Unfortunate Paradox
It’s a simple problem. The people that produce and consume the bulk of sympathetic LGBT writing are the people that have the least to gain from it. To put it another way, closeted and repressed people don’t read LGBT sympathetic material. In the rare instances when they do, they often find that there is a significant disconnect between the issues of interest to them and those which are under discussion by the people they read. This reinforces denial in many cases, since any difference a repressed person sees between themselves and an unrepressed person will be happily interpreted as a sign that they aren’t really lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. “I might be transgender” leads to “what is a transgender person?” which leads to “This is a transgender person”, which then leads to “I’m not like that, therefore I’m not transgender”.
Repressed people will look for reasons to stay repressed. They will find them even in the writing of people who would like to help them, and they will rarely even search out such writing except when it serves this purpose. There is a combination of factors at play here. First there is the problem of the inaccessability of information. Second is the problematic tendency repressed people have to use LGBT writing to reinforce notions of differences between themselves and other queers. As if being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender were something which defined the whole of a person, and therefore being any of these things meant being it in the exact same way as everyone else.
The psychological tendencies of repressed people are hard to combat. Increasing access to information isn’t necessarily helpful in itself, because doing so involves taking the discussion of LGBT issues into the public sphere. This is often viewed as invasive and used as an indictment against queer people, which hardly helps to change the mindset of the repressed. It also opens up the discussion to those who have problems with LGBT people and therefore validates the perspective of bigots through equal access to social discource. On the whole, information alone can’t do anything to help.
I don’t know what can be done about this. So many people are caught in a cycle of imitation discourse. They search out information and pretend to consider it, but leave with their perspective unchanged. They blame the information for failing to change their minds even though it was their own individual responsibility to accept or reject it. It’s as if they need something to force them, to hold their hand and guide them against their habits; except nothing like this exists. What makes communicating with repressed people so difficult is that they lack a sense of personal responsibility for themselves. They don’t recognize or accept the obligation they have to synthesize their identity with reality and with the unique circumstances of their own existence. Instead, they define themselves in terms of other people.
How does one stress (and convincingly) that coming to terms with oneself is an issue of personal responsibility? How does a person sell this sense of responsibility to people in whom it is absent? It is not helpful that the language of responsibility is often co-opted for just the opposite sort of argument. There’s an absurdity to that. A person can only be responsible for what they do with things that are. Gender and sexuality are internal, psychological realities. Since they are internal, the only person that can perceive them is the person who lives with them. I think that is the source of confusion. People who think it can be a personal responsibility to not be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender don’t understand that these things are subjects. They’re under the mistaken impression that they’re simply modes of conduct, rather than objective yet personal realities which people either rise to meet or neglect.
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