Doing The Right Thing

On the slow burn of disillusionment.

I’m still working on a piece about exiting Gray Tribe, but here are some immediate thoughts on disillusionment.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about activism, idealism, and when they do more harm than good. Trying to pinpoint the exact moment that I caught the activism bug.

My formative media diet had a lot to do with it: Star Trek: The Next Generation was a centerpiece. Simplistic morality plays that often painted things very black and white; some things were wrong, and someone needed to do something about them.

It wasn’t until I found myself in drug policy activism that I was able to start putting that moral code into action. I came in at a time later in the activism cycle; aside from police, conservative politicians, and people with financial incentives in maintaining prohibition, the battle for hearts and minds was won.

It was baby activism that gave me a lot of unrealistic expectations, but it felt so good.

I was doing the right thing as a policy expert, and the collective we of good actors in the industry were doing the right thing in pushing forward radically progressive policy.

After that, the right thing was usually something to do with trans rights or feminism. It’s when I first started learning that just doing the right thing wasn’t enough, sometimes it matters more whether you did it in the right way.

It’s been very difficult for me to navigate transition and womanhood, in the midst of a slew of world changing events over the past few years. It felt like being in the roughest part of a whirlwind of chaos, and layers of gray have been piled onto the relatively black and white world I used to live in.

Amongst all that gray, I tried to keep a solid moral compass. To me, the wrong things were still pretty self-evident. I tried to never look the other way on something if I had a choice.

I fought to get women of colour speaking opportunities at conferences, and got some predictable friction. It was my first exposure to right and wrong ways of doing things.

I eventually was labelled with the words that follow women who do things in the wrong way. Difficult. Demanding. I really didn’t care at the time, because my policy expertise usually won out over the peanut gallery.

Then, I fell into a few secret worlds. No one told me about the way things were not to be done in them.

I regret every piece of writing I’ve ever done around negative experiences that I’ve had. They were the right things to do, and I’d do them again, but the changes they brought to me were mostly negative ones.

I’m told I’m brave often; I think I can also be pretty stupid.

Writing about a violent shove, a grope, someone throwing a drink on me, and general harassment probably was stupid. Bravery isn’t conducive to acceptance. I think illusory acceptance would have been better than nothing during some very vulnerable moments.

I thought it was wrong that all these things happened to me, so the obvious right thing was to say it. I used to think that not playing the same game as most other people was an advantage.

I truly did not give a fuck whether people thought I was demanding or whatever other word they want to use. I dislike the metaphor of ‘game’ in general, as it’s used to justify all kinds of horrendous shit from various intelligentsias.

The worst of those games were what I often found myself subject to: Gatekeepers purposely fucking with you, up to and including assault, to see if you were going to obey their social structures.

It’s a game that other trans women have told me goes on in their secret worlds. In retrospect, I wish I had just done Ayahuasca or whatever else would have been required to make the humiliation not feel so bad. Or that someone had told me a lot of those invites were contingent on not being difficult.

If I were to write So You’ve Labelled As Difficult, the first chapter would be the only chapter. People with money and power can be the most mercurial, flighty humans on the face of the planet and the sea of humans in a room will still part when they walk in.

If you are a trans woman and are running a unicorn, the most virulent transphobes will still beg to be on your cap table. If you can get fuck you money and/or power, none of the games matter. You get to write the rules to the games other people play.

Owing to my love of writing, most of doing the right thing for me has been writing about things. That’s become pointless, at least in this political environment. After the election, people in some tech-adjacent group chats I was in were celebrating Elon Musk using his wealth to influence the election results.

The right thing doesn’t matter anymore, if it ever did. Now, it’s about how much influence you can wield. I think any discussions about doing the right thing in any impactful context are utterly meaningless if you don’t have the fuck you capital to back it up.