We Can Be Friends, But Only If You Let Me Decide What You Are
A Short Essay About the Self-Destructive Drive for Safety at the Cost of Social Progress, Healthy Solutions, and Every Human Being That Looks Even Remotely Like Your Oppressor
You’re having a day. Hell, you’ve had a year, and it’s only gonna get worse from here. There’s not a lot of point in doing much of anything. You’re alone, you don’t have much of a support system, and you’re forced to keep all your inner thoughts entirely to yourself. You certainly couldn’t talk about them with your friends; they’d mock you relentlessly and torture you emotionally for years if they learned what went on inside your head. And every single person that you maybe could interact with in a way that makes you feel emotionally safe has giant red, flashing signs around them saying, “DO NOT INTERACT” and “ALL ATTEMPTS TO MAKE PHYSICAL CONTACT WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.”
I mean, it’s not like you want to go around touching random people. You’re touch starved, but honestly, people kinda suck, and being touched by them feels weird and uncomfy. But regardless of whether that sign applies to you, you imagine to yourself it’s probably best if you just stay clear of that person and everyone donning similarly flamboyant threat signals.
So life sucks, and there’s no escape. You’re not ready to end it all just yet, so you open up something—a website, a newspaper, a magazine, whatever—and you see two ads in front of you, each promising to change your life forever:
Accept the simple truth. You are shit. You will always be shit. You are a constant danger to everyone around you, and you’re lucky we even let you be around us. We will certainly never welcome you among our number.
You should still be on our side. Support the Purple Party, and we’ll let you hang out with us but, like—over there, ideally. Don’t worry! You can still be a Purple Party Associate, though! Think of it like…a “second class” membership. Ha! Pwned.
Be on our side! Otherwise, you’re even worse! Vote Purple! 💜
Then there’s the second ad:
Have you ever wondered why you’re so sad and alone? Why you feel bad all the time and no one ever seems to care? Isn’t it terrible how the world seems to not be bothered at all whether you lived or died?
It’s 100% the Purple Party’s fault. Just look at them! They called you names! They don’t respect you, and they never will. You could join them, but then you’ll just be at their mercy.
Fuck Purple. Join the Orange Party instead. We won’t make the world better—no one can, just look at Purple; they’ve been trying to make the world better for 100 years and all they are a century later is angry about the nothing they’ve accomplished.
But hey! Sometimes hurting the people that hurt you makes it all worth it. 😈
You’re probably telling yourself you’d never join the Orange Party. They’re very clearly not interested in doing anything good for anyone. But when you feel as shitty as you did the day you opened that whatever-piece-of-media you found both ads in… Man, the Purple Party sounds like the same shit you hear every day. At least Orange is trying to do something new.
Orange Is the New “Less Abusive”
A lot of young cis men choose the Orange Party all the time. We can blame them, and the problem continues ad infinitum. Or we can have a conversation about it and, I dunno, do something different than the same thing as always. Plus, I’m not sure how you can call yourself an honest, intelligent person and also fail to understand why young men skip on the Purple Party and join Orange when:
The Purple Party hates you. Some members have called you a “pussy” for crying when they tormented you in elementary school, and neither you nor they spend time considering the hypocrisy of that behavior. Consequently, you assume those hypocrites are representative of the entire Purple Party. After all, isn’t that what the Purple Party does to you?
Your emotionally abusive mother belonged to the Purple Party when she was younger and “experimenting by kissing other girls” in college. She’s part of the Orange Party now, if you couldn’t guess from that quote.
The Orange Party, which your Orange mother tells you is only for “real” men, will ever accept you if you don’t join the Orange Party too. Nobody will explain what a “real” man is, but everyone assures you that you’re not one if you’re asking the question. (Like a certain naked Emperor was once told.)
The first friend you made was a member of the Purple Party, and you thought maybe the Purple Party sounded like maybe it was better than the ad made it look? Then you asked a clarifying question that revealed your Orange upbringing, and the Purple friend gave you a disgusted look and never wanted to talk to you again.
The world has changed a great deal since the 1900s and 1950s, and while things have never been equal, revolutions have a way of destabilizing all members of a society, both privileged and marginalized. And we can trivialize or validate the experiences of either group simply because we wish to. It is very simple to do, and a clever quip about how men deserve what they get and should just be quiet surprisingly does not aid feminism in achieving its goals. It may no longer be possible to achieve much of anything as a singular, solitary voting bloc. This ineffectiveness, compounded with the radicalization of groups of men and women that things are getting worse for two genders (not “both” because more than two exist) while an outdated philosophy demands that we only give a shit about one of them, serves as one of the many causes for the reactionary regression we’ve been seeing in the past decade.
I did say men and women, right? Good. Because a whopping 45% of American women voted for Donald Trump during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and any description of the patriarchy as being solely held up by men is immediately failed by the simple fact that reality and agendas do not share the same objectives. For any agenda to be effective, it must answer reality, not a fiction built of fear and an inability to move beyond the primitive, poisonous, pseudo-dichotomized intergender toxicity that trans people are grateful to exist largely outside of. (Thank goodness for countercultures too, especially when they keep us away from cis people who can’t help but hate—no matter the direction that hate may be pointed in.
Why Regressiveness Wins So Much of the Time
Many of us have spent a long time learning enough about the world and about other human beings to develop progressive ideas about what a human is, what rights a human ought to have, and what the limits of a human’s responsibility to their community ought to be. Others of us had the privilege of having been raised by individuals who had already acquired progressive ideas, and such individuals were given the gift of improved ethics and improved mental health.
For those of us who experienced awful mental health due to having been raised by people with horribly regressive ideas, the improvement of one’s mental health is often stymied by the self-same regressive ideas that encourage one to mistreat others or oneself. Some of us were lucky—yeah, lucky—because our parents were so violent, cruel, malignant, and monstrous that their sadistic torture of us prevented us from ever bonding with them to the extent that we also adopted their beliefs.
And thank goodness. I’d probably have killed myself by now if I’d been so unlucky as to have been raised somewhere that permitted me (because learning what your parents teach you is not an intentionally interruptible neurological process in early childhood) to internalize regressive beliefs that would ultimately render me subhuman filth to most people who would otherwise consider themselves progressive, or worse, “kind.”
Sometimes I hear trans women online talk about the “Nazi to trans pipeline.” I distrust such concepts because most trans women never experienced the urge to play at fascism, bigotry, and genocide at any point in our lives. Empathy for Nazis is never worth the trouble it brings (the death of democracy, for example). But a trans woman that wonders whether she is a “real enough” woman to enter public women’s restrooms, and another that feels pained by internalized self-hatred because she finds herself wondering whether she poisoned herself by taking hormones and moving herself away from the false male presentation she’d effected her whole life? I suspect there are better ways to answer such regressive, but ultimately more damaging to the person who holds the belief than to anyone outside of that person, ideas that sometimes bubble inside the heads of folks who are choosing to reckon with concepts their entire childhoods brainwashed them against.
As Americans, we value punishment so much, we’re willing to destroy a person rather than help them heal just to get the punishment out of our systems. Even when destroying them is so much more costly than helping them to heal.
Yes, some very regressive cis men do feel like it’s women’s jobs to fix them. But “fixing someone” is not helping them to heal. “Fixing someone” is a Sisyphean task because all psychoemotional healing is internal, therefore the only entity in all of existence capable of accessing that which needs to be healed is the person that requires the healing. “Helping someone to heal” means holding them accountable for their mistakes. It does not mean engaging in Puritan shunning practices and calling them “seeking safety,” it does not mean breaking people down because they happen to look a little like someone that hurt you once, or worse because they look like nothing you ever expected to see with your limited lived experience.
Anyway, Yay Trauma!
So thank goodness for the fucking decades of psychoemotional torture that graced me with the ability to be “worthy” of a Purple Party membership.
And if your ideas about whatever “progressive” subject you hold most dear require the folks you’d otherwise exclude to be grateful that their physical, emotional, or sexual trauma allowed them the gift of inclusion…
I have no idea how you sleep at night, except by intoxicating yourself with the very misery your once-righteous, now-monstrous fury has allowed you to excuse yourself for bringing into the world. But let that sleep be harried by the knowledge that you are absolutely contributing to making the world worse for you and everyone that your ideology permits you to care about.
And then, choose to do better and to sleep better because you found a better way to coexist with human beings that have never, ever harmed you.
Or, you know, assume everyone that disagrees with you even a little is a monster working for the oppressor. If we can’t fix the world—if you won’t let it heal because you refuse to allow anyone around you to—might as well just burn it all down. At least then, hypocrisy can be the one sin you’re never accused of.