Alternate Really Long Title: On Existing as an Other in a World That Sees You As Normal; a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, if You Will.

Before you read this blog post, there's a couple of things you should know.

The first is that this is dedicated to my amazing aunt Jerri. I have so much love and respect for you and one of the first things I'm going to do when my schedule clears is come visit.

The second is that this isn't a research paper, an "article", or anything of the sorts. This is for all intents and purposes one of my journal entries turned blog post. These are my thoughts, opinions, and lived experiences. While I'll include links to sources I still remember/have bookmarked, I'm not going to defend my existence with a bibliography.

The third is that I recognize I've lived a very privileged life - which is kind of the crux of this post.

The fourth is that I'm an individual and by no means represent the larger community of any aspect of my identity.

The fifth is that depending on how this post reaches you, you may know me. And not just be a LinkedIn connection, a classmate, etc. - but that you know me and you might even be someone I consider a friend. Just know that regardless of what you may think of who I am and how you react to this, I have so much love for you. Honestly, this goes for most others reading this too. My therapist reminds me each session that having too much love to give isn't a bad thing - even if it may feel like a burden sometimes.

And finally, I don't have answers. This isn't a post about solutions. This is a post about problems.

Content Warning: LGBT/you-name-it-phobia, q-slur, f-slur, disordered eating, self-harm

I feel like I have to put this here just in case (yes, I've had to explain this to people before). Cishet is not a slur. It stands for cisgendered/heterosexual.

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These thoughts have been swirling in my head for, well, around 10 years at this point, but solidifying at a rapid rate recently. The catalyst in actually posting this was the discourse today surrounding a certain company's announcement.

Yes, I recognize the irony of me posting this on HEY World - but hey, it's a good product and that's all I should care about, right? /s

Honestly, I'm not even sure where to start. Is it the danger of relinquishing DEI decisions to one person, no matter how "qualified" they may be? Is it the danger of silencing discussion and discourse at work (egads! the horror of having your worldview challenged at the workplace! /s)? Is it my own personal experiences as someone whose existence gets questioned, belittled, and mocked at the workplaces I've been at - regardless of workplace policies on "political" discussions?

I know, I know, you're supposed to gather your thoughts before you write the post. I thought I had, yet once I started typing I realized just how much of an iceberg this topic really is. So I'll start with what I know: myself.

Over a year ago, I donated to a fundraiser Discord was hosting, and I forgot the specific charity but it was to support homeless LGBT youth. As a small trinket of appreciation, they ended up sending me this pin.

And I love it. It sat in my desk drawer unopened until a couple weeks ago, though.

As I mentioned, I've lived a very fortunate and privileged life passing as a straight, white male born to a financially supportive and successful family. That's not to say my life hasn't been bumpy, in fact you can read about my academic and mental health struggles here. However, if my skin color had been different, or I had been born into a different family, or any number of other factors that can affect survival in this country - I might be in an entirely different situation and I think about that constantly.

It's a challenge to surrender privilege. This post is barely even doing that. 3 people might read this. Not much of a difference, if you ask me. But time and time again, I hear a phrase along the lines of: "well, I don't have a problem with [insert identity here], I just wish they weren't so loud about it and did things quietly like the rest of us." And it makes me so, so mad. So mad, that I've decided to finally be brazen about my full self, not just my mental health issues, at risk of losing friends, family members seeing me differently, and possibly missing out on professional opportunities. I don't care anymore - these are risks I'm willing to take even if it shifts one person's perspective.

So, here are a couple labels you can slap on me if you'd like to determine whether or not I should be "quiet":

While these aren't who I am, they are fractions of my identity that are very important to me. I'm still discovering who I am. One of the most wonderful things about life is that I'm constantly changing, growing, evolving, and questioning my place in my community, in society, and discovering more about myself.

The problem is that I'm not even being loud. Very few of us queer people are. There have been, however, some very loud and vocal people that have fought, sometimes with their lives, for people like me to be comfortable existing in this world. To not need to be loud. And I'm tired of cishets acting like putting pronouns in a bio, showing basic affection in public, or minimal representation in media is being "loud". It's not even close to being audible.

Many much more eloquent queer people and people of color, throughout time, have written on some of the topics concerning today's discourse, so I'm not even going to really touch on some things that I'll just end up butchering. I'm just going to talk about my experience as someone who fits in, but just barely. And very quietly, up until now.

Some of my first experiences were transitioning from homeschooling to private schooling once I moved from rural Kentucky to a big city. I was around 13, and I'm sure most of you know how 8th graders can be. It was a dynamic time in my life. I fell hard (and repressed those feelings hard) for my best friend. I would get called fag, cow, and some other more colorful terms. And this wasn't for being out, this was for not fitting in with the in-crowd in very basic ways. And it's what ended up making me feel like I had to compress so many aspects of myself just to create a digestible facade - because God forbid I be perceived as gay or fat.

This led to a lot of things - disordered eating (lost ~70 lbs) and cutting being the most harmful. It led to me desiring so strongly to belong, that I stopped standing up for myself and other people. I ended up trimming the edges of myself so I could jam my puzzle piece into the bigger picture.

And was it worth it? Absolutely not. But I got to hear what people thought of the me that was buried so deep inside, I refused to believe it was even me.

One of my more recent experiences was at my last job when someone in the office made a transphobic joke (you know, the only one that transphobes have? the one about the attack helicopter?). Honestly at this point I'm more mad that it's just not even funny and way overdone. Trans people have much better trans jokes, trust me.

The great thing about being able to exist within these groups of cishet men is that I get to know what they really think about me and the people like me. That they think gender identity is some newfangled 21st century thing. That they think we're not deserving of the same privileges they are. And in religious circles, that people like me aren't worthy of love and acceptance.

We've been here the whole time. Yes, even trans people and enbies. The reason we're getting louder and louder is that we keep being silenced.

The core issue I have with the whole "businesses shouldn't care about social impact" and "no politics at the workplace" spiel is that it's not that simple. The privileged get to be apolitical. It has minimal impact on their lives. But for others, it means whether or not the government recognizes your right to exist in the same way that cishets do. In the past, businesses were a part of their communities. You knew the people there, and if you didn't you were friends with someone who did. Now, with these massive conglomerates, businesses have more and more impact socially and politically than ever before, and being willfully ignorant of that impact is short-sighted.

I'm fairly certain I even agree with a lot of the political beliefs of DHH and Jason. But this feels like a very cognitively dissonant decision on their part. Going against the grain doesn't always make you money, and the thing I loved about the Basecamp/37Signals ethos was that that didn't matter. Hell, even using this product, HEY, was a political decision for me - because I believed in the social and political impact that it could have in the realm of privacy and protection.

When you close off workplace discourse, you are by nature encouraging the majority opinion to continue having a stranglehold on those that it oppresses. By being silent, you allow the default voices to fill that silence, regardless of how "vocal" they are. You let yourselves continue to have the platform that you've gained from being vocal, while silencing your employees. Yes, people have lives outside of work (sometimes), but for most of our lives we'll be working. For most of our day, we're at work. So I'm sorry if you think that we should somehow be okay with not standing up for the things that are important to us in an environment where we're investing so much of our lives.

I'm lucky enough that I can take my pin off when I need to. It's like magic, actually. Taking it off transports me into a safer, more accepting world. I don't have to worry too much when I get pulled over by a cop. I can walk around my neighborhood at night and still feel safe. Most of my problems have stemmed from simply existing in a system that doesn't think people like me should exist - and being able to camouflage myself within this system grants me privilege even if it comes with a great mental and emotional toll.

Because of this, I can guarantee you there are people around you, suffering in very quiet ways - in ways that I have suffered.

Like trying to search for resources for living with BPD but only being recommended Google searches about how I'm not capable of love and that I'm manipulative and that I'm an abuser.

Like navigating an educational environment that holds performance and grades above truly learning things - and being forced into a decision of being medicated to maybe fit into the system or give up and rely on the other support systems in my life to get by (which is also intrinsically tied into politics, surprise surprise).

Like hearing queer, faggot, and other fun words thrown around since childhood, knowing how "negative" they are and then growing up to realize that you're that word you heard your cousin go on a tirade about. Fun tip for my queer friends out there: when being called a slur, just say "yeah, and?" - super disarming and it tends to hurt their brain sometimes.

And worst of all, my entire life my dad has wanted to pretend my aunt doesn't exist - or at least, has seen her as a threat and wanted to "protect" us from her. When in reality, if my aunt had been given a voice during my childhood maybe, just maybe, I would have learned that it's okay to be myself and love myself for who I am.

People will continue to suffer unless more and more people stop being quiet. I'm done being quiet.