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A few weeks ago, I participated in a workshop on youth mental health.
I'll probably write more about that another time, but the short and snappy is that it's designed to help adults who work with young people recognize when those young people are facing a mental health challenge so they can provide support, offer resources, have those difficult conversations, etc. It's an important skill set to have, and I'll be able to utilize it in my professional and volunteer work, as well as with friends and family.
The training was a tough six-hour day, though, learning emotionally hard skills, talking through challenging scenarios, and having our own difficult conversations, and in the middle of it, I was pretty excited to eat the catered lunch of pizza and salad and small-talk with my table mates. One of my table mates was from my same town, so we chewed over the perennial topic of road construction and how to avoid it, and why our town doesn't have certain restaurant chains when it definitely should (Donato's is DELICIOUS!). Another table mate also homeschooled, it turned out, and also teenagers, which is a scenario VERY rare on the ground around here, so I was super stoked to chat about homeschooling with this person, until they said said that one of the reasons they were homeschooling was... and then they said something transphobic.
It wasn't even important that what they said was factually wrong on a lot of fronts. Drag queens aren't the same thing as trans people, drag queen story time isn't a drag show, and I bet my life that there aren't drag queen story times happening in Indiana public schools. Wrong people are just gonna wrong.
The important part is that in reply to this transphobic statement, I. Said. Nothing. I can pretty much guarantee that I looked horrified, because I FELT horrified and my family regularly chides me for not having a poker face. But I didn't SAY anything. I blinked a couple of times, sneaked a look at my other table mate (who was studiously ignoring us because this conversation was entirely Not Her Circus), took an awkwardly large bite of pizza, and then practically shouted "Thank you, Jesus!" out loud when the moderator said it was time to get started with the afternoon session.
It ruined the entire afternoon, which was already sucky on an emotional level. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, couldn't concentrate on the material as well as I had in the morning, took a couple of extra bathroom breaks, and bolted at the end of the day.
Later that night, I confessed to my family what had happened, and they tried to help me workshop some things I could have said, or could say the next time. Because this is the other thing: people say shit like this to me surprisingly often. I know why, too.
It's because I homeschool.
And it doesn't even come from people who don't know anything about homeschooling--those people ask me about socialization, and how will my kids get into college, and they're super easy for me to blow off. The people who casually say homophobic shit to me are ALWAYS other homeschoolers, and it's always because they've simply assumed that as a homeschooler, I'm also homophobic, transphobic, of a certain specific set of religious sects, with a certain specific political leaning.
Essentially, they think that because I, too, homeschool, that I, too, share their extremist beliefs, and that I am a safe person to discuss them with.
I've already gone through this shit with white supremacists, but the difference is that white supremacist beliefs are at least taboo enough that the white supremacist in my homeschool friend group did NOT see me as a safe person to share her extremist beliefs with, and I didn't know anything about anything until the gossip got around to me.
I am so over homeschooling being a dog whistle for bigotry, and I've got to figure out what I'm supposed to say the next time someone thinks I'm a safe person to share their bigotry with. Matt says I should just say, "I don't agree with that," but with what? The incorrect fact, or the transphobia/homophobia that prompted it, or the person's idea that I was a safe person to say this to? Do I just say, "You're factually incorrect, statements like that are prompted by transphobia, and as I'm not transphobic, I don't want to hear those things?" Or, "Your homophobic statement is personally offensive as well as morally wrong; also, both gender and our current understanding of biological sex are contemporary cultural constructs and therefore essentially false?" Or, "I homeschool so that my children have more time to build working trebuchets from scratch while they listen to Lord of the Rings on audiobook, not to keep them away from drag shows, which we sometimes attend in our free time?"
That doesn't seem like something that any human would say, much less me, much less during the lunch break of a youth mental health workshop.
I definitely should have said something, though, even though I still have no idea what. If I keep quiet, then I actually am being a safe person to say bigoted things to, and the bigots probably walk away feeling great, while I'm the one feeling uncomfortable and stewing over it for weeks. So PLEASE feel free to spam me with potential social scripts!
Until then, I assuaged my guilt by making a small donation to the Fuck Bans: Leave Queer Kids Alone fund. If I'm not going to open my own mouth to support trans people, then the least I can do is hand someone twenty bucks to do it for me.
Anyway, Happy Pride Month, Y'all.
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