An Antidote to Intolerance

I need to talk about something.

I should preface this by saying that I’m a huge optimist. I believe love will prevail over hate. I believe in the basic humanity of people as a whole. I believe technology and innovation will help us meet the great problems of our time: climate change, food insecurity, energy shortages. Sometimes I say I believe, because belief itself creates a kind of spaciousness in my life, which leaves me enough room to help create the conditions for those things to become true.

And lately, I’ve been feeling a bit antsy.

Stay with me. This article is my antidote.

I have joked in the past that if there ever came a day when the way I’ve lived my life, as a sex worker, queer person, trans person, and all the rest of it, landed me “up on the wall,” then at least I’d be among friends. For years, my private slogan has been inspired by a meme of a cat in cowboy boots riding on the back of a horse: “Once you ruin your reputation, you can live with total freedom.” To me, living with total freedom meant dropping internalised shame and, as far as possible, not letting other people’s shame weigh too heavily on me.

But I had assumed that possibility was far away.

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling uneasy. Wary. Disconcerted. There’s a flutter in my chest, a tension low in my body, small embodied signals that read like fear.

Two weeks ago, the harrowing new television series Tip Toe, written by Russell T Davies, was released. It tells the story of Leo, an HIV-positive gay nightclub owner, and Clive, an electrician whose fears, financial pressure, and conspiratorial thinking pull him into radicalisation. The finale, depicted in the opening scene, shows Leo being executed in a suburban street in Manchester; a public hanging, led by Clive and a group of men. It is brutal, intimate, and chilling.

As I watched it, fixated and horrified, I didn’t think of The Handmaid’s Tale. I thought instead of the street scenes in Argo, of real-life Tehran after the revolution, and of the public hangings that marked a new regime’s violence. It made me think of how quickly a society can move from relative openness to something far darker than people expect.

Here’s where this starts to matter.

We know media is built to profit from outrage and attention. My social media feeds have been increasingly pushing me toward stories about trans lives becoming harder in the US, about widening hostility, about a public mood that feels more punishing by the week. I avoid clicking on anything attached to JK Rowling because I do not need the livestream of vitriol that follows.

I reassure myself that I’m in Melbourne, that this is the capital of tolerance, that we’ve decriminalised sex work, that we are Australian; a place shaped less by religious extremism and more by a live-and-let-live instinct. I count my lucky stars to be here. To feel safe.

And yet I am still antsy.

My snow globe of optimism has a hairline crack, and the water is leaking through, droplet by droplet. It niggles at me.

I refuse to let that become my whole inner weather. I refuse to dwell too long in the bodily sensations that say fear, or let them take over my ability to be here, now.

So this is my prescription. My antidote.

It starts with staying connected. Not in some grand abstract sense, but at street level, in the ordinary everyday world around us. I walk down my street and I smile at people I meet on the pavement. I chat to the cashier. I stop to offer help. I comment on someone’s dog, their shoes, their hair. I try to meet people with honesty, curiosity, and care. These connections are not trivial. They are not performative. They are how I stay human.

If I’m feeling too depleted to connect from a place of joy, I find joy first in some small way. I pick a lavender flower and hold it to my nose. I stand still in the sun and let the warmth reach my skin. I pause beside a piece of street art I know and love. And slowly, almost always, I find the steadiness I need to take the next step toward other people.

That, to me, is the bedrock: to be connected to myself well enough that I can reach out to someone else with care, and offer that care as a balm, a point of sparkle, if they are open to it.

We have to stay connected and caring toward other humans, regardless of politics, demographic, or identity. At the local level, we have to resist the habit of sorting people into enemies before we’ve ever met them. Too often now, intolerance arrives first, simply by virtue of identity. In the US, that seems starkest in the Democrat versus Republican split, where people are too often flattened into a tribe before they are seen as a person.

In Tip Toe, Leo screams at Clive, “You believe anything online. Why won’t you believe me?” And that, for me, is the heartbreak at the center of it all. Not just violence, but the collapse of trust. Not just ideology, but the loss of proximity. There was a time when someone might hold broad prejudices, even ugly ones, but still trust the person who fixed their car, or lived next door, or served them at the shop. I’m not saying that was enough. I’m not saying that was okay. But we did once trust the people around us more than we do now.

And I think we have to find our way back to that. Back to trusting the people around us enough to meet them as people first, not categories. Back to noticing that humanity is still right there in front of us, if we are willing to look and meet it.

It might not seem like a lot. And maybe it isn’t. But small actions matter. Connection, at the local level, keeps me open, ready, and resourced for whatever comes next.