Superman Is Not Brave
My fifth grade teacher once wrote “Superman is not brave,” up on the board while we were all at lunch.
I promise I don’t intend to bore you with the tales of my fifth grade exploits, none of which were thrilling. But because, at least for me, fifth grade was so long ago and in such a different reality that it feels like it happened in another age of human existence, have some context in the form of some of things we did that year:
- Learned the preamble of the United States Constitution from a Schoolhouse Rock video;
- Discovered that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell;
- Gathered for a class called “Computer Lab” where we largely fucked around with MS Paint;
- Took part in an annual school-wide walk they inexplicably called the Fitness Fun Run, despite it being neither Fun nor a Run, and
- Cared for a chicken egg as though it was a human child. (The sexual education curriculum in Ohio, in fifth grade and beyond, leaves a lot to be desired.)
Everyone was there, in my fifth grade class. All the usual suspects. The kid who in retrospect makes you think, “Yikes, what was going on at home?” but at the time made you think, “Oh my god, I wish I could push that unrelenting little bastard out the window” — he was there. The kid who’d eat anything for a price was there too. The children who had, over the summer, discovered “popularity” were of course there, as were the (generally rather kinder) children who would never quite manage to understand the concept. It was a regular who’s who of eleven year olds.
Our teacher, a man in the early years of his career who I’ll just call Mr. K, was a wildly popular educator by the standards of this motley crew of children, all of whom were a little bit in love with him. This was only to be expected: Mr. K was hot. Mr. K was, in fact, too hot to be appreciated properly by a group of preteen miscreants, hot in a way I only truly understand as an adult. He was a former college baseball player who often walked around the classroom with his arms resting casually on a bat yoked over his shoulders; he cared deeply and earnestly about the well-being of his students; he talked regularly and with gentle, adoring fondness about his wife. We could not, as mere youths, properly recognize what a rare model of cis masculinity we had been presented with, but certainly we paid him rather more attention than we might have had he not always looked as though he wandered into the classroom directly from the baseball diamond.
The day we came back from lunch to find “Superman is not brave,” on the board, Mr K was almost vibrating with the effort of containing his energy; it was clearly one of his favorite lessons to teach. He asked us all to look at the statement for a moment, to think about it, and then he asked us what we thought it meant. There were the guesses you’d imagine from a room full of people whose primary interests in life were Dunkaroos and Nickelodeon — one enthusiastic child declared, “Because BATMAN’S the brave one,” as though this completely settled the issue — but most kids are smarter than most adults tend to remember. Pretty quickly someone said, “Because he’s stronger than everyone else?” and Mr. K roared his agreement with delight.
Now, there is obviously a separate conversation to be had here about the finer points of the Superman canon, the specific bravery of Clark Kent as opposed to his alter ego, and the nature of what bravery could mean for a character whose physical strength cannot protect them from emotional pain — I am not arguing otherwise. But this is not the conversation Mr. K was trying to have with this room full of fifth graders, and it’s not the conversation I’m trying to have in this newsletter right now; if you’re here to talk about the Snyder cut, then you are urgently needed anywhere else. The point that Mr. K was so eager to make was that if you have an enormous amount of power, and you use that power against someone with considerably less power than you, that’s not bravery. It’s not courageous to punch down.
I’ve thought about that lesson a lot in the last twenty years (though o! how it pains me to realize it’s been that long). I thought about it as a teenager, as I watched the fifth graders who’d embraced popularity become middle and high schoolers who embraced cruelty; I thought about it as a young adult, as I encountered petty academics far more interested leveraging their power over students than teaching them. I thought about it as I accepted that I would likely always struggle with anxiety — as I learned about the other thing I always reach for on the topic of bravery, the inimitable Carrie Fisher’s advice to “Be scared, but do it anyway.” And I’ve thought about it a lot — a LOT — since beginning to live my life openly as a trans man, and watching bad takes roll in every morning.
It sometimes feels pointless to even try to talk about trans issues. The trans and nonbinary people who encounter my writing not only already know everything I have to say, but likely know it even better than I do; on the other hand, it’s increasingly hard to believe that cis people who aren’t already on the side of decency can be turned around. What can you say to someone so afraid of you, of what they’ve decided you represent, that they don’t see you as human being? How are you supposed to communicate with somebody determined not to listen? “Please, sir, if you could recognize for but a moment that I too am a creature with thoughts and feelings, possessed of personhood equal to yours?” The whole thing is just so absurd. And even if you do manage, somehow, to get through to someone like that, how could you possibly share the gorgeous, complicated expanse of the trans experience — something that, beautifully, is a little different for everyone — in the few short moments of grudging consideration you’ve managed to wrangle?
I keep talking anyway, largely because it’s all I know how to do. For better or (usually) worse, I’m someone who gets through the day on believing most people are trying to be decent most of the time. We all suffer so much for the sometimes questionable pleasure of being alive — surely most of the misery of the world is, itself, born of misery. Surely most people want to be good to others, and have only stepped off the path of kindness by accident, or in confusion about what’s right, or as a reaction to their own traumas and hurts. I know that’s naive at best, but I’m okay with being naive on this; believing it is what gets me out of bed each morning. Without it I’d be so afraid of everyone all the time that I’m not sure how I’d carry on.
But I have to say it makes me sick, watching these lawmakers and pundits and single-minded hucksters who dare to call themselves journalists insist that they are courageously standing up against the dangerous trans movement. “I’ve been cancelled!” they cry, from atop the mountains of their enormous platforms. “I’m being punished just for asking questions!” they scream, failing to mention that the questions were things like “Do you also think that trans people are monsters out to corrupt our youth?” and the ‘punishment’ was a couple of trans people saying “Could you maybe stop defaming us?” And, of course, they repeat for anyone who will listen that they are brave, that this is bravery. That they are standing up for what’s right in the face of adversity, and this makes them heroes.
But they’re not heroes, and they’re certainly not brave, because bravery is not now and never will be defined as “leaning off the top of your throne of influence and power to punch absolutely as far down as possible.” It’s not brave to hurt people who are already suffering; it’s not brave to vilify an entire group of the most vulnerable members of society; it’s not brave to use your platform to spread hateful lies and rhetoric about those who are largely powerless. Courage is about doing what’s right even when it’s difficult, even when it would be easier and safer not to. Courage is about standing up for the vulnerable, not tearing them down. Courage risks something. A room full of fifth graders could tell you that much.
Today is the Trans Day of Visibility, an occasion I always find a little humorous, since every day is a day that I’m visibly trans. Especially this year, with anti-trans sentiment as high as I can ever remember it being, with anti-trans legislature being actively pushed in state governments all over this country (not to mention the rest of the world) — I do not, personally, feel I am suffering from a lack of visibility. I’d be more interested right now in a Trans Day of Invisibility, where for 24 hours everyone, by law, had no choice but to leave us alone.
But since I cannot have that, I will settle for this: cis people, I am begging you to be brave. I am begging you to swallow your discomfort, to push past your fear of confrontation, to risk things getting awkward and really push back against this horrifying movement, and against the transphobes in your own life. Your chance of getting through to them is so much better than mine, because they see you as a person and me, at best, as a wedge issue. I know that it’s not easy, and that it will probably suck — believe me, I know — but please, do it anyway. Be visible in your support. Have courage enough to stand behind us.
I didn’t know I was trans in the fifth grade, at least in part because I didn’t know trans people existed when I was in the fifth grade. I just knew I was small and strange, sad that I never quite fit anywhere. But I was learning every day — about bravery, about mitochondria, about what adulthood would mean, about myself. Today’s trans children, whether they know who they are yet or not, are learning too, and somehow they’ve been placed on the front lines of this cruel, one-sided culture war. What do you think they’re learning? How many different ways are we teaching them to hate themselves? This hurt they’re feeling now is going to shape them, because everything that happens to children shapes them — who will they be, as adults, after this? What exactly have we done here?
I don’t know yet, and none of us fully will for years. But I know this: nobody with an ounce of sense would look at a bunch of adults faced off against a group of children and call the adults the brave ones. There are, in fact, words for a person so afraid of a fair fight that they target the most powerless, the most vulnerable, and those words are not “brave” or “courageous;” they’re “bully” and “coward.” Hope that clears things up.
•