Do You Even Care?

I want folks to be honest; that they don’t care about people or things until people they hate have things they hate them having.

Ove the weekend, Lia Thomas has been the source of much confusion, ire, and (yes, I’m going to say it) blatant transphobia. I could go through all of the examples of how a lot of their transphobia runs into the same walls that it sets for itself; how limits on trans athletes will inevitably limit cis athletes as well, how their transphobia only seems to extend to one gender, how they deliberately inflate the achievements of these athletes like a bad game of telephone because it’s only a bad game of telephone that can give them the talking points that their debate needs. I could do all that. But I’ve been doing it since Laurel Hubbard’s medalless Olympic debut in August of last year. That’s over half a year, folks. I’m tired. Besides, there’s obviously a more interesting thing to mention.

Everybody had something to say about Laurel Hubbard competing in women’s weightlifting at the 2021 Olympics. Nobody had much to say about how she did. Because then, they’d have to admit that some of their assumptions had been proven false, or at least inconclusive.

(l-r) New Zealand women’s weightlifter Laurel Hubbard and UPenn women’s swimmer Lia Thomas.

But, more importantly…they’d have to have watched the damn thing. And they didn’t. They waited for the results and the news coverage, hoping for the gotcha moment they were building up for, and when it didn’t happen…they largely shut the hell up. A few of them decided instead to talk about her previous successes, saying that she stole the spot from a more deserving ‘real woman’, as though Laurel also runs the selection committee for New Zealand’s women’s weightlifters. And then, when that got old, and all the other transphobic dogwhistles were still wet with other people’s spit, they…started complaining about black elves in Amazon series, I reckon.

Because that, in truth, is what this is about. Think, for a second, about all the people you know making noise about Lia today, or yesterday. I’m sure they’re well-meaning people; loving partners or parents, good gaming buddies or trusted colleagues from work. So you give them the benefit of the doubt. They might be saying some really weird and harmful things, but their heart must be in the right place, right? They care about these issues, which makes sense! If we talk it out, at the very least, I can learn something about this I didn’t know before…

But when was the last time they showed an iota of concern about this shit?

Did they express a deep sense of excitement about the weightlifting category at the last Olympics? Did they even watch any of the last Olympics? Do they follow the Ivy League Championships (I’m guessing they didn’t, because they’d know that when Lia still identified as a man, she was winning there too). Do they follow sports rankings? Or were all of their social media posts prior to this media frenzy all mediocre low-res COVID memes?

Yeah, I thought so.

That’s not to say that people can’t discover something new to have feelings about, even harmful feelings. It’s possible that, all of a sudden, these people were whipped up into a frenzy by genuine bigots with practice couching issues like this as ‘just asking questions’ or ‘thinking about the children’. Only now, they carry the burden of asking the questions, and then getting the answers, and then dealing with those answers thoughtfully and in good faith. And, even when they try to do that in good faith, it’s often hard for them to do it thoughtfully. Because they don’t think about this shit. Not long enough to interrogate the biases they have, fully reconcile the data or lack thereof with their existing beliefs, question the institutions that they’re so interested in defending the status quo.

And the vast majority of them aren’t interested in a good faith conversation in the first place. They’re interested in those same biases. In this case, they have simple, essentialist understandings of the bodies of men and women, as monolithic biological truths. When those truths are challenged, like the fact that there are many who don’t fit the gender binary that they live by, they call those people outliers. When they’re reminded that their anti-trans rhetoric stands to exclude a significant number of cis women as well, they say it won’t be to the degree that it is a real issue. When you tell them, “oh, so you don’t actually care about cis women having opportunities to compete, then?” they stutter and stammer and say “you’ve given me a lot to think about…until next time!”

Sometimes, if they’re not paying attention, they bring up Mack Beggs (pictured above), who competes in girls’ wrestling…not realizing that it’s the exact same world they’re asking for - biological women competing against biological women) that created this circumstance. Beggs is a trans boy, who wants to compete with other boys, but is barred from doing so by his state.

When people say that, in a show where a necromancer teaches a bunch of races how to make rings that give them invisibility and healing powers and shit, that black elves is where it crosses into the unbelievable, they’re not saying they want grounded, realistic storytelling. There are documentaries on National Geographic they could be watching. They’re saying that they didn’t care about fantasy until black people started playing elves. And of course they didn’t - they didn’t have to! Pick a fantasy series made before the year 2000 and…whaddayaknow, white elves and white everybodyelses. But now they care, because people they don’t like have things they don’t like them having.

It’s not about authentic storytelling, or the writer’s vision. It’s not about black people ‘making their own stories’. It’s about hating black people seeing themselves in the stories that those haters believe they shouldn’t see themselves in. “This is my story,” the bigot tries hard not to say out loud. “This is my space. I get to decide who’s in it.” And, when they’ve successfully done the work of excluding people from the places they believe they have the right to be in, they…go back to not caring. To not caring if the storytellers they care so much about make a living wage, or that COVID protocols on set are being observed, or even caring to watch the show most likely. They don’t care about the thing. They care about who gets to have the thing.

I’m not bothered by who wins or doesn’t win an NCAA swim competition. Because who wins doesn’t bother me. Sure, if I’m at the gym and they’re showing it on the screen, I’ll…I dunno, root for the first person of color I see. But when the winners and losers line up, I’ll probably utter a quiet ‘damn’ and move on. Not because these things don’t deserve care - of course they do, from players, coaches, parents, lovers, fans., even activists sometimes!

I do care that women get the chance to compete (they do) safely (I care about improper coaches getting arrested) and fairly (there are data-driven regulations already in place). I also care whether young people are taken advantage of, which the folks arguing about Lia here don’t seem to care about? I care that the fact that only a small fraction of college athletes will actually get to continue a career in the sport their school and division made money off them from, by NCAA’s own admission. Haven’t seen a lot of Facebook posts about that, recently.

And you know what, I wasn’t bothered that I hadn’t seen a lot of posts about those things. I don’t care about bigots and their feelings until bigots have that one feeling that irks me - audacity. Every other time, I’m too busy caring about the people they say they care about. The folks who care so much about the sanctity of girls’ spaces aren’t the ones who actually volunteer at girls’ schools. The folks who care so much about women and girls’ safety never attended (or crafted) gender based violence trainings to protect them, or engaged legislators in letter and in person to prevent their harm. The folks who say they ‘actually do want trans people to be safe and treated equally’ aren’t advocating when they’re legislated against, assaulted in private and in public, experience bigotry and discrimination that pushes them to suicide.

Because they don’t care. And it’s impossible to have meaningful, careful, caring conversations with people who just don’t care.