My Guide to Surviving Anti-Transgender Hate

You need to filter. You need to watch the puppies.

A Breath of Elena wrote a very sensitive article not long ago, It Hurts to Read News About Transgender People, about her reaction to hate-filled media that surrounds the transgender community.

I responded to her:

“Elena we all can’t be gender warriors. Lives are too complex and to simply come to terms with being transgender is a monumental task itself without including the world’s hate into the process. The media doesn’t want happy transgender stories. They need to sell advertising. The good cis people who respect us get no press coverage.

Simply being ourselves is the greatest weapon against the hate. Stay strong and purge your hate-filled filters occasionally with the good people and stories that do exist. It just harder to find them. For example the wonderful Medium community we share here.”

After I wrote that, I began to think about how I functionally go on with my life surrounded by all the media-magnified hate we experience. There is so much around. Transgender hatred, although very personal for me, is just a small part of hatred that has infected so much of our world today.

Professionally, I spend my entire day absorbing global news and media feeds. I need to absorb, analyze and advise clients on my perceptions so they can act on them financially. My reputation relies on my ability to filter the endless stream of data and then provide reliable and actionable advice. I’ve been doing this for decades and, lately, the amount of negative news that assaults us daily is staggering, even to me.

I regularly need to help my clients clean their “filters” to remove the massive amount of negative and fake news so they can make decisions on fact not fiction.

The one common reality that we all have to deal with is that the majority of all media outlets in the US are profit-making businesses and that negative news sells. If you watch the six o’clock news hour, the first 55 minutes is filled with retched stories of human misery and then the last five minutes the story is about cute puppies. There is no balance. Happy people don’t increase viewership which is what generates advertising revenue. Humans will always slow down as they pass a car wreck on the highway.

Media organizations and advertiser know this.

You need to know this too in order to not sink into the deepest, darkest pit of despair.

If you want to understand the editorial content of a particular media source, find out how they get paid. Look at their advertisers. I start work at 7 am, and this morning I got a laugh watching CNBC, the “high quality” business and Wall Street channel. During the break, I watched commercials for the California Psychic and one for medicine for erectile dysfunction.

Not sure I can totally unpack all of that.

Infowars founder Alex Jones became a mega-millionaire by simply lying on his show to people who wanted to believe his lies. At its peak in 2017, Infowars had 10 million visits. Credibility is not valuable anymore to advertisers and, clearly, to many in the general public.

This is not a new phenomenon in America. During the 1930s millions of Americans listened to Father Coughlin on the radio. He became wealthy through the bigoted advertisers on his radio show. He was a Catholic priest who preached fascism, bigotry and antisemitism. He magically disappeared off radio when World War Two broke out. War made fascism unpopular in America until the McCarthy Era…

Hate works in cycles. Every generation spawns a new crop. Every country has them. It a question of whether society can control that evil social virus or let it run rampant.

So how do I survive my daily does of hate? I battle for perspective and filter to the facts. It is unfair, hard work. You have to be willing to work at it to not fall into the black hole. I remind myself pretty much daily that not everyone hates me, not everyone wants me dead and not everyone’s opinion matters.

Understand that the media, like a drug dealer, is selling hate to you for money. Like a drug dealer, they have no sense of morality. They do it for the money.

Stop being a victim of their news biases. Hate is not the only human emotion in our world. It just sells well. Start filtering it out. You will need to work a little harder to find the massive amount of good news that surrounds you. It all gets lousy press because there are no advertisers so you are going to make an effort to see, hear and feel it.

Don’t let hate in all its forms numb you to the joy of life that is all around us.

It is truly there.

Author Viktor Frankl wrote of his experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II in his classic, Man’s Search for Meaning. Few of us can claim a comparative experience of misery and pain. The essence I took from his writing is that to survive we need to identify a purpose in life to feel positive.

It takes a personal effort, your personal effort, my personal effort, to push away the veils of despair that surround us. We need to take away the power of the haters and the liars in our lives.

We are in charge of our happiness, not them.

I see the puppies, I see the people being courteous every day, and I know that there are people who love me. Nothing is perfect and it never will be but I will get as close to the joy of life as I can.

OK, I’ll stop being preachy.

Time to key in the puppies.

I added the cute babies into the happy mix too. Enjoy!!!

Emma Holiday

Thank you for reading my work.

Please also read:

Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts, so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand, and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted, and treated as a normal person. We are.