I just watched a recording of a gay guy interrupting and harassing a trans person who was in the middle of a conversation with some other people at a conference.
“You… are a MAN!” shouted the gay man, voice quaking with fury. The girl just stood there blankly. Several other women froze dumbfounded at the interruption, until a security guard got involved and broke up the fracas.
“You are an adult human male!” continued the attacker, as he and his phone were bundled away from the shocked group of onloookers.
I don’t want to get into the brambles with this. The trans person was using the footage on Twitter to display how vilely they had been (and are) treated, and how little support there seemed to be from those dumbfounded folks who had stood around.
It’s complicated and emotive and theological and horrid, and I’m not ready to wade into the TERF wars like some sort of grey Jedi. So I won’t.
What I’ve realised though is that these ugly conversations are likely to happen more and more. Someone with a camera is probably going to come up to me and create a situation one day. And I will have microseconds to know how to respond.
The women in the circle probably did what most of us would do, if we’re honest; they froze. I don’t believe they were transphobic by their silence. I think they were simply working through that flight or flight mechanism - in response to something confusing and surprising happening right in front of them. I wouldn’t blame a rabbit in the headlamps for not advocating road safety.
Anyway. How do we get ready for short answers to difficult questions? If you’re a Bible-believing follower of Jesus, some day someone is probably going to ask you directly if you believe homosexuality is a sin, and whether gay people are hell-bound by default, and your answer, for whatever reason, has the potential to go viral.
They’re going to ask whether humans have the right to choose our own gender, whether trans rights infringe on feminism, and whether personal choices about lifestyle and behaviour should be sacrosanct to the person living them out.
Worse still, our natural instinct to smooth out ugly conversations like the one in the conference lobby, could easily look like muffling the debate, or even taking sides. Those silent women were labelled ‘emboldeners’ remember, to which dozens of Twitter uses clicked like or retweet in agreement.
The video made me feel sad for all of these reasons. I don’t feel clever enough to have worked out what to say, or wise enough to know what not to say. All I can hear in my heart is the aching wonder about how Jesus would handle it - because I know he would.
Life is enormously complex. People want sound-bites. I’m not sure everything can be bubbled down to simple terms any more, and that’s a shame because communicating well requires both brevity and breadth - and we’re not well prepared for that in our world.
I’d like to think that if I were there, I’d have diffused the guy by gently removing him from the situation. But I know very well that I would actually have frozen in social embarrassment too, just like I did when a colleague told a racist joke in 2014… and just like I did when an angry person burst in at the back of church, effing and jeffing.
How do you love someone like that? How do you quickly see through their pain to their heart, to their fears and their joys? There are so many angry people out there, just like the gay guy with the camera, just like the trans girl with an axe to grind. There has to be a way.
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