Hate.

When Will was a fifteen year old boy and told us he was gay, the first thing I said to him was that we loved him just as he was. My immediate thought after that was that his dad and I would protect him at all costs from the hate and vitriol that was surely going to come his way.

A few years after he had told us, I went with him and the girls to see Barack Obama at a rally nearby when he was running for president the first time. As we walked to the venue Will spotted members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a ragtag bunch of a religous zealots who gained notoriety for their hatred of everything. Their specialty was their God Hates Fags signs and promises of eternal damnation for anyone who was not straight. Will grabbed my arm hard and said, “Mom, we can’t walk past them,” and I could hear the fear in his voice. We crossed the street and avoided them, but I wanted to confront them, I wanted to grab their signs, I wanted them to fear my wrath like my son did theirs. But the funny thing about this group was that they were heavily protected by the police wherever they went unlike my young, gay son.

That was many years ago and as a country we have since graduated to hating the transgender community because now everyone knows somebody who is gay so there’s no novelty in that. But that group of people? Well, they’re coming for your bathroom, your swimming medals, the dressing rooms at the moonlight madness sale at your local Kohl’s, and in the course of your kid’s school day changing their sex in the nurse’s office.

When I worked at a local university, our office was home to LGBTQ Affairs so seeing students of every identification was a normal part of the day. I was working with a student group on one of their events via email. The student rep’s name was Katherine, but every email was signed off with a different name which kept confusing me. When they came to the office to meet me in person and talk over details, the person at our front desk came to tell me and said, “Just so you know, they are presenting themselves as male,” which I was grateful to have a heads up on. What followed was a conversation on the business end of things and then a different conversation about the difference in name and my apologies for the confusion. We had more emails, and phone calls over the weeks that followed and their event went off without a hitch. Through it all I stayed solidly female.

Last fall I took a writing class sponsored by our library where a trans woman was in attendance. Her look was over the top and garnered lots of attention which for me would be so uncomfortable I’d probably end up hiding in the bathroom out of embarrassment. A few hours later we were in a class together where she furiously took notes which I admired because I was having trouble staying interested. As the class wound down and the instructor asked if anyone had any advice to share about their method of writing, she raised her hand and proceeded to wow the room with a multitude of tips. In that moment her look melted away in light of her enthusiasm for writing and supporting everyone in the room who was struggling with the same thing – making time to write. I often think that trans people are the bravest of us out in the world. We all package ourselves in order to be accepted and they have the courage to rip the packaging off to show their true selves and face ridicule, and often violence, at every turn.

I cannot accept punishing anyone who has purposely been pushed to the fringes of society for being who they are, for wanting the same things all of us want, for daring to dream that they, too, get a chance. As the holidays get closer and we are starting to think of our celebrations, for those of us missing someone (and isn’t that all of us?) there are so many bittersweet reminders of how it used to be. Mark loved pumpkin pie, my mom used an old-fashioned meat grinder to crush her cranberries, my dad loved stuffing. As the turkey is in the oven the memories flood in and the longing of setting one less plate never goes away.

The airwaves this election season have been flooded with the vilest of commercials demonizing the other. We are being groomed to hate. But there is a person on the receiving end of that, a chair being made ready for them, sisters who can’t imagine life without their brother, and parents desperately praying that they can shield them from that which they do not deserve.

Hate has consequences.