[Re-post] Actually Existing People

Because of the “normal distribution” post that I republished last week, and because of the recent, utterly cruel, cynically political posturing of Nancy Mace around trans women and bathrooms, and because of the beautiful film that Will Ferrell made about his friend, Harper Steele, I wanted to follow up with another repost, of something I wrote in July of 2023.

If you haven’t seen Will + Harper , on Netflix, you should. It’s a kind and funny and heartfelt look at an enduring friendship, and what it means to truly know someone, and how you can think you’ve known someone for decades without really understanding their heart, and how brave and scary it can be to reach out and ask the hard questions you never bothered to ask before, and how brave and scary it can be to open yourself up to show yourself to another person—even an old friend.

Are there tears? There are some tears. Are there hard scenes with ugly people? There are a few. But there is also a ton of love and empathy and understanding—some of it coming from places and people that might surprise you.

The film reminds us that this country is not filled with MAGAts or Snowflakes or Wingnuts or Libtards; it’s filled with people—quirky, individual people—actually existing people, most of whom are just trying to live their lives in peace and freedom and dignity and safety. Which is what made me want to revisit what I wrote here, a year ago.

It was sometime in my twenties when I finally started to notice that our news media provided descriptions and qualifiers for some people, that tended not to be used for other people. If a man being reported on was Black, he was identified as such; if he was White, race wasn’t mentioned. If a woman was being reported on, her clothing and hair were described; if it was a man, those things were omitted. These descriptors said to readers, whether they consciously realized it or not, that certain things were “normal” and therefore not worthy of comment, and that anything outside of that norm needed to be described to ensure understanding. Race was invisible unless it was a particular race; gender was only noteworthy if it was female. White and male was simply “regular”—the default setting of human—or, at least, American.

And yes, I probably should have noticed this much, much earlier. Shame on me.

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We all should have noticed. But prior to the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements, most of the people being talked about in newspapers were White males. And let’s get real: is it easier to drop all the modifiers if everyone you’re talking about—and everyone you’re talking to—shares them? Of course it is. So, if the newspaper is a record of what members of the club are doing, meant only for other members of the club to read…how much detail do you really need? It’s understood. It goes without saying.

Note to self: Beware of what goes without saying.

Now, of course, we’re more inclusive—or, at least, we try to be more inclusive—or, at least, we’re aware when we’re not doing such a great job of it. We know that being in the majority doesn’t mean you’re the only thing that exists. There are Actually Existing People all over this country who do not fit into one majority group or another. We get that. But when we use language to frame reality in a way that excludes people, we make it too easy to think of them not just as members of a minority group, but as quasi-humans, people who are abnormal, outlying, not part of the tribe: wrong. And once you have done that to a group of people, it becomes easy to do other, more terrible things to them.

I mentioned last week how people like Todd Rose have showed us how un-meaningful it is to be bunched around the mean value of one or two traits or behaviors. There are more of us there; that’s all it means. But when there are more of us, we assume we’re in the right. We can’t help ourselves. When you’re a kid at the school bus stop, it’s hard not to think less of the kid who stands by himself on one corner, because he’s not part of the crowd bunched on the opposite corner. To be alone is to be the loser. This is how we define everything.

Our “the majority owns the normal” framing encourages othering, even though the fact of being a few standard deviations away from some mean value has, in itself, no moral or ethical value; it simply says that whatever it is, there is less of it in the tails than in the bulge. But remember: there are a lot of “its” that make up the whole. No one represents the absolute mean of all traits and values. The “100% normal” is a null set—no one is there. Someone you think of as a freak or a weirdo because of one aspect of their life might align perfectly with you, and with the majority of people, in some other aspect (and that guy who looks and dresses and talks just like everyone else might be keeping some disturbing and dangerous behaviors secret).

Regression to the mean is not a sign of righteousness. Anything existing along a continuum is part of the data set, as I wrote last week. It’s all a part of who we—the big we—are. I may be waiting by myself at the bus stop, but we’re all getting on the same damned bus. Why does it matter where I stand? Or what kind of coat I’m wearing? Or who my parents are married to?

In elementary classrooms, teachers have pictures of their spouses on their desks and make casual mention of their families as part of class discussion. It happens all the time. Teachers ask questions about the families of their students. And all of this is fine…as long as the spouses and parents are heterosexual. But if the same things are done in reference to a same-sex spouse or parent, it’s considered (in some parts of the country) dangerous, provocative, and an act of deliberate “grooming” of young people, to get them to change their gender identity or sexual attraction.

As if casually talking about your weekend could effect such a profound change in anyone.

Gay teachers and parents, and their same-sex partners, exist. THEY WALK AMONG US. So do trans men and women. So do gingers and vegetarians and Presbyterians, by the way. Acknowledging and validating the existence of gay and trans people shouldn’t be a threat or a challenge to the sanctity of anyone’s family, any more than a Jewish teacher talking about Chanukah should be a threat or a challenge to any Christian’s faith. We got over that fear (mostly). We can get over this one. Not everybody is the same or does the same things. That makes zero demand on the rest of us. I’m having tacos for lunch. You do you.

I’m trying to understand why “you do you” is so threatening to some people—why “live and let live” seems to be acceptable only up to the point of “it makes me feel icky,” and then must be stopped by legislation.

I do understand the moral panic that some parents are feeling over the recent increase in visibility and acceptance of trans men and women. I think it’s misguided, but I understand it. Some of them seem to worry that acknowledgement and acceptance have led directly to a spike in children identifying as gay or trans—that it is a causal relationship: someone is making my child into something they’re not. But can popular culture really cause straight young people to become gay or trans? I mean, it hasn’t made any gay kids straight.

Or does acceptance simply allow gay and trans children—already existing gay and trans children—feel safer about sharing who they are and what they’re going through?

Honestly: do people really think our culture is creating new gay people out of straight people? Do they think “trans” is some cool, new, cultural product that the 21st century invented, a lifestyle so sparkling and attractive that kids can’t resist adopting it?

Or is it more likely that our language and the weight of our biases invisible-ized entire swaths of people for generations, making it difficult for us to see them and making it dangerous for them to show themselves?

I am thinking of someone close to me who suffers from Depression: capital D, clinical, chemical imbalance Depression. When she first talked about it with her mother, she discovered that she was far from alone: her family was riddled with Depression, going back generations. But it was never spoken of, never discussed. It was shameful. Not just in her family—across the whole culture. And so, it remained invisible, and each sufferer had to suffer tenfold, alone and in silence.

Is that level of suffering really justifiable, if the only reason for it is to make sure other people don’t feel uncomfortable?

It seems to me that, at most, cultural acceptance is leading some young people to investigate and experiment and ask questions. Is that a crisis? Investigation and experimentation are what young people do. It’s what adolescence is all about. Whether it’s alcohol or drugs or gender—or skateboarding, for that matter—anything teens are curious about and hungry for, trying to see if it resonates with them, can be done safely, or it can be done dangerously.

I don’t know where the lines should be drawn when it comes to things like body dysmorphia and gender affirming care for young people, or who should be drawing those lines. Let’s have that discussion. Having raised two kids, I’d probably defer to safety most of the time. But mental health is part of the safety equation. Either way, I wouldn’t want the decision legislated for me by people my children have never met.

Isn’t acknowledging and accepting what actually exists in the world the best first step towards having sane discussions about people’s desires and choices?

The MAGA types, with their eyes fixed firmly on the past, seem to think that the Actually Existing world of their childhood was wildly different than our current world—that certain things and people they find problematic simply didn’t exist back then. But that’s nonsense. There were always Black people. There were always Jews. There were always gay and trans people. Just because they may have been kept out of sight doesn’t mean they weren’t out there, actually existing and trying to live their lives. What changed was our framing and our language (and then our laws). We can see people better now, and that makes some of us uncomfortable.

Maybe part of the discomfort is the understanding, deep down, that gay and trans who seem a tiny bit happier and more comfortable now were always among us, silenced and immiserated by our prejudices and fears.

Our children are not being changed into something they never were. They're just feeling safer expressing who they are, or asking questions about who they might be, because our old, constrained, only-the-bulge-in-the-center-is-real way of thinking is changing.

The rainbow has always been there. All of its colors have always been there. The fact that we used to see the world in black and white doesn’t mean the world was binary and limited; it just means we were.

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