This just in – Chivalry: not dead. Now mourning: bravery.

If you know me well enough, it is a surety that you are aware of my penchant for making bizarre remarks. In the time of my life where we start to feel older when friends are getting engaged and it doesn’t seem like a terrible idea and when people are having non-accidental babies; my circle of friends and I oftentimes find ourselves prefacing sentences with “you know you’re old when”. I recently found myself saying – “There are way more lesbians in this gay bar than when I first starting coming here.” And of course, everything is less about what you say, but how you say it. I said it as if somehow, as a straight woman, there was something amiss that gay women would be frequenting a bar that in my recollection was geared much more towards gay men and the drag queens they love. Rather, what the hell am I doing there and what claim do I have to lay on this place?

Sometimes I worry that I’m too straight for my own good. Why worry, you ask? Anecdotally, with heavy amounts of truth, we have a more than general understanding that the world is run by heterosexual white men. So I look to the opposite of that spectrum and see homosexual non-white women. I’ve always taken a substantial amount of pride that I’m two out of three and have had to battle the obstacles of what being of the power minority entails. I’ll never fully understand what it would be like to be all three – what I somewhat jokingly call the minority trifecta. That same night as my silly remark, I was hit on by a lesbian. At least that’s what my friend told me – I’m so straight I can’t even tell when a girl is hitting on me.

You might be happy to know that this post isn’t actually about me. It’s actually about people who are very different from me and perspective I really wish I could gain through their bravery and not-so bravery. This is finally the blog post I started this summer, but could never find the right thoughts to logically put together. So thank you to the people who inspire me and allowing me to learn through who you are.

It was a hot summer day during Taste of the Danforth, a friend and I walked from Danforth and Pape to Bathurst and Bloor, all in the name of saving a TTC token. We were meeting up with some friends at Snakes and Lattes. My friend mentioned that we’d be meeting a friend Adrian, whom I hadn’t met before and someone earlier had remarked that he was named something else before, where I wondered aloud, how do you just change your name just like that? Then we walked into a cheese store for heat reprieve and I just dropped it. When I met Adrian, there was something striking familiar about him that and I remembered him being really pretty, for like, a dude.

I’m not really one for board games that aren’t Scrabble and I didn’t quite feel like paying the $5 cover charge, so I sat and observed some new fangled board game my friends were playing. When we decided it was time to call it an afternoon, my friends who had started a tab with the café went to go pay for their lattes and food consumed. Who knew a board game café could run just like a nightclub? I’m sure I don’t carry the proper hipster ID to be admitted next time. Just like how I’m too straight for my own good, hipsters sniff me out in a second. Adrian’s name was called to collect his ID, except they didn’t call out Adrian, they called out a different name – just as my friend had mentioned earlier. And then I realized why Adrian was so familiar; I went to high school with Adrian. I also went to an all girls’ school.

I can’t tell if Adrian recognized me as well because, hell, I’m a different person from who I was in high school. I didn’t ask any questions because I met Adrian that day. With the exception of perhaps his ID the person I knew before wasn’t the person who stood in front of me that day. And I guess that’s something I will never be fully able to understand because I guess I lucked out, the sex I was born matches the social construct of gender I feel I am supposed to be. I will never have to go through such a courageous experience to truly express who I am.

This was the first transgendered person I had met in real life. Sure, Degrassi (yes, I watch that) has a character, but that’s obviously different. But I feel like if you met Adrian, you wouldn’t really have any idea. Nor should you, it was a happenstance that I was able to connect the dots. Perhaps I have met other transgendered individuals and just not known - as it should be. I think about Adrian from time to time, thinking about what a brave decision he made and how he needed to be honest with who he is and even though it may have hurt some people around him (I don’t know that for sure) this is something that ultimately what he needs and everyone else too.

I can only imagine that this may be the bravest thing a person could ever have to do. I’ve come out to people before; I sit them down and tell them that I like men. I get a lot of weird looks, but I wish we didn’t live in a society where you’d just assume I was heterosexual. I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’m doomed to only love men. So sometimes being honest with yourself does not always require that much bravery; then again we are often so deluded by how we perceive ourselves, who really knows? Whatever the case may be, it is seemingly harder when you need to honest with other people.

I’m not quite sure when exactly it happened, but somewhere along the line it was decided that we could treat each other like shit and that is the acceptable norm. In the early days of this blog I wrote about smartphone etiquette, which at the time of the article I didn’t have a smartphone to my name. Finally, I’ve added data to my Android I got free re-signing my life to Telus because my work pays for it and I’m trying my best not to log into Facebook just because I can when I want.

But this isn’t about smartphones, this is about bravery and how we as society lack it wholly. So how is it that some people can make brave decisions and be true to themselves, whereas others can decide that it’s too much work and can’t be both to simply give a one-liner of anything? When did it become okay just to ignore people?

It is crystal clear that not answering a text, a call or an email denotes a general lack of interest. I have taken a cue from silence is golden to derive the phrase: silence is the golden fuck you. But I only tend do that to people who are really and truly deserving, where even if I’d like to yell, scream and demand answers to behaviour I don’t understand, I opt for silence. Because oftentimes the concept of closure is an unattainable one and we can waste a lot of time trying to look for it.

But what I don’t understand is when silence is unwarranted. Someone drops off the face of the earth with nary an explanation as to why. You’re not sparing my feelings by ignoring me. It’s cowardice. And that is a word that is not used very often and is actually befitting to the behaviour that we’ve condoned as normal.

Oh, and chivalry isn’t dead - no. It’s only alive when a dude is trying to get in your pants. You should see how many car doors are opened for me when they're trying. But yes, it still lives on, unlike the ever elusive bravery. I’ve decided that I want to take the concept of normal etiquette further. I’m actually queuing up some thoughts for chapters of a book I want to write (and no one will publish).

This post has gotten to be longer than I thought, but the focal point is juxtaposing a brave individual versus the not-so and their decisions to be brave and stay silent, respectively. The rest of you assholes might want to see what a real man looks like.

Until my book tour then…