Four years ago, I reposted a text post on Facebook: "Remove the word 'preferred' from your language when talking about transgender people's names, pronouns, and identity." The meaning of this post, for folks who are newer to the conversation, is that my name, pronouns, and gender-identifying language are mandatory, not a preference. (Some people who use multiple sets of pronouns do have preferred pronouns, and that's fine! But the base assumption should always be that the pronouns you're told are the mandatory pronouns.)
Someone I knew only tangentially - let's call him Kyle - commented asking what the post meant, and I explained it just as I did above. The end result of that conversation was that I lost my entire circle of friends at Framingham State.
You may reasonably assume that the conversation must have been pretty ugly in order for me to lose my whole friend group, including people who had in the past supported me against transphobia. Over the last four years, I myself have sort of built that exchange up in my mind; after all, it must have been bad if everyone ditched me.
So last week when I started writing this piece, I pulled it up so I could see what exactly had happened. And guess what, y'all? It was nothing.
Those of you who know me know I can be outspoken and even abrasive, especially on my private page. I wouldn't blame anyone for assuming that I was abrasive in this conversation. But in fact, I wasn't. I explained myself calmly and clearly, and Kyle asked a followup question that sounded mocking: "Should I formally ask a person, 'what do you mandate me to call you?'"
Frankly, I feel like it would have been totally reasonable of me to assume that he was making fun of me and respond accordingly. But I didn't! I told him it would go over badly to do so and told him to just respect what people told him to call them.
Four people besides me entered the conversation at various points, and while none of us coddled him, we all explained, clearly and firmly, what was wrong with what Kyle had said. His response was to claim repeatedly that we were attacking and belittling him and that we hadn't answered his question.
Had he been someone my FSU circle didn't know, I have no doubt that this would have been a nonissue. Instead, the whole circle of (almost entirely cis) friends cut me out. Blocked, unfriended, ghosted. One of those people was my ride to and from campus and simply stopped showing up without a word; I had to pay through the nose for Uber for the rest of the semester.
And the kicker is that all of these people believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that they were allies.
So hey, "allies", let's talk about who you are and what you're doing. First, the FAQ:
What is an ally?
An ally, broadly speaking, is any person who supports queer people, including other queer people! We should all be allies to one another. However, in queer parlance and in the context of this article, an ally is a person who does not hold any queer identities but supports people who do.
What do allies do?
Allies respect the identities and experiences of queer people, uplift queer voices, and acknowledge that there is always more they can learn. They take correction with equanimity and prioritize the feelings and safety of queer folks over their own comfort.
Can allies go to pride events?
Personally, I'm not a fan of allies coming uninvited to pride events, for reasons I laid out in my article two weeks ago. But if you're invited, you can go. Just be mindful of whose event this is. I'll go to the office Christmas party, but I won't scream-sing Hanukkah songs at it. Welcome to the party, stay in your lane.
Can I call myself an ally?
I mean, you can. But here's the thing: you don't get to unilaterally decide you're an ally when queer people don't agree. "Ally" is a title someone else gives you, not one you give yourself.
I recently saw a post in a generally delightful queer group; an admin reposted a graphic about what the A in the acronym stands for (asexual, aromantic, agender), and added some advice for allies:
"You don’t need to say you’re an ally. You do need to prove it. You do absolutely need to earn that title from the people you claim to be an ally to. Additionally, when you claim the title of 'ally' and mean you are not LGBT but you support us... you are communicating that you want to let people know you’re not one of us, you’re not LGBT. There’s no reason to say you’re not one of us. LGBT people can and should be allies to each other. 'Ally' should already include LGBT folk who are allies to each other. 'Ally' is not and should not be a term for cishets that support LGBT people… when I hear people use it in this way and wear these pins, it becomes a question of 'why do you need to separate yourself from us?'
"I guess I would ask: why does a shirt or pin you wear need to say 'ally'?... Why can’t it just have a rainbow?... All people should be allies; therefore, telling people you are an ally is like telling people 'I’m a good person.'" -Jason Baskette
Jason said in remarkably few words what I've spent years trying to communicate: if you are truly an ally, you don't need to advertise it. Just be it.
What about the ally flag?
Frankly, the ally flag is a bit of an eyesore, but more importantly, it's more advertisement: a loud announcement that you think allyship is an identity on par with marginalized genders and sexualities. The ally flag does nothing for the queer community, and I personally trust people more when they fly the progress flag than when they fly the ally flag.
Don't you think you're alienating allies with all these rules and rude posts about "taking a seat"?
No. True allies understand that queer people are angry at our treatment and know that we aren't targeting them specifically every time we say something about it. True allies don't take it personally; they listen to queer people and try to learn. If an "ally" is alienated by queer people expressing anger, they aren't an ally.
Now that we've covered that, let's talk about allyship.
I know some truly good allies. I've got a friend who keeps having to "come out" as a cishet man; his vibes are so good and nonthreatening that queer people just kind of assume he's one of us. My dad, who really didn't know a damn thing about transness when his kids came out, took it entirely in stride and has been an outstanding supporter for both of us. One of my cousins seems pretty solidly baffled by transness but tries really hard to use the right pronouns and make me feel supported. I have a small circle of local progressive friends who aren't queer themselves but never hesitate to stick up for queer people and address casual cisheteronormativity.
But I also know a lot of people who are conditional allies. There's the girl I once worked with who used to tag me to "debate" her violently transphobic friends until I unfriended her; the former classmate who told me bi people in "straight" relationships don't belong at pride events; the uncountable numbers of people I've met who support cis queer people but not trans people. And, of course, people like the ones who ditched me after that post - people who are allies only so long as the person being called out isn't a friend of theirs.
I try to make space for new allies, because I know what I was like before I realized I was queer. When I was 14, I called people "gay" as a pejorative. When I was 16, I posted a complaint about "cisphobia". I made mistakes on the way here, and I am grateful to the people who called me out on those choices and made me reevaluate my actions, even if they weren't always very patient with me about it. They didn't owe me their patience.
A few months after the incident with Kyle, I started the most exciting job of my life so far: I had been offered the inaugural position of LGBTQ+ Inclusion Coordinator at the Jewish summer camp I had been working at for the previous three summers. I was beside myself with pride and joy, brimming with ideas. And then I spent six weeks being ignored, dismissed, and generally used only as a token queer person.
That's not to say I didn't do some good; I did. I led a series of discussions about queerness in the Torah. I organized a renaming ceremony for people whose Hebrew names didn't match their identities. I gave allyship trainings, bunk by bunk, to the entire camp. But I also got blocked on almost every initiative I presented. I suggested taking spare trash cans from the attic of the main building and putting them in the stalls of the boys' bathrooms; despite the fact that it would literally have cost nothing except ten minutes of my time, it didn't happen until the campers started pushing for it. I suggested that we get pronoun pins and make them available for everyone on camp; instead, I was given a button maker with thirty buttons and told that that would be enough for the 300-person community "because not everyone needs one." I pushed to put a trans girl in girls' housing instead of the boys' cabin she'd been assigned to, where she was facing frequent transphobia from both campers and staff; not only was that refused, but she wasn't even allowed to participate in the girls' overnight. Even my suggestion that we relabel the bathrooms to "urinal" and "no urinal" was rejected. The whole summer was frustrating and heartbreaking.
At the end of the summer, I got a meeting with the director to present a policy document I had written. It is, to this day, the best work I've ever done - six pages of airtight policy on housing, bathrooms, bias incidents, chain of command. It was approved by three members of the leadership team before I brought it to the director, and the assistant director told me he was excited to implement the policies next year. And then I met with the director, who told me that I had been "breaking community" instead of building it and that I would not be welcome back next year. I was too loud. I was too insistent that we make changes. I cared too much about the safety and comfort of queer kids and too little about the delicate feelings of cis adults. Every one of those adults considered themself an ally, but not one of them put any time or effort into providing material support for the queer people under their supervision. Of the entire hundred-and-something-person staff, half a dozen were vocally supportive of my work; four were trans, and only one was a member of the leadership team. The other ninety-plus people were either actively opposed to my work, or simply disengaged enough to let queer kids go unsupported.
And this is true everywhere. In every space, there are people who want points for being allies but don't want to make any changes to actually be allies. Instead, they decide that they've done enough and it's the queers who are wrong.
Every single year, I read stories from other queer people about how "allies" demand that we be queer enough, nice enough, knowledgable enough. I've heard stories of bi people being pressured to perform their sexualities at pride events. I've heard stories of trans men being excluded from conversations about reproductive rights because they're men, even though the conversation applies to them. I myself have been told over and over that if I'm not nice enough and patient enough, my rights and the rights of the people I advocate for don't matter.
My rights matter. The rights of every single queer person matter. If you only support the nice ones, you don't support us.
In Jewish spaces, you often hear the phrase "know before whom you stand" - essentially, consider your audience. Know who is watching and listening.
This month, allies, know before whom you stand. And then maybe, just maybe, take a seat.
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