Fucking daylight saving time.
No, that came out wrong.
FUCK daylight saving time.
I already have a hard enough time finding my fucking Z's. Then we, as a society, decide that twice a year we're going to fuck with the clock? Here's an idea. If you're one of those rare people whose workday revolves around the sun coming up, adjust your fucking schedule. The rest of us go to work at the same time every morning and come home at the same time every evening, regardless of whether that giant burning ball in the sky has decided to grace us with its presence. In the dead of winter, I'm riding to work in the fucking dark and coming home in the fucking dark. So can we please stop fucking with the clocks?
But no. Here we are. And because we've decided to rearrange time itself, I find myself wide awake at eleven instead of midnight. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. So, eyes still blurry from sleep, I do what any responsible adult with a thousand better things to do would do. I start scrolling through Facebook.
And almost immediately, I come across something that makes me stop.
Now, before I get into this, I want to make something perfectly fucking clear. I believe in freedom of speech. Not just freedom of speech for people who agree with me. Not just for people who say things I find reasonable, compassionate, or intelligent. I mean freedom of speech for everybody. Even people whose opinions I find absolutely fucking ridiculous.
We all come from different places. We've lived different lives, had different experiences, and developed different perspectives along the way. Sometimes those perspectives are grounded in genuine thought and experience. Sometimes they're little more than tribal talking points regurgitated from whatever political machine somebody happens to identify with. But it doesn't matter. That's liberty. You get to believe what you want, you get to say what you want, and I will defend your right to do both, even when I think you're completely full of shit.
But here's the thing. Your right to say something doesn't mean I'm obligated to stand beside you while you say it.
And that brings me to the Facebook post.
It read: “A trans gender woman who married a woman is a straight man…..”
Well. Okay, then.
First off, I'm not married yet. But I am engaged to a woman. And I'm transgender. And the person who wrote that post knows both of those things. We've met. We've talked. We've even had a face-to-face conversation about my identity. So when I saw that post, I had a pretty fucking good idea who he might have been talking about.
Could it have been some completely unrelated observation about transgender women and their relationships? Sure. Anything's possible. Maybe he woke up in the middle of the night overcome by an urgent need to share his thoughts about the gender identities of people he doesn't understand. Maybe it was just a remarkable coincidence.
But given our history, it certainly didn't feel like one.
Now, the smart thing to do would probably have been to scroll past it. And ordinarily, I would. I understand that not everybody believes transgender women are women. I don't particularly understand why the existence of transgender people has become such a fucking obsession for certain segments of the population, but whatever.
People believe all kinds of things. Some believe the moon landing was staged. Some believe World War II never happened. Some apparently believe that shape-shifting lizard people have infiltrated our government and are secretly running the country.
Believe whatever the fuck you want. I'm not interested in policing your thoughts.
But this particular person and I have actually discussed my identity. Face to fucking face. He told me, essentially, that he considered me a man. I tried explaining my experience. I even asked him a question: "When did you decide to be a boy?"
He looked at me like I'd asked him when he decided gravity was real. He hadn't decided. “Exactly,” I told him, “Neither did I.”
But it didn't get us anywhere.
And you know what? That's fine.
Not everybody is going to understand me. Not everybody is going to agree with me. Not everybody is going to look at the world through the same lens I do. I can live with that. Hell, I have lived with that. I didn't stop speaking to him. I didn't demand an apology. I didn't insist that he attend some mandatory seminar on gender identity before being allowed back into polite society. I let it go.
Because at the end of the day, I don't need everybody's approval to exist.
But then came the Facebook post. And suddenly, something that had been a private disagreement was sitting out there in public. And I found myself wondering why.
Why was this important enough to post? Why was my identity, or the identity of somebody in circumstances remarkably similar to mine, something he felt compelled to publicly diminish? Was he trying to educate his friends? Was he hoping for applause? Was he looking for somebody to agree with him? Or was he trying to send a message?
I don't know. But I know how it landed.
And I decided to respond.
"Interesting that my existence and relationship bug you so much. I've never done a fucking thing to you. I've been kind and respectful. This is not."
That's it. No eighteen-page dissertation. No screaming. No demands that Facebook remove his post. Just a response. Because here's something I think people have forgotten: Freedom of speech isn't freedom from being answered. And it sure as hell isn't a guarantee that the people you're talking about will continue treating you like a friend.
Which brings me to the part that actually bothers me. This person isn't some random stranger on the internet. He's someone connected to my life through the woman I'm going to marry. And she considers him a friend. She's helped him. She's been there for him. She's invested time and energy into that friendship.
So what I find myself wondering isn't simply why he has such strong opinions about transgender people. It's why he would publicly express those opinions in a way that could hurt someone he supposedly cares about. Because when you question the legitimacy of my relationship, you're not just questioning me. You're questioning her. You're questioning the woman she loves, the relationship she has chosen, and something that makes her happy.
Now, let me be clear. She doesn't need me to defend her choices. She's perfectly capable of doing that herself. But I love her. And I find it pretty fucking strange that someone who claims to be her friend would treat her happiness as an opportunity to make a political statement.
Because that's what this has become, hasn't it? Everything is political. Even somebody else's relationship. Even somebody else's identity. Even somebody else's happiness.
We can't simply look at two people who love each other and say, "Good for them." Nope. We have to run their relationship through our political filter first. Does it align with our beliefs? Does it fit our understanding of gender? Does it offend some principle we've adopted from the people we agree with? And if it doesn't pass inspection, apparently we're supposed to announce our disapproval to the fucking internet.
Why? What are we accomplishing? Seriously. What the fuck are we accomplishing?
I've written quite a bit lately about liberty. About the right of people to live their own lives. About the danger of allowing government, political parties, or social movements to dictate how other people are supposed to exist. And I mean every fucking word of it.
I don't believe government should have the authority to tell you what to think. I don't believe it should have the authority to force you to approve of me. I don't believe you should be punished by the state for expressing an opinion I find offensive. But I also don't believe that freedom requires me to pretend your words don't matter.
You are free to speak. I am free to listen. And I am free to decide whether I want you standing beside me afterward.
That's not censorship. That's not oppression. That's not some terrible assault on your constitutional rights. That's two free people making choices. You choose what you say. I choose what I do with what I've heard. And sometimes, those choices change relationships.
That's life.
What I find especially frustrating is that none of this needed to happen. If he genuinely had concerns about my relationship with Dawna, he could have talked to her. He could have talked to the woman he considers his friend.
But instead, we got a Facebook post. Another little declaration tossed into the social media echo chamber. Another opportunity for people to nod along and congratulate themselves for being right. And another relationship made a little more complicated for absolutely no fucking reason.
I don't know whether this person and I are friends, we don’t know each other that well. But Ido know that we’e talked about this. And I never once asked him to approve of my existence. I've never asked him to change his beliefs. I've never asked him to pretend to understand something he doesn't. I've simply treated him with respect, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same in return.
Not agreement. Not approval. Respect. There's a difference.
I can defend your right to speak without defending what you say. I can respect your freedom without respecting your behavior. And I can believe with every fiber of my being that you have the right to express your opinion while deciding that I don't particularly want to share a fucking campfire with you.
Because liberty doesn't mean we all have to agree. It doesn't even mean we all have to like each other. But it does mean we have to accept that other people get to make their own choices.
Including the choice to walk away.
So say whatever the fuck you want. Just don't confuse your right to say it with my obligation to stand there and take it.
