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The Hurt You Cause, and How to Fix It

An Open Letter to Aaron Schock

By Sophia-Helene Mees de TrichtPublished 4 years ago 5 min read
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This is as nice as that Insta post gets

Aaron,

You’re gay. Congratulations! No, I’m serious. You’ve taken a big step and it’s worth taking a moment to recognize that. Welcome home.

Now. What are you going to do to fix the damage you did to LGBTQ equality? It’s not enough that you’re sorry and that if you were in congress now, you’d support it. That’s not good enough and never will be.

First off, no you wouldn’t support LGBTQ equality if you were in office now. You’d fold like a cheap suit with a bad poker hand on a card table made of bread dough, just like every other power-hungry republican quoting my people’s book to score points with intolerant rurals. No you wouldn’t. The GOP wouldn’t allow it, and we both know it.

Second, next time you try to tell your story, maybe you could leave out the equivocation and “both sides”-ing and the bitter recriminations. You’ll learn, as you become more familiar with the community as a whole, that gentle mockery is an important facet of LGBTQ life. Have you ever been to a drag show? Those bitches are vicious. But we all accept it’s in good fun. We’re reclaiming the mockery that has been used against us. We’re owning the weapon that people who believe the same things you do have used to wound us. Get a grip, Aaron. The gay media was slightly mean to you. It happens. You think Queerty or Gay Star News were mean to you? Wait until you get a load of what Rush f***ing Limbaugh is going to say about you.

Third, I sympathize. Really. My parents occasionally text me, and it’s almost always a bad time, but otherwise, I’m not welcome in their house or their presence. Your story is only unusual in that you were in congress. And we strongly suspect it’s not that unusual there either. Stories about republican electeds toe tapping pages and aides in bathrooms are nigh-ubiquitous. So many of us have parents who won’t talk to us or who only talk to us to try to torture us into not being who we are. It’s pretty rough.

But, as you pointed out, this hasn’t changed your politics.

Well. It hasn’t changed them yet.

What you’re probably realizing in your heart right now (or might have realized by judging the reactions of your constituents and your colleagues toward LGBTQ issues) is that the personal is political. And that, even though you’re a straight passing cis white male, you’re part of a minority. And that’s scary! It’s a scary time to be part of a minority! I’m a lesbian Jewish trans woman, I’m constantly afraid! I joked with a J Street rep the other day that I would go and engage with five of my six representatives, but I won’t go up to Sioux City to talk to Steve King because I value my life (and my time). We laughed, hahahahahahaI’m not joking. The other side of the Corn Curtain (well, it’s more pork than corn, but to go that route would be to eschew a joke about how going into Steve King’s district is like traveling to the remote corners of Belarus in favor of a vagina joke. Read the room, Soph…) is a completely different country, and I think you know that. It’s not a crowd that’s picking up what I’m putting down. They’re not smelling what I’m stepping in (which again, is almost entirely pig shit).

Here’s the thing about politics: you’re going to realize in relatively short order that the politics you’ve espoused your entire life have systemically disadvantaged people like you, and people like me, in obeisance to Christian “values.” You’ll soon find that finding a job is going to be much harder among your conservative peers, and that’s capitalism, and you just have to deal with it. Well, maybe you personally won’t. You are still a cis white male. This system was designed specifically to benefit people like you, and your party is determined not to change that. And if you analyze it closely, you’ll see the excuses have always been ridiculous, but are only getting more obvious. In the 80s, it was “tax breaks to the wealthy will cause them to re-invest into the economy,” which was bullshit, it just made rich people richer, and they promptly moved their money beyond US jurisdiction. That has really been an idea that your side has used to justify their actions up until about 2014, when there was a… “tone shift.” Now, people are much more mask-off about their reasons for conservative reform. Now, there’s a large (well, a loud) section of your base that believes that my people are (oh my G-d…) engineering a demographic shift. Now, that’s a dogwhistle. The bullshit you pointed out in your open letter? That’s not what a dogwhistle is. This “demographic shift” bullshit people who think like Steve King are on, that’s a dogwhistle. It means “We think the Jews are encouraging white women to fuck non-white men and encourage illegal immigration so that white men cease to exist.”

I hope I don’t have to say how utterly, contemptibly ridiculous that assertion is. But it’s becoming increasingly popular. On your side and your side alone.

So bullshit justifications aside, you’re about to run headlong and at great speed into the fact that politics is no longer a game you play that has no real effect on people. Your views, your silence, your *work* has hurt people in very real ways. And that work is quintessentially republican. I’m not asking for you to become a pinko commie like me, I think that’s too much to ask. I’m saying that an honest reflection on how capitalism as it is practiced here disadvantages people who belong to your minority group, and criticism of those practices, and hard work to limit and repair that damage is something you’re uniquely placed to do.

In short, I wish you well, but I’m also not ready to forgive you for the damage you caused and that your coming out letter refused to acknowledge. I hope you become better, and if you do the work to become the kind of person who would never consider doing that kind of hurt again, maybe then you should apologize for the hurt you’ve caused. In the meantime, your fellow LGBTQ Americans are suffering under this administration and we need help. That’s a good place to start.

Anticapitalistically yours,

Sophia-Helene Mees de Tricht

Ruthlessly Transgender Advocate/Activist

politicians
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About the Creator

Sophia-Helene Mees de Tricht

I'm a socialist space penguin. I mean, I'm sure there are more important things about me, but I also don't want to be accused of misrepresenting myself, so let me just say that up front and loudly and clearly and oops! I'm about out of spa

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