Acceptance

I saw a staged reading of a play called The Knot this afternoon. It made me think, and I really liked that. The story revolved around two women and their lives in different time periods. It explored their sense of self, femininity, and relationships. It made me think about acceptance.

This inspired me to write a post about what acceptance means to me. Of course, as is often the case with this sort of thing, I have to start by mentioning a couple things that acceptance is NOT.

Acceptance is not legality.
More precisely, acceptance is about more than the law. For marginalized peoples, legality is really just a starting point. When we have arrived at the point where "the gays"/black people/women/whoever can vote/marry/live their lives in peace, we have only begun the struggle. Too many times I see privileged people (whites, men, heterosexuals, cisgendered people, I mean you) pat each other on the back and talk about how much better it is now that, for example, New York has legalized gay marriage. Yes, it's a good thing. But it's just the beginning. To take another example, my college recently (after we took over an administrative building for a few days) revamped its sexual violence policy. While this represents a victory, we've still got a long ways to go before we rid our campus of a rape culture. Do you think that Brown vs. Board of Education solved our problem with segregation in our education system? Do you think that when blacks and women earned the right to vote, we solved racism and sexism? If you think so, I suggest you take a long, hard look at the world we live in.

Acceptance is not tolerance.
This point is very important. Tolerance, while better than intolerance, is not enough. When you tolerate something, you don't like it. You don't tolerate your friends. You tolerate flies. You tolerate annoyances. Tolerance means you don't like something, but you allow it to continue. To put it in perspective, when it comes to marginalized groups, tolerance fucking sucks. "Congratulations, minority group! I tolerate you! I don't really like you or want to spend time around you, but I guess we can exist in the same society... Just stay away from my children." When we reach a point where everyone can be tolerated (which we haven't yet achieved) we'll have come a long way. But we won't be done. So please, don't act like tolerance is anywhere near enough.

Acceptance is about love.
When you accept someone, you appreciate them for who they are. To me, acceptance means that of COURSE gay people should be allowed to marry if they want to. So should trans men, trans women, genderqueer people, poor people, black people, multiracial people, disabled people, and polyamorous people. Acceptance means that you look at those who are different than you, and you love that they are different. You love diversity because it's a part of being human, and being identical is a fucking shitshow. As a people, we desperately need to understand this and stop wasting our time fighting with each other about this stuff. We need to accept diversity for the wonderful thing it is so that we can move on and grow as a people.

Fuck legalization, fuck tolerance, and fuck being the same. We are even better than all of that.