Acceptance

Love has boundaries

Reflecting back on last year, I’d like to set an intention for this new year.

A while back, someone on Substack asked “What does love mean to you?” I didn’t have an answer ready. I’ve never felt things the way they seem to in movies and TV romances. Is that because movies amplify it, or because I experience love differently?

To me, love is acceptance—accepting someone as they are. Beauty, grace, scars, warts, and all. It means accepting them as they are right now—not some theoretical idealized future version or some flawed past version.

Yet, love is not unconditional because people change—circumstances change.

We are not set in stone. People have great capacity for change and do so constantly. Those who don’t often stagnate because they resist change. This means you may no longer accept someone for who they are today or may one day accept them for who they have become.

I am a flawed person. I was worse yesterday than I am today. But I continuously work to improve myself. You first have to be bad at something to eventually be good at it. Writing has helped me to understand myself, reading has helped me to accept others.

To understand love, it must be compared to its opposite: hate.

Hate is not acceptance. Accepting a person means recognizing their dignity. Hate denies dignity and causes real harm to the people it targets. You cannot simultaneously recognize someone’s dignity while permitting something or someone that denies it. Therefore, accepting hate contradicts accepting people.

I do not accept hate. I do not tolerate hate. It’s the Paradox of Tolerance. To be truly a tolerant society, you must deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance.

Why am I talking about love and acceptance? It’s not just me thinking aloud—it drives how I engage with people. It’s what brought me to this community on Substack. I wanted to understand the queer people who are close to me better and to help build and support a safe community.

Full disclosure, I am a cisgender heterosexual man. I don’t know what it is like to be LGBTQ+, and maybe never will. But I don’t believe understanding someone’s experience is a prerequisite for accepting them or standing with them.

Humans are naturally wary of what they don’t understand—it’s an evolved survival trait. But caution isn’t an excuse. The more we understand each other, the easier acceptance becomes, and the responsibility to seek that understanding is ours.

When I first came to Substack, I sought out openly queer fiction writers and those that supported them. Through the people I started following, I found a great community of LGBTQ+ authors and allies.

I’ve been reading a lot of fiction by queer authors—across genres, across identities, across platforms. Some of it is quiet and platonic, while some of it is vivid and explicit.

I’ve lived all these lives for a brief moment. I guess I’m gay now. Or maybe I’m a lesbian. I’m asexual. I’m bisexual. I’m romantic. I’m trans. I’m aromantic. I’m still trying to figure it out. Or maybe I’m who I’ve always been: a straight white guy who’s learning to better accept others as they are.

Borrowing these lives didn’t change my gender or sexual identity—new information can’t change what is inherent, but it can reveal things previously misunderstood or hidden. What it did change was my understanding. The more I understand, the more I can support.

Since then, I’ve written stories with queer characters. If you’ve read Chuq’s story, then you might see that the love I represented there was acceptance. Seeing people at their most vulnerable, or at their worst, and loving them anyway.

My wife and I work with groups that carve out a safe space for LGBTQ+ teens and adults in a conservative area. We see the struggle every day. They aren’t struggling with their identity. They know who they are and that will evolve as they grow and feel more accepted. They struggle because they aren’t accepted—by family, by former friends, by culture, by society. Because of that, they may not accept themselves yet.

I was feeling pretty good about the Substack fiction community. Then, it became not so cozy. It became hostile.

Someone was spreading hate—attacking people for being trans, and attacking those who defended them. (I’m not calling them by name here as I do not want to amplify their voice anymore.)

Worse, I learned that some parts of the community supported this hateful person, whether out of ignorance or misplaced neutrality. As I mentioned earlier, tolerating hate means accepting the harassment of others.

When this happened, I was heartbroken. It pains me to see people struggle to be accepted for who they are—especially when they feel like society won’t let them accept themselves.

Tolerating hate means siding with the attacker and denying the victims their dignity. That is what divided our Substack community—not intolerance, but the failure to be intolerant of intolerance. In cases of abuse, it’s critical to listen to the abused and harassed—not to center the voice of the abuser.

You can’t always know who a person truly is. Especially when they hide parts of themselves and only show you what they want you to see. It’s frustratingly easy to be gaslit. But some people peddle hate on their front page.

It’s natural to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if someone is genuinely being curious and trying to understand people better. But it doesn’t take long to see that they’re questioning in bad faith and arguing in bad faith. It’s a mask to hide their hate.

You don’t have to agree with what people do and who they are, but you can accept it without hating them for it as long as what they’re doing is not hateful or harmful to others. Judging them for it is not acceptance. My judgement only goes so far as to determine if you’re an antagonist or an ally.

Fighting hate is exhausting. Not every fight is worth engaging in. I’m not going to fight little fights with random people online. I’m going to block them and save my energy for work that actually helps people.

It’s not our responsibility to educate people every time they make a mistake. If someone asks in good faith, I’m willing and able to help. But understanding can’t be forced. That kind of motivation is internal. You have to want to do it.

Hate is different. When someone spouts hate and people keep listening or responding, that hate is being fed. Don’t feed the trolls. Attention tells them their message is landing and that persistence might eventually pay off. If there’s hope that their message will prevail, why would they stop?

Set boundaries. Block. Disengage. To be effective, we must remove people from spaces where they target others. Don’t lend hate a voice. Don’t feed it. Let hate starve. This isn’t to punish or silence—it’s to protect people who are already being harmed.

Sometimes that distance creates room for reflection. Someone with hate in their heart may consider why they were pushed out and why people think their words are hateful. They might have a change of heart. Sometimes though, they don’t make the effort to reflect. If someone chooses to double down on hate, then that reveals their true nature and they’re better off far away from their victims—just like any abuser.

I will defend your right to be the arbiter of your own body, identity, gender, sexuality, or otherwise.

I will defend your right to free speech, with the understanding that you suffer the consequences of your words. Freedom of speech—not freedom from consequences. Shame is a consequence. Banishment from our spaces is a consequence.

Seek to understand and to be understood. Accept yourself for who you are. Accept others for who they are. Don’t let ancient culture or bigoted society decide what is right. But of course, do not accept hate, within yourself or others.