No, You Aren't Right. You Just need a New Pair of Glasses.

When high-definition monitors hit the market, I hopped along to get one of my own. When I fired it up, it didn’t look much better than my old technology, so I returned to tell the store the monitor was broken. The shop worker gave me an HDMI cable and assured me my screen was working just fine. I pointed at it and asked him how he could call that clarity. He pointed at it and asked me how I couldn’t call it clarity, so I relegated the HD craze to the garbage heap next to yetis and fairies.

Years passed. I mean yeeeeaaars. Then last year, I went to an optometrist, who fitted me with a pair of multi-focals. You know how this story ends, right? Watching movies with my new lenses was revelatory. Holy shit. My movie looked almost 3D. The monitor wasn’t the problem. My eyes were.

I recently wrote a post about rape culture. As usual, it launched thousand screams from men who just couldn’t get a clear image of the female experience. We were telling them we found rape culture oppressive. They were insisting we were wrong about our own lives, and they were right. We were perpetual victims. And they were right. We were making the whole thing up. And they were, you guessed it, RIGHT. Then a quiet man crept into the shadows to say he’d suddenly realised he’d been displaying the entitlement in my post all his life. He’d gotten a new pair of glasses, and suddenly that shitty picture had come into view.

A new pair of glasses is revolutionary. You wonder how you lived with the blurry pictures of yesterday and how the hell you saw it as The Normal Human Experience.

Yesterday several cis people in my thread spoke about correct pronoun usage as trivial. They’d never sat down and listened to the trans experience, but they were absolutely confident that they didn’t need glasses. They didn’t know the trans suicide rate, and they’d never connected with a trans person pre and post-surgery. They could just magically see the entire issue in high definition. Automatically. Because knowledge is somehow inherent. You’re born knowing everything already.

This is not how it works.

You can’t see how sexism and rape culture affect women unless you get a new pair of glasses. You can’t see how gender dysphoria affects trans people unless you get a new pair of glasses. You can’t comprehend what life with chronic illness is like until you get a new goddamned set of motherfucking glasses <throws tantrum>

Please stop judging people you cannot see in HD.

I mean this is a crazy idea, but how about when someone tells us about their lives, we just... I dunno... believe them?

This idea of a new pair of glasses isn’t my own. I really did tell an IT guy my monitor was bunk, but the metaphor was actually coined by an alcoholic named Chuck C around his sobriety and the religious experience that followed. I’m a raging atheist. Sorry, Chuck. I still agree with his essential point, though: The only way to get a new pair of glasses is through conscious contact with another. I will never know what it’s like to live in your body. I will never fully understand your experience, so I will assume that when you speak about your life, you know quite a lot more than I do.

Still, I can make conscious contact with you. I can listen. I can get a new pair of glasses that can see you in high definition.

As for the bigots… well… they’re still pointing and asking how we can call that clarity.

And they look every bit as ridiculous as I did.