Stand Up Against Insecure Bullies and Steal the Attention Back
Let’s use our privilege to speak out against injustice and transphobia
“Don’t be such a tattletale, Anna. If he hit you, just hit him back!”
The teacher looked at me with annoyance when I told her that a boy had hit me on the playground. I was frustrated when she refused to intervene but then shocked that she told me to just hit him back. I had expected she would tell the boy to stop hitting other kids.
I’m sure this wouldn’t necessarily happen today, nearly 40 years later. But when it happened back in the late 70s/early 80s, it left a lasting impression on me. It was the first time I learned I couldn’t rely on adults to help me. I would have to figure out how to deal with an aggressive bully myself.
That episode was more empowering than I realized at the time. I learned to fight my own battles. In fact, I would go on to fight other people’s battles, too, because I’d intervene when I saw someone else being bullied.
I hate bullies and I realized that many bullies love the attention they get from their actions. They intentionally target people they think are not going to fight back. So it’s a surprise when someone else jumps in to support their targeted victim.
We cannot just stand by and watch the bully hog the limelight. We need to take that power away from the bully.
I thought of my experience with bullies after I read the essay written by Ross (as PostingDad’s guest), “Trans Lives Matter (and can be boring)” and felt outraged. Trans people are being targeted by ridiculously narrow-minded and entitled people who don’t want trans people to play sports, go to the bathroom, or just exist.
As Ross said:
We’re just people. We’re poor and we’re rich and we’re brown and we’re white and we’re across all classes and employed and on the dole and we’re out there just like you, scratching along, living our lives.
And yet for some reason, there are people out there who have developed the equivalent for QAnon for genitals and created an incredibly weird mythos around people like me.
