Keith Callister

I saw a lot of posts over the last few days.

Posts making claims about a particular boxing match in the Olympics.

Posts that had very particular intentions, these intentions being dividing us.

Every time I saw one of these posts it made my blood boil, mostly because the language used was further intended to create divides and marginalize a group of people who do not need to be pushed further outside of society.

Let me state emphatically that Trans people are people who are worthy of our love and respect, they are just people trying to live their lives in the best way they can while navigating something very few of us will ever understand. Something that I can only imagine is harder than anything I have ever had to contend with about myself.

We are all just people.

We are all doing the best we can.

But this…

This claim that an Olympic boxer is a Trans woman, and that is why she excels at her sport.

And more importantly the terribly ugly rhetoric that has surrounded it from too many people on my feed.

Has told me a lot of things.

I mean there is the whole bit about actually checking your facts and knowing what the hell you are talking about, and that many of you are not really looking deeper into the things you see on the internet, which alone is terrifying to me.

But mostly it’s that some of you need a whole lot more compassion in your lives.

When we look at people who are not like us, people that we might not understand or God forbid people that make us uncomfortable because they are different than we are and our immediate response is anger and fear and attempts to isolate them, we are telling on ourselves in a very real way.

It reminds me of the old question, that when you squeeze an orange the only thing that can come out of the orange is orange juice. Because that is what’s inside the orange.

This week I saw a lot of people who are carrying around a lot of things inside of them. Things that I think are ugly and shouldn’t have a place in our society.

I not only saw the bullying of an athlete for excelling at her sport, but I saw the dehumanization of this person, and an entire group of people.

An entire cohort of human beings was being treated as less than human, all because of what?

Because they want to live their life in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in their own skin.

This isn’t a whole piece about “can’t we all just get along?” I’m asking for something deeper than that. Look inside of yourself when you feel the pressure, especially when you feel the pressure about how you feel about the way someone who is not you is living their life.

And ask yourself why you feel the way you do.

And if all that is coming out is fear and anger and a desire to marginalize and hide the things that make you uncomfortable I would encourage you to look inside even further.

Because the truth is, none of this has anything to do with those people that you don’t understand.

And it has everything to do with you.

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