We have the PRIDE month book from Kai Cheng Thom, a famous LGBTQ writer and poet. This book is a very honest reflection on how social media and public opinion shape the LGBTQ community, sometimes in a harmful way. And Kai offer both personal and systematic suggestions to safeguard her beloved queer community, to make it more resilient and more welcoming to everybody.
The book touches on several queer movements and ideology, questions how our core human values stand on these issues. As she pointed out in the book, some movements end up called for bigger oppression, marginalizing the already marginalised groups of outcasts. Her victimhood and survivalhood has used as fuel for a movement; with her personal integrity compromised.
The existing class system in the mainstream public persist in the LGBTQ community that Kai found that her trans identity exposed her to more physical dangers, mental breakdowns, and discriminatory treatments than other LGBQ people even in the LGBTQ “wonderland”, where she shall feel safe and free.
So from my impression of what I’ve read, social movement led to both progress and side-effects. Whether/What we benefit from these movements required further scrutiny. For example, LGBTQ movements have led to the implement or anti-discrimination law and legalisation of gay-marriage. Whether the acceptance and visibility of queer people increase, the deep-rooted concept of the two-gender spectrum has not been changed so far. In contrast, such visibility reinforce a collection of queer stereotypes and undermine gender diversity. That potentially make people already don’t fit in well more distressed and worried if they can “pass” or not to be accepted into the LGBTQ community. Kai again found that she does not fit very well at all: too “whitewashed” for asian LGBTQ, too exotic for the mainstream community; not to mention other labels such as trans woman, a femme, and a woman.
These movements have burdened people with labels of “victims” and “perpetrators”, that may not facilitate healing and produce more harm via “tolerance”.
Some “victims” finally became “perpetrators” because they did not have enough supports and resources to recover from their traumas, and resorted to the familiar violence in stressful situations.
With a narrative that reduce them to their “mental illness” or “victimhood”, no one stand up to intervene because we ought to be more “tolerate” to this poor “victims”.
That silence from covering up these problematic acts corrupts the trust and supports between community members.
Kai suggests that we shall rather focus on forming a better understandings of what boundaries are, and help each others from getting hurt.
The #Metoo movement sure has exposed a lot of previously unspoken sexual exploitation. Kai argued that however, the movement put too much weight on revenge and punishment that did not bring about real social changes. The “called-out” culture, Kai pointed out, expelled certain members from the community but do not necessarily create a safe space. And those being expelled, without any supports, may end up dead/crazy/disappeared. On other occasions, the enactment of “justice” involved dehumanising punishments, inflicting tremendous pain, which the wrong-doer totally “deserved” it. Such perpetuation of hurt and damages probably won’t help anybodies to move forward but rather to satisfy our thrills on vengeance. Such justice systems don’t serve us in anyway; it does nothings in preventing future harms nor preparing people to defense themselves.
Kai also mentioned that trans people are often left out from the hard-earn protection gained by the movement. For example, the “consent law” was somehow used for crimimalising trans people not informing their partner as “trans”. We cannot refute that logic; we do feel conflicted as we all know “coming out” is hard and can be dangerous.
Through the descriptions of how Kai navigates the reality and how she decided to tell the story creates hopes and love to one’s own life. She learnt from the trans people of the older generations, work with her sisters to build a better community, and aspire to be a mother for the future trans generation. It is very endearing to see that how she is striving for empowerment from hurt and sadness.
I understand the dread of desiring “normalcy”, which can provide us easy accessibility to many “good” things that an ordinary life can celebrate: a stable livelihood, recognition, a typical family life, a promise to the future; all in all , a “good” person living a “good” life.
However, maybe it is time to forgo these expectations of the “agreeable” people and embrace the fact that all life can be a “good” life; we all collectively have to contribute to each other’s well-being. Maybe it is true that I will not be able to enjoy certain happiness from a particular life style (i.e. a cis-white-heterosexual female faithful marriage and middle-class life). But that shall not be my expectation anyway as my life surely will lead me to my own adventures and myself settling on the reality that the aforementioned life style may not always translate to happiness.
It will be great if we finally don’t need to be brave and survive our life but instead just be one of the very ordinary unique individual living in a peaceful society. That is my hope, without faith; knowing that the future will be new and we all have a chance to shape it.
p.s. Dear Sarah Hegazy, we will fight on until we meet you in the next world.