[Part 72 in a continuing series titled "Katy is self-obsessed and oversharing again."]
I was bullied by a teenage boy yesterday. That hasn't happened for a while.
It was just a little en passant misgendering while I was waiting to cross the road. "Hello Mister," he called, in that unmistakably nasty tone, as he cycled by. And immediately I was cast back to the school playground.
I'm working on a theory that bullying is far more prevalent in socially, ethnically, and culturally homogenous communities. Bullying (as opposed to common or garden violence or provocation) becomes more absurdly futile as communities become more inclusive; you can't humiliate someone for failing to adhere to a comprehensive and universal set of social norms that doesn't exist.
In homogenous communities, one might think that the bully will be chronically in want of a target, but in fact it is quite the reverse. It is always possible to redefine normality more narrowly in order to meet the demand from bullies for aberrant freaks.
This is why I live where I do. Carlton South is not all that diverse — absent the uni students, it's wall-to-wall dotty old ladies — but the inner North in general is comfortingly accommodating. I would wager it's a place where only a bigot could feel themselves a misfit. (This is why public housing is so essential: to stop such sanctuaries becoming a gentrified simulacrum of diversity.)
The last time I got any *-phobic abuse was less than a month before I took a one-way plane trip to Melbourne. I was climbing the stairs to my flat one evening after work, when sailing across the carpark came the cry "Poof!" from some neighbour or other. Which was a) curious since I was still in the closet, b) untrue since I'm as heterosexual as any woman could be (or so it seems, much to my surprise), and c) quaintly weak sauce, insult-wise.
In much of contemporary Australia, "you poof" could be somewhere between a mild rebuke and a term of endearment, perhaps delivered with a smile to cloak embarrassment when a friend has just done you a kindness — because of course saying "thank you" would be a little too poofy.
Still, this was Sawtell, where (apart from tele-commuting seachangers with laptops) men are still real men, wore shorts and thongs year-round in all weather, and have skin with the colour, texture, and odour of a vintage and well-worn brown leather hat. Nevertheless the taunt didn't land with the intended force. I was just grateful that I had my plane ticket and had secured the "backhaul" services of a truckie (shorts and thongs, walnut-stained skin, etc.) who would take what was left of my worldly goods to a self-storage facility in North Melbourne.
However bullying from a teenager stings, partly because one thinks of children as unfiltered truth-tellers yet to learn the finer points of propriety; partly because they are so practiced at finding the weak points in their victims' armour; but mostly because when one has been an adolescent in an environment of pervasive casually delivered humiliation, it really doesn't matter how long you've been living with dignity as an adult human being of recognised worth. All it takes is a single well-pitched insult to make you feel exposed as a ridiculous, contemptible fraud.
If I had access to a time machine and a lifetime supply of estradiol, I would jolly well use them. Temporal paradoxes be damned. I would be more than happy to let this old lady wink out of existence if I could spare that poor girl decades of inexplicable distress.
As it is, I'm a fifty-five-year-old teenager. It's very difficult to explain to anybody who hasn't experienced it. I look like I've been around the block more than a few times, and I fear others often set their expectations of me accordingly, but really I've just been sitting in the gutter watching the world go by, trying to avoid unwanted attention.
I don't know how to do many things that most people consider trivial. I'm desperate to stretch my wings, but don't want to leave my comfort zone to do it. I'm tired of working alone, living alone, being alone. Tired of being ashamed for wanting the perfectly ordinary satisfactions of life that most people want.
I am not, as I assumed for so long, uniquely undeserving. It is not grossly impudent of me to have needs.
I should be able to express delight and admiration for the people in my life who I consider delightful and admirable, without feeling as though it would be outrageous hubris to expect that anybody might care about how I felt about them.
People can be so lovely and brilliant.
I don't like to play favourites, but my heart sings whenever I see a trans person in the street. Knowing how much, at minimum, they had to get through makes every single sighting a celebration of a glorious triumph. (I know transdar isn't a thing, and there's a fair chance that sometimes I'm cheering an unusually tall cis woman, but as a vertically ample person myself, I can say that's also a marvellous thing to carry off with grace and poise, and well worthy of recognition.)
I don't understand people who feel threatened rather than comforted by human diversity. I mean I understand in principle how weird, pseudoscientific, tribal thinking coheres into a self-consistent worldview. I just don't know how you can walk down a street full of ordinary people going about their business and genuinely feel that you see menace and insidious corruption of the nation's purity everywhere you look.
I was very disappointed by something Alexei Sayle said recently, as he's a lovely fellow of impeccable moral credentials. On his podcast, in the context of a row within Jeremy Corbyn's "Insert Policy Here Party" over trans rights, Alexei mumbled something conciliatory about the need to accommodate the "socially conservative" working class.
I have given it some considerable thought, and I honestly can't come up with a sensible definition of the term "social conservative" that would make it anything but a synonym for "bigot". I asked around my Fediverse parasocial circle, which is probably a skewed sample, but I can at least say that a sizeable population of neurodiverse trans women with a background in IT and a fondness for cats was better able to find a distinction than I.
So ultimately, I have to say that if you're willing to march alongside Nazis, I don't much care what your relationship to the means of production is. You've forfeited your place at any table I'm sitting at until you've reconsidered your position on equal rights.
I am fretting about this sort of thing at the moment, as the next March for White Australia will be strutting and sneering its way through the Melbourne CBD in less than a week's time. Then a week later I will be visiting the Shire to check up on Mum.
I always fall into a funk for about a fortnight after seeing the nightmarishly familiar landmarks of my youth. Coming so hard on the heels of a parade of thousands of obnoxious bigots through my home, chaperoned by Nazis and police (not mutually exclusive classes), I can't imagine I will be very pleasant to be around when I get back.
So I need to get my act into gear and start doing something positive for the forces of love, decency, kindness, and all the other social ills that threaten to destroy civilisation as we know it (and about time, too). It's a bit overwhelming.