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Hey Hetero, try harder!

I have done loads of sexuality/gender identity awareness trainings in my time. Unfortunately they are often repackaged as “diversity” training because some people find sexuality/gender identity too embarrassing or political to say. Fact is, sunshine, when I do workshops I am explicitly talking about queers and trans folks, and our issues. Many of us (read: queer/trans people) get pissed off with this burying of queer/trans experience under the bland word “diversity”. This strategy of making queer/trans education palatable for hetero consumption is risky. It evades confrontation and erases the specificity of queer/trans experience, making us just one of many cultural groups who should now be “celebrated” for the differences and “colour” we add to white bread heterosex-ciety. This is tokenism and it gets us nowhere.

Secondly, people underestimate how challenging this training can be to run. It is actually really hard to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and come out over and over again. To talk about your painful experiences, and get nothing back. Then, following that discomfort, you open yourself up to a myriad of questions, some of which cross the border into offensiveness. The fact is I don’t enjoy doing queer/trans awareness training. I am called to do them because the alternative (no training) is worse. Please don’t tell me I am “brave” for being open about myself. I am not brave; I am generous and hopeful, or angry and anxious to make change.

The thing that really gets me is when the audience just wants to play with new words. They act like cats with a dead bird, batting it around the room. It is as if my identity, and those of my communities, is the latest curio to add to your vocabulary. In my recent workshops I have stated that that just knowing words is not enough. When we go over labels in gratuitous detail we don’t have enough time to get to the actual point of the workshop: how cis-heteros need to appreciate some uncomfortable realities, and make changes in their own lives, communities and work-spheres.

So hetero, next time you go to a queer/trans awareness training, try harder! How about you take note of the words you don’t know, and go Google them later. Better still, how about you focus on the issue at the core of the workshop: How you are going to change and act as an ally for us in making the world a more inclusive and fabulous place.

<3 La Di Da