Pride and Prejudice

Shame, authenticity, and the lifesaving importance of Pride

The early June sun beats down on me, and I am alive. It’s 2021, and I’m at my very first Pride festival. Other queer people swirl around me, a flurry of flags and colors, just as my dress swirls around my knees in a riot of cream fabric and edge-printed butterflies. My earrings—my very first two estrogen vials, made into dangling celebrations of my womanhood by a dear friend—dance on my neck as I celebrate being, for the first time in my life, fully at home.

Someone’s singing on the stage, a living disco ball of sequined dress. The volume of her? his? voice is cacophonous, enough to make my ribs vibrate, and the screaming exuberance of the people here to celebrate is almost enough to make my ears ring. Tt seems like everyone here is a violent, vibrant, defiant riot of fierce joy. COVID vaccines are out, but this is the only Pride in west Michigan that wasn’t canceled, and everyone has turned out today.

And I do mean everyone.

Behind me, standing opposite to the stage and near the little library that makes up the quad that this Pride has settled into are a dour row of six almost-entirely-men. They stand in front of grim signs promising hellfire and damnation. One of them screams presumably-scripture into a megaphone, but even though I’m only twenty or thirty feet away, the only sign of his pitiful mewling I can detect is his tomato-red face as he screams futilely against towering stacks of concert-grade speakers. An array of young queer people dance in front of their line, holding flags to blot out their hateful signs and kissing exuberantly to spite them. Part of me wonders if the man with the megaphone is going to have an aneurism or just pass out from the heat and his inaudible screaming.

But as much as I love the riot of my fellow queer folks, noise this loud has never been for me, no matter what its source is, so I start making my way towards the vendors’ row. B— is staffing her roller derby team’s booth, and all of this rampant queerness has left me wanting to kiss my wife, fiercely, and in public. We’ve been here for a few hours, and I’ve made the circuit a couple of times, buying earrings and smoky-smelling soaps and talking delightedly to the vendors.

I break free of the press of bodies near the stage and look around, simply enjoying myself. A pack of four or five tweens, long and spindly, like scarecrows with skin in that way you see in early puberty, after they’ve hit their height but before their muscles have caught up even a little bit, break away from the protesters’ line and move towards me as one. I realize I’ve seen them around a couple of times, and evidently they’ve seen me too. The lead one says something, but their young voice is drowned out by the dueling noise of the stage and the protesters.

“What?” I shout as I bend down toward them, cupping my ear.

“You’re pretty!” they shout back, in my ear. “Can we hug you?” Stunned speechless, I nod, and the youths embrace me, one at at time, as I stoop to meet them. Only after, as they retreat back to the protest line, do I notice them unfurl their pride flags, a trailing line of trans and nonbinary pride, snapping in the wind from the river walk.

Goddamn, do I love Pride.

They built a machine out of hate

As they say, the first Pride was a riot.

The world is very good at telling queer folks, and is especially good at telling trans folks, that we don’t deserve to exist. Anti-trans prejudice is all but omnipresent in the West, and we take it almost as an article of faith that resistance to that hate, that prejudice, was inevitable. Sooner or later, someone would’ve picked up those bricks. Sooner or later, someone would’ve told the cops to go to hell. Sooner or later, someone would’ve fought back.

Maybe. Maybe not.

The thing is, organized resistance to hatred is never guaranteed, and neither is its success. Most acts of resistance are snuffed out by the systems built to oppress us, whether it’s because we’re queer or trans or because of our gender or our race or any other of a thousand reasons. Hate, when it seizes power, builds tall walls and mighty machines to keep us from rising up and demanding that we be treated fairly and equally.

The really heartbreaking thing is that they generally work, and work well.

Look at the history of apartheid states for a moment. When you get right down to it, the overwhelming majority of apartheid states that were operating in the 2000’s continue to operate today, crushing human hope and joy and authenticity and the very bones and flesh of living, desperate human beings every single day. Really, the only apartheid states that have been meaningfully dismantled since the 1950’s are Ireland and South Africa, and both only after colossal international pressure was brought to bear in the form of divestment, boycotting, and global protests.

So when I say that the dismantling of the machines of oppression is an urgent, crucial task for us all, please know that I mean that I mean all machines of oppression, in all places. They cannot be repurposed to noble ends. To quote the brilliant Audre Lourde, “the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

But today, in this place and in this time, the hate machine grinds ever onward.

And its continued existence has consequences.

When prejudice turns inward

When your whole world screams at you, from the day you’re born, that you’re bad, you’re wrong, and that you should be ashamed of yourself… well, it’s hard to not believe that. The omnipresence of a belief based on social stigma makes it almost impossible to avoid picking up at least some of it. This is called self-stigma, and self-stigma is the mother-category of all sorts of really awful things, from internalized racism to internalized transphobia to any number of self-reinforcing self-hating beliefs. And self-stigma is bad. Really bad.

Suicide bad.

Self-stigma works in four ways:

1. It alienates people from their community, making them feel different, lesser, or worthless.

2. It anchors stereotypes more and more deeply into peoples’ minds, and gives them the authority of truth.

   1. For instance, many transfeminine people worry about things like “clocky hands” or the width of their shoulders, or that they’re not feminine enough to be accepted as their gender when the research says otherwise pretty decisively.

3. It validates others’ discrimination of a person, giving it an air of authority and appropriateness.

   1. For instance, a self-stigmatizing person will often come to believe that they deserve their own oppression for some reason, or that if they do a certain number of things in a certain way, that the dominant, hateful group will leave them alone.

4. It drives people to withdraw from groups, particularly when the source of their self-stigma becomes known to others.

If you’re reading that list of behaviors and thinking to yourself, wow, that sure sounds like everyday conversation for a lot of parts of the trans community, from /r/transpassing to /r/truscum? Well, that wasn’t my point in compiling data on self-stigma here, but it’s pretty undeniable. This, by the by, is the reason I have absolutely zero patience for transmedicalism—it’s nothing more than self-stigma, filtered through a thin veneer of misunderstood and outdated or surpassed science.

And to those who might feebly object that social assimilation is a path to equality—you damn well know better, and if you don’t, you really need to read this essay. To be frank, every queer person does, because no matter what we ever say or do, we will never be more than a clutch of fa——s to our oppressors. So long as the hate machine groans ever onward, we will not be free.

Regardless, the main product of self-stigma, whatever form it takes, is pretty simple:

Shame.

The trap of shame

Shame, as an emotional response, probably evolved as part of humans’ instinctive group-bonding behavior. In a nutshell, because people have to live together to succeed as a species, we have to have behaviors that not only benefit us individually, but which benefit our social group as a whole, even if that benefit comes at our individual expense. Shame is one of the main ways that nonnormative behavior is punished, which is a complicated way of saying that social groups use shame to keep individuals from doing things that would harm the group. Most psychologists think that the main reason this behavior was beneficial when we evolved it was to reduce the spread of disease within a group.

Shame is one of the major emotions basically all people feel, and I feel almost compelled to tack a word on to the end of that statement: “unfortunately.”

Why “unfortunately?”

Problem is? Shame is strictly harmful on an individual basis, and especially when it’s based on who a person is, not what they’re doing. And really, I mean absolutely zero beneficial effects.

Feelings of shame are directly linked to decreases in both physical and mental health in every single way we can measure physical and mental health, and the more shame-prone a person is, the shorter their lifespan will be, on average.

Shame is bad for you.

But how does it function, on a basic level?

At its most basic, shame comes from emotional abuse. If that sounds harsh, remember that our understanding of how shame came into existence was as a harm-reduction behavior—cause some harm to one person to prevent lots of it to many. That emotional harm increases the person’s self-criticism and perfectionism in an attempt to keep from doing the same thing again… or, at least, to be caught doing it again, which is the trap trans folks so often find ourselves in.

You see, like all forms of emotional abuse as a form of social control, shame is very effective, because human beings’ group-bonding instinct is so strong. Because it’s effective, people in a position of social dominance or control can use it to get what they want, in ways far, far from the original disease-reduction strategy that shame probably evolved for. For many things? It works, with few enough side effects; after all, look at widespread Western derision for communism, as an alternative to capitalism. Both are just ways that a society can self-organize, both with advantages and disadvantages, and both with ways that they can be incredibly destructive to individual well-being.

But when shame gets cast on ways of being, whether that’s being gay or trans or Black or a woman or disabled or fat—and yes, before anyone objects, we have really good evidence that fatness is not the result of a lifestyle (though it can be influenced by lifestyle), but rather the consequence of a wide variety of diseases and genetic heritability, and also that it doesn’t shorten lifespans—it generally takes an absolute wrecking-ball to a person’s ability to live their life. Ask anyone who’s chronically (even dangerously) skinny and has to fight desperately for every pound they add just how much control they have over their weight and you’ll see what I mean. I wanted to take the time to point out this stigma over fatness because it’s an incredibly good illustration of how a normal part of human biodiversity that’s not related to sex, sexuality, race, or gender can get so stigmatized, and how it can pass as a normal, natural thing.

When shame is put on a part of peoples’ identities, then, rather than deterring a specific behavior, people internalize that shame more and more, their self-criticism and perfectionism rising as they try to change their identity the same way they’d change a behavior. Which would be conversion therapy, considered broadly. Which doesn’t work.

So we create cisheteronormative masks, harming ourselves to wear them.

It’s a spiral of shame and self-harm, trapping us. And sometimes killing us.

Pride, prejudice, and crushing shame

The most potent, reliable way to overcome internalized shame and self-stigma is compassion for yourself, and it’s so effective at the job that it’s even being brought over as a highly effective treatment for CPTSD. And, if much of the sharp, reaction pain of gender dysphoria is a form of CPTSD, as may well be the case, then compassion-focused therapy stands to help trans people suffering from self-stigma shame an awful lot.

But what does it look like, in practice?

In compassion-focused therapy, you take the parts of yourself that were traumatized, or that you’re ashamed of, and you work to become more mindful of them, more appreciative of them. We turn to those parts we were told to hate, to shun, and we incorporate them into the rest of ourselves, coequal to any other. We find the parts of ourselves that are self-critical, which are perfectionistic, and we question their dictates.

And, ultimately, we embrace the parts of ourselves we’ve been ashamed of. Ideally, we celebrate them.

As queer people, we live in a world that constantly reinforces our internalized shame, so this can be especially hard for us. Social stigma reinforces self-stigma, which produces shame.

And that’s why we have Pride. That’s why worldwide, fierce, defiant celebrations of queerness matter. When queer people are in community with each other, we are our own social group, and we can live and love and dance and sing and weep with relief at our collective truths.

Pride, ultimately, disrupts the shame cycle, because it is the full flowering of the same goals of compassion-focused therapy: it embraces, centers, and celebrates all of the things you’ve been told your whole life to be ashamed of, then reinforces that celebration not with social stigma, but with joy in solidarity.

We raise each other up, and in doing so, we save each other’s lives.

That’s why kink always belongs at Pride. That’s why cops, who are a brutal tool of authoritarian oppression, don’t. So, please, go to a Pride event. Go to several. Bask in community with your fellow queer folks. Celebrate every single fucking part of yourself that anyone ever told you to be ashamed of.

Yes, that part.

Especially that part.

Celebrate your kinks.

Celebrate your failures.

Be too much.

Be too much in public.

There is literally zero mental, emotional, or physical upside to feeling shame, and a huge array of negative effects.

And if anyone tells you to be ashamed, to quote a trans elder:

Throw sand in their fucking eyes.