ACCOZZAGLIA

Ten years ago, a person — two, actually — put me in a place I couldn’t escape.

Its dimensions belonged to a second cluster of trauma whose violence I’d survived previously across several years and iterations. Each of those further unmoored my faith in how cis people actually go about things when presented with a known trans person in their presence — versus whatever aspirations of inclusion they openly pledge to meet.

The trauma from 2014 shared contours with something severe I survived in 2003. Its particular approach, however, was unique and, thus, unanticipated. The ends were the same: as with 2003, I was broken.

What happened last decade doesn’t make for gripping storytelling. I still struggle recounting it without my amygdala walling off parts as “off-limits”. I’ve had to rely on both EMDR and MDMA therapies to understand it, but even that’s been incomplete.

Similar with 2003, it put a kibosh on a life plan toward which I‘d worked furiously over the preceding decade to make happen.

Every party to have engaged in this kind of violence was cis (and, curiously, also white, as well as co-sharing other structural placements).

Each time it’s happened, my cis peers and counterparts who strove toward similar opportunities weren’t affected.

[Sidebar and disclaimer: I’ve been fortunate to experience many times when cis people did well and just by evaluating the quality of my work, team integration, and strength of character. This essay isn’t about anyone who proceeded no differently than they do with cis counterparts. They should be a given, not noteworthy exceptions.]

Why a bridge metaphor?

What happened in 2014 was the latest bridge toward an opportunity I’d been crossing as someone else detonated it, timed while I was on it.

This always happened at vulnerable moments: I’d begun to trust cis people by their word. It’s like finding oneself on a bridge over a steep gorge: they see you making your way over, and then they detonate it.

Each time bridges toward opportunity are detonated, injuries mount. Pain lingers. Forward momentum slows, stalls. Eventually, the very sight of bridges induces dread.

Destroying the bridge, consciously and wilfully, interferes with progress toward participation, opportunity, and labour security — not because of any shortcomings in ambition, participation, knowledge, education, personality, teamwork, references, portfolio, or experience, but because of what one is powerless to change or what their existence (typically, aspects of their body) signifies: an unfounded, specious threat.

Taking down the bridge is to leverage control: it’s meant to do harm.

For each demolition, life chances — Max Weber’s sociological idea of Lebenschancen — vanish. Cis counterparts, having traversed bridges, gather momentum and cover ground toward key milestones in their lives as I found myself, again, mired in river currents, trying furiously to disentangle from debris to avoid drowning.

To be keenly aware a bridge is falling underneath is next-level nauseating. Your instinct is to scream for help, but there’s not enough time to react. It’s like waking from sleep paralysis at the apex of a nightmare — except the paralysis doesn’t go away and the nightmare is real.

While many cis people would probably feel guilt for blowing up bridges or for being accomplices of those who set the charges — and, thus, wouldn’t do that — the motivation for those who do so rests on the same, basic ideas:

1. to compel trans people to be out of sight;
2. to dissuade and/or disinvite them from involvement;
3. to have them forfeit hope; and/or
4. [bonus level: unlocked] to compel them to purge (i.e., to de-transition and exist in abject misery), in exchange for opportunity and labour security.

Each means used to take down the bridge shares these objectives. Every adjustment I made to detour around previously known hazards meant I wasn’t preventing those I couldn’t foresee. Each added to a visceral cluster of avoidance-anxiety-panic — complex PTSD responses. These persist today.

This isn’t like fleeing the trauma of an abusive partner or parent. Rather, I’ve learnt this problem can turn up anywhere, anytime. It’s incredibly hard to circumnavigate. It’s impossible to completely escape. The hazards are embedded with trying to better one’s station.

These means, to effect the same basic ends, are what I’m calling the Thing.

What I can’t change is I’m a woman. I’m gay. I’m trans. There are others, but these have been the big three. Whether or not I want it, these co-existences get conjoined synergistically, amplifying my susceptibility to harm. The Thing prevents me from disregarding how the cis people in question leveraged these fixed aspects of my personhood to destroy the bridge as I tried crossing, as I was bolstering opportunities for work and career.

What’s the Thing?

In a spirit of descriptivism — to describe concepts instead of labelling them prescriptively (and, frankly, lazily):

“The Thing serves to remove, exclude, or omit people from opportunity and participation on unsubstantiated grounds: immutable, superficial aspects of what their body or composite personhood signifies (or is believed to signify). These are considered threats and/or detriments. Qualities of their knowledge, experience, and character are consigned to second chair, if not ousted altogether.”

The Thing isn’t OK. It’s antisocial. It’s ugly. It’s violent. There’s no valid use-case for it.

That’s the entire point why anyone engages in the Thing: it’s more a reveal about themselves and their insecurities than anything about their target.

The Thing is given an easy pass so long as its accountability is anything less than ironclad, even in rare places where A) it’s prohibited explicitly by law; B) law is enforced; and C) doing so risks an act of social suicide. So motivated, if gifted a centimetre, they’ll still steal a kilometre.

The sociology of Othering

First, some dry sociology. It’s kind of unavoidable if I’m to go on. Which I must.

The Thing finds its footing, its power, in the primal act of reifying (of, literally, “making into a (real) thing”) a phenomenological Other, or Otherness [have fun: https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54544-2_4].

The Other is an outnumbered group — a statistical minority — who gets pushed to (or beyond) a civil society’s margins. For marginalization to work, there must be no fewer than two groups: one dominant, the other marginalized; only the dominant produces the existence of both.

The statistically dominant, hegemonic group conserves and profits from setting sole terms of a prevailing social order to benefit its ends, to the exclusion, omission, and hardship of the Other. This veers easily into the illiberalism of normativities — like social homogeneity, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, wealth hoarding, religious dominance, impositions of strict moral order, and so on — over the plurality, vibrancy, and vitality of a healthy, heterogeneous society.

The Other, meanwhile, becomes prone to suppression, even eradication by a hegemonic group — for no reason beyond denying the Other a footing in a social order for which they’re deprived from being equal stakeholders. “Tyranny, by a majority” is shorthand for this asymmetry.

The marginal line of Otherness divides people who are kept from negotiating how the line gets drawn, from those with the power to draw and enforce it. Otherness distinguishes who must work orders harder to have even a mote of access to something as fundamental as opportunity, versus those who needn’t do anything to enter that gate of access.

[“This stale take sucks and I don’t agree with it” doesn’t negate its existence. Have a seat.]

The Other become at risk of harm whenever fevers of reactionary populism gin up widespread animus against them as a means to uphold false scarcity and false dichotomies within a social order. A good example is the ongoing cis hysteria toward trans people.

Deprived from their own voices, sometimes even their humanity, people who are Othered get portrayed as a false threat to that social order. It’s the rationale for placing the Other in the crosshairs of structural, stochastic, and/or physical violence — to harm all who are known (or believed) to be members of that marginal population.

Anyone who exploits the Thing prevents Others from finding steady footing wherever they themselves work, gather, or participate. This makes it orders harder for Othered people to co-exist within these spaces.

The Thing is an act of vigilantism. It’s couched in a conviction that anyone found to be an Other must be deprived, in part or whole, of steady footing for opportunities which they themselves have benefited.

To deprive the Other is to conserve a false scarcity deemed worthy of protecting. In this world view, that the Other could find footing similar to theirs is to suggest this devalues themselves [spoiler: it doesn’t] by erasing lines of marginalization [spoiler: it does]. Without definitive lines, there can be no margin, no asymmetry of opportunity, and no conservation of false scarcities.

There’s a “lite version” of the Thing’s vigilantism: tolerate the Other conditionally — just so long it’s still possible to spot, contain, and/or regulate the whereabouts of all known Others at all times. There’s a long history with several variations on this insidious practice, to present day.

A basic social contract, leading to the point of this whole hecking essay

The Thing has power because it relies on a human-engineered discipline: the dismal science of economics.

Economics underlies the rationale for hegemonic-Othering asymmetry in capitalism and producerism [https://politicalresearch.org/2000/11/11/producerist-narrative-repressive-right-wing-populism]. It elevates opportunity for one population over the other by shaping terms around how labour gets accessed, valued, and compensated — or doesn’t.

When labour by an Othered party is devalued or revoked, then opportunity gets withheld in favour for those whose standing within a hegemonic social order is esteemed (even when the quality of their actual labour production is, well, meh).

We know people do the Thing and block Others from opportunity, relative to what they themselves believe they’re entitled. The idea behind this is to promote a kind of hegemonic monopoly (another economic concept!) to elevate the value of their placement over the Other.

The notion of everyone having shared opportunities, based on a shared set of qualifying criteria, would erase illusions of scarcity (yet another economic concept!) facilitated by acts of exclusion, in favour of selecting the most qualified candidates on applied qualifications alone.

The Thing is a cudgel: it never lets the Other forget how they lack even footing in the hegemonic aspirations of a society purporting itself to be civil and just for many, but certainly never for all.

Throwing obstacles into the path of an Other is to slow or halt them from the opportunity of fulfilling a basic social contract: to be chosen for their talent and to do labour for which they are best qualified, in exchange for compensating their labour capital on par with their hegemonic counterparts.

Were access to this social contract and compensation truly comparable, then the Other would no longer face exploding bridges, and the hegemony would lose relevance.

The Thing yanks the basic social contract of opportunity from bargaining tables. It means Others, writ large, face being held to the margins as yanking the contract assures the hegemonic social order for all who aren’t marginalized lives on.

The Thing is a uniquely human invention: it rebukes pluralism, comity, and mutualism. Its end effect, paradoxically, is to douse acid onto one’s own face to spite one’s nose (and to assert the resulting disfiguration was desired).

When caught dead to rights, folks who do the Thing are quick to deny it. (There are noteworthy, but rare exceptions.) They grab hand fans to exclaim, “Why, I never!” like some porcelain southern belle.

The Thing is a shipping container trash fire on a runaway freight train. How and why it ignited doesn’t matter: it’s already lit. Its toxic inertia is hard to douse as it belches clouds of negative externalities: everything in its wake gets sullied by the soot, stink, and toxins it spews.

The Thing is a feature of our society, not a bug.

The Thing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its perceived value comes from someplace: a transactional commons within which a contempt for the Other, expressed as the Thing, undermines that someplace.

Until very recently, I lacked a way to describe this someplace — how, when the Thing torpedoes opportunity, it can wreck the lives of Othered people.

This has been the greatest challenge to wrap my slow, simple brain around. I know I’m not treading new ground.

Key exceptions are given exceptional passes (I call these allowances prescriptive vocations). I’m trying to describe this someplace in the best way I know how, arising from protracted, first-hand experience of Otherness. I’ve been trying to articulate its roots for three decades.

That I’m attempting to write about this someplace is a sign I’m getting closer to giving it a working name. This helps me to defuse the cluster of cPTSD tangled with its deprival, destroying my paths toward opportunity as it has across much of my adult working life.

I’m referring to this someplace as The Bargain.

“The Bargain”? Seriously?

[Zip it.]

The Bargain is an entrenched idea — a value — instilled from the earliest days of our lives. We accept it, overall, as doctrine.

The Bargain is so foundational that it’s, virtually, a transparent layer of the society we co-inhabit.

To be valued as a part of a civil society is to be permitted to participate in The Bargain.

Or, when one cannot participate, then a civil society should, ideally, in a conscious act of beneficial mutualism, strive to safeguard one’s welfare isn’t forsaken — that one’s value isn’t tallied solely by one’s capacity to participate in The Bargain.

(Think social safety net. Beyond colonialism and the nation-state, think gift economies and interdependency in systems theory.)

In simplest terms, The Bargain is:

“When a human producer of labour (like a worker) has ability, ambition, aptitude, experience, and time to do available work (and to be compensated fairly for that work, even when money is not involved, like volunteering), then opportunity shall present itself commensurate to those means.”

Its corollary:

“As compensatory work needs doing, even as scope and skills needs evolve, then opportunity for adequate training and structured preparation must rise to meet those needs to prepare human producers of labour for smooth, efficient entry into that work — for training to be accessible and not bury one under debt.”

We’re sold on a myth that The Bargain works because, in theory, it shall compensate for human production — labour — fairly. That production may be premised on time and/or scope. We may get taught this from an early age.

We become conditioned to believe The Bargain facilitates “equal opportunity for all” — without specifying to what extent “opportunity” and “all” are inclusive.

We’re sold a myth that The Bargain must be immune to knee-jerk obstructions like the Thing.

Tacitly, we’re aware The Bargain isn’t accessible to all, but we condition ourselves and each other to believe it can be. We may hold this belief as if it were some dispassionate economic principle.

We accept and re-iterate truisms around The Bargain because, deep down, we know they’ve never been true. Just as long as we’re not excluded from The Bargain, then no harm done is no foul to worry about.

Collectively, we admit and acknowledge wilful exclusion from The Bargain is real enough of a problem, in a society aspiring toward civility, to enact the therapy of non-discrimination laws.

Most of us accept The Bargain works “well enough” that any likelihood of being on the short end of the Thing won’t lash us, at least not repeatedly — that risk of repeat may stay low enough for a big chunk of our working lives to affirm The Bargain still works, mostly, as intended.

Whether we think about it consciously, we rely on faith in The Bargain whenever:

• we commit, long-term, to education, training, and preparation for an area of work, believing so long as we stay focussed, driven, our commitment will pay off with opportunities;
• we seek and hope for mentoring, to refine and guide us along the way, to help us reach our best potential;
• we network and apply for thousands of job postings, knowing we may get only one response for interview, yet we still do the legwork since we believe The Bargain, however flawed, works for everyone committed to finding work (that is: we’ve faith “the hustle” isn’t Sisyphean);
• we go to interview and trust we’re being assessed on our skills, experience, and personableness — not on anything else bearing no relevance to the work to be done;
• we believe once we’re hired, if we’re hired, we won’t be pulled aside abruptly and either penalized, disciplined, or removed because of what our body’s existence signifies to others;
• we evaluate which skills and interests to explore and we prioritize our commitment to learn them, aware these could be commissioned to do paid labour in service of The Bargain — consigning the learning of other unrelated skills and interests, particularly those demanding multi-year learning curves (like new languages, instruments, or making lacquerware), to be sidelined until, maybe, after “retirement”; and
• we plan major economic or financial life choices and commitments, based on reasonable guesses, against our current opportunity to participate in The Bargain today: if we believe we’ll still be working at a skill (or compensatory) level relative to now, we at least have a baseline idea upon which we might improve or extend — and, luck willing, won’t be pulled asunder by unforeseen disruptions (like downturns, grievous injuries and illnesses, or the Thing).

When we rely on these ideas as foundational, sacrosanct, and steady, we believe The Bargain delivers a fair covenant of opportunity for a civil society. Only should one be excised — Othered — from The Bargain might one begin pondering whether this was really the covenant it was sold to be.

Put another way: people who are marginalized as Other never nominated or ratified the production of marginalization!

I know I’m naïve af.

I don’t, however, believe The Bargain warrants being denied or withheld — not when superficial, immanent aspects of one’s personhood, irrelevant to The Bargain’s terms, are implicated involuntarily. Maybe my naïveté was what made me susceptible to suffering this cluster of complex trauma. Naïveté, however, doesn’t grant the Thing a pass from being held accountable when it’s utilized.

Whatever the case, especially since 2014, the Thing has shattered my faith in believing, overall, The Bargain will ever be upheld faithfully by the random cis person or that they’ll resist the temptation of bridge demolition whenever anyone like me happens upon it.

Why does any of this matter?

I’m bothering to write about this because from the vantage of being a woman who’s gay and trans — and has found myself in numerous situations where a woman who’s gay and trans isn’t expected to be — I can attest the Thing works. It works really well.

I know cis people absolutely do pull trans people from The Bargain’s participation, and not unintentionally. Most get away with it, because the notion that trans people merit even footing in civil society, or are reliable narrators of their own experiences, lacks widespread accord amongst a plurality, if not majority of cis people, even in 2024. Many cis people believe, in the end, they’ve nothing to worry about — no concern for accountability — when they play the Thing card on a trans person.

Consequently, trans people of all sexualities, just like cis gay people a generation previous, continue to get hurt. This problem is entrenched. Repeat brushes with the Thing do accumulate: they eliminate trans people from participating in The Bargain. The episodic may morph into the cumulative, the ceaseless.

The Thing derails The Bargain: it deprives those Othered from finding even footing. The Thing conserves hegemonic social order: it makes varieties of Otherness not only possible, but also tenacious, stubborn.

There are, however, remedies.

When one survives repeated violence by the Thing, it helps to find others who’ve also had opportunities to The Bargain withheld — or risk having it happen.

When that alone can’t cut it, folks who are at high risk of being on the Thing’s short end should strive to tighten communities of care and to facilitate the foundation of lasting care networks.

Collectively, they must seek to cultivate and sustain their own informal economies to assure work, pay, and shelter remain possibilities to vulnerable peers should The Bargain be withdrawn, involuntarily, from their table of opportunity.

They must decline hegemonic means to hurt one another — that using such means won’t win them a spot in a hegemonic social order.

They should work constantly to organize restorative social events — like rent parties [https://archive.ph/1Q19P] and in-person fundraisers, to satisfy two goals concurrently:

• one, to look after Othered compatriots in acute crisis, arising from exclusion from The Bargain, to help them maintain their footing and base-level Maslow needs (shelter, food, medicine, clothing); and
• two, to weave community bonds more tightly, as in-person socializing fosters networks in ways which even the wonders of social media, prone to siloing, cannot deliver. It means stronger local connections remain vital for a marginalized population in ways remote connections alone cannot remedy. (This used to be impracticable for trans people; ironically, the internet altered that calculus.)

All of these actions are not only restorative, but also meaningful: each is counter-hegemonic in their purpose. Each pushes back on the hegemonic which reified that Otherness in the first place.

In theory, it also helps to have explicit, non-discrimination law (and supporting case law) on the books. As I can attest, however, this mechanism — civil therapy — lacks the ability to bite unless the dentition of affirmative case law can push through gums. It’s painful.

The takeaway

What doesn’t preoccupy my mind nowadays is how being denied opportunities to The Bargain has harmed me. I already get how it’s done so — how it brought me to this moment.

As I edit this, I’m on the verge of sleeping rough — despite holding two, higher-tier university degrees; lacking status in my country of residence; and resolving how the root of my complex PTSD, to be deprived of The Bargain in at least nine unique ways, is something I’m still powerless to fix, yet something I also can’t avoid.

I tried avoiding it. I adapted. It wasn’t enough. I failed.

I already know what harm to occur each time a cis person leveraged the Thing to assure I’d never forget I was still Othered by the hegemony of cisnormativity.

What I’m trying to focus on, with time I have left, are two things.

The first:

Find a place wherein I can engage in The Bargain, even if it’s neither anywhere near my past experiences or disciplinary training, nor may it optimize the best and most of my aptitude, capabilities, and ambition. I need grounding — basic Maslow stuff, including permanent residency — before I can do anything else. (“Anything else” includes being able to help to lift others as much as I’ve long wanted to.)

This is my “Plan C”.

This pill is propranolol-bitter. Yet, considering my strong work ethic, I’d rather have opportunity to participate in The Bargain, even if it doesn’t make the most of my skills. I’d rather work, with equitable, steady compensation, if The Bargain — one couched in the economics of capitalism and producerism — is the best this society can come up with. (Equitable compensation has always eluded me.) I think desiring this opportunity is not a terribly high bar, but it’s one from which I shouldn’t be deprived — arising, solely, from my existence (and placement) as a gender and sexual minority, my womanhood, or these and any others (like neurodivergence), in synthesis.

That I’m even writing about this underscores how this society is far less evolved than I was conditioned to believe.

I conjecture a civil society can exist which could do better — one whose core values may have thrived at microcosmic scales in since-eradicated and/or conquered cultures, but won’t emerge at widespread scale within my lifetime, even were I to reach age 200. For this reason, I know I don’t belong to this time: a time within which I would belong has yet to exist, if it ever might.

The second:

By writing about the sowing of division — perpetuating Otherness as marginal to hegemonic social orders — I mean to remind how the Thing has hurt, is hurting, and shall continue to hurt many more people, needlessly, as they’re blocked from participating in The Bargain. I’d like to believe we’re better than this, but it turns out disappointment is a deep well.

So I turn tables: what little thing can you do today to erase the margin — to counteract it?

It’s easy to gloss over, in denial, how much magnificent potential has already been extinguished, consigned to dehumanizing thralldom, and coerced to remove themselves from existence (or to be removed forcibly and violently if unwilling to self-eliminate) because some aspect of the Thing impeded their access toward opportunity.

It’s unclear how the destroying of bridges to upend one’s momentum accomplishes much beyond soothing hegemonic insecurities — what we’d otherwise call fragility. Destroying bridges is, condensed, an act of macro-level self-sabotage.

Innovation? New ways of seeing? Fresh creativity? Pish-posh — not when the act of obstructing these, should they originate from the minds and involvement of Othered people, lay bare nakedly false scarcities wrought by Othering as the zero-sum fallacy it’s always been. We mustn’t upset that apple cart.

When those who can show us ways to become better stewards for each another, for society, and for this planet, but who happen to, inconveniently, signify existences deemed as Other — and we lure them (or let them be lured) to bridges of opportunity slated for detonation, just as they cross — then we sabotage ourselves when we let them fall to the raging rapids below.

We have the means to intervene, to disarm harm. But shall we? Shall you?

How might you do it?

Looking up takes great effort.