold. Among the same people who don't believe that people other than themselves should have self-esteem, the canard that children ought to "respect their parents' authority" is popular. Okay, so---you're teaching your child to respect your authority, which presumably entails taking what you say seriously. Yet at the same time, you call your child "garbage" or a "fatty" and... expect it'll just bounce right off them? Because they don't take you seriously, and thus don't respect your authority? What's with that?

The other problem with the concept of "treating your kids as if they are strong" is that its acceptance necessitates willful ignorance of the power disparity between parents and children. Again, there's some rather blatant doublethink involved, since the same people are saying in the next breath that parents get to use their power to determine that the kids should spend 3 hours a day practicing piano rather than having friends. But if you do acknowledge that the relationship between a child and their parent(s)---parents being the only people legally empowered to assault the child physically for any reason they choose, and being the only people legally required to see to the child's needs for food and shelter---is wildly unequal, then how in the hell can the stronger person in the relationship countenance treating the weaker person "as if they're strong"? I'm going to punch a kitten in the face because I like to treat kittens as if they're strong, not fragile; it doesn't matter that I weigh about 90 times more.

The conspiracy of silence in which Chua participates, and which psychologist Alice Miller (for example, in her book For Your Own Good) has written about, involves perpetuating this myth: What adults do to you is for your own good. Be grateful for it, and suck it up, cupcake. It's a politically useful myth. Kids who internalize it turn into obedient workers (bosses naturally replace parents) and into supporters of authoritarian politicians. They also tend to turn into bullying parents themselves. And the cycle goes on. But people like Chua aren't helping break it. Read Chua's essay while asking: "What is it doing for her to treat her children in all of the ways she describes?" This is a question she never seems to ask herself. But it's a question that would decenter her perspective and show that claiming that coercion is "for your own good" is the act of psychological coercion that enables all others.

There is a lot of noise about how one oughtn't to criticize how other people raise their kids. I, by the way, don't speak from experience raising a kid, but I do speak from experience having been raised, which gives me exactly as much credibility as anyone else. Anyway, the argument goes, "everybody has their own way of being a parent, and kids usually turn out fine, so it's all good." Well, many kids aren't fine. Some of us spend most of our lives dealing with depression, and some find that becoming an adult isn't enough to escape their childhoods and have to escape using the only method that's left to them. Even so, it's probably a good rule of thumb to avoid critiquing your friends' friends' parenting habits during dinner parties. But I believe that a person with a lot of middle-class credibility, like Chua, can actually influence what kinds of behaviors are considered acceptable. And I think that when she uses a bully pulpit (no pun intended) to advocate coercion, that contributes to an environment in which coercion is a socially acceptable tactic to deploy upon your children.

Chua herself talks about attending a party where some of her friends were horrified to learn she'd called her daughter "garbage". Like many such arguments, that one appears to have changed no one's mind, but aided by sources of cognitive authority like Chua's article, the next round of dinner-party arguments about parenting might do more than just keep yuppies off the streets. I do think that whether people in the mainstream media talk about---say---hitting your kids in a way that's approving, or disapproving, influences whether people hit their kids. It's not that parents read the manual first before making any decision about raising their kids---it's that as social animals, the approval or disapproval of our peers matters to us, whether it comes to how we treat our kids or whether we drink artisanal water. So I do not think that critiquing this article puts me in the same bucket as those ladies who talk about how if your baby isn't getting breastfed and wearing cloth diapers until it's five, you're a terrible parent. Ok?

Finally: I can imagine someone responding to this with, "well, Chua wasn't saying that the 'Chinese style' of parenting is better, she's just describing two different parenting cultures and the different sets of assumptions and actions involved in each." Perhaps so, although personally it's quite clear to me that she's advocating her way (just read the bit about the American daughter who felt horrible that her father called her beautiful and talented---it's interesting that Chua didn't look for any Chinese daughters to quote who are in therapy dealing with their mothers calling them "fatty"). But given the number of people who apparently read this article and came away nodding with approval for the "Chinese style"---even, in some cases, wishing they'd had parents like that!---I think that's a moot point. By expressing pride over having called her daughter "garbage" (and not spending a word interrogating herself about whether by using a word that her parents used against her when she was a child, she was using her daughter to satisfy her own psychological needs), Chua locates herself squarely in the Dan "Kids are sociopaths until you beat it out of them... metaphorically" Savage camp. It's the camp that gives aid and comfort to abusers in their quest to make more abusers. It's the camp of being worse than an abuser, because many abusers act in the thrall of their emotions and lack the ability to reflect on their own motivations intellectually. People like Savage and Chua do reflect on their own actions in the cool light of day, and decide to justify the path of violence, of emotional manipulation, of taking out your anger over how you were treated when you were small and powerless on a new set of small, powerless people, by rhetorically recasting selfishness as selflessness.

Won't somebody please, please think of the children? It's remarkable how often the question is asked and how rarely anyone actually does.

lindseykuper

Hi everybody! Many of you know that I spent a month volunteering in Leogane, Haiti with Hands On Disaster Response (now called All Hands Volunteers). My time there, while brief, impressed upon me the enormity of the task of recovering from a natural disaster in a country that had already suffered more -- and for more clear-cut social, economic and political reasons -- than any group of people ever should.

Partners in Health is a group that has been working in Haiti for decades, and they recognize that helping poor and sick people is inseparable from working for social justice. They are committed to helping where the need is greatest, and addressing the universal right to health care, food, housing, and meaningful work.

For my 30th birthday, it would be great if I could get 15 friends to donate $30 to PIH. However much or little you can afford, I would still appreciate it.

Note for All Hands folks: I couldn't find a "Cause" for All Hands on Facebook. However, if you want to donate to All Hands instead of (or in additional to) PIH, I would appreciate it just as much!

Dan Savage is a bully. I say this not only because of his history of using his column as a platform from which to belittle fat women, women in general, bi men, trans women, trans men (not meant to be an exhaustive list), but also because of his most recent column where he berated an abuse survivor for the crime of being triggered. (Why doesn't he tell suicidal gay boys that they are being cruel and selfish and ought to think of someone else's feelings besides their own, rather than telling them not to kill themselves? Oh, well, guess women's lives or experiences aren't very real or important.) Most of all, though, I say it because of a segment Savage did on the "This American Life" radio show (episode 341), where he related a story about verbally abusing a student while teaching elementary school, as well as his own experiences as a parent later in his life. In apparent sincerity, Savage said:

"You can't hit 'em... and so sometimes I feel trapped, like the only way I can communicate my intense displeasure and also, to the kid, how far he's pushed it... is by sounding like I'm going to kill him, physically, like I'm going to take his neck in my hands and choke the life out of him."

"Kids are sociopaths until you beat it out of them... metaphorically beat it out of them."

"With the removal of violence from the parenting arsenal, we've had to ramp up the screaming and yelling and profanity. It soaks up the energy that might otherwise have gone into a clean, quick smack."

Who hasn't behaved like a jerk sometimes? No one's perfect. But I wouldn't be picking on Dan for his transgressions against peace, love and justice---I wouldn't even *know* about any of them---if he didn't choose for himself to assume, in a very public and intentional way, the persona of an aggressor, a screaming parent, a bully. In the story that Savage tells on this particular TAL episode, he tells a fourth-grade student of his, "Shut the fuck up, you little piece of shit," then lies about it to the school principal in front of the student; all, he says, to teach the kid the important lesson that adults are crazy and untrustworthy. If he actually meant anything he said, then Savage has about as much credibility to start an anti-intimidation campaign as the Portland Police Bureau does to start an anti-civilian-murdering campaign. And yet, people seem to take him seriously.

Savage's "It Gets Better" campaign is a wonderful way to help straight people believe in a just world. It's wonderful, really, for straight people to get to enjoy this fantasy about queer lives: Sure, maybe queer people suffer a little when they're young, but hey, a little suffering builds a kid's character. And once those kids leave home for college (everyone gets to leave home for college, right?) it's just the beginning of the ascent to a land of joy and bunnies, where gay people get accepted. As long as they're gender-normative and monogamous, but those are totally reasonable conditions, right? There's no need to actually work to mitigate the cultural factors that make everyday life hard for trans and queer people; why work when you can just send a few loving words, via the magic of the Internet, to some queer kid? And the best thing of all is that no one can criticize this particular political strategy, because if someone does, it clearly means they want to deprive kids of the one thing (a recording of a privileged adult talking about their life) that would surely stand between them and the most convenient weapon of self-destruction.

Let's be absolutely clear: "It Gets Better" is a political strategy. It is a strategy that renders the narratives of those queer folks whose lives do *not* get easier once they turn 18 invisible, and that de-emphasizes the role of political action in favor of passive waiting, of individual self-esteem.

The other fantasy that seems to be grabbing the coattails of "It Gets Better", though perhaps not part of the original campaign, is the idea that all bullying is basically the same. So, absolutely everyone can relate to the "It Gets Better" message; truly, it doesn't matter whether you're a member of a minority group or a member of a particular social class or, well, anything. There is simply nothing specific to the experience of queer people, trans people, queer people of color, or any other specific marginalized group, that isn't also shared by, for example, a rich white kid who's teased for wearing glasses.

"Bullying" is such an unfortunate term to choose here, because it attributes the crimes perpetrated by the instruments of a homophobic, misogynistic culture to the instruments themselves---you know, those wayward individuals who act as randomly as dust particles in the wind. The preferred story here, the one that "It Gets Better" helps people hang onto, is that if people would just be nicer, would respect each other more, listen to what their parents taught them (because all people have parents who teach them these things, of course), we wouldn't have such problems. There is no need to challenge fundamental values and certainly no social framework in place that supports individuals in their acts of violence against queer and gender-variant people.

Tyra Hunter wasn't killed by school bullies, but by a firefighter/emergency medical technician who refused to treat her after she experienced a car accident and he discovered that she had a penis. Though a civil lawsuit awarded her mother a bit under $2 million in damages (what is the value of a life?), the firefighter was never criminally punished for killing Hunter through negligence. In fact, he was promoted. The other firefighters on the scene, all of whom chose to joke about Hunter's body rather than save her life, as well as the doctors who provided only dilatory care once she was finally taken to an emergency room, were never punished either.

That says how much we really value queer lives. Saying that "it gets better" with no promise that the next time someone like Hunter gets murdered, there will actually be an indication that anyone valued her life, is worse than saying nothing.

Richard M. Juang, in his essay "Transgendering the Politics of Recognition" (in the anthology _Transgender Rights_, edited by Paisley Currah, Juang, and Shannon Price Minter) compared Hunter's death with that of Vincent Chin. Chin, a Chinese-American man, was murdered in 1982 in Michigan by two men who blamed Chin for "taking away American jobs". His killers were charged with manslaughter, fined $3,000, and released on probation (a decision defended by a judge who characterized the murderers as good people with responsible jobs). Juang compares Chin's case with Hunter not because there was any reason to think Chin had a queer identification, but rather, because both case illustrate---in Juang's words---"gross refusals of civil and human recognition".

The different amounts of punishment against Hunter's killers, and Chin's killers, as compared to the punishment that the killer of a straight, upper-class cis white man or of an attractive, young white girl would receive, show that bullying is not the same whether or not you're a member of a minority group. Or perhaps we can start saying "violence" instead of "bullying"? Good. To harm someone who's straight, who's white, preferably both, carries much greater social sanctions than harming someone whose life is seen as marginal, as subhuman. When the state backs those who do violence against queer people and people of color, that's when we have to start admitting that no, everyone's experience with bullying or other forms of violence is not the same.

The problem, as I hope you can see, is not confined safely within high schools. The fantasy that we're selling to kids---that escape from high school means escape from misogyny and homophobia---will never work. The problem is everyone.

It doesn't get better if you're a trans woman doing sex work because no other employer will hire you, and there are no anti-discrimination laws that say they have to hire you anyway, and you get arrested, placed in a men's prison, and raped.

It doesn't get better if you're a trans man who loses the right to see your kids, forever, because your ex-wife chose to invoke state-imposed gender regulations to render her marriage to you invalid and erase your parental rights in one fell swoop.

It doesn't get better if you can't get health care because it's legal to deny that care to trans people, and you die of a treatable illness or you kill yourself because you can't access medical transition.

When you go ahead and make your "it gets better" video despite knowing about all of these stories---all of these adults who *did* hang in there past adolescence and found that the world's designated enforcers of power structures were even more interested in using their own identities against them---you say "I don't think that these people's lives matter, because fully understanding their lives would require that I disrupt the comforting story I tell myself about *life getting better*."

All of these scenarios could improve, not for the people who have suffered through them already, but rather for the queer kids who are being born today and yesterday. It could get better if we take concrete action to dismantle homophobic, racist, and classist power structures. To be concrete, I mean things like lobbying for trans inclusion in health insurance plans (while access to private health insurance is a privilege, it would send a message that it's not okay to deny medical care to trans people just because we're trans)' like lobbying for universal health care, period; working to eliminate the state regulation of gender by eliminating gender designations from driver's licenses and passports; and working to decriminalize sex work. That's just a start, and if some of these ideas sound rather inspecific to improving queer and trans people's lot, that's because working to improve the lot of those who are disproportionately poor and disenfranchised is sometimes about taking steps to alleviate poverty and disenfranchisement, too.

Holding up the privileged, white, middle-class or upwardly-mobile gay male experience as "The LGBT Experience" does a service only to people who don't need a service; it renders everyone else invisible, while reassuring straight folks that really, everything's just fine. The solution, this strategy says to straight folks, is to coax queer kids to suck it up long enough to turn into happily assimilated members of society---not to hold those kids' tormenters accountable, whether those tormentors are some other high school kids or some candidates for Michigan secretary of state who make it their campaign issue to deny identification to trans people.

And holding up that experience as the one true queer experience only serves the people for whom it was never bad to begin with.

What I find even worse than the "It Gets Better" campaign itself is the campaign of silencing that seems to go along with it. Look: "It Gets Better" is pissing people off. It's pissing off many of the people who it purports to serve. Just in my group of friends, straight people seem to love it, and the more socially normative of a gay or lesbian person you are, the more you probably love it too. But maybe it might be worthwhile to listen to what the naysayers say about it---particular the naysayers who have their own stories of violence to share. Rather than silencing them with "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" or "You can't criticize people if their intention is good" or "It's useful if it stops one teenager from committing suicide" (what about those who die as a result of apathy and complacency?), try listening. You're not doing anyone any favors by making it taboo to talk about queer lives that aren't all sunshine and ponies. The folks who are pissed off might just be angry because their lives aren't getting better---and Dan Savage is not only failing to help, but doing active harm to the politics of queer resistance.

In writing this, I am informed by the thoughts of more than one person who does not feel safe actually relating their experiences in a public forum. The anger is real, and we're getting told not to tell our stories because it interferes with the comfortable folks' comfort zones. So, seriously, please stop using "think of the children" as an excuse to indulge your fantasies. Kids are smart enough to know that "it gets better" is a fairy tale; if you're too busy to make the world a better place for them to grow up into, just a little bit, even if in some everyday ways, then maybe it's best to let the silence speak instead.

• Don't make jokes at the expense of trans people. This doesn't just mean avoiding jokes about trans people, it means not treating the idea of a man taking on feminine attributes as an inherently hilarious concept. And if you're in a group of people where someone makes such a joke, or if you're exposed to media (whether it's "Toy Story 3" or "Family Guy") in which trans or gender-variant people get made the butt of jokes, then take it as a teachable moment and talk about why it's not funny or welcome around you.
  
• Violate gender norms. I want to be careful here, because not every cis guy with a ponytail is entitled to claim the Trans Struggle as his own. But sometimes, an act like an otherwise-normative guy wearing nail polish or a woman wearing a suit with pants and a tie instead of one with a skirt can play a tiny role in letting others know the world doesn't fall down when people violate the expectations that were placed on them at birth. Maybe there are bigger ways than clothing to ask yourself whether you're being who you are or whether you're acting out some gender norm that you learned before you could question it, too.
  
• Accept and reinforce other people's gender self-identification, and call out others when they don't. Talking endlessly about how trans people should inform a potential partner as to the nature of their genitalia before sleeping together contributes to a world where trans people are murdered for daring to have bodies that depart in some ways from how they present themselves. When you act on the knowledge that there is no objective gender, no "real" or "true" gender other than the one that exists in each person's brain, you take a tiny step towards creating a world where people don't murder each other in order to enforce the fiction of "objective gender".
  
• Know that trans people are everywhere, and act as if they're listening. Even if you believe you know what trans people look like, you don't know how many trans people you've met who you never knew were trans. Many cis people seem to be attached to a belief that they can always spot whether someone is trans, but this belief is both logically flawed (it's unfalsifiable, since you never find out about your false negatives) and problematic as it's tied into a belief that trans people aren't real and that this difference manifests itself in some obvious, physical way.
  
• Don't use transphobia and homophobia to shame others. If you're trying to motivate a guy to work harder, and you tell him not to be such a pussy or such a sissy, you're reinforcing the culture of violence against gender-variant people in a tiny way. Why not find ways to resist such violence, even in a tiny way?
  
• Don't use terms like "biological" or "genetic" to delegitimize trans people's genders. It turns out that the more you know about biology and genetics, the less appropriate it begins to look to call cis men "biological men" and cis women "biological women". There's the obvious fact that everyone is biological; we're all made of the same matter, and we all need to breathe and eat in order to live. Maybe more to the point, the thing that makes cis men men is the same thing that makes trans men men: a combination of personal identification and social consensus. When it comes to gender, there is no "there" there other than that. The categories that humans develop to classify people are merely an interpretation of biological reality; the map is not the territory. Instead of "biological", "genetic", or "real" (which all tend to get used to mean the same thing), use "cissexual" or "cis" for short to refer to people whose internal self-conception matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
  
• Recognize that trans and intersex people are exemplars of the category "human" to the same extent that cis people are. This means, among other things, recognizing that the idea of a biological sex determined by whether one's karyotype is XY or XX is an inaccurate model of reality, because it fails to account for intersex people whose karyotypes are neither XY nor XX. To insist that the model must be maintained despite that reality falls short is to insist that some humans are more human than others. Similarly, when you insinuate that trans experience is less typical than cis experience (in much the same way that some people call art and literature about women's lives "women's writing" or "women's music" whereas when the topic is men's lives, it's just "writing" or "music"), you suggest that trans people aren't fully human.
  
• Listen to trans people's struggles and accept that those struggles may be different from yours. Should you happen to be lucky enough to know any trans people, keep in mind that listening is good. But diminishing every problem by reducing it to one that cis people also face (for example, "Everyone has something about their body that they don't like! For example, I'd like to lose 5 pounds"), or insisting that love conquers all or some other such thing -- that by waiting, it will get better -- is worse than silence.
  

This is part of the reason I am not entirely thrilled with the “It Gets Better” campaign – that for a lot of us, it simply does not. While many of us have the autonomy to begin transition, this often happens while forced into survival sex work, homelessness, and HIV, among other difficulties. Trans people have at least twice the unemployment rate of the general population....

I don’t mean to introduce these statistics to say anyone has it harder, but rather to question why with all the talk about bullying and getting better, why what trans people specifically face is not discussed at all. I mean 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide? As compared to the 1.6% of the general population? I remember when people questioned the idea that trans people really had a 50% rate of attempted suicide, but it looks like that is confirmed. This is, honestly, reprehensible that this is constantly kept invisible, in the background. And it’s not as if trans people are a such a small minority, either. Educated guesswork puts us at .2-.4% of the population, with numbers supported in multiple countries, not even counting non-transitioning trans people that were neglected by Lynn Conway’s paper. In the US that means out of 310,430,000 people (per Wikipedia). 620,000 – 1,240,000 trans people.