How do I handle family who vote against me?
Okay, so there's no right answer here. I think that the questions to ask yourself are, what kind of relationship can you feel good about having with the people who they are?
If someone is willing to vote for someone who thinks that you don't deserve rights, they do not love you.
They may say that they love you, they may feel an affection for you, but love and harm cannot co-exist.
If we are choosing to harm someone, we are not displaying love.
Love is a verb, not a noun.
It's not a thing that happens to us and just exist within us.
It is the choices we make, the things that we do, the ways that we show up for a person, the ways that we enact that love.
Love as an emotion is useless.
Love as an action is actually the only thing that matters.
So, if someone is voting against your interests, what kind of relationship can you feel good having with them?
Not tolerate, not deal with.
Can you feel good having with them.
I think some folks can get stuck in a place of trying to like win them over or convince them to change their minds or make things better, right?
And that is a really lovely idea and sometimes that can happen. I am not someone who thinks that you should always cut family off if they vote against your interests.
That is not at all my position.
And at the same time, if your interactions with them are based on the ways you are hoping to change them, that is really shitty.
Like that is really shitty in any relationship.
People change when they want to change, not when you want them to.
And if you are so much more attached to getting them to change than you are relating to the person they are, neither of you are going to be getting what you want or need from that connection.
If you are someone who still relies on your family for like financial support or a place to live, the kinds of choices you can make about how to cope with that family or handle them are very different than if you're someone who is very financially-independent, maybe not geographically close to family, you have a solid support network of your own.
The more you need your family, the more difficult a lot of choices are going to be.
I am not a fan of a culture of disposability and sometimes keeping people in our life is harmful.
You are the only person who can know how much of a relationship you can have with someone without it being more harm for you than good.
I think that when you have family who vote against you, who vote against your personhood, who vote against your rights, if you can, I think it is often really empowering for you to go to them and say, “I don't understand how you could vote for someone who thinks that people like me should not exist and should not be able to use the bathroom, should not be able to get married, should not be able to drive on the freeway without being afraid of being pulled over and murdered.” Right?
When you have family who votes against your interests, it can be helpful to sit down with them and say, “I don't get how you can say that you love me and vote for someone who wants me dead or disappeared or harmed. Can you explain that to me?”
And give them a chance to say like what is it that is so important to them that it is worth voting against your interests, right?
And that will give you a good idea of how they are calculating what is important to them and how they're balancing those priorities.
If they're like, “Oh, well, the deficit and the economy,” and blah, blah, blah.
So, are you saying that your bank account is more important to you than my ability to exist as a person?
And they're like, “Oh, you're being hyperbolic.”
I'm not.
Because if we look at this bill, this is exactly what they want.
They want me to not exist.
In society they want me to not exist at all.
They want people like me to die.
They have said those things explicitly.
"Oh, they don't mean it."
Even though again the research always shows that Democrats are better for the economy and better for people's pocketbooks, but like whatever.
I think having the conversation where you make them explain themselves can be very helpful, both in terms of making you feel like you've stood up for yourself, which often feels good and rewarding for us, but also in putting them in the difficult position.
A lot of times we feel like we're in the difficult position of having to justify our existence and why people shouldn't vote for us to be sent to concentration camps, but make them justify it.
How do you justify voting against the life of a person you say you love.
If I love you, and a politician was saying, “We're going to send all the baby boomers to camps because they can't be trusted,” and I was like, “Well, but my bank account though.”
And you were like, “But they want to send baby boomers to camps.”
And I said, “They don't really mean that. That's just rhetoric. You know, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine,” right?
They would be justifiably very upset about that and I think putting them in the position of having to explain to your face why you are less important to them than whatever these other factors are, is very, very worthwhile and gives you the information you need to decide what kind of relationship do you want?
Can you be happy with this person?
If you accept them exactly as they are today and do not interact with them from a place of wanting to change them, needing them to change, what relationship can you have?
My parents' political beliefs are very, very, very different than mine.
Very, very different.
And when they say things about politics, I will tell them they are wrong to their face.
I will say, “Yeah, that's not really how that works.”
My mom recently said something about like at least Trump is tapping the deficit and I was like, “But he's not. Like nothing has improved in terms of the deficit and in fact if you look at the new bill, it's going to be worse.”
I am okay with the relationship I have with them because I don't sit and stay silent and eat it.
I tell them they're wrong.
And if it starts a whole debate that I don't want to get into, I can say like, “Look, we're not going to agree. Let's just move on. Have you seen the new season of Andor?”
Just like pick another topic that is a safe topic to move on to.
I think that for some people, they decide that they cannot have any relationship with their family.
And that is a valid choice.
Some people do not feel safe enough cutting off ties with their family.
That is a valid choice, right?
Like there is no wrong choice here.
I think that this is about figuring out what choices you can feel good about.
Because at the end of the day, what matters the most is that when you go to sleep at night, you feel like you've been true to yourself.
You've honored yourself.
You have taken care of you.
You have made decisions that you can feel good about.
Because if you don't feel good about the choices you're making, it's worth looking at whether you can change them.
I think that it is a difficult time right now when it comes to politics, when it comes to information about anything, because the information landscape has become so siloed and atomized and it is so hard for the average person to get reliable information.
The kinds of information that I have are often completely different than the kinds of information that people in a conservative ecosystem get, and they have no idea about the things that I know.
Not even they think they're wrong.
They've literally never heard about them.
And I think the challenge now is like can we find a space of some empathy not for the choices they're making about voting against you, but that it is every day harder and harder for the average person to find out even what is true and what is happening.
One of the most effective parts of the conservative takeover of media and the information ecosystem has been the way in which they have made it almost impossible to trust anything or to know what truth even is.
Like, there has been a war on truth for years.
Ever since Fox News basically sued to say that, like, they shouldn't have to tell facts on their own news, because it's entertainment.
And I think that the worrying things that I feel within me about these kinds of issues are that what they are choosing to do is harmful and hurtful and not okay, and they are operating from a place where they do not have all the information, they don't know that they don't have all the information, and coming to a broader view of information on their own is challenging or impossible.
So, can I have understanding and empathy for that challenge while not excusing what they are doing and figure out a relationship that feels good?
The majority of people are not super online, they aren't super informed, and that means that a lot of these choices they are making are based on very biased information that people have paid millions and billions of dollars to put in front of them in order to make them think that things are true that are not and in order to make them scared and more racist and to think that they are closer to being a billionaire than to being unhoused, which is never the freaking truth.
I think that we have to figure out how we move forward at this point because we can't just treat every single conservative as disposable.
We can't just say that all of these people who are making these choices are evil and awful and idiots.
And we can't excuse the things that they are doing.
It is a really tough thing to hold.
I have empathy for the reality that the vast majority of people do not have access to reliable information that covers a variety of topics from a variety of perspectives and that they think they are getting information when they are often getting propaganda.
I have so much empathy for the ways in which this country has devalued expertise and truth and knowledge and reporting to the extent that for most people, they do not even know how much the information they are getting is propaganda and not information.
The majority of people have no idea how biased their news sources are.
And at the same time, they're making choices that could land a person like me in a prison in another country just because I'm real queer and talk about the government in negative terms.
And I don't know how we hold both those things, right?
This understanding, this empathy and this truth that what they are doing is not okay.
And I think that that's part of why my stance on what do you do with family who votes against you is really messy and nuanced because I don't think there's one answer. I think that we each have a level to which we can tolerate.
Being in relationship with people who are doing things that hurt or harm us.
We all have a different level of effort we're willing to invest into setting up boundaries and being clear about what's not okay.
And if someone feels their only option is to cut people off, I understand that choice.
I just think that I hesitate to recommend that as a universal option because I think if we start down a road of like disposability for everybody who votes against us, I don't know how we ever get out of this.
Those people who are voting against us, the vast majority of them should be our comrades.
They are much closer to our struggles than they are to the successes of any of the liars and grifters who are feeding on them.
And that does not mean that the actions they're taking are okay, but it means that we have to figure out some way that we can show them that life is better over here, that us together is better than them throwing us under the bus in the hope that it will slow the bus down enough, it never hits them.
And I don't know how we do it.
I don't know how any of us make this choice.
And I think it's a day-by-day choice of how we interact with these folks who have caused us harm and who are voting for our harm.
And I think you have to figure out what that choice is for you.
