Good Queer News: Unexpected Allies!
We've become hard wired to view ourselves as constantly expecting an "us" vs "them". When you spend time looking around, those lines get a whole lot blurrier.
Everybody loves a team sport—sometimes, we love it a little too much. No, I’m not talking about Eagles fans trashing their city to grieve a Super Bowl defeat, I’m talking about social media.
Many of us find ourselves frequently frustrated at how “everyone is just so divided/polarized/angry/etc. these days”, and it makes sense that it feels that way! Our feeds show constant battles on a hundred fronts at once: all those for or against a certain candidate, pro- or anti- a certain issue, members of a group that is hated by and hates in turn a different group. Over time (much like frogs slowly boiling in a pot of water), we’ve adapted to what it means to live in a digital warzone: I expect my algorithm to show me content from “my teams”, and I try my best to avoid even opening the frontlines (also known as the comment section of doom) for the bloodbath I know I’ll find lurking beneath most posts I see. When I finally close the app, I leave feeling like I barely survived.
We’re all quiet veterans of this ongoing digital battle, and it becomes harder and harder for us to shake the feeling that whether we’re online or offline, things all boil down to a loving us and a hateful them. I felt that way for a long time, too, reader. Then, I went outside. I went out into my community in St. Louis, Missouri. I went to production warehouses in tiny communities and churches in rural Georgia and time and time again when I expected to find “them”, I found “us”. Maybe it wasn’t always in the shape or form I was used to, but every time I went somewhere expecting to find pure, unadulterated hate, I found instead confusion, curiosity, misinformation, or fear; I found people with queer family members who were ready to learn more and people who firmly adopted a “live and let live” policy. In short: Where I went expecting some kind of villain, I found a messy bundle of humans being human.
As it turns out, once I put my phone down and started searching for good people, and expanded my definition of good to include those who wanted to do better, even if they weren’t exactly sure how, I started finding them everywhere. Now, I’m not here to wax poetic about the dangers of social media. I know that you’re here because you need a reason to unclench your fists, a reason to inhale and exhale allll the way out, a reason to keep on hoping, and boy howdy have I got that for you!
So take my hand, friend. This week, we’re going out into the world to see just how many of “us” there are.
For this week’s Good Queer News Report, here are just a few of the many stories of our allies showing up for us!
First, some surprising political allies!
On September 3rd, 160 high-profile democrats filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in opposition of Tennessee’s gender affirming care ban. This didn’t come as a surprise. What did, however, was the 31 high-profile republicans who filed a separate amicus brief on the same day, also in firm support of transgender young people.
Source: NBC News (September 4th 2024)
If you’re shocked by this, it may delight you even further to know that this fits into a long-running pattern of more and more republicans taking a firm stance against their party’s devastating focus on taking away the rights of transgender young people. These stances have varied from privately challenging their colleagues all the way to making game-changing votes preventing various anti-LGBTQ+ legislation from going into effect, as we saw with an Arizona ballot initiative in February and an attempt to override a governor’s veto in Kansas this April.
Even when we aren’t able to block these challenging laws from going into effect, there are good people everywhere who are refusing to follow them or are working tirelessly to minimize their harm and eventually defeat them. In Oklahoma, for example, the education chief told schools they had to teach the bible, but over five dozen major school districts are refusing to do so (Source: LGBTQ Nation, August 5th 2024). Now, 21 Republican state legislators are calling for an impeachment investigation against him (Source: LGBTQ Nation, August 14th 2024). In Utah, where a bounty-hunter style anti-trans bathroom bill was passed, the republican state auditor has posted multiple videos slamming the state legislature for making him a “bathroom monitor” and calling them out for avoiding legislative action that would actually keep women and girls safer. His office has received over 12,000 hoax complaints since the reporting form opened. (Source: Fox13 Utah, May 14th 2024).
These laws aren’t just unethical, folks. They’re unpopular and often unenforceable. Yes, they are scary and awful and bringing so much harm upon our community, but they are never, ever, the end of the fight.
Now, a few of my favorite stories from this week of regular human beings showing up with kindness and compassion for the trans folks around them.
When it comes to trans people and sports, many of us mentally jump right to the aggressive hate that transgender athletes like Lia Thomas (or even cisgender athletes like Imane Khelif) face. This week, a story to remind us that even if people on social media are cooking up a storm of online hate, people out in the actual world usually are trying their best to be kind.
Transgender Paralympian, Valentina Petrillo, said that despite facing outside hate from figures like JK Rowling, the olympic village was an incredibly welcoming community, and all the online hate amounts to nothing more than fear-mongering.
Source: NBC Out (September 10th 2024)
Many of us know and love the comedian Will Ferrell. I loved him in charming roles like Buddy the Elf, and his delightfully satirical CEO in Barbie. His most famous movies, though, are films like Anchorman and Talladega Nights. Movies that are cult classics, especially for straight men across the country. His newest film, though, might take all of us by surprise. Will and Harper is an intimate, comedic documentary about himself and his best friend, Harper Steele, who transitioned to female after they’d known each other for 30 years. They decide to take a road trip, just the two of them, across the country to explore this new chapter of their friendship and what it means to be a transgender American right now.
From what I’ve seen through countless rewatches of this trailer, Will Farrell is showing up unashamedly as an ally for Harper while asking her (and himself) some pretty significantly deep questions. Yes, it will be beautiful for many of us to see a story with so much love, but for his biggest fans, particularly the aforementioned straight male ones? To look out at their world of Dave Chappelles and masculinity influencers and be presented with a path towards compassion? That has the potential to be earth shattering.
I highly recommend checking out the trailer.
From what I can tell, it’ll only be in theaters THIS WEEKEND and then on Netflix on the 27th, so grab your tickets folks!!
Thank you!
That’s all I have for you this week, but there’s always more good news where that came from! I’m so, so grateful to all those of you who have subscribed and have helped to share this newsletter with the people in your life. If there’s anyone you think could use an extra dose of good news in their life, it would mean a lot to me if you would help spread the word!
Until next week, keep looking for the “us” out there.
Together in Hope,
Ben