Tools of the Trade

Artwork by Mary Fisher

I don’t really know how it feels to be transgender, but I have some acquaintance with being the object of ignorance and bias. To be a woman with AIDS, when I was first diagnosed and probably still now, was to be a dirty woman, not infected but corrupted.

Maybe that’s why I resonated with an article sent by a friend, authored by Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell. He noted that “every single major medical organization, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association, supports age-appropriate, gender-affirming care for transgender and non-binary people.”

Then he adds: “In the last election, the United States decided that the prime threats to American greatness are not the climate crisis, not systemic racism, not income inequality. Rather, they are immigrants, park rangers, and transgender people. I won’t go into all the tragic stories and statistics about transgender people – family rejection, social scorn, assaults and murders, homelessness, suicide. If anyone seriously believes that a person would go through all this so they could skulk in women’s restrooms or have a successful swimming career, they are dismally misinformed and have been callously manipulated.”

I think both are true: people are being “dismally misinformed” and “callously manipulated” by power brokers who want to stir the cauldron of fear and hide behind chaos. I can count on one hand the number of media sources I now completely trust to tell the objective truth, and some days I’m not sure about two of those fingers.

This isn’t new. I noted in my forthcoming book (Uneasy Silence) that what the media reports and what it does not report are both key to manipulation. Tiny lies become national stories. Myths and deceit are transformed into wide-spread convictions. Those manipulating the media in State Houses and the White House, invoking censorship to “cleanse history,” are employing tools of the trade for despots and dictators. This isn’t politics as usual; it’s dictatorship as always.

And it's why I included the following in my book:

“Sarah Quinn tells the largely unreported story of the 1889 massacre in Leflore County, Mississippi. Black farmers, struggling to survive, organized a co-op, or ‘Alliance,’ to increase the poverty-level prices they were paid for their goods. The National Guard, called in to impose order, arrested 40 local Black men and turned them over to a local white mob. One scholar estimates that the Leflore County Massacre took the lives of 25 Black people; reports at the time actually suggested 100 people were tortured and killed, including women and children. As a strategy to take away the voice of the oppressed, Quinn notes, the killing ‘was purposely not recorded in the county news, and a journalist who later went to investigate found locals too terrified to speak of it.’”

Terror works. Intimidation is a potent silencer. When Black people in Ocoee, Florida asked for the right to vote, a white mob turned Election Day 1920 into what historian Paul Ortiz has called ‘the single bloodiest election day in modern American history.’ At least sixty Black people died. Black homes were burned. Black men were castrated. The horror went largely unreported. I’ve never read about it in any history book I was assigned.

Time and again, history proves that nothing is as silent as the grave.”

I wanted Uneasy Silence to be uplifting and encouraging, something that evokes a smile or teases out a laugh. Early readers of the manuscript have generously said it achieves this.

But the problem is, every page isn’t a joke because I also wanted to tell the truth. These days, given – well, given everything, it isn’t easy to balance grim realities, truthful reporting and a relieving laugh before bedtime. It just ain’t easy.

— Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Uneasy Silence - coming soon