Comment by wolvoleo
3 hours ago
Good point but that's exactly what we in the LGBT community have had to deal with for years now. After a while the will to find a common ground just gets eroded. But that is a bad thing, I agree.
And the thing is a lot of MAGA people do want these things. Otherwise they wouldn't happen.
But yes part of the blame lies with me too. It is as you say very tiring.
I strongly feel that that's the thing that's mitigated modern queer integration into popular society.
I understand that being either loud and proud or even just unabashedly your own self can be trying at times. I know, by first hand experience (as a cis-ish passing transwoman if you squint), that embodying your own reality in public can be a difficult and damaging experience...
But it's just...necessary. Even on a completely selfish front, no one's going to accept me myself for who I am if I can't tell people who I am. And then there's the larger front that those who have come before me did some of the work to make my life easier, and that by my own work I can make the lives of those who come after me easier.
It's just...sad, you know? Like I know it's hard for us to keep banging our heads against the wall. It's hard to go out in public and recieve insult after insult. It is hard to visit an unfamiliar locale not knowing how we will be accepted. But we have to! Literally the only path to acceptance lies through exposure.
That's the real reason that I am so sociable. I know that the only way past the insults is past the insults. If I only ever hide in the closet...well, the closet isn't all that big is it? I believe that if I show up as myself in any and every interaction I can only have a positive effect. At worst, I find people so bigotted that they are beyond help, avoid them, and pray for those few. In the middle everyone lets me slide. At best, I find bigots who I can expose to reality as it is and help them to get over their fears and prejudices.
I have found through experience, that this reality is closer to the best of possible worlds I just described and far from the worst of the worlds I just described. I have been rewarded time and time again in my encounters, finding countless people that I am able to relieve of their fears and knowing that I have saved countless unknown queers from the vitriol that those I have helped would otherwise have spewed.