There’s a powerful essay on Assigned Media by about the death of Lindsey Graham, a terrible, hateful man, and her reaction to it.
Visaggio writes about trying to be a good person, the kind of person who doesn’t speak ill of the dead, the kind of person who tries to see the good in even the worst of us. But Visaggio is trans, the kind of person Graham and other evil people have spent years harming.
Yet here I am. Cheering and joking and mocking, fruit flying from my hand, hating this man who, unlike those I once prayed for, has never to my knowledge actually murdered anyone. He died, and all I can say is I wish it had happened sooner, and been more humiliating. I gleefully entertain fantasies my editor has asked me to cut from this text. Ten years of public scorn and mockery for trans people as a category and for myself personally showed me how. Ten years of being told we are affronts to God, a danger to children, sick, deluded rapists have been my education. I have, at last, learned how to hate.
Ten years after I transitioned, I am a better person in countless ways – but in this, the most important one, I am worse. Ten years of abuse at the hands of bigots and opportunists, ten years of eliminationism, ten years of my own father’s endorsement of these people; all of that has taught me to hate, to hate fiercely. To wish ill. To dream of the moment I can say, at last, these fuckers are dead, and it is better this way. Do you understand? They didn’t just make me worse. They made me like them.
I’m nine years in rather than ten, but I feel that way too. I’ve been taught to hate, and I hate it.