Accepting Other's Happiness

Martha Anglehart and Alexandra Anderson

Big Blog Post #2

"It takes no compromise to give people their rights... it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression." - Harvey Milk

            Happiness is defined as a state of well-being and contentment: a pleasure or satisfying experience. What does it take to be happy? Is it watching a movie that is enjoyable? Is it being able to dress the way you want? Is it eating something delicious? Is it seeing something amazing? Is it having sex with whoever you want? When I think of what makes me most happy, it is nothing more than being with the people that I love and being accepted for being me. 

“My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectation.” - Michael J. Fox

            iO Tillett Wright grew up in downtown New York City, where at the age of six, after being told she couldn’t play basketball with the boys in her grade, she came home and shaved her head. She decided, at the age of six that she wanted to be a boy. She said that it wasn’t that she hated her body, or her gender; it was simply what made her happy at the time. She continued with her gender switch for eight years, when she woke up one day and decided that she wanted to be a girl again. She had gone the last eight years telling people that she was a boy, and that is what people knew her as. No one in her life knew that she was a girl. In her excerpt on Ted Talks, she says that she was never asked to ‘define’ herself by her family at any one point, she was simply allowed to be herself, growing and changing at every moment. This is compelling to me. Rather than her family pushing her to figure out who she really was, they let her come to who she wanted to be.

            Human beings are among the most complex species on this planet. We have feelings, we have thoughts, we can communicate, we can love, we can hate - we can do almost anything. Complexity is found within each individual person. Despite all of the differences in each and every person, we still attempt to ‘box’ people into different categories or types. How can we as such complex individuals allow ourselves and others to box us in so easily? Don’t we all fall under the category of ‘human being’? In a world where individuality, expression and freedom is pursued, don’t our narrow-minded laws and attitudes in who we love, what gender we are and how we express both, limit what we brag to be? 

            Yes, by placing each other in boxes we can relate based upon our interests but are we to shun someone because they believe or think something different? No. Why should we? We are all human here. We are all ourselves. We are all individuals but in the grand scheme of it all, we’re not alone. We have the rest of humanity surrounding us and it seems our best chance of surviving all the ACTUAL evil in the world - that we recognize we need to come together instead of pushing one another apart.

All over history there is evidence that the lines were blurred when it came to sexuality – take the Khajuraho Group of Monuments in Khajuraho, India that were built between 950 and 1150 for example. The stone carvings that cover them depict a completely different view of acceptable behavior. So when in our society did we decide that many of these things became wrong and deserving of persecution and judgment?

iO Tillett Wright asks the question, how could anyone vote to strip the rights of someone based on one element of their character? Just because they might not be gay, or bi, does it mean that they can place limits to demean someone’s potential happiness? How have we as a nation come so far, yet we lack the ability to let every person in the country be happy? We are repeating our mistakes so blatantly; here we are drawing boundaries throughout the country limiting one’s potential happiness just because of law. We are creating boxes, and these boxes are wrapped around a single word. Defining oneself as a word is irrational and does not make logical sense. We are not a word or words, we are an identity, and should have utmost abilities to express ourselves.

As humans, we need to leave the choices of others alone and let them do as they want. We need to set aside our own ideas about what consequences we THINK may arise; they are the ones that have to live with what they choose. Not us. If what someone else is doing is harming me – like smoking in a room with me in it, or waving a knife around – then I have the right to state my opinion, but for matters regarding what sex a person wants to be or who a person wants to love – it’s none of my business what they want to do. Rather than looking at each individual as a word, gay, straight, jock, bi, transgender, Goth, blond, punk, anorexic, the list goes on and on, we need to start seeing what is there, the multiplicities of human beings, seeing nothing more than faces of individuals rather than judging them based on a preconceived stereotype. Human beings have every right to have their own character, and should be able to express that as they wish, without having limits or restrictions placed on them.

            According to Alyssa Royse, we are all allowed to have sex, exactly the way we want, as often as we want to, and it is up to the rest of us to let each other know that. For as long as people have been having sex, they have been doing it in in wild and creative ways and they often even call it art. It’s intimate, personal and completely natural. We cannot allow our own fears of sex and sexuality and gender to continue to dictate what other people can do. We need to find that place again where we allow people to be themselves, however they define that to be.