I’ve never been a protestor or an activist for anything. I kind of figure people can handle shit without me. And I hate to say it, but I don’t really believe protesting accomplishes much in the way of real, lasting change. That’s a fucked up view, I know. But it comes from 60+ years of experience and observation, so what can I say?

I think the kids are better suited to handling the protests and the activism anyway. They’re discovering inequity for the first time, so they’re super-fired up about it, they haven’t seen enough yet to know that the game is hopelessly rigged, and they have the time and energy that it takes to do serious activism.

But here on the last day of Pride month, I’ve been thinking about some of the things I’ve posted, mainly on LinkedIn, and some of it here as well. Things about queer or trans inequality or inclusivity. Things I wouldn’t have ever expected to hear myself saying.

I think a lot of it comes from seeing so many trans people facing so many difficulties every day of their lives. I don’t have any difficulties at work around my gender identity, so I feel very fortunate about that. And I guess I like to tout that in places like LinkedIn.

Not tout it in a “look at me, I have it made!” way, but in more like, “Come and work here with me, this company understands and will treat you as a human being.” That kind of thing.

I titled this “Accidental Activist,” but I’m not delusional, I know I don’t do the work of an activist activist. Like I said, that’s better left to the youth. But I think I’ve learned that just adding my voice is beneficial, and maybe it’s low-key activism. I don’t know. Can we change this country (world)? I think we have, but you know how it goes. One hand gives, the other takes away.

It’s good though, more and more trans people standing up and saying, “Hi, I’m here and I’m not leaving,” that can’t be bad. I mean, I don’t know. Does increased visibility cause increased resistance? Some anti-queer people are kind of backward, so maybe they forgot about us but now we’re just reminding them to be hateful.

Who knows. Things are surely better though in some parts of the country. While other parts…I don’t know. What do we do with a sinkhole like Texas? I have friends in Texas and they tell me, “the people aren’t the politicians.” Well if that’s the case, then you Texas people need to fix that shit. Because your politicians are determined to make you look like hateful, witch-burning hillbillies in the eyes of the rest of the world.

And that sucks because I know “the people aren’t the politicians,” but the fact is they are. We are. The people in Texas are allowing the steady descent into some kind of 18th-century white man’s boner ideal to continue. They sit there and watch it happen. So I have to believe that at best they just don’t care, and at worst, they agree with the repression and regression.

The result either way is that I wouldn’t visit my friends in Texas if my life depended on it. That’s not my fault, it’s theirs. I wouldn’t even drive through Texas. I’d add a week to my trip just to drive around it. Way around it.

Anyway, yeah. It doesn’t take a super-deep look at American history to see that rich white men have always set shit up the way that they’d like it to be set up. It never mattered what non-rich white men type of people wanted and it still doesn’t. Rich white men have figured out how to manipulate people by destroying the concept of truth, just like their man-crush Adolph Hitler did.

Convince people there’s no truth, fill them with false fear, and let them burn the witches for you. I’m not saying, for example, that people who voted for Trump were stupid. I’m not saying that, but they were. And most of them still are. Stupid, I mean. Shockingly stupid. So I guess I am saying that. It’s not a nice thing to say, is it?

I usually don’t talk like that because I truly love people. and I have faith in the goodness of people. If your car flips over on the freeway, those Trump voters will be running toward it to help you. Everyone will. Or most of us will. That’s people, that’s humanity and love.

I just wish some of us would trust our hearts rather than willingly wading into an endless sea of political conspiracy chatter and nonsense. Have you ever listened to right wing radio stations? I have. They are incessantly, unrelentingly banging the drum of ignorance and hate 24 hours a day.

It’s like nothing exists except republicans and democrats. That’s all they fucking talk about. Seriously. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world, they will twist it to fit their “Democrats hate you and want to turn your Christian children into faggots” ideology. Plane crash? Democrats. Famine? Democrats. School shooting? Somehow still Democrats.

I’m sorry, I take back the famine part. I mean, they would indeed blame famines on democrats, but they don’t care about or talk about famines, because famines don’t affect rich white men.

I have certainly driven this train off the tracks here, haven’t I? This is not what I intended to write, but here it is, so I’ll let it stand.

What I intended to write was that I think meeting and hanging around with other queer people here in the desert has made me feel more included in the LGBTQ+ world (I’m the T after all), and that’s probably why I’ve been saying more queer/gender related stuff on LinkedIn. That and I’ve kind of tapped into the trans membership of LinkedIn, and there are a lot of us, as you might imagine.

Either way, it’s been interesting, changing my approach when it comes to these things, when it comes to speaking out. I still feel a little bit like “That’s not my issue to discuss.” But of course it is my issue to discuss. I just haven’t counted myself in the LGBTQ+ ranks before, because I wasn’t out publicly. But I do now.

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN