Bigotry Reloaded
What living in the countryside has taught me
We’re driving around with nothing to do, which is what all teenagers in the country do. We think we’re going to buy snacks, or see people we don’t like, or fill up the car for the rest of the weekend, but really we’re trying to go somewhere that we’ll never reach. There’s a lot of driving and loud music for a lot of nothing. My boyfriend is always driving because I don’t have my licence yet. I’m always in the passenger’s seat, watching endless fields go past through the window. I’m young, bisexual, and bored. Other queer people are hard to come by. All the boys we meet joke about those who “take it up the bum”. There’s a lesbian couple at my school consisting of two girls younger than me, and I’m vaguely aware they’re getting bullied for it. I don’t personally know them, but I recognise their faces. I try to smile at them in the hallway. I feel detached from them, from everything I could be.
I never really came out, I simply let everyone in on the process of me discovering who I was. In hindsight, it seems like a mistake. I never got into trouble, never had to face everyone I loved to make a nerve-wrecking announcement, but I never had the opportunity to present them with my identity and be explicitly accepted, either. It was all about which celebrities I liked and adjusting my language when it came to future significant others and spouses. It was about my mother overhearing me talk to my best friend about kissing girls. It was having the same conversations with my boyfriend over and over again because I was desperate to be acknowledged. I never faced true hatred, I just got increasingly exasperated about homophobic jokes. I felt invisible. The closer I got to finishing school, the more I started dreaming about university, imagined it to be a queer haven where I could come into my own and meet more people than I could begin to count. Where I could dress the way I wanted and be admired for it and kiss girls. Even though I loved my boyfriend, in a stereotypical way I resented him. I didn’t feel seen while I was with him. Even though I was anxious, I was also desperate to leave.
Having acquired my two degrees, I ended up having to move back in with my parents, back into the same village. I took a job a five minute walk away from our house. I’d spent years in an academic bubble — taking Women’s Studies and Queer Studies whenever I could, going to protests and parties, carrying a banner at Pride, discovering new parts of my identity — and felt prepared to attack systemic bigotry on all fronts. I wasn’t prepared, however, to face up with what it looked like every single day, out of the mouths of people who were right next to me, who had power over me. It started small, at first. My coworkers, all relatives, were telling the youngest in their midst she would get slapped by her father if she dared to cut her hair short. It only got worse from there. “Foreigners get everything handed to them”, was a popular one. I tried to take that one down without the nuance about immigration and the refugee crisis I’d been taught to keep in mind in my courses about teaching language. A Black man worked with us for a few months, and it seemed an absolute sensation when he first started. “Don’t be shocked,” my coworker said when I came in, hesitant to even say out loud the reason why she thought I would be. He was bullied from then on, left behind when we went on break, barked at. In turn, I tried to joke around with him in English, joke about the others being crazy. He didn’t last long. A lady tried out for a day after he’d left. Completely appalled by me and my coworker mock-flirting, she called my supervisor later that day. “Did you know that you have lesbians working for you? You should shut that down.” While I kept making it clear the entire time I was bisexual, spitefully coming out time and time again, it never seemed to matter. A regular coworker called me a lesbian behind my back, spitting out the word like it was an insult. I confronted her, she denied having said anything like a mean girl on a playground. The list goes on. Transphobia, xenophobia, racism. Sometimes I speak up, sometimes I don’t, because I get tired of defending my existence. I get tired of seeing them absolutely convinced they’re right. Of their shocked faces when I say that being trans is not a choice. It runs so deep that I often run out of words. These are things, though, we’d do well not to ignore. This is one of the faces of the system, the way it manifests in the middle of nowhere, or, more accurately, in so many people’s heads. This is why we keep saying visibility matters. We know why and how these opinions come to pass, but they remain dark theory until they happen to touch us somehow. It’s not a fight I would ever demand everyone fight, that’s simply too harmful for everyone to bear. But if you can, and if you’re forced to remain in a certain situation, if it touches you, be the person who stays spitefully visible.
