The Sympathy Hoarders
Why do we self-censor for those who demand we behave and cooperate with our oppression?
When you see manifestations of solidarity, do you ever ask yourself, what is it, precious and silent even in the defiant chorus, that they know?
From Colombia to Palestine. From the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia in 1985 to the rockets hitting apartment buildings in Gaza today. Some are always brave enough to care, to share love and strength in a struggle against oppression.
In my family line sits the unspeakable, unthinkable breach, the forever-open wound of India’s Partition in 1947 that ripped our ancestral province in half. I cannot see or think it, having been born forty years too late to be a witness, but precisely for that reason I can sense it, written into the flesh of everyone who raised me. Etched into my skin too as a warning, a clarion call to oppose colonialism and its atrocities.
What we know is the way of sympathy, a scarce resource.
I talk to Eva on the phone, relishing in the rare fluency that forms when two trans women don’t have to translate or self-censor. We talk about how much is built on our negation. She makes my skin prickle with creativity in telling me that of course the TERF hates herself and hates women, but what matters far more is the structure of self-loathing that forms as protection in response to the her assaults. We train ourselves to do away with ourselves. We follow the siren song of the TERF insofar as we make self-hatred the condition of our womanhood. We think we are protecting ourselves from her but in reality we are acceding to her terms as our interiority. Something Eva says to the TERF pricks me:
You are beneath my art form.
I think about the sensationalism around Janet Mock. How, after so many years of achievement and artistry, of the cruel demand for perfected poise embedded in Pose, they tried to come for her because she spoke the truth. Because she was brave enough to drop the armor they had come to expect from her, as if it were effortless, and she said what she knew, what others fear to hear because they wanted her to serve them dutifully, without transformation.
We think we are living through some sort of breakthrough moment, where Black and brown trans women are representing themselves and speaking to cis audiences, to white audiences. But this is a ruse, one as obvious as any Ryan Murphy season arc. In reality we are being granted a patronizing permission to speak in only the narrowest terms, to explain ourselves, not represent ourselves, to cis audiences and white audiences in their language, on their terms. The rest we are either forced to hold in, or know better than to speak. We self-censor as ever.
The present is made of Pyrrhic victories. Some of us will be on tv and some of us will write novels—but nothing else, if you look closely—so as to ensure that trans women never achieve anything more. The strongest strategy of containment, after all, is to make your opponent think they are advancing while they enter your trap.
I fear the conservatism this situation breeds. If you come to identify with your world’s loathing for you, it will make you a far greater foot soldier for your annihilation than your oppressor, reliving him of the effort of striking you down. If you come to fear that the complexity of your lived experience is too much for the world, you will become the ultimate censor.
You will give up the ability to feel for yourself and for others.
There are sympathy hoarders among us, those who bathe in the open humiliation of their failure because it pays. They indulge in the reprehensible theft of failing upwards, of stealing vulnerability from those who experience it and wearing it like the Emperor’s new cloak. They make a deal with the devil and promise to be mediocre, or worse, in exchange for the success attached to a sympathy that is their inheritance primarily as a propertied matter of whiteness. They reinvent, with far less poesis and even less understanding, Kipling’s “white man’s burden”:
“Take up the white Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humor”
Every time the sympathy hoarder is critiqued they cry out at their vilification. Every time their power is denuded, they claim it as proof that they are really weak and in need of rescue by power. Every time they are corrected, they say that truth and content don’t matter, it’s just uncivil or mean of us to criticize them. They are made of the weakest skin and it brings them unending pleasure to not just pretend we are on an equal playing field, but that we, the oppressed, are somehow their oppressors. Foolishness, except that it works, over and over. They cry over their cancelation and find a hundred new subscribers, or a new long-form magazine commission, or a new podcast, or a new book deal.
The TERF is one such hoarder, basking in the limelight of white women’s feminism to alibi her cruel hatred of her own sex. She must colonize and make of those who fall outside the line she draws in the sand her vassals, for that is the mandate to prove her worth to white men that she was given centuries ago by Queen Victoria, Empress of India. By Manifest Destiny and “the Rights of Man.”
But there are many more sympathy hoarders who are respectable pundits—many on this very website; too many, in fact, should I have wanted to name them, which I do not so as to avoid giving them what they want most of all: attention. The attention that garners them sympathy so that we may be left unsympathizable.
There is another self-censoring, the one that we are exhorted anew to cast off: fear. Fear that if we step out of line or say what we know to be true, we will not so much be canceled as deplatformed. Harassed. Told we should kill ourselves or that we are justifiably killable for our transgressions of civility. That our mandate in life is to be quiet and not exist.
If I am tired of being told I have to look the other way, refuse to engage, or even speak about being yelled at, and not always anonymously, that I should die for speaking publicly as a brown trans women, I cannot imagine the unbearable weight of those pressures in Bogota, or Gaza, or every Black neighborhood in this country where the police roam like the slave patrols out of which they were formed.
I used to think I was too meek to feel the kind of “transsexual rage” that birthed a certain form of trans thought. I could understand why Frankenstein’s monster was kin to trans women, but I could not feel the monster’s rage, its anger not so much at its creator, but at the world that cast monstrosity out and yet expected monsters to behave themselves nonetheless and play along with their own devaluation.
Blinding rage is still difficult for me, though now I feel it daily. But where it might take us, to its credit, is the love and solidarity that form out of channeling some of its focus and clarity into our kin. To know that if your survival is mine, then mine is also yours. To no longer hoard. Towards a Fanonian maneuver.
Les damnés de la terre derive out of the colonial situation the knowledge not just for its overthrow, but for something better than the hollow alibis of a white innocence and sympathy forged centuries ago to make of “man” a better prison than anyone could build out of brick. We know the way to freedom.