Post

I want to talk a little bit about fear, considering it's something I wrote a book about. One thing I heard about in the lead up to this event was about fear - that people are afraid of what Hasan being here meant, that they're afraid of his "rhetoric," and that we should respect that fear.

I'm intimately familiar with fear - not just because I had an anxiety disorder for nearly two decades, but with the fear of my rights being taken from me, and the fear other people have of me and my friends existing in their spaces as trans people.

But I've also learned that when I am acting out of fear, I am not my best self. I am not guided by my moral compass - I'm guided by terror and trying to make whatever is scaring me stop. Fear is, at base, irrational.

I think it is importance to wrestle with the complexity of a person's fear. I remember when I realized I was passing as a man and how that changed my relationship to the cis women around me. Two months after top surgery, I was in LA for a book promotion thing.

I was still getting used to my new chest, and was in LAX for a red eye flight back to Minneapolis. I used the women's restroom, and was washing my hands. A woman walked in, saw me, and stepped back outside to check that she'd entered the right room. She was scared of me.

The thing that made me finally switch to using the men's room - which I was afraid to do!!! - was another airport time. My friend's car had died while parked at the airport, so I came over and helped him jump it. While we were working on that, I went inside to pee. Again, used the women's room.

I fully respect that primal emotion that people feel upon seeing me - a person they perceive as a man - in the "wrong" space. I sometimes find it a little amusing. But I've also had to square that with my own very real fear of being confronted about it with violence.

I think a lot of politics, *especially* amongst centrist Dems, is based in fear. It's different types of fear depending on who you ask, but there's a lot of it going around - fear of losing power, fear of going too far left that you lose elections, fear of things changing and being uncertain...

...and there's a primal fear in those who have always been in the position of the oppressor that the oppressed will treat them the same way they've been treating the oppressed. That's the fear of the tyrant.