You don’t look gay

[This is the chapter I wrote for the book “Stories From The Trenches: Volume 2 from the Let Them Finish series”, published in 2018. It is reproduced here with the permission of the publisher.]

Content warning: this chapter might make some people feel uncomfortable because it discusses sex. I encourage you to read it all the same. Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.

Progress Pride flag by Daniel Quasar

When we contemplate what it means to be human, expression of self is the most sacred of all things. How you see yourself, and how you want the world to see you, is the single most important driving force of humanity today.

But first a bit of background. This will necessitate a look at human history as well, for context. While I can’t promise to keep it short, I’ll do my best to make it interesting. I like history. It’s a special interest of mine.

Queer soup

When you were born, you were assigned a sex at birth by a doctor or midwife. This sex classification would have been male or female, based on your physical genitalia. That’s all there is to it. Our entire lives are dictated by some soft tissue between our legs when we are born which we don’t even take seriously for the next ten to fifteen years.

Before very long, we are assigned traditional roles based on that single physical characteristic. We are dressed in traditional clothing made up from traditional colours. We are encouraged to play sports that everyone else with the same sex assignment plays. If you somehow feel like you want to go against that assignment for any reason, societal norms say that it’s wrong. There’s no reason for it, it’s just wrong.

This is what heteronormativity is: the socially preferred (“normal”) view that we can divide everything into two sides, and that we are expected to fit neatly into that binary system.

Unfortunately, this neat convenience is just that: convenient. How can a physical characteristic assigned at birth by someone else possibly account for your own feelings, desires, and self-expression? That’s where gender identity comes into it.

I learned more about gender and sex identity in three months on Tumblr than I did in the previous 35 years of traditional education. And what I discovered is that gender is whatever you want it to mean. However, because sex and gender are conflated in Western society, this is as good a place as any to talk about alphabet soup. Every June in North America it seems like there are more letters to memorize for Pride Month.

Unless you’ve been living off the grid, you will have seen some variation of these letters to describe people who do not fit into the heteronormative sex or gender binary. This is what those letters mean. Some are overloaded with two or more meanings, and some are region-specific.

• L — lesbian (women who have romantic or sexual attraction to other women)
• G — gay (men who have romantic or sexual attraction to other men)
• B — bisexual (men and women who have romantic or sexual attraction to other men and women)
• T — trans (gender identity or expression that is different to their assigned sex)
• Q — queer / questioning (this can also include gender-fluid or gender-queer people)
• I — intersex (physical sex characteristics are ambiguous)
• A — asexual / agender / aromantic (the “a-” prefix means “not”)
• 2 — two-spirit (Native American only: a third gender not defined by identity or sexual attraction)

The A is not for “Ally”.

You may see these letters written out as (for example) LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTQ2, and in some cases followed by plus signs (LGBTQ+), because humans are bad at labels and inclusivity. While there has been discussion over the years to find one word for this group of people, there is no consensus. And anyway, what’s the point? If we ignore individual definitions of identity and expression, we silence and erase the people who use them. It’s like some Americans of Irish descent calling themselves “Irish”. Who am I to judge?

Other words that don’t have a letter to describe them include pansexual (sexual attraction to any gender or sexual identity), demisexual (sexual attraction only after you get to know someone, irrespective of sex or gender), and allosexual (the opposite of asexual).

Humans love labels, and for some reason we love them more if they are scientific. Homo sapiens. Brassica oleracea. Heterosexual. Cisgender. These are just words to describe things. Cisgender describes a person whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth: AMAB stands for “assigned male at birth”, while AFAB stands for “assigned female at birth”. Most people who read this are cisgender. It’s not an insult used by “liberals” or “SJWs” (social justice warriors); it’s a literal description of most of the 100 billion people who have lived and died on Planet Earth. If you feel offended by this label, maybe you need to look at the other letters and see if something fits.

I know this is a lot to take in, and who has time for it? Surely, it’s just better if we pick one or two words and stick with it? Right? Here’s the thing, though. Words have power. Words are used to oppress and suppress. What if I asked you to stick with a label you had no say in. It’s like identifying by the nickname you were called at school.

Through the years of human civilization, humans have considered themselves superior to other species, including animals, by divine right. And because that’s how humans think, we’ve extended definitions of our superiority to make it “scientific” that people themselves are different in some way or another. Foreigners. Women. Slaves. Melanin-rich people in general. There’s a good chance I’ll be accused of saying that the Bible made us racist white misogynists, but there’s an element of truth to it.

A Look Back

By definition we call everything before recorded history “pre-history”, and that just refers to a pre-historic time. It doesn’t specifically mean the time of cave people, though in terms of human pre-history, the cave people are somewhere right near the beginning of that story.

Humans that first looked like us developed around 200,000 years ago. Humans that behaved like us (abstract thought, art, and technology including hunting implements) developed around 50,000 years ago. It took another 10,000 years for modern humans to leave Southern Africa and spread across the world.

The Neolithic period (neo means “new”, lithic means “stone”) started around 12,000 years ago (10,000 BCE). That’s when we figured out agriculture, which in turn caused us to change from a nomadic lifestyle (moving around all the time to find food) to forming settlements. And that is when we started rapidly developing as a species.

Recorded human history goes back to around 5,000 years ago. That’s the time of the Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians, and coincidentally (but importantly), the earliest forms of writing. The Sumerians figured out a way to write on clay tablets, which means a lot of their cuneiform script has survived. Two thousand years before they developed writing (around 5000 BCE), the Sumerians moved to an agricultural lifestyle. They developed mathematics a thousand years after that.

I don’t want to downplay the Sumerian influence on modern humanity. They were one of three civilizations that invented wheeled vehicles (the wheel itself was discovered earlier). They also invented arithmetic, developed writing at the same time as the Ancient Egyptians, came up with a legal system, developed irrigation, and invented new hunting implements and military weapons. As with all human culture, they had a mythology.

To summarise, we had more than 40,000 years of abstract thought until the Bronze Age came along around 6,000 years ago. I don’t know about you, but it’s mind-boggling to me that we have no knowledge of nearly 90% of human history. Except that we do.

Those 40,000 years without writing or staying in one place would have required the sharing of language, ideas, concepts, dangerous plants and animals to avoid, bedtime stories, and history lessons. In other words, mythology developed in different cultures over those years, and with agriculture eventually ushering in the Bronze Age, we had the beginning of the stories that became Sumerian and Egyptian mythology, which in turn influenced European traditions. In fact, a lot of the Bronze Age civilizations are referred to by name in the Hebrew Bible (commonly known as the Old Testament).

Many cultures borrowed from Sumerian mythology in the same way that West Side Story is pretty much the same plot as Romeo and Juliet. It is only in more recent years, relatively speaking, that we consider original ideas to have higher value than copying others. You can thank the printing press for that.

Before writing, there was oral tradition, meaning that a culture’s history, moral code, ethics and knowledge were passed down through word of mouth to younger generations. Some more abstract concepts might be taught through parables or fables, not because it was less intellectual, but because it was easier to remember. Think of the stories your own parents or caregivers taught you. A mythology containing stories of natural spirits and gods might be have started as warnings of dangerous plants and animals, that through human creativity became more colourful over the generations.

With the development of writing, the oral traditions of many pre-historic cultures could be recorded, and those writings could be handed down alongside or instead of the mythology. We have examples of that today. You will teach your children to read and write, but you’ll also tell them jokes and stories you learned from family and friends that have no copies in writing.

But to my original point, writing hasn’t been around all that long, and before that we were only just figuring out agriculture and counting to ten. As it happens, it takes around 10,000 years for human skin colour to change based on where we live relative to the equator. A 2015 study led by Dr Iain Mathieson out of Harvard University discovered that “white people” only developed around 8,000 years ago.

In the history of humankind, being white is so insignificant as to be meaningless. If you’re a white supremacist, you are not only descended from black people anyway, but these ancestors were black because of the sun.

How does this relate to gender? There is a prevailing myth (and as we’ve already established, mythology is very powerful, having been around ten times longer than writing) that there are only two genders. What’s happened at some point is that we conflated sex and gender.

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, our physical sex organs are used to define how we are named and raised, when in fact the only relevance they have is how we procreate. It just so happens that we enjoy the act of smushing these sex organs together in several ways that don’t result in procreation. Add to this a Bronze Age mythology that guilts us into thinking it’s bad to feel good, because 6,000 years ago, humans needed to focus on not getting killed a lot more than they do now.

I get it. Old habits die hard. We’ve been learning for thousands of years about binary systems. If a culture is imposing a mythology on their people in order to grow their civilization, it is understandable why the act of sex is restricted to making more babies that can be taught the traditions of that civilization. But at some point, we took over the planet and conquered nature with indoor plumbing and diesel-powered SUVs. We also have the Internet which connects billions of humans across the planet and allows us to share our stories and create new ones. This is where Tumblr comes in.

Gender and Sex Identity

We are part of a species that has been identifiably abstract and artistic for 50,000 years. We only really started talking about gender being the same as sex in the last few hundred years. Think about that for a moment. What we know now is that gender is not the same as your biological sex organs. We’ve only spent one percent of our time on earth as smart humans talking about gender as a thing, and how it is a part of your personal identity.

But speaking of one percent, here’s something that might blow your mind. Between 1 and 2% of all (yes, all) humans have red hair. There are over 7 billion people alive today, so that’s between 70 and 140 million people with red hair, or as much as one third of the population of the United States.

Did you know that the percentage of Intersex people could be as high as 1.7%? As mentioned in the earlier list, Intersex people have ambiguous physical sex characteristics. It is prevalent enough that medical professionals have developed visual classifications for genitalia that decide whether a baby is “male” or “female”. One of these is the Quigley scale, which defines seven classes between “fully masculine” and “fully feminine” genitalia. Seven does not go into two, so for cultural and social reasons, doctors may perform surgery to make the ambiguity less evident. Parents might be ashamed and not tell their children. And those are just the sex organs you can see at birth. Other people may only discover that they are Intersex when they hit puberty. This doesn’t even cover genetic factors, including people who have more X chromosomes than the average (known as Klinefelter syndrome).

Put simply, there are tens of millions of people alive today who are born with sex characteristics that do not fit the socially acceptable binary of male and female. Just as you know someone with red hair, and irrespective of how you feel about male and female, someone you know was born Intersex.

Gender is a social construct. We are coded to behave in certain ways, prefer certain colours, play certain sports, and take interest in certain things based solely on the genitalia we are born with. Assuming for the moment that these smushy bits are on the left or right side of the Quigley scale, it is nothing more than a cultural habit to define what someone should like or do based on external characteristics. It is the same as saying that a child with red hair should learn the piano.

Interestingly, cultural habits can change, and they do change. Before 1900, pink was considered a masculine colour and blue a feminine colour. This changed in the 1930s and 1940s. As recently as 1953, Americans began associating pink with being feminine. How quickly we forget.

Pink is just a colour, folks. Skin colour literally changed from black to white less than 10,000 years ago. It only took 70 to turn pink into a colour for girls. Children don’t care what genitalia they have. They don’t care what colour you dress them in. They don’t care what the colour of their skin is. Why do you care so much about it?

Diversity, the theme of this book, is not just a word bandied about by people on social media. Humans are a mix of different cultures, colours, genders, sexual orientations, who have likes and dislikes including TV shows and films, food, books, and so on. Some people like the same things, and you might choose to be friends with them. Some people might like different things, exposing you to ways of thinking that you can use to create completely new ideas. You could use parts of Sumerian mythology to come up with a story about a saviour who comes to earth to cleanse the sins of your ancestors. You could use parts of Japanese mythology to come up with a story about a boy from a desert planet who saves a galaxy from a tyrant with the help of a green space wizard.

Diversity is a human thing, which means it’s a messy thing, and labels chosen by other people aren’t helping. If you meet someone who doesn’t conform to gender norms, respect their choice. If we can memorise the name of our favourite Starbucks drink, so too can we accept personal pronouns.

And for goodness sake, let people use the toilets they want to. Every toilet on a plane, on a bus, or in your own home, is gender-neutral. If you’re looking at other people’s sex organs while they’re eliminating, maybe you’re the problem.

Gay

Gender is many things, but one thing it is not, is the basis of sexual orientation. How I identify myself (a choice) has no bearing on who I am romantically or sexually attracted to (not a choice). We can dress it up in terms like “man crush”, but it’s increasingly evident that sexual attraction is not linked to body parts.

This confuses people. It confused me for the longest time. The simple fact is that people are people. If someone identifies as a woman, they are a woman. If they identify as a man, they are a man. Surgery and outward physical appearance don’t define gender, nor should they.

I am sexually attracted to people who identify as men. I am also attracted to really smart people, which has made things awkward once or twice in my 20s after I came out at 19 as “not straight”. As for gender identity, my best label so far is “Randolph”, and if I’m questioned further, “go fuck yourself”.

I dress, walk and talk like a man. For convenience (there’s that word again) I call myself gay. I have the privilege to do so, and I live in a country that accepts this label. People are comfortable with the idea of men living together now, and adding “guilt-free warlock unicorn” isn’t helping anyone outside of my subculture.

I’m the luckiest person I know. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to have all my limbs. Lucky to have almost full control of my mental faculties. Lucky to get paid from time to time to do interesting things. As lucky as I have been in my life, there are millions of people in the world who are less fortunate. As I write this in June 2018, there are still 28 states in the United States of America where it possible to fire someone for the simple fact that they are a part of the LGBTQ community.

Even worse, some countries carry the death penalty for the way someone is born.

So yes, I have privilege. I grew up white during the tail end of Apartheid in South Africa. I was in grade 12 the year Nelson Mandela came to power, so it took a while for the sea change to take effect, and the only challengers for jobs I took were other white people. That’s the very definition of white privilege, when your competition is only 10% of the population. Heck, my second and third jobs were offered to me by friends. Sure, I had to do interviews, but they were tilted in my favour.

The change that came over the country from 1994 was profound. Hardliners expected, perhaps hoped, for a bloody civil war. Somehow, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk managed to broker a mostly peaceful transition to fully democratic rule and were awarded a shared Nobel Peace Prize. The country’s nuclear arsenal was dismantled. South Africa drew up a new constitution with a Bill of Rights that is still one of the best in the world, including protections for gender and sexual orientation. This may seem trivial in 2018 as I write this, but in 1993 when the interim constitution was drawn up it was a big deal, especially on a continent known for its history of human rights abuses.

Given all that, it’s hilarious that a significant percentage of white people are still upset that they are no longer in charge, no longer special, having to compete with ten times the population than before for the same work. And, despite employment equity legislation that tries to improve opportunities for previously disadvantaged people, white people still control a large percentage of the country’s economy. Equality is a noble pursuit, but it requires buy-in from everyone.

I knew I was different growing up. It felt like I was from another planet. I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on at primary school, or the point of it all. I just wanted to read books. When I did participate, I finished the work easily. However, I was bored and easily distracted. I used big words and was made fun of. I was also bullied because I was one of the youngest kids in my class, and small for my age. Kids called me names, some of them unprintable. Teachers would call me bright but lazy. I was labelled as a gifted child and attended pointless gifted child classes after school for a while. My father bragged about my high IQ to his friends.

Up to then I had interpreted “gifted” to mean that I would never have to work hard to achieve success. As it turns out, that was definitely not the case.

My father died a month after Nelson Mandela came to power and my world imploded. After finishing high school and not getting into the universities I was provisionally accepted at due to poor performance, I took a detour into journalism school, but my heart really wasn’t in it. I spent most of my time in the student radio station. Unfortunately, that’s where my interest in my major started and ended.

It was at journalism school where I finally realized at the age of 19 that I was attracted to men, despite knowing since I was ten. University was a rough experience when that information was made available to the people around me. When I came out, I was called a liar by omission, and then threatened to have my heart ripped out, that sort of thing. Masculinity is so fragile.

Here’s a fun fact. South Africa decriminalized homosexuality in 1997. It required a challenge in the Constitutional Court once the constitution was signed into law in 1996. But decriminalizing it doesn’t automatically stop people from hating you. It doesn’t protect you from being murdered for wearing a Pride t-shirt, which happened to the son of a person I knew. In many parts of South Africa, as in the rest of Africa, being perceived as gay is an invitation for violence and a possible death sentence.

I came home from journalism school halfway through 1996, recently outed, and later that month my grandmother died. Eight days later, my second grandmother died. Those were interesting times.

It turns out that I’m on the Autism Spectrum. I was diagnosed as an adult with High Functioning Autism. When I got that diagnosis, it was a revelation. It explains a whole lot, but importantly it explains that I don’t like change, and when I lost two of the most important figures in my life within eight days, I had the first of several meltdowns. My best friend at the time was witness to his friend losing touch with reality and breaking down. I contemplated suicide several times that year. Each time it came back to what it would do to my mother, brother and sister.

This is not a cry for sympathy. This is not a request for solace. I have grieved the loss of family members just as I’m sure you have in your own life. We are not immune to death. I’m writing all of this to explain what happened next.

I’m white. I present as male. I’m autistic. I’m attracted to men. On the one hand, I have the world at my doorstep. On the other, I might be killed because I’m attracted to men, and I guess heterosexual men feel threatened. Is that the basis for all the hate in the world today, men feeling threatened?

Throughout my younger life I tried to fit in better, which was sometimes tough. When I changed high schools, I stopped performing in choir. I became the class clown in order to deflect attention. If someone was laughing at me, they weren’t punching me. I realized that school was a game and figured out how to do the least amount of work for the most recognition.

But after the year of death in 1996, I grew angry. I figured the world owed me something. Then again, if the comment section of the Internet (Twitter) is any indication, anger is a thing that affects many a privileged white kid, so I wasn’t unique. I wasn’t special. It didn’t feel that way at the time. I developed a bite to my humour. One of my friends would say “Be careful you don’t cut yourself on that tongue.”

Through the lens of 41 years, I can see how petulant and entitled I was. Even now I can regress into that frame of mind, and it’s frighteningly easy for me. It takes hard work to be a decent human being. It requires considered thoughtfulness to be kind to others. Most importantly, it requires sheer force of will to apologize for something. Entitlement is an illusion that I was buying wholesale.

Then the best thing happened. I encountered diversity in my own little community. But first, a story.

In 2000, I attended Johannesburg Pride. I didn’t actually march in the parade, mind you. Even so, I went with friends to the event, which was a month later than usual, and it rained. A lot of entitled gay white males (GWM) were unhappy with the planning because maybe the beer tent was too busy or they got a little bit wet during the parade. I don’t remember why I was upset. Entitled as I was, I figured I could do a better job. After all I was a software developer with a small web hosting company on the side. How hard could it be? (“How hard could it be?” is the rallying cry of average white men the world over.)

In late 2000 I joined a committee that eventually organized the 2001 Johannesburg Pride Parade and Mardi Gras, extending Pride to a week-long series of events including a lot of activities that recognized people and contributions outside of the standard GWM mentality of “party, drugs, party, drink, party, sex, party”. I met a lot of people that I normally would never have interacted with. The co-chairs were a black Jamaican lesbian woman and a brown Muslim gay man. For the first time in my life I met militant lesbians complete with short bleach blonde hair and boots, and invited them into my home several times for meetings. It was intense.

Prior to that, my experience of lesbians were mullets who drank beer and played pool at the local gay bars while the “boys” drank cocktails, took ecstasy, and danced to electronic dance music (EDM). And then I joined this committee thinking how I could do a better job and was given a lesson in history and humility.

I learned that the first Pride March in South Africa took place in 1990 (as late as 1990!) and was organized by Simon Nkoli. There were very few attendees because homosexuality was a criminal offence at the time. South Africa had a law that was known colloquially as “two men at a party”. If you had more than two men at a party and not enough women, when the police raided you could be arrested for homosexuality and thrown in prison (or “disappeared”).

South African members of the LGBT community (as it was known at the time) created their own slang called Gayle. Similar in principle to Polari in the UK, women’s names were used as code words. Dora meant “drink”. Beulah meant “beautiful”. Priscilla meant “police”.

This wasn’t the big lesson for me, though. I learned that people of all races participated in the first Pride March, and they wore paper bags over their heads so that they wouldn’t be recognized.

People of all races. Not just white gays from the suburbs looking for a drink and a good time. I learned about Simon Nkoli, who argued that race and sexual orientation were “inextricably linked” and that he couldn’t be free as a black man in South Africa if he wasn’t free as a gay man.

I learned about how women argued and won the right to have the G and L swapped around so that we were LGBT and not GLBT. Men already had everything else, even in our community. I met and spoke with some of the original members of the gay rights movement in South Africa. I got into long arguments (from my place of privilege) with community members who were tired of arguing with young white gays but did so anyway.

I learned about what happened during Apartheid to people who didn’t look and speak like me, who were murdered or “disappeared”.

I realized that I was a small part of a bigger community. I remember discussing the need to hire buses to bring in members of our diverse community to the parade, members who couldn’t afford to pay for transport, members who were not white and privileged. And through it all, it was the militant lesbians who showed the most compassion.

As with all committees, the usual attrition took place. People who were fired up at the start were dropping out due to stress, time constraints, and politics. Every committee is political, and you have to deal with keeping the gays with money happy so that the party (which generates all the revenue to pay for Pride) goes ahead, while still being representative of the entire community. There was a Black Pride contingent that we negotiated with to participate in the parade. There was a long argument about the route the parade would take that was safe to walk through (downtown Johannesburg is considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world), and not too far from the centre of the city which was easy to get to.

A few weeks before the parade was due to go ahead, the non-profit that owned the rights to the Pride name and constitution was dissolved for financial reasons. We suspended the Pride constitution in an emergency meeting, and through sheer force of will managed to keep the event running. Two weeks beforehand we still weren’t sure if it would go ahead, especially with the new Pride Week concept.

I swore after that experience that I would never serve on a committee again, but thankfully that promise didn’t stick. I was given the opportunity to serve on a committee with a shared living history of the LGBTQIA movement in South Africa and Jamaica, and my payoff was leading the 2001 Pride Parade through Johannesburg as a flag bearer (we had a section of the original Pride rainbow flag).

Failing upwards

I am the luckiest person I know. In my first three jobs, I worked for women. Personality conflicts aside (because remember I was an angry person back then), I credit these bosses for being balanced and fair. When I didn’t have a driver’s licence, the second boss appealed to my sensibilities to help me get one and become more independent. One time I screwed up with a major client by leaving a profanity-laden voice mail message, only to have it quoted back to me on Monday morning. The same boss didn’t have to yell or scream, nor did she fire me. Pure class.

In 2004 I left a good job because I was bored, angry, and stupid. After flailing for a few months, I found work as a junior lecturer at a computer college in downtown Johannesburg. A few days a week I would teach Java at a college comprised of non-white students, all of whom were on full scholarships. I discovered my love for teaching in the three months I spent there, and even through depressive episodes, the absolute joy on my students’ faces when I walked into the class was my motivation.

At the start of the following year, following the teaching bug, I took a job as a high school teacher at a prestigious private school in the north of Johannesburg. There’s nothing like earning the equivalent of $500 a month at a school where the annual school fees are $3,500 per student, in an area known for having some of the best horse breeding in Africa. I was teaching computer literacy to rich (mostly white) kids who had computers at home and wanted for nothing.

My life took another interesting turn here. Because I was at a rich school, and not qualified to be a teacher (I only started my Bachelor of Education degree the following year), my subject was not examinable. In other words, the kids were not being tested and they thought they were there to play on the Internet with adult supervision.

I realized really quickly, in the same way that I gamed my own high school experience, that I would lose the kids if I didn’t engage with them in a respectful way.

I created the most expensive contest I could afford. I was earning practically nothing, and my teaching subject was pointless, so I developed a raffle where students could ask me general knowledge questions, and if I didn’t know the answer I would enter them in a draw to win an iPod Shuffle. For all I knew, most of them might even have one at home already, but it worked because I have a pretty good general knowledge. All those years of reading as a child came in very useful. There were obviously a few kids who managed to stump me and that was fine, but the challenge of it was the thing. I earned their respect with my knowledge, and they learned something from their fellow students who tried to stump me.

I learned something in that job, too, ten years into post-Apartheid South Africa. There were around one or two non-white kids per class. Population representation was off by a factor of ten. One of the older girls was there on a scholarship, but most kids were there because their parents could afford it. Ten years in, only rich or lucky kids could get an education with the best resources money could buy. It wasn’t the kids’ fault, but they were still benefiting from a system that was supposed to have been dismantled already.

While I was teaching this fairly banal class, albeit with a great set of students, the headmaster asked me to take on a student who had recently moved from Taiwan and didn’t speak much English. I was to mentor him in Computer Science so that he could improve his English while working in a subject he was good at. At the same time, I was also invited to participate in a Saturday School, where the school provided resources (classrooms and stationery) for underprivileged children from a local township. Aged 11 to 14, these kids would arrive by bus and they would have time with volunteer teachers to learn stuff they might not have been taught at their own school.

I had far more job satisfaction from Saturday School than my actual day job, and when I received an offer to work as a software developer at the end of the school year, I left computer literacy behind, but continued to do Saturday School for another three years.

Ignorance

This is a long way to go to get to the point of this chapter, in a book about diversity. This is not about me. I don’t want accolades for working with underprivileged children. I don’t want recognition for organizing a Pride event. I don’t want a prize for having a positive experience working with women. These are experiences that are personal to me and helped me become more understanding of people in general.

This book is about you, Dear Reader. I’m hoping that relating my experiences can help you gain a new perspective as well. This last section is going to give you some homework, because I’m still a teacher at heart.

People look, speak, and act differently to you, and have different belief systems. Habits, strong opinions, and words in one culture that are forms of endearment, can be deeply offensive to people of other cultures. If the recipient is historically (or currently) oppressed, this becomes a method of control over that recipient.

As residents in an increasingly complex world, we are directly affected by the explosion of the Internet and its ability to allow people from many different cultures to communicate. Learn from them. Diversity and inclusion have been shown in study after study to improve working conditions, encourage innovation, and increase market share and profits. This extends to friends and family. Exposure to new ideas, to different perspectives, makes your own life experience richer. It all starts with how you speak.

Do you know what I hate? I’m turning 42 years old this year. I am an adult in the prime of my life, successful by any measure, extremely lucky (and let’s face it, I look like I’m the right colour and the right gender), but I check myself whenever I want to show my affection to my spouse of almost eleven years in public. Nothing extravagant, mind you. Whispered “I love you”s and air kisses, hugs, holding hands. Any LGBTQ+ couples we see doing that in public is “brave”. Why should it have to be brave, to be wary of ignorance? When I express my love for my husband, it’s not your place to tut-tut and cross the road, mumbling under your breath. You already won.

The term “microaggression” was coined in 1970 by psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, a Harvard professor, to describe the little putdowns that African Americans received regularly from non-black people. Over the years this term has come to refer to (usually subtle) insults and behaviour that denigrates any marginalized group.

This is a list of phrases I’ve heard through my life which hopefully you are now equipped to understand and respond to in a way that is meaningful. These phrases were directed at me personally, so they are specific to my gender expression and sexual orientation. It is a small step to relate them to sexism and racism, all of which stems from ignorance. The better educated you are, the less ignorant you become.

• You don’t look gay.
• It’s just a phase.
• Have you ever tried sleeping with a girl? Maybe that’ll fix you.
• Why does your hair have a centre-parting? It’s effeminate.
• Why do you like that singer? He’s so gay.
• You should drink beer. Cocktails are girly drinks.
• You’re one of the good gays. It’s the flaming queers I can’t handle.
• Be a man.
• That car is for girls.
• You throw like a girl.
• You run like a girl.
• You scream like a girl.
• Why can’t straight people have a Pride Parade?

While the Wikipedia article I took the definition from also cautions against victimhood culture, the items in this list qualify as microaggressions which are insensitive and ignorant in the most generous of readings. And anyway, why is feminine behaviour bad? So what if I run like Caster Semenya, or hit a ball like Melissa Mayeux? Do you have rocks in your head if you think that’s an insult?

The reason I don’t look gay is because I’ve been trying to look and act like everyone else, to avoid micro and macro aggressions from ignorant people. I’M ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES.

I started this chapter with a lesson on race, gender, and sexuality, dipping into human history to give it some context. Gender and sexuality are inextricably linked to race, as Simon Nkoli said. Historically disadvantaged people have faced the same struggles to greater or lesser degrees, and I’m just a small voice in a big world, asking for some consideration of your own humanity.

I don’t buy the argument that “we can’t just say anything anymore because someone will be offended”. We can’t keep slaves anymore. We can’t kill people who steal from us anymore. This is human progress. However, I do accept that there’s a nuance that we are losing in common speech, and that’s entirely the fault of social media, which loves to expose mistakes without any context. Where in the past we could have discussions about things, Twitter and Facebook relentlessly force us to summarize our thoughts in a few characters. Otherwise it’s tl;dr (too long; didn’t read).

We must find a balance between the right to say what we like, and how it affects other people. As children we learn that if we say something that hurts someone, we should apologise. In the same way, if we say something as adults that comes from a place of ignorance, we can no longer say it’s “just a joke”.

It’s fine to make a mistake once or twice, but if a marginalized person or group explains why what we’ve said is wrong, or that it can be easily misconstrued as offensive, we should learn from that and modify our speech. It is no different to learning manners as a child. The right to speak freely does not include the right to be treated politely if we repeatedly say the wrong thing.

Finally, if you want to be an ally for LGBTQ people, you don’t get to be racist. You don’t get to take kids from their parents at the border. You don’t get to conveniently forget that I’m a foreigner because I look like you. And please think before you speak.