I Progressed

Howdy, folks. So in my thirty-odd years of life, I’ve had many opportunities to learn, grow, examine myself, and to change my beliefs. Unfortunately, I’ve also had many opportunities to fuck up and believe, say, and do horrible things. I’m a big believer in owning up to and admitting past wrongs; it’s important to remember that none of us are perfect and that we’ve all erred, some more than others. I also want to make it clear that I’m in no way saying I’m perfect now, either; I still regularly screw up and I’m sure I believe, say, and do things now that I’ll regret in the future. I’ve talked a bunch on Twitter about this, but I figured it’d be good to organize my thoughts and put them all in one place. I’m going to be fairly blunt in this article, so trigger warnings apply for transphobia, homophobia, racism, and probably several other things as well.

Before I begin, it’s important to talk about my background. I’ve already written about my experience with child abuse, my experiences with being diagnosed mentally ill, and so forth, but there’s a bit more I need to talk about. To say that I grew up in a … regressive environment would be putting it lightly. I was raised in an extremely right-wing, conservative home and school environment. I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh from the age of three. I regularly watched FOX News and read Ann Coulter books growing up. I used to watch Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity — all of the top names in conservative media. I grew up being taught that homosexuality was evil, that people are poor because they were lazy and deserved it, and that women were inferior to men. I grew up with extremely limited sources of information, well before social media like Twitter and Facebook existed to connect me with people who weren’t like me. I bring this up not to make excuses for my behavior and beliefs in the past, but to provide context for why I behaved and thought this way.

I was a pretty typical right-winger in a lot of ways. I was opposed to welfare programs of most stripes, believing them to be wasting money on “lazy” folks who didn’t put the effort into building good lives for themselves. I looked down on those who received minimum wage and government benefits, having a typical Republican view of them as “parasites” on the middle class and those who had “bootstrapped” themselves up. I thought most entitlement and welfare programs should be cut and that taxes should be lowered for specifically the middle and upper classes, as I believed “low income people don’t pay taxes anyways.” I felt incredibly entitled to my upper middle class lifestyle, believing I had somehow “earned” it and was more deserving than those who didn’t have access to the privileges I enjoyed. I assumed that people who didn’t have access to them didn’t deserve them or they and their parents didn’t work hard enough.

While I never quite bought into the “homosexuality is evil” spiel from my religious upbringing, I did have a lot of latent homophobia and biphobia, viewing it as “weird” and also believing businesses and the government had the “right” to discriminate against gays and lesbians. I basically had the attitude that I wouldn’t discriminate, but it was okay if others did. I was also extremely transphobic. I very much believed that what was between your legs defined what your gender was. I once told a friend back in 2009 or so that transgender people were “lying to themselves” and “if they want to wear a dress, fine, but that doesn’t make them a woman.” I also said that it’d be acceptable for businesses to discriminate against them in terms of both service and employment.

I also was a latent racist. I used to believe that slavery and Jim Crow were “a long time ago” and that people who complained about them or wanted reparations were just greedy individuals who were “race baiting.” I used to believe that ‘black on black’ crime was a real thing and that much –if not all- of the plight of the black community was due to misdeeds and a lack of responsibility from its members. I was also a big fan of ‘respectability politics’; I thought that it was incumbent on people of different races to “fit in” and “get along” with white people, and that those who didn’t do this were responsible for any discrimination against them that might occur.

I was also a hardcore anti-feminist. I believed that women had already achieved parity with men in every sense. In fact, I was a firm believer that until women had to register for selective service, that they had more rights than men did. I thought the wage gap was false. I thought feminists were a bunch of whiners who wanted more rights than men, screaming into the void about pointless little things. I used to be anti-choice; oh sure, I believed that abortion was “okay” — but only up until a certain point. I thought that it was fair to have waiting periods, to ban it after 22 weeks or so, and to have plenty of other restrictions. I also heavily judged people who did get abortions, viewing them as irresponsible people who “should have used protection.” I also was a “nice guy”; I thought that women seemed to only like jerks, but that I wasn’t a jerk (I was), and thus that I was owned companionship of some nature. I hate to say it, but if GG had started several years ago, I probably would have been a member.

Online harassment is another thing I used to engage in. I had a lot of people I didn’t like, and I would engage in the most vicious attacks possible against them. Attacking their looks, their upbringing, their personality, making rape jokes — you name it, I’d do it. I have absolutely no defense for any of this — everything I did was reprehensible and out of line, and I’d give anything to go back and change it, but I can’t. All I can do is apologize and try to be a better person in the future. It’s a hard thing to look back at your past actions and self and to realize how disgusting they — and you — were. I perceived any and all opposition to me as a threat, and I responded accordingly, using tactics that I learned while growing up dealing with bullies: fighting fire with fire. Many of the people I argued against and harassed were horrible people themselves, but that does not excuse my actions in the past. If anything, it makes me regret my actions more: maybe I could have reached some of these people if I’d have known then what I do now and if I had been more patient and compassionate with them.

So, how did I change from all of this? Years of hard work. When I got into grad school, I became exposed to a lot more information than I had been previously about things like the wage gap or abortion rights. While this was going on, I also started being active on social media on both YouTube and Twitter, which further exposed me to more information and people different than myself. One of the primary things I learned was simply to shut the fuck up and listen to people talking to me. I got over my transphobia by actually engaging with and listening to what some trans people had to tell me about their lives. It’s amazing what you can learn if you’re willing to shut your mouth and listen.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate that people saw past my many, many flaws and gave me a chance. People were willing to sit down with me and educate me on topics I was totally and completely ignorant of. People would have long conversations with me about issues, spending their own time to explain things to me that I either didn’t get or didn’t care to get at the time. It’s taken a long time for me to shed the artifacts of my upbringing and to become a (hopefully) better person. It’s not always easy; I often find myself very tempted to lapse into old behaviors, to be an unrepentant jerk to people when I’m confronted. It’s something I struggle with every day, and I imagine something I may always struggle with. I’m just eternally grateful to those who gave me a chance to learn and to grow and didn’t immediately write me off like I probably deserved.