In this essay I use the word ‘sin’. I’ve gotten feedback that this has valences for many Americans that it simply doesn’t have for me, but I also cannot come up with a better word for what I’m getting at: an act that is seen by a community as being in some sense against that community, rather than in any religious sense. In the sense I’m using it, it’s contextual: what is a sin to the church may be quite the opposite in the queer community, and vice versa.
Forgive me, for I have sinned. And I am afraid.
To be human is to sin. Some sin greatly, and some sin lightly. Some repeat their sins, some learn from them. Some realise that they sin, and some do not. Some must choose between two sins. We all sin.
And I have sinned. I do not know how greatly, or how often, or whether I have learned, because I do not know how many of them I recognised. Sometimes I think I have learned, and then I hurt someone again. Sometimes they tell me, and this is a gift. Some of those times, I understand. Some of those times, it takes years.
We form ourselves into communities, subgroups with common contexts and experiences and views of the world. And those communities have their own idea of what is a sin, how severe each sin is, how it should be dealt with. And which people might plausibly commit which sins.
And so I am afraid.
Community is vital to us. Community is a lifeline. Without social contact we hurt badly, without friends to help us through tough times we lose a great deal of safety. Without people willing to interact with us at all, we would quickly starve. When we perceive someone has sinned grievously enough, we withdraw our friendship and support. We talk of their sin, and collectively they are marginalised from our communities.
Community is about who we are: not just individually, but as a part of a collective. We share musical tastes, clothing styles, in-jokes, jargon, and our sense of what is just and right. This can scale up to an entire culture and down to a friendship group or a family, and we are members of all of these concurrently. To be an exile is a mighty blow.
For those of us in marginalised groups – such as trans folks – we understand the pain of exile. Many of us have come out and found that being transgender is, in some of our communities, a sin. We find ourselves excluded, and sometimes we slowly reintegrate as the community renormalises its notion of how deep a sin we have committed. Our smaller communities are informed by our larger culture, and our larger culture has a consensus which looks down upon us.
Therefore, we find our way to pockets of community which do accept us, and exist in a world which in the large does not. Often, we find community among those who are just like us. We support each other, and create a small and fragile bubble of safety where we can shield each other from the ravages of the outside world.
We’re already sinners to them. They’ll easily believe other sins of us than those marked as in-group. We are denied shelter and work and safety. We are denied credibility. It is a part of the process of being pushed out of the community of our larger culture. To fall out of the culture is almost to be an unperson, to be set upon a downhill slope that leads to jail or destitution. Our fates do not matter to the in-group, and we are extremely vulnerable: if we sin against them, we are punished severely. If they sin against us, we are disbelieved and they are not punished severely.
And so we hold our space, and we developed an ontology of these mechanisms and how they play out. We deliberately give special credence to those talking about being sexually assaulted, because we know that a great deal of the time victims are disbelieved. In the greater culture to accuse someone with more status of rape is a sin and treated as an unmerited attack on their status. We deliberately work against this dynamic, because pushing a victim out the safety of our community both deprives them of support they desperately need and signals that perpetrators have social cover.
We attempt to take what we have learned and apply where we, instead, are the group with power. We consider it a sin to provide cover for a dangerous person and to discredit someone in a more vulnerable out-group. That my communities can be starkly undiverse, and particularly starkly white, is a testament to how terribly bad we can be at this. This includes me: I am bad at this.
We exist in a small and fragile bubble of safety from mainstream culture, and we do our best to understand and counter the forces that would split us apart, and we try to make headway into that mainstream. We understand the dynamics which do this to us, and yet we inevitably duplicate them. We still treat ourselves, or other marginalised communities, as less credible. We still hold ourselves to a higher standard when we know it’s dangerous: we scrutinise Caitlyn Jenner more closely than we would a cis woman saying the same things.
And we reproduce power dynamics within our tiny bubble. There are still more powerful folks, and less powerful folks. There are those with more credibility and less, and those with less credibility are more vulnerable whether or not that lack of credibility is justified. And so we still have the same problems that we face from outside: some folks like to accumulate power, and some like to use that power to their advantage.
We fight so hard to keep ourselves safe that we will quickly push out anyone deemed to be a danger. When we do, we push them out into a world where they are no longer a part of a community, and whether powerful or not in our communities they are suddenly facing the roar of pressure we try so desperately to shield each other from. We should be mindful that to exile someone is to remove the safety of community and expose them to the full force of that social violence, and accept that as a consequence when we do. And we should be mindful that when we repeat a rumour about someone that we have not ourselves substantiated, or worse, is so vague as “she’s problematic”, that we are contributing our tiny part to the collective shove.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that no sin merits that shove; I simply fear that we can be quick to make our small contribution to a large social punishment for far lesser sins.
Worse: I fear that we reproduce the problems we are trying to avoid, but more subtly. Our communities are a nested fractal of human nature, and as we attempt to make a norm of ignoring the broken morals from the greater culture which is hostile to us we still encode many of the ideas and reactions that cause those problems. We have a different set of tools, but a malicious individual can just as well pick up those tools and have the same effect: to harm a more vulnerable person and receive social cover if they’re called out on it.
It seems like damn near every allegation of abuse has a counter-allegation, and it becomes impossible to detangle the entire dynamic as a third party. So we stand by our friends, as perhaps we should, and sometimes we fracture our communities right down the middle as we do so.
And so we exist in the fractal fragment that our larger society struggles with: some people sin, and some people know how to get away with sin or deflect sin onto an innocent party for their own purposes. And when we react to that sin, we can never be sure of whether we have done the right thing, in the right proportion, to the right person.
All I know is: I have sinned and hurt people, and I believe and hope that the extent of that is only so large as to harm a friendship until we can work through the problem. I feel vulnerable, because my allegiance to my community is strong but theirs to me can be broken, just as I can break my ties to another member on the say-so of a friend.
It feels like the security theater of community safety. I wish I knew how to detangle the knot. Until then, I want to keep my community safe from the ravages of the outside world. I want to do my part to break down those power relations that push folks to the margins for utterly inconsequential “sins”, such as being in other marginalised communities too.
Most of all, I want to catch in myself, every time before I commit it, that sin of perpetuating power dynamics and of being a part of a process that harms one of my sisters by pushing her into invisibility without being very, very clear of the decision I am making.
I feel constantly as though I am walking a tightrope between enabling abuse and enabling a more subtle kind of abuse by being a useful idiot. I wish I knew how to detangle all of this.
