A few weeks ago, I was talking with one of my LinkedIn connections about having the language to articulate and comprehend one’s own LGBTQIA+ identity when I remembered a scene from Witches Abroad by the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett (#GNUTerryPratchett).
In this scene, Granny Weatherwax, Magrat Garlick and Nanny Ogg (witches from Lancre) are travelling through a forest that the villain of the book has been using as a testing ground/practice field for her MO of forcing people to have fairytale lives and happy endings, whether they want them or not, under the honest belief that she’s doing what’s best for them and being the ‘good fairy godmother’ by doing so. The Lancre witches run across a version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ which is played for tearjerking horror in that the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ is an ordinary wolf that’s been compelled by magic to think human thoughts and perform human actions (walking on two legs, operating door latches and so on) with a wolf mind and wolf body. This compulsion causes the wolf such colossal pain, being torn between wolfhood and humanhood but unable to be either, that it ultimately begs for a mercy kill: “”Preeees,” it growled. Annn enndinggg? Noaaow?”” (Granny Weatherwax insists on the wolf being given a proper burial afterwards, so as to disrupt the story further.)
What got me thinking was the applicability of the idea that, regardless of your intentions, forcing people into stories or roles that they don’t fit only causes them harm.
Whether it’s forcing autistic people (via ABA and the like) to perform neurotypical actions and think NT thoughts with an autistic body and mind to fit an ‘autism is a disease to be cured’ story, compelling LGBTQIA+ folks (e.g. via conversion “therapy”) to follow cisgender and/or heterosexual thoughts and behaviours with a non-cis/het body and mind to fit a cis/het/allo/amato-normative narrative, or any other variation on the theme of squashing people into boxes that are all wrong for who they are — it doesn’t matter whether the harm is your overt intention or you genuinely believe that what you are doing is what’s best for the person you’re targeting. Forcing a person into a role they don’t fit for the sake of a story that is not theirs, but rather is imposed upon them from outside, is colossally harmful and counterproductive.
Susan Albinson 