Anger and frustration
[ Originally posted in a different space, 2024-08-02; lightly edited and slightly expanded. ]
The output from a recent art therapy session of mine expressed some of the anger and frustration i feel from several decades of the knowledge and experiences of myself and others being ignored, dismissed, downplayed and invalidated.
In the early 90s i was one of the loony greenie lefties warning about climate change; those chickens are increasingly coming home to roost, and it's large numbers of people in the Global South who are bearing the brunt, suffering and dying.
In the late 90s i was one of the lazy malingerers who developed CFS; the chickens resulting from failure to take CFS professionally are increasingly coming home to roost in the form of people suffering from Long COVID with no clear course of treatment.
In the early 2000s i transitioned to living as trans and genderqueer, in the face of substantial hostility from the feminist and trans communities; that hostility has substantially decreased over the years, but the psychological damage remains.
In the early 2020s i was finally diagnosed as autistic and adhd, with various classic symptoms having been ignored because i'm not a cis man, and my childhood symptoms were those now known to be characteristic of girls rather than boys.
i see the world, and the health professions in particular, continuing to systemically ignore, dismiss, downplay and invalidate the experiences and knowledge of anyone who's not a well-off white cis man[a]. i see women and afab people with endometriosis, with PCOS, with severe menstrual pain, with significant health issues more generally, being treated like shit and continuing to suffer, not because medicine doesn't know any way of treating or managing those issues, but because the world acts as though suffering is just part of being a woman (if not active punishment for being a woman).
Maybe people don't care about my suffering, about how i'm negatively impacted by attitudes and behaviours, about how active resistance to learning about climate change, and CFS, and gender (no, it's not enough to merely know and parrot the problematic phrase “gender is a social construct”[b]), and autism and adhd in people other than cis boys and men, has harmed my physical and mental health, with significant negative impacts on people close to me. Okay. But i know now that so many things which have been implied to effectively just be An Alexis Problem, involving me imagining or exaggerating issues, were and are things that have been negatively affecting large numbers of people other than myself.
A while ago i wrote this poem:
So often a Canary. i will keep speaking of what is happening to me. How i am suffering. i will keep speaking of what i see is to come. How i and others will suffer. But i am not important, i don't matter. You will find my noise irritating. You will tell me to shut up. You will ignore me. But Others are important, Others matter. Many years later, You will realise that Others, perhaps even people You give a damn about are being harmed, will be harmed. Maybe, maybe at that point, You'll start to consider maybe, maybe, starting to take the issue seriously. All the while, this Canary keeps being poisoned and suffocated again and again and again ....
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[a] Yes, i didn't include ‘het’ in that list of adjectives; that's deliberate. The experience of myself and various other queer+tgd activists over the decades has been of cis gay men being listened to more often than the rest of us, and of cis gay men typically doing little to amplify our voices - on the contrary, regularly encouraging the idea that they can inherently speak on behalf of the rest of us regarding our perspectives and priorities.
[b] Cf. this 2020 blog post of mine:
“On the word ‘gender’ and the phrase ‘gender is a social construct’”