I hate airports. But when my Teacher Education program halted for a two-week break, I went to Mexico for some rest and relaxation and this required spending some time in airports. For some reason, the number of strange looks I get because of my gender expression skyrockets in airports. I’ve come to expect it. But something happened in the Mazatlan International Airport that I never would have predicted.

Prior to boarding my flight back to Canada, the customs officials had the people at the gate form two lines: one for men and one for women. My passport says I am female, so I thought I’d better get in the women’s line-up and did so reluctantly. As the crowd split into two lines, a nearby female passenger who was jammed in the men’s line-up suggested that she and I switch places. I uttered words that felt like a betrayal of myself in many ways, “Unfortunately, I am a woman.” She tried to act like the exchange didn’t happen and made her own way into the women’s line. The line slowly shifted forward as passengers were searched and then allowed to board the plane. Soon, it was my turn. The customs officer shyly said that I should be in the other line. “I am a woman,” I said again. She took my passport, inspected it and my boarding pass, and waved me through to the next phase of the security check. The customs officer there took one look at me and angrily pointed me to the men’s line-up: “Over there!” she demanded. I didn’t want to get into trouble with customs, but wasn’t sure how to best avoid it. I went into the men’s line-up. A feeling of pride swept over me and I smirked with satisfaction. This was the line I’d much rather be in. Until I realized they were screening the men with more intensity. Many men were being patted down, whereas only the women’s carry-on luggage was being searched. My heart started thumping hard in my chest. What if the customs officer patted down my chest? Fortunately, when it was my turn, they didn’t pat me down. They must have thought I was just a teenage boy so it was unnecessary. I boarded the plane with bemusement.

Maybe you’re asking yourself: What does this have to do with education? Well, my airport experience reminds me of how often boys and girls are required to form separate line-ups in schools. Do you remember having to line up by gender, perhaps in the hallway or during gym? I do. I also remember a time in gym class when my practicum teacher instructed the girls to line up, and one of the boys galloped off to line up with them. The result was that he got laughed at by his peers. This particular student likes many traditionally feminine activities like gymnastics and knitting. He is also in touch with, and quite good at expressing his emotions. Perhaps he (consciously or unconsciously) felt a stronger association with the female group. Or perhaps he just wasn’t listening to the teacher’s instructions.

Either way, his gender was being policed through the line-up, just as my gender was policed by the customs officials. The implicit message of the requirement to form a gender-based line was: You are either male or you are female. Not both. Not neither. You must choose one. The other message was: Whether you are male or female will not be determined by you. Your identity is not up to you. The group will decide who you are and will discipline you to comply through fear or shame. Is this an ethical way to teach? I don’t think so.

As a friend of mine says, we wouldn’t ask students to line up by race: “Black kids line up here and white kids line up there.” We don’t ask kids to line up according to whether they have a disability or not. Or whether they are middle class or working class, or whether they are straight or gay. Why is it okay to ask them to line up according to gender – and considering the harm it does to students who don’t fit in these boxes, is it worth it?

Last night I prepared a resume to distribute to potential employers at the biggest education career fair in the province. The Faculty of Education advised us to include a picture and our gender on the resume, which gave me pause. I decided pretty much immediately not to include my gender, because there is not a simple enough answer for a one-page resume, and any simple answer I gave would either feel untrue to myself or be likely to prevent my application from being considered. However, deciding on the picture component was a bit more difficult. If I included my picture, I might as well scrawl “lesbian” or “trans” on the top of my resume.  At the same time, everyone else would likely be including a picture and my resume would probably garner less attention without one.  I somehow convinced myself that maybe some employers might welcome a queer applicant. Maybe there would be a queer employer there, and I would stand out in a good way. I don’t think there is anything unprofessional about how I look. I decided to include my picture.

This morning, I put on a nice grey button-up dress shirt with a navy blue sweater vest and some greyish brown cords. I made sure my hair was tidy. I went to the career fair thinking I looked pretty good. I circulated among the booths and submitted some resumes to my preferred school districts, which tended to have line ups. I noticed the Maple Ridge booth was vacant, and thought I’d introduce myself to the representative. I walked over, smiled, said hello, and told her my name with my hand extended for a handshake. Everyone was shaking hands at the career fair, it seemed like a good thing to do. Rather than shake my hand, she folded her arms. I thought, maybe she’s a germaphobe. But she didn’t even smile or take my resume. She said they were only hiring for a few select positions. I said thank you and walked away feeling embarrassed and wondering why she was so rude to me.

I walked over to the station for the Council of International Schools, introduced myself to the representative and requested some literature. A pretty woman, my age, with long brown hair then approached the table and handed the man her resume. He took it, looked at the picture and said “Wow. What do you teach?” She responded with, “High School English.” He then mouthed the words “I heart you” while he drew a heart on his chest and pointed to her. She giggled, he handed her his brochure, and they chatted. I was ignored and he didn’t even give me the brochure I had requested. I waited until they were finished and then asked if international schools tend to have a high turn over rate among the students. He answered – yes they can. And that was it, as though I was not worth his time to give a thoughtful response to.

I briefly chatted with a representative from an all-female private school called Crofton House. While she was willing to shake my hand and answer my questions, it was clear from her body language and tone that I was not what she was looking for. They weren’t what I was looking for either.

I was beginning to feel discouraged. I probably shouldn’t have gone to the Calgary School Board next. But I thought the representative seemed gay (!), so I chatted him up. When the ice was broken, I asked if the Board was welcoming of gay and lesbian teachers. He was caught off guard, and said that Calgary has “…multidiversity” and there are many homosexual teachers and students, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. Also, the word ‘homosexual’ threw me off – folks who use that word tend not to be allies. I thanked my lucky stars he’s from Alberta and I have no intention of moving there, anyway.

I’m pleased to say that the woman for the Vancouver School Board was incredibly kind and professional, and Vancouver is my top choice …though 800 teachers there just got potential layoff notices. The Northwest Territories folks were also quite pleasant, but their disposition stemmed from desperation! Still, I’ll give them some thought. After today, I’m beginning to wonder about how being visibly queer will affect my job prospects.

One of the projects I have given my Grade 4/5 class is to practice and present a story through Reader’s Theatre. Today, one group of students presented their performance to the junior kindergarten class. One of the members of this performance troupe was Aaron, a boy who has apraxia – difficulty with the motor movements required for producing speech. Every time he said his lines, the kindergartens laughed at him for the way he talks (I recorded it, edited out faces, and posted it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouOlp3q49Zw). The kindergarten teacher shushed them (and had a talk with them afterwards about respecting people’s differences). But the damage had been done – as I walked Aaron back to class, he was near tears. He said he felt humiliated that the kids had laughed at him – and understandably so. What can you say in these moments? I told him that people who are different often get laughed at or treated badly and its really unfair. I said that even I get laughed at because of how I look compared to most female teachers, and its really hard. But the good thing about it is that, since we know what it feels like to be treated badly for unfair reasons, we know not to do this to other people. It can make us both stronger and kinder. I also said I was so sorry this happened to him.

But these words are not enough. What now?

I thought about how I would respond if he was being laughed at for reasons related to queerness. I would probably want to plan some lessons to raise awareness about differences in gender expression. I’d probably lead discussions about how students feel about and respond to people who are different from them and what the effects of this are. I might even start some kind of ‘don’t let gender box you in’ club to support gender-queer students. If I did these things as a teacher candidate during my practicum, I would be stirring the pot and likely gain myself a reputation that could prevent me from landing a job after I graduate. The good news is, it is socially acceptable for a teacher candidate to stand up for kids with disabilities. Maybe I’ll focus some of my energy here. It’s certainly needed. I wonder if some of my responses to homophobia could be tailored to fight ableism.

This leads me to wonder about the intersections between queerness and disability. How are our fights bound together? For one, my non-conformist gender identity and expression often leads me to use the wheelchair washroom to protect my safety in public – I am not a wheelchair user; I use these spaces because they aren’t usually designated for a specific gender. What does this say about how society views the gender and sexuality of people with disabilities? Maybe these folks don’t fit the norms associated with ‘real’ men and ‘real’ women. Neither do queers.

Furthermore, being ‘homosexual’ has historically been classified as being disabled. More specifically, homosexuality was considered by the psychiatric community to be a mental illness until 1973. Today, being transgender is still listed as a mental illness under “Gender Identity Disorder” in the DSM-IV-TR. This is a revealing example of how disability is socially constructed (and laden with heterosexist values) in order to govern what will be considered normal and abnormal, and thus who will enjoy unearned privilege and who will be oppressed.

I’m sure there are plenty of other intersections between queerness and disability and its not my intention to list them all here. My point is that being a queer ally means being an ally for people with disabilities and vice versa. So I want to make Aaron’s fight my fight.

My tutorial instructor is a big fan of something called Imaginative Education, a framework based on the idea that people see the world differently depending on the developmental phase they occupy. By tapping into developmentally-appropriate worldviews, teachers can engage students’ imaginations and entice them to learn. According to this framework, kids in their mid- to late- elementary school years are in the ‘romantic’ phase of life. In this phase, they love to learn about the extremes of reality – the biggest, the hottest, the oldest, the richest – the kind of thing you’d find in the Guinness Book of World Records. Imaginative Education encourages teachers to frame knowledge in these terms in order to capture their students’ interest.

One day in tutorial, we were discussing gender non-conformity when the term ‘intersex’ came up. My tutorial instructor asked the group, “Do you think kids are interested in learning about intersex? Of course they are! It’s like something out of the Guinness Book of World Records!”

When I think of that particular book, the image of the world’s longest fingernails comes to mind. I remember being horrified but fascinated by the way those fingernails twisted and turned – they were really gross! Now I try to imagine a picture of the genitalia of an intersex person next to that. It occurs to me that this is not an extreme at all, but actually the middle ground. Extreme would be ‘full-on’ male or ‘full-on’ female, wouldn’t it? His logic was problematic, but I still knew what he meant. The Guinness Book of World Records, like Ripley’s Believe it or Not, is a modern-day take on a centuries-old form of entertainment – the Freak Show. ‘Hermaphrodites,’ as intersex people were formerly known, were a mainstay of these exhibitions. Around the 1970s, when human rights were extended to more than straight white men, freak shows became less common. But I think the freak show is often brought back to life by educators seeking to prod their students into, well, paying attention. My instructors remarks made perfect sense in this historical context.

While I’m sure the idea of a ‘hermaphrodite’ lingered in my consciousness from a young age, the first time I was introduced to people with genitalia that weren’t easily classifiable as male or female was in Grade 11 Biology. In a dark laboratory, a British man in a white lab coat put images on the overhead projector of naked people whose bodies were neither male nor female. The class gasped and groaned and laughed, and the teacher seemed quite satisfied with himself for capturing the interest of his otherwise apathetic students.

Today, I wonder: Where did those images come from? Who were those people whose naked bodies were cast on a screen for gawking teenagers to laugh at? Who took the pictures and why? And couldn’t my teacher come up with a more sensitive way to discuss the topic? It was less about education than about creating an atmosphere conducive to a freak show.

I bring this up because there is a big push in Teacher Education to make lessons that are interesting, engaging, and fun – which is great. But I think we need to critically reflect on what constitutes an ‘interesting’ or ‘engaging’ lesson. What emotions are we hoping to evoke and how does this shape our students’ relationship to those who are different from them? These are particularly relevant questions for educators seeking to bring queer issues into the classroom.

As a student teacher on a budget, I use public transit nearly every day. Buses are awkward spaces to occupy because you are usually jammed uncomfortably close to all kinds of people you don’t know. I tend to get a lot of glares, scowls, death stares and the like from young men and old ladies. Once I was roughly shoved and another time, a guy made a comment to me that prompted the bus driver to pull over and kick him off the bus.

I follow all the rules of bus etiquette regarding backpacks, cell phones, giving up your seat, and not being smelly. This leads me to the conclusion that they are glaring, scowling, death staring, and shoving because of my gender expression. So when I ride the bus to school or to my practicum, my senses are on high-alert.

I was coming home from practicum today on the subway when I could hear the annoying hum of an electronic melody that just wouldn’t stop. I thought someone must be playing a videogame without headphones and managed to ignore it. After a few minutes of this, some guy lost his patience and yelled “Your fucking cell phone is ringing, asshole!” A tension-filled silence hung in the air after the cell phone ringer was switched off. I glanced back to spot the man with the rage issues and hoped he wouldn’t end up sitting near me. Thankfully, he didn’t sit near me. He got off at the same stop as me, though. And he decided to ride up three stories on the escalator standing beside me (in the walking lane), talking to me the whole time like he knew me. He talked to me like I was a fellow male.

I know when straight men are relating to me as a man because they use words like “buddy,” “dude,” or “man”, speak with a certain tone and ‘insider’ humour, and use a certain body language that is different from when they think I am female and are either condescending or flirtatious. It feels like I’ve gained access to the all-exclusive league of men. Normally, I love this feeling because it means I’ve passed.

But this time, riding that escalator, I was scared shitless of what would happen if this creepy man with rage issues realized I wasn’t quite what he thought. There’s nothing quite like the dysphoria that takes over the face of cisgender folks when they realize they were interacting with you as though you were male only to discover you are actually someone quite different than they thought. Some get embarrassed and apologetic. Others get downright disgusted. The cell phone ordeal gave me a pretty clear clue of what kind of reaction this guy would have. If I could just make it up the three flights of stairs without giving away the secret of my feminine voice, I was pretty certain there wouldn’t be an issue. He cracked weird jokes, and I smirked and nodded where I should have laughed. Where responses were required, I mumbled a few words from as far back in my throat as I could manage. We made it to the exit of the station and, lucky me, when we parted he was none the wiser. I felt like I’d dodged a bullet. Maybe nothing would have happened. Who knows? Sometimes the not-knowing can be almost as scary as the knowing full-well.

I find the language that the straight folks in my program use to talk about queer folks pretty interesting, because its so different from the kind of language I’m used to hearing queer folks use to describe themselves. Case in point: the idea of “sexual confusion.” Someone thought that I must be “confused” about my gender because I do not always identify as male or female. My response included three points: 1) I am not confused; 2) members of the queer community who are uncertain about an aspect of their sexual identity tend to identify as “questioning” not “confused;” and 3) the term “confused” can be hurtful because queer people who are coming out are often told that they are not queer, but confused, which delegitimizes the significance of their own self-identification.

This third point is also significant when it comes to pronouns. My colleagues tend to use the pronoun that corresponds with the gender a person was assigned at birth rather than the gender a person actually identifies with – even when that self-identification is 100% evident

At one point, someone adamantly claimed, based entirely on a gut reaction, that there was no such thing as transgender children.

And it’s shocking how many of my classmates had no idea what “intersex” was.

Lots of anguish was expressed about not knowing the correct terminology to use…

In my experience, if anyone is confused about sexuality, it’s generally the heterosexuals.

The discussions about social justice in my tutorial have been getting pretty heated. People are getting downright emotional. Things are getting seriously personal. Nobody feels quite comfortable. And it must be interfering with the educative process. Enter my tutorial instructor with the rational solution – a presentation on dialogue (or rather, on how to conduct oneself properly during tutorial!)

What could possibly be problematic with dialogue? If only we could engage in calm, rational dialogue, we could arrive at fair solutions to all the world’s problems, n’est pas? Yes, through dialogue, we shall all become enlightened. Empowered by reason, there will be equality for everyone.

To those who say the Age of Enlightenment is over, I say – give it time! Be patient for another century or so, and one fine day we will arrive at the conclusion that you are in fact human, despite the fact that you are so different from me. Trust me. Just you wait and see.

…Errr. Looking around the table, I see those with whom I am to engage in dialogue. There are 10 straight people and I am the only queer. Well the playing field for this dialogue isn’t exactly level, is it? Thanks to these numbers, queer issues might not be considered a legitimate topic for dialogue in the first place. I am at the mercy of the straight people to decide whether queer issues are even on the agenda. And my experience tells me they probably aren’t since many of the folks around this table are reluctant to engage with the topic – its decidedly “not pertinent to the educative process.” No worries, surely I can win them over through the power of reason.

Trouble is, many of their brains are thinking using the assumptions and concepts from dominant discourses (which are homophobic and heteronormative, so the odds are further stacked against me). Within these discourses, there are very rational ways to explain why there are two sexes (male and female) and male-female sexual partnerships are the natural pattern for all humans to follow. Makes sense, right? Well, not to me. I’m not going to spend time discussing the merits and critiques of both perspectives on gender and sexual identity here (I don’t feel like justifying my right to be considered a normal human being right now, thanks). But I will say that we are not operating on the same assumptions nor with the same understandings of crucial words like ‘natural’ and ‘gender.’ The very foundation of the dominant culture rests on there being distinct men and women, who each embody certain characteristics and occupy certain roles. I’m operating on assumptions that are so radically different (but still highly sophisticated and logical) from the dominant culture and most of the people around the table, that for them to engage with my ideas, they need to accept a significant degree of discomfort and trouble the very foundational ideas of their culture and society (such as: what if the line between male and female isn’t so clear cut? How would you understand your identity then?).

This is where another problem with dialogue kicks in. People feel emotions. Cue the fear. Or the guilt. Or the defensive anger. We’re taught that we can use reason to control these emotions, so they don’t cloud our judgment. I’m not sure we should be controlling our emotions so much as understanding where they come from and why they might be problematic. I think we can do this to an extent, but I don’t think it comes easily to many. In fact, I think this is a skill that most of us need to be taught in order to participate in dialogue effectively. And sadly it’s a skill that by and large isn’t currently taught in public schools. So now, if my fellow interlocutors are to understand what I am contributing to the dialogue, I’ll probably have to spend time on getting them up to speed on the latest theories about emotions and education, like pedagogies of discomfort and crisis, and how we can navigate emotions in educative ways. And you know what? I could do that…if I were the instructor! But I’m not.

Rather than the heterosexuals doing some intellectual and emotional heavy lifting, it’s so much easier for them to simply cast the queer voices as less legitimate and on the fringe. The path of least resistance is so tempting that queer voices tend to end up being brushed aside as less than relevant.

So things get heated. People get emotional. It starts to get personal. And guess what identity groups end up bearing the brunt of the emotional burden (and subsequently, guess whose ability to thrive in this educative process is most likely to suffer). And yet we are told to control our anger, because otherwise… we aren’t following the rules of dialogue. And we’ll be seen as disrupting the educative process for everyone else.

End-of-course evaluations are a common practice at any university. They mostly involve responding to a series of questions by shading in a box. I filled out one such form today and the first question asked me to indicate my sex by shading in either the box for male or the box for female. I’ve been filling in these forms at this institution since 2005 and have responded to this question in a variety of ways. I’ve shaded in both boxes, neither box, the female box, and the male box. Sometimes I add a comment, such as “Why?” Today I just circled the entire question and wrote “Fuck you” next to it. It depends on my mood, really.

I showed my paper to the person sitting next to me, with a grin on my face. This sparked an informal discussion about why this data was being collected in the first place. Someone mentioned that the data might show that student satisfaction with a teacher can vary according to the student’s sex. Perhaps a teacher who makes a lot of sexist jokes wouldn’t be very popular with women, but the men might love him. I mentioned that I know a lot of men who are offended by sexism (not to mention, a lot of women who aren’t!). I also asked if it wouldn’t be more efficient to just ask students to rate whether they felt the teacher made an effort to be inclusive of differences in the classroom.

What followed next was a discussion on how the survey might be altered. One student suggested there be three options: Male, Female, and Other. Or maybe students could mark where they fit on a continuum. Or maybe the question could be deleted from the survey altogether. Nobody said it out loud, but I’m quite certain some were thinking that the two options were fine as they were, and no doubt they thought this discussion was ludicrous!

What I find ludicrous is that the bureaucratic system of my university refused to recognize my existence! Let me qualify that. They recognize my existence when I owe them tuition fees. Incidentally, they don’t ask me to declare a sex when they ask for my money. (Wouldn’t it be lovely if that were a requirement…”I can’t pay because according to your system, I don’t exist!”). But on that piece of paper it was crystal clear: I do not exist within the realm of what is human, unless I declare myself to be male or female.

“Really, teachers are powerless to change broader social structures. Yes, you have to look into the abyss. But then you have to step back – and party! Some people get stuck staring into the abyss. But life can’t be all doom and gloom.” These are the pragmatic words of my tutorial instructor to my teacher education class. The abyss, in this context, represented all the social problems that impact the classroom – poverty, drugs, alcohol, abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. ad infinitum.

His assumptions are revealing of his positionality, experience, and perspective. He’s assuming one can actually choose when they ‘look into the abyss.’ And I suppose he has generally been able to choose when he will contemplate poverty, racism, homophobia, and other social justice issues, because as a middle-class, straight, white man he enjoys a relative place of privilege.

People who don’t enjoy this privilege can’t simply choose to step back from the abyss and party, because the world won’t let them. The abyss is in your face, and maybe sometimes you get to look away and party, but sooner or later your face will get shoved back towards the abyss when somebody shouts the word faggot (and they are talking to you), or when someone asks why you have to flaunt your sexuality (when you just want to hold your partner’s hand), or when you have to go pee but no matter what bathroom you go into, people give you dirty looks and want to know what you’re doing there. And if you dare to feel upset about it, or, someone forbid, speak out about it, well then, you have an attitude problem. Why can’t you just look away? You’re spoiling my party!

The benefit of having your face held up to the abyss is that your eyes start to adjust to the darkness and you begin to see what its really made of and how it all works. You begin to understand how power works – and that we really aren’t powerless. Every action and every word serves to either reinforce the way things are or nudge the world toward change. Even ‘doing nothing’ is an act of power that reinforces the way things are. There is no neutral, no powerless act or word, no middle ground here. Social structures begin to change when enough of us are nudging in the same general direction. It’s often a process that moves at a glacial pace, but that doesn’t mean we are powerless.

Stepping back from the abyss, looking away from it, or ‘partying’ as it were, is also an exercise of power and thus an act that needs to be guided by ethics. We need to enjoy life, but we also need to constantly question the cost of our enjoyment. I think that this is one of the fundamental purposes of education – to help us look into the abyss, make sense of what we see, and choose how to act.

I worry about the effects of my tutorial instructor’s words to my class. Since schools function in our society to reproduce knowledge and culture, teachers in particular are in a position of power. It’s really dangerous to tell a room full of teacher candidates that they are, in fact, powerless. I’ll take this as a lesson of how not to teach.

Today I had an ‘inspiring’ conversation with my tutorial instructor. He said, “You can spend your life fighting the battle against ‘isms’ if you want to, but you
will lose.” Since September, he’s peppered me with other variations on the uplifting theme, “One person can’t change the world.” He tends to speak to me in the paternalistic way that only a straight, white, balding, middle class male can pull off so well. So far, I’ve been tempted to not only ignore his advice to give up on fighting oppression, but prove him wrong by creating change.

Only trouble is, I’ve been fighting oppression for years, and how often can I say I’ve made a real difference? I could probably give you about 50 inspiring examples of stories with happy endings – times when I really did help change someone’s relationship to the heterosexual/homosexual or masculine/feminine binary. And I could give you about 500 depressing stories where I failed. That’s not a great batting average. It’s exhausting to fight, fight, fight and meet with so little success.

So as much as I hate to admit it, there is some truth to what my tutorial instructor is saying. I can spend my life fighting oppression, but generally speaking, I will lose. I thought he was telling me this because he’s a heterosexist homophobe who thinks the status quo is the way things should be, so I should stop trying to change it. He’s a Christian and a conservative, so I don’t think I’m that far off the mark. But even so, I believe most people have good intentions. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s also telling me to give this activism business a rest so that I will enjoy a decent quality of life.

He raises an interesting point.

An activist has to balance the need to transform society with their own need to enjoy a certain quality of life. I used to feel so miserable that I figured sacrificing my own quality of life for the sake of the greater good wasn’t a big deal – my life as a queer in a heterosexist, homophobic world was going to be pretty lousy anyway. It might as well be lousy for a purpose. But somewhere along the line, I started enjoying life despite all the heterosexism and homophobia. And in a way, what could be more radically activist than that? What could be more radically activist than saying to my oppressors, “You have not and will not defeat me,” with a big fat genuine smile on my face? And besides, what kind of activist can I be if I’m curled up on the floor in the fetal position? In this way, my own survival becomes crucial to my project as an activist, just as my project as an activist is crucial to my own survival.

So how does a queer activist survive in this world? I’ve been seeking answers from other queer activists. One answer: “Pick your battles.” This means, counterintertuitive though it may be, that sometimes someone will say something heterosexist or homophobic and I need to just let it go. My initial reaction is to call this strategy cowardly, lazy, and unethical. But if I’m not going to win every battle, why make my own life even more miserable by trying to fight every battle?

I’m pretty queer looking. Stepping out the door in this body is already a pretty radical act. Dealing with the social repercussions of living in this body already challenges my sanity and security every day. Why willingly insert myself into even more situations that further sacrifice my sanity and security for a losing battle?

Maybe next time a teenage boy on the bus says something homophobic, I can let it go rather than trying to educate him about why he’s being a douche bag (am I really going to cause a stranger on the bus to have a revelation about their relationship to privilege and oppression?). Because seriously, one of these days I’m going to get beat up doing that. I need to feel physically safe in my environment to enjoy a decent quality of life.

And maybe next time someone in my teacher education program mentions an imaginary child’s mom and dad, I don’t have to interrupt with “or two moms or two dads” because my peers will think I’m annoying and nobody will want to eat lunch with me, or be my partner in gym class, or sit next to me in science class, or work with me on a group project. And let’s face it, I may be an adult now, but I still need a degree of social acceptance from my peers to maintain a decent quality of life. (And really, is everyone in the room going to remember from now on that we cannot assume everyone has two heterosexual parents?)

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing in the towel on queer rights. There are already way too many people who are unwilling to sacrifice an iota of their comfort for the greater good on any given cause. But the opposite of this, sacrificing too much for the greater good, isn’t sustainable either.