On Dealing with Microaggressions

Lockdown progress report for Saturday, May 16, 2020

Total words: 0 (I will start once this post is finished)
Manuscript total: 67,802

I’m very visibly queer. I always have been. Everyone knew I was gay long before I figured it out myself; even in elementary school, people were calling me “queer” before I even knew what the word meant.

It’s not really fun to grow up like that, especially when you’re an introvert at heart trying your hardest to melt into the walls and hope that no one sees you or comments on you. But inevitably, whether through misgendering me at first glance or in some other way.

It’s frustrating, to be seen first as a gender question-mark before any other aspect of one’s identity can be seen. I tried dealing with it in different ways over the years: I went through a time period in middle school of trying desperately to fit in, when I actually grew my hair out and had those 1980s big bangs (LOL), but I eventually found that pretending to be someone else in order to escape those stares was ultimately even more uncomfortable than accepting the constant double-takes and snide comments.

In my young adult years, I changed tacks. I dealt with it by leaning into my butchness, embracing my inner dyke with a kind of “F-U” punk attitude that I think many (most??) butch lesbians eventually adopt as a way of coping with the broad spectrum of homophobic experiences they have, ranging from the truly dangerous to the friendly and playful jokes they endure at their expense.

I eventually developed a habit of making jokes at my own expense, in an odd variation of the “I’ll get them before they can get me” coping mechanism. I’ve generally told myself things like I’m being out & loud & proud and therefore creating visibility and normalizing women like me within society, or that by owning my identity fully, the small offenses offered by others are rendered impotent.

But ya know, the truth is, I’m still a shy, sensitive thirteen-year-old on the inside, and even though I’ve been out for a good twenty years now, it still hurts to have my nonconformist gender identity called out, or seen first before people see anything else about me.

Microaggressions actually *do* matter.

Decades after learning to laugh off homophobia as my primary coping strategy, I was exposed to the video above by one of my USC colleagues, and it has had a big impact on me. I’ve watched that video probably a dozen times. It validated the underlying feelings of hurt I feel each time I’m misgendered, and it validated why it’s hard to explain why I feel hurt in the first place to people who don’t have the same experience — including even other butch lesbians.

I mention other butch lesbians because I know a lot of women who are butch but who, for example, never (or rarely) experience being misgendered, and so even these women fall into the category of people who look at me askance and tell me that I’m overreacting when I admit to being hurt or offended by the little things I deal with day-to-day.

But you’ve got to understand: I genuinely do look a lot like a teenage boy, so misgendering happens to me All. The. Time. (Less so now that I live in Southern California than in the South, but still often enough.) I’m grateful for my small chest and generally small build, but those things also mean that I have a lot of uncomfortable experiences when I’m mistaken for a male, if only for a quick second. So please watch the two minute video I posted above and try to understand what I’m saying about these small little experiences adding up over time.

But anyway, I stray from my point, which is this:

Microaggressions matter. They impact our psyche, especially over years and decades, and we don’t have to listen to people who tell us that it’s “no big deal” and we should just “brush it off” or that we’re “overreacting.” One microaggression truly is no big deal, but the problem is, for those of us who experience them, they don’t come only “once in a while.” They come all the effing time, sometimes from places (people) we least expect, which is what often makes them so hurtful, what makes them feel like a real gut-punch.

I’m on this rant this morning because of a comment one of my USC friends made yesterday in a group text about the kind of “meat” I like to eat (or don’t like to eat, as the case may be — you can fill in the blanks with your imagination). It was a light-hearted joke, a playful wink-and-nudge about my sexual preferences, made not by a stranger or a redneck homophobe but by a friend.

And it would have been fine if the conversation had anything at all to do with sexual preferences, if we had been joking about sex or romantic partners or queer identity. But we weren’t talking about any of those things. We were talking about graduating from USC, about graduation gifts we’d received (or not received), and about the fact that I’d received frozen meat by mail that day. The comment about my sexual preferences was utterly out of left field, completely unrelated to our conversation.

I felt like I’d just been made into a lesbian caricature.

So while my initial reaction was my standard go-to coping mechanism — just laugh it off, ’cause if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em — I decided

No. Just no. Not this time.

Because if you can’t call out microaggressions with your friends, if you can’t say, “Dude, you just completely out of the blue turned me into a lesbian caricature for no conversation-related reason” to people who consider themselves LGBTQ+ allies, then these forms of subtle homophobic comments will never freakin’ go away.

So before I started this post, I wrote them a long email. It will be a turning point in our friendship, one way or another.

This blog post is for you.

Just so you know, I was going to write a movie review of a cute film I saw on Netflix yesterday, The Half of It, but I’ll save that for another time because this is more important.

I’m sharing my experience because I want you to think about where you stand on microaggressions against minorities of any kind, LGBTQ+ or otherwise.

Which category do you fall into?

“God, I so relate to what you are saying. Thank you for this post.”

Then this is for you, to remind you that you’re not alone and we’re in this fight together. I have your back, my friend, and I know that you have mine.

“Naw, dude, you’re overreacting.”

I’ve said that lots of times before myself, but I’ve come to realize that I’ve been conditioned to “shrug it off” because it’s just “how things are.” It’s akin to people of color shrugging off small racist comments because they’ve come to accept that society is freakin’ racist and maybe it always will be and there’s little they can do about it. In this way, our society teaches us over time to implicitly condone the small slights we endure on a regular basis, maybe even to believe we’ve earned those slights. (That’s internalized homophobia, btw.)

Well, I reject that. I reject the idea that society cannot change, and I also reject the notion that I myself bear no responsibility to help produce that change.

If it’s not my responsibility to effect change, then whose is it?

And besides conditioning, I think we also brush things off because it’s easier to go along and get along than to confront microaggressions and call out people we consider our friends. It’s easier to tell ourselves that it’s “no big deal” than it is to pull someone aside and have a difficult conversation that may end up damaging our friendship in the long run.

Anyway.

I think I’m all ranted out.

I hope that I’ve encouraged you this morning — either encouraged you to have those difficult conversations in your own life, or, at the very least, encouraged you to recognize that responding to microaggressions may not be as much of an overreaction as you thought it was after all. Making the world a better place — a less racist place, a less homophobic place, a less Trumpian place — does require that we stick our neck out sometimes, that we risk being told we are overreacting, even by our allies.

Because if we don’t push back in the small ways, the one-on-one relationship ways, then we can’t expect the big changes to ever occur.