Please stop calling me brave

By Dylan

Every day I get ready to go out into the world, I look in the mirror. I adjust the things I can change and accept the ones I cannot. I pick out clothes I like. I do my hair. I put my best face forward in the same way that billions of other humans on this planet do every morning, for the same reasons — because I am a person who lives in the world and today is another day to live in it. And then I walk out the door, and someone tells me I’m brave.

I know they mean it kindly. I know it comes from a genuine place, from watching the news and seeing the legislation and feeling something like awe that a person could keep walking toward a world that keeps pushing back. I understand the impulse. And I still need to say, as gently as I can, that it causes harm.

The term ‘inspiration porn’ was coined by Australian disability activist and writer Stella Young. In her 2014 TED Talk, she described it as the objectification of disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people — the practice of holding someone up as remarkable simply for living their life, as though their ordinary existence is an achievement that should inspire the rest of us to appreciate our own. The person being held up, she noted, has not done anything remarkable. They have simply survived in a world that was not built for them. And the applause for that survival has nothing to do with the survivor, and everything to do with the audience.

I am not disabled. But the framework she described is one I recognise completely, because the same mechanism operates on trans people with the same consistency and the same cost. When you call me brave for existing, you are not commenting on something I did. You are commenting on the world I am doing it in. And in doing so, you are accepting that world as the backdrop — dangerous, hostile, exceptional by default — rather than questioning whether it needs to change.

This is not a small distinction. Minority stress theory, first formally articulated by psychologist Ilan Meyer in a landmark paper published in Psychological Bulletin in 2003, describes the chronic, cumulative psychological harm that comes not just from direct discrimination but from living in a social environment that marks your existence as unusual, as difficult, as requiring extraordinary reserves to navigate. Trans and gender diverse Australians experience this at documented scale. The La Trobe University Private Lives 3 survey — Australia’s largest study of LGBTIQ+ health and wellbeing — found that trans and gender diverse respondents reported psychological distress at rates dramatically higher than the general population. The study’s authors are clear about what drives this: not gender diversity itself, but the social environment that treats it as a problem to be endured.

Calling me brave is part of that environment. Not the most harmful part — I am under no illusion about the scale of genuine harm in the world. But it is part of the architecture that makes the world harder than it needs to be, and it operates through exactly the mechanism that makes it difficult to challenge: it comes from kindness.

Psychologist Derald Wing Sue, whose research on microaggressions has been widely cited across clinical and counselling literature since his 2007 paper in American Psychologist, describes a category of harm he calls othering — the well-intentioned statement that, in attempting to acknowledge difference, reinforces it as fundamental. The message underneath ‘you’re so brave’ is not the message the speaker intends. What they intend is: I see how hard this is, and I admire you. What lands is: your existence is hard in a way mine isn’t, and I’m glad it’s you and not me. That is not warmth. That is relief wearing warmth’s clothes.

Here is what I actually want you to understand. I did not choose to be trans in the way you might choose a difficult path, knowing the terrain and deciding to walk it anyway. I am trans the way you are whatever you are — completely, unchangeably, as the most basic fact of who I am. The path is difficult because the world made it difficult, not because I chose a difficult path. There is nothing brave about being yourself. There is only the fact of being yourself, and then the question of what the world does with that fact.

When you call me brave, you take the question of what the world does with that fact and redirect it toward me. You make my survival the story instead of the system that makes survival necessary. You absolve the world of the work of changing by substituting your admiration for me as a stand-in for that work. And you leave me carrying not just the weight of existing in a hostile environment, but now also the weight of being someone’s example of how to do it gracefully.

I am tired. Not of being trans — I have never been tired of that. I am tired of the performance my existence is expected to put on for people who find it remarkable. I am tired of being someone’s lesson in resilience when what I actually need is a world that does not require resilience just to survive in it.

Don’t tell me I’m brave. Tell me the world should change. Tell me you’re angry that it hasn’t. Tell me you are paying attention to the legislation and the headlines and the things happening to people like me in this country right now, and that you are going to do something with that attention beyond aiming it at me like applause.

That, I would be glad to hear.

Sources: Young, S. (2014). ‘I’m Not Your Inspiration, You’re Welcome’. TED Talk, TEDxSydney. Meyer, I.H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. Hill, Bourne, McNair, Carman & Lyons (2020). Private Lives 3: The Health and Wellbeing of LGBTIQ People in Australia. La Trobe University. Sue, D.W. et al. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life. American Psychologist, 62(4), 271–286.