When the Bully Gets “Bullied”
For people with privilege, facing an uncomfortable truth outside their experience feels like “oppression.”
Every year, the nonprofit I work for puts on an UpStander Carnival. We bring out “Equity Jeopardy,” materials on cyberbullying, a popcorn machine from a movie theater, and tens of volunteers, and we set up next to our city’s weekly farmers market. The UpStander Carnival is aimed at elementary-aged kids, although we get a lot of preschoolers. Each kid gets a “passport” and earns a stamp at each station of the Carnival. The stations teach kids about identity diversity, the signs of bullying, and tools to be an UpStander — not a bystander — when bullying happens. Once the passport is full, they gain entry to the Fun Zone, where parents hope they expend enough energy dancing with streamers and hurling balls at targets so they can have a relatively quiet afternoon.
My station is the Identity Diversity Table, where kids do an activity I titled “Identity Euphoria,” based on the trans experience of Gender Euphoria. (Our nonprofit was founded by a woman whose son was nearly killed in an anti-gay hate crime, so much of our work centers on the LGBTQ+ community.) We have cardstock cut-outs of people in a variety of skin colors, and kids decorate them with googly eyes, nylon hair, felt clothing, multicolored feathers, foam shapes, and fancy sequins. Sometimes we have butterfly wings so the people can be fairies. Our fantastic volunteer, Sam, talked about how every person the kids make looks different, but is unique and special, just like each one of them. These are young kids, and we’re trying to communicate that difference is not weird or suspect, but instead something to appreciate and embrace. (I will note that lighter-colored people cut-outs tend to disappear faster than the darker, brown ones, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Yesterday’s UpStander Carnival was nearly perfect: gorgeous weather, the perfect temperature under the shade of the trees, plenty of volunteers, a steady stream of families clearly enjoying themselves. The kids were an absolute delight, and their parents were all excited, happy, and pleased with the Carnival. So many people told us they were glad we put on the event and were grateful to have our organization in the community.
But there’s always that one person.
An elderly man stopped by my table, hands clasped behind his back, surveying the cluster of kids absorbed in creating. I had put out a sign that read: “Did you know? A UCLA study of California youth 13–18 years old found that 27% (more than 1 in 4) said their peers view them as gender-nonconforming.” The man caught my eye and said, “Can I ask you a question?”
He had a hearing aid in each ear and was clearly struggling with short-term memory. He would talk, lose his train of thought, ask me to remind him what he was saying, then try to pick up the thread again. He spoke with a slight, educated English accent, so it didn’t surprise me when he told me he had attended an all-boys boarding school.
He said that when he was growing up, there weren’t as many gender nonconforming kids, and so what did it mean that there were more now? I pointed out that just because there were fewer out gender nonconforming kids when he was growing up, it didn’t mean that the overall number of people who identify as gender nonconforming had changed. I added that trans people had existed throughout human history and in cultures all over the world, so while trans folks may have seemed rare when he was growing up, it didn’t mean they were rare in all places. But if gender nonconforming people seemed more common, it just meant that people felt safer coming out in the 2020s than they did then.
“I don’t believe that,” he said bluntly. “How do you know?” I replied that people his age who are gender nonconforming said, consistently, that they didn’t feel safe coming out at younger ages. “Well,” he responded, “that’s what they say, but that’s not evidence.” I pointed out that his personal experience of one didn’t constitute evidence, either. “But I grew up in an all-boys school, and people were very open, there were lots of homosexuals, and so I don’t believe that people didn’t feel safe to come out.”
Having dealt with cognitive decline with my grandparents, I felt compassion for the challenges of aging, it didn’t change the fact that what he was saying offended me in a way that, for those of use who are marginalized, is tiresomely predictable. And although it may be easy to dismiss his opinion because “it was a different time,” I have had similar conversations with people of all ages.
I won’t bore you with an exact retelling of how we went around in circles, but the crux of his argument came down to, “My personal experience and analysis of how many gender nonconforming people existed when I was young, as a cisgender heterosexual man, needs to count as evidence equal to the experience of a gender nonconforming person, or even the collective experiences of all gender nonconforming people of my same age and cultural background.”
This is an extremely common experience for anyone who belongs to a marginalized community. People who are white say it to people who are non-white. People who are able-bodied say it to those who are disabled. People who are wealthy say it to those who are poor.
This is one example in a pattern of how people who are not marginalized center themselves in discussions about marginalized people’s experiences and institutionalized exclusion. I can’t tell you how many times a white person has asserted that their opinion of whether or not something is racist should count as much as mine — even though, by definition, the white person has never experienced racism while I have experienced it my entire life and studied the histories, literature, and socio-economic-political analyses of non-white people on the topic of racism.
This denial of our expertise in our own lives is incredibly invalidating, and it’s dispiriting to have to counter it again, and again, and again.
The people who noticed my predicament were two women of color, who recognized the signs of an unwanted conversation that was testing my my tolerance for illogical argument and dismissive attitude. They ran interference for me: one tried to explain to the man how he was being rude and disrespectful both to me and my community, then the other told me I was needed elsewhere and escorted me away from him. The man continued around the stations at the carnival, at one point demanding of an 11-year-old volunteer if she thought that bullying was more common now than when he was growing up. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m in elementary school.” An adult sent to intervene in this inappropriate interaction reported that the man said he was feeling bullied.
This is part of the burden of being marginalized, and for those of us who are multiply marginalized, it’s compounded. It’s having these conversations throughout our lives with people who never seem to learn. It’s being vigilant about our friends and loved ones being pulled into these conversations and needing to rescue them. It’s moments of letting our guard down only to be blindsided by bias when we thought we could take a breath. It’s knowing that it’s not our responsibility to educate the ignorant, and yet having to do it again and again because no one else in the room will step up.
Systemic prejudice is more than just bullying, but bullying on an individual level can be one manifestation of systemic prejudice.
Even though what this man said made me angry, I knew I needed to keep our conversation “civil.” Even though he was cranky and obnoxious with me, I knew I couldn’t come back at him at the same level. I had to “go high.” Men like him can give into their childish impulses and still get taken seriously; I cannot.
Yet despite my delicacy and moderated response, he still felt “bullied.” Being told that his personal experience was not, in fact, the definitive measure of the truth made him feel threatened. Other people in positions of privilege will similarly latch onto the language of the oppressed to describe the unpleasant feeling they get when told they are wrong by a marginalized person. Without ever having experienced being systematically excluded based on inherent attributes like race, sexuality, or disability, they will call the feeling “reverse racism,” “prejudice,” or “intolerance.”
Situations like these present an opportunity for allyship. When people with privilege leverage it to make the points marginalized people make — but in a voice their peers can hear — taking on that burden of education and emotional labor is a genuine service. Unfortunately, too few people within that position will seize the opportunity. They may not recognize it as an opportunity. They may hesitate, and in that moment of hesitation, a person who is marginalized and all too familiar with these dynamics may jump in, aware of how upsetting it is for the marginalized person who is the target of the conversation. They may not be aware that the incident is happening at all. Learning to intervene capably is a skill, and like any skill, it takes education, practice, and repetition. Many times, fear of failure will prevent an ally from trying at all, while the marginalized person in the situation rarely has the choice to decline to interact.
This is why we’re so tired. This is why we’re angry. This is why it’s so hard sometimes not to give in to hopelessness. In the scale of oppression, this one encounter seems minor, but it’s the accumulation of interactions like this — some just micro-aggressions, others worse than this one, some genuinely violent — that build over time. And we know it will never stop in our lifetimes. But we fight so that the children in our communities now might face less exhaustion, rage, and despair as they grow up. Our struggle has to mean something.
“Inequity” can sound so abstract. But for those of us who live it, the cost of that inequity is something we pay for in a multitude of ways every single day.
(I keep my writing free because I want it to be accessible, but I still have kids to feed. If you can afford to, please support my work: https://www.patreon.com/jorjorian)