You are thirty-seven minutes deep into a biannual Facetime call with your friend from home. You have covered the basics: who got married at nineteen, which benzodiazepine her mom is on, and what newly vacated storefront the Spirit Halloween will be erected within. As you are about to not-so-casually ask about her totally not incredibly hot dad, she brings up the string of local killings that happened last year in middle-of-nowhere Connecticut, which is apparently an oxymoron.
“Did you hear that he got parole?”
Stricken with a choice between solidarity and bystander, you must quickly determine: Is this the hill I want to die on? Of course, you don’t want to defend her (the woman, the killer, the icon who also happened to keep bones in a Shakespeare and Company tote bag), but she is still a human being!
It’s not like you can start citing Laverne Cox’s “misgendering trans people is an act of violence.” You know, time and place. But is it really that serious? They’re just… pronouns. And if you can handle respecting your professor’s “they/them” while they assign you 300 pages of Durkheim on a Wednesday, you can handle calling a murderer “she.” Even if she did bury three people in the parking lot of a Panera Bread in New Haven.
So you clear your throat. “She got parole?” you repeat, casually, like you didn’t just correct your friend on the pronouns of Connecticut’s most infamous woman since Martha Stewart. Your friend blinks. Maybe she notices, maybe she doesn’t. Either way, you’ve done your civic duty. You’ve upheld accuracy in the face of evil.
And what do you get for your bravery? Nothing. No applause, no thank you, not even an Instagram graphic. She just keeps talking, seamlessly pivoting to whether Lizzie from chem class had her baby yet. Like all things, the conversation comes to an end.
Your phone is silent. You sit in your bed, wondering if this is allyship or if you’ve just accidentally become unpaid PR representation for a murderer.
Right Time to Be Right? What to do When Your Friend Misgenders a Transgender Serial Killer
