Ash and Dusty discuss how ADHD traits (hyperfocus, justice sensitivity, rejection sensitivity, and perfectionism) shape the way people approach allyship. Ash opens with a vivid story about feeling unintentionally objectified at a conference after coming out as transgender, illustrating how well-meaning curiosity and requests for education can put emotional labor on the person with a marginalized identity. Dusty describes common ADHD patterns—the over-eager ally who wants to demonstrate knowledge, the panic after a misstep, and the tendency to seek drama online—and explains how those patterns can derail genuine support. Both emphasize that intention alone isn’t enough: allies must match intent with respectful action.
They offer practical guidance for managing capacity and making meaningful choices: focus on a few causes you can sustain, donate or volunteer locally, and pick moments where conversation can lead to real change instead of getting into futile online fights. Learn independently rather than relying on marginalized people to educate you; when interacting, meet people as people first and let them set the boundaries for how much their identity becomes the topic. Small, thoughtful actions (checking safety, providing accessible spaces, following diverse voices) often create outsized positive effects and are more valuable than performative gestures.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I am Ash. [00:00:03] Dusty: I’m Dusty. [00:00:04] Ash: And this is Translating ADHD.So Dusty, do you want to tell our listeners what we’re gonna be talking about today?
[00:00:14] Dusty: Yeah, we’re gonna be talking about ADHD and allyship, or really just more allyship than ADHD, I suppose. But ADHD can be in there somewhere. [00:00:23] Ash: Absolutely. ADHD does have an impact, and we will be diving into that. I wanna start by saying that I think I have a unique perspective on allyship because I’ve lived on both sides of privilege. I lived 38 years as a cis white heterosexual woman with all of the privileges that came with that identity.And now I’m living as a transgender man, very visibly trans, very open about my transness. And the stark difference in those experiences is actually really fascinating now that I’m far enough through it to not be so affected by it.
But I wanna start by talking about my first CHADD conference after I came out, because it was such a difficult experience for me. Here I am showing up at an industry conference where I’m well known and where more people know me than I know them. I’m seeing a lot of people that I hadn’t seen in quite some time because that was also my first conference back since the pandemic.
I was also about a year into transition at this point, so I was feeling more comfortable in my skin and more comfortable with my identity coming in, expecting it to be a really great experience; and it was so strange to have people treat me so differently. And by the way, I don’t mean badly, and that’s part of why we’re doing this episode today.
Nobody was bigoted or awful to me, or transphobic or anything remotely like that. I never felt unsafe. But the way that people sort of insisted on centering my transness in everything was just…
The way that people insisted on centering my transness was something I was not expecting or prepared for. It was really getting under my skin, to the point that I reached out to a colleague, a person of color. I asked her if I could just come talk to her about this experience because it was really weighing on me and she looked at me and said, “you know that conversation we had a while ago”, this was prior to me coming out, “about emotional labor. Well, this is what you’re going through, right?” People were wanting me to make it okay for them to talk to me, because it wasn’t just about centering my transness, it was about people approaching me like they don’t know how to talk to me.
[00:03:06] Dusty: And I’m guessing that there were a bunch of people who were wanting advice or just wanted information, in the sense of wanting you to educate them about transgender identity or transitioning. I bet there were lots of people who were like, oh, my son or my daughter, or like this person that I know, what should I say to them? Were people asking you or telling you stories and asking you for advice about things that weren’t about you or was it always more about you? [00:03:31] Ash: . It was definitely both. I’ll start with my very first experience walking into the conference. So, day one, a woman approached me. She knew me. I did not know her. She explained how she knew me. I don’t remember if it was via the podcast or something else and had some very nice things to say about my work, which I really appreciated.She then said, “and you look great by the way”. And if she would’ve stopped there, that would’ve been awesome because I was at a point in my transition where I was still not necessarily comfortable with how I looked, so that felt really good to hear, but instead she followed it with, “is that okay to say?”
Is that okay to say to you? Now, would you ever say that to a cisgender person? Would you ever walk up to Dusty and say, “you look great – is that okay to say?”
And so it was a lot of small interactions like that just piling up. People were telling me how brave I am, which again, coming from a great place, but I’m here to be a professional. I’m here to be amongst my ADHD colleagues, just like everyone else.
This isn’t about my transness, but it’s understandable that this happens. According to research, only 44% of adults in the United States personally know somebody who is transgender.
So for a lot of people, I may be the first transgender person that you’ve interacted with or the first one you have any sort of relationship with. So it’s natural to sort of want to ask questions, to want to better understand but on the flip side of that, you need to understand that I may be the only transgender person you know and this type of interaction for me and environments like that is abnormal. And it’s not what I’m there for.
[00:05:29] Dusty: Yeah. Well that’s what made me kind of wonder how much you were getting questions that weren’t even about you, because that’s the thing, right? As white people or as a cis or het passing people, we are never expected to represent our entire group, right? But then when you become some kind of visible minority in any way, you’re expected to represent your whole group and I don’t know why.I’m reading a really, really great book about this right now. It’s called White Tears/Brown Scars, and it’s about white women and fragility. But, I was thinking as I was reading that book and as you were speaking, I remember after 9/11 and in the early 2000’s when I was around only communities of white people in some sort of “terrorist attack” would happen. People would always be like, well, why isn’t the Muslim community denouncing terrorism? And I found that such an interesting comment ’cause I’m like Muslim people are just people. They’re just living their life.
So just like that, some trans person somewhere does something and now you’re expected to make a public statement about it. Like all of a sudden you’re a part of a group that is representative of every other person in that group, right?
Another example is women. If a woman does something somewhere, I’m never called upon to explain why women do anything. And maybe we get that a little bit with ADHD if you ever talk to somebody who doesn’t have a lot of people with ADHD in their life. I’ve found that I’ll get into some conversations about ADHD and doing a little bit of emotional labor that way, but largely we never have that experience of being othered.
It sounds like people didn’t mean to necessarily cast you in that role and didn’t know that they were doing that, that’s what I’m hearing you say, right? You weren’t just you at the conference anymore doing the same thing that everyone else was doing, doing the same thing that you’ve always done. Now, there was this other layer of people and self objectivity or people objectifying you in a way where now you’re seeing yourself as this person that everyone else is seeing you as, and you have to represent and you have to answer questions about who you are and why you are that you weren’t expecting to.
[00:07:43] Ash: Exactly, Dusty It certainly threw me for a loop because up until that point, you know, this was still at a time where a lot of people were practicing COVID safety. So in my daily life I was mostly around close friends and family. So this was really kind of a first experience being out in the broader world.And again, in a place where I am kind of visible because I do this podcast so more people know me through my work than I know them. It was definitely an eye-opener for me. But let’s pivot here and talk about some of the uniquely ADHD things that can show up in an allyship situation.
[00:08:28] Dusty: Oh yeah. As soon as you said that thing about the conference, my mind just went to ADHD and autism and sort of that binary all or nothing thinking and, and partnered with justice sensitivity. I think of the over enthusiastic ally, like the one who’s so eager to prove that they know everything.We very much care about justice. We very much want to be doing things “the right way”. And then sometimes we really go a long way to educate ourselves about what is the right way to be an ally. But then, coming from a legitimately good place, we’re very eager to “perform” that allyship and demonstrate it. We want to show “look at me, I’m a safe person to be around.” or “I’m a person who understands racial dynamics. Let me demonstrate that in the conversation so that you know that I’m a good ally.”
And again, when I say perform I don’t mean that they’re being performative. I’m sure they really have those values, but I can just imagine the level of enthusiasm that a person with ADHD, who’s gone down a rabbit hole about a certain issue, who’s very into justice sensitivity and sort of all or nothing rules brain is really eager to show that off as soon as they get the chance. And then maybe, unintentionally, you do some harm or you go way overboard in your quest to be “the perfect ally”.
[00:09:53] Ash: Sure. That is something that I’ve experienced. I would say I almost experience that more than I experience any bigotry in my day-to-day life. The over enthusiastic ally, the one that feels like they have to show me right away that they know the things, or even worse, the ones that will kind of talk over me or tell me what my experience is.Not intentionally, but again, trying to demonstrate that they have read up or done the research and homework and I know my stuff. Well, yes, that’s great, but you are not trans. So if I am standing right next to you, do not attempt to speak for my experience.
[00:10:35] Dusty: And I swear, I don’t mean to be putting anybody down but I always think it’s so funny when I’m with a group of people who are all clearly cisgender and they’re like, “okay, what are everybody’s pronouns?” Or we’re in a room full of white people and they say, “okay, let’s do land acknowledgement,” right?There’s this kind of over enthusiasm, and it’s good, right? It’s good that we’ve changed that paradigm and we always ask about pronouns or that we always think about whose land we’re on. But here in Canada, I think we do a lot more, but there’s a lot of criticism of land acknowledgements because they are sort of an empty gesture. While we’re still actively oppressing indigenous people. I think it’s good we do it but I also think it’s funny when people go way overboard with really wanting to show it, you know?
[00:11:30] Ash: So Dusty, what else do you think is uniquely ADHD when it comes to struggling with good allyship? [00:11:37] Dusty: I think there’s sort of two scenarios where that can pop up. One is like in your quest to do everything so perfectly. If you’re really hyper-focused on learning everything about a certain group of people and you really wanna show what you know, and that you’re a good ally and you might make a misstep or you don’t get the cookie. So, someone doesn’t say, “oh my gosh, thank you for being such a great ally to trans people. You really make me feel comfortable.” You may not mean it, but you sort of want that feedback.Or on the other hand, maybe you don’t know anything about a group of people and you unintentionally say something offensive, which again, huge shame trigger with ADHDs, right? Often we put our foot in our mouth and say something unintentionally harmful. If you have ADHD and you think of yourself as a good person, it’s so tough when you accidentally upset or offend someone and you didn’t mean to. And it can make it hard not to get into rejection sensitivity.
I had that happen personally when I was first coaching and I started realizing just how many autistic clients I had or clients that were ADHD. I wasn’t trained in anything about autism and I had had a handful of autistic clients. Or my ADHD clients were really comfortable with their autism, so they talked about it all the time and they kind of joked about it. I remember I had a client and I don’t actually know that this is the reason, but I had a client in group coaching and they were ADHD and I remember at one point I made kind of like an offhand lighthearted comment. I said something like, “and there’s autism showing up” because that was something I had heard other autistic clients say, right? Like the person said something and I kind of made a lighthearted comment like that. And then a few groups later, they disappeared from the group. And this is the only time this has ever happened to me. This has never happened to me before or since. So it was really jarring and I was kind of like, hey, like where’d you go? Is everything okay? And they were like, yeah, but they basically said that they were not comfortable in the group and that someone had made them feel uncomfortable. They didn’t say it was me, so, to be fair, I don’t actually know, but of course with my rejection sensitivity, I immediately thought it must be that one thing I said. And it could have been some other thing that some other person in the group said and maybe I just didn’t catch it, or it could have just been about them and their own rejection sensitivity.
But I was a bit like, “oh my God, what if it was this one comment that I made and well, I’m not autistic so I probably shouldn’t be like making lighthearted cracks about people’s autism.” Even though I had heard other clients do that, maybe that’s not okay. But it was so hard for me. I had a lot of rejection sensitivity, especially because being that person’s coach, I was like, oh no, what have I done?
And I think I handled it really well, but it was really hard because I wanted to be like, was it me? Am I the one who said the thing? I’m so sorry. It was hard, really hard for me not to make it about myself and have my emotion about being rejected override that person’s experience.
I think rejection sensitivity can really get in the way of us being good allies, because most of the time when we say some dumb crap, we are really not meaning to harm that other person. But when harm has been done, especially if you’re more privileged, like that’s what the whole book I mentioned earlier that I’m reading is about. It’s about the way that when people of color want to bring up an issue that they have – white women’s tears basically override everything, right? Like if a white woman cries when you talk to her about a racial misstep, you’ve lost, they’ve won and the whole conversation gets shut down.
And so our own sort of fragility when we are in a position of privilege is something to be careful of because our tears or our rejection is still something that wields power and can end up hurting others. Let’s say if I offend you, I say something transphobic unintentionally, and you reply, “hey Dusty, that was kind of uncool of you, that was transphobic.” If my emotions get really big and I’m like, “oh my God, Ash, I’m so sorry.” And then the next three conversations we have are all about how bad I feel and how sorry I am, and how I didn’t mean to do that. Well now I’ve made it about me.
I think that’s probably something that I was certainly guilty of earlier in life when I had less awareness, but it’s something I think could really get in the way of allyship. I don’t know. What do you think?
[00:15:54] Ash: Dusty, funnily enough, something I have been guilty of myself up to and including the “white woman’s tears”, which is really funny to say now, but is also really true.I actually had a moment after George Floyd was murdered. I was doing a regular happy hour that was kind of a holdover from COVID times with two colleagues who are both black women. I had a moment where I showed up in a way where I shouldn’t have showed up where I was putting emotional labor on them.
I was looking at them, asking them. What can I do? Actually, the question was what can Cam and I do? Cam and I at the time were feeling like we wanted to do something with this platform, but I’m turning to them, asking them, what can I do? What should I do?
So this is right back to the beginning. We were talking about that experience at the conference where people are asking me what they’re supposed to do, how they’re supposed to do it.
When you have a moment like this, and this was my learning and my takeaway from this experience that I had myself, that is your opportunity to do your own work. Don’t lean on marginalized populations to give you the answers to tell you what or how you’re supposed to do something. Take the opportunity to learn something about those experiences.
And that’s precisely what I did. I went into my own bit of hyperfocus and learned a lot about blackness in America, something that I really hadn’t studied in any meaningful way up until that point. Not because I wanted to demonstrate to them, I’ve never even said this out loud until now, that I’m doing better or that I’m a better ally, but because I realized that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and it was up to me to learn what I didn’t know. It wasn’t up to them to educate me.
[00:17:45] Dusty: It’s kind of like if you never played an instrument before going up to Slash from Guns ‘N Roses and being like, “hey, could you show me how to play something on guitar?” Not that that’s the wrong thing to do, but you could start with some intro to guitar books or you could take a class. There’s a lot of things that you could do to teach yourself those early things. But to go to someone who is a world class guitarist and be like, “could you teach me the basics?” is just sort of a dumb thing, right?I think we do often forget with ADHD, we skip steps and we forget there are so many things that we could teach ourselves, like you said, Ash, you went and you did some learning. It’s hard because with ADHD and making so many missteps, I can see how we get ourselves tied in this “oh well, but who can I ask?” Who can I talk to? What if I don’t know how to learn?
I don’t want people to get stuck in the perfectionism of who is it okay to ask and who is not okay to ask because I don’t wanna get in trouble. I don’t want people to feel like they’re gonna get in trouble. But I do think it’s, as you say, we forget that there’s a lot we can do on our own. And just going right to that person who’s lived that marginalized identity and asking them to teach you something is akin to going to a world famous guitarist and being like, “can you teach me how to play a scale”, right?
There’s a lot of other ways we can get that knowledge and that’s where being a good ally too means educating our peers. So part of being a good ally, like for me as a cisgender person, is to be willing to have those conversations and do some educating of the people around me so that they don’t have to go to the Ash’s of the world, people who are just trying to mind their businesses at conferences.
That’s really hard too, because I feel like there’s some weird threshold that I crossed after I learned a certain amount at a certain point. I just internalized and sort of implicitly understood this issue about whiteness. I feel like it kind of clicked at a certain point and now I’m not offended. If anyone’s ever mad at white people in general or says “I don’t like white people”, I’m like, yeah, I get it. Or CIS people or whatever, right? Like I get it without taking it personally. I kind of understand, but in a weird way that’s almost made it harder to engage with people who don’t get that.
And I feel like now those people kind of look at me and if they’re not on my side of politics, they’ll just sort of write me off as a person who’s sort of brainwashed by the woke left. So it almost makes it harder for me to engage with those people now because I’m like, if you don’t get it, like I get it then you don’t get it.
I don’t know. I don’t know what you don’t get here, but I have to not be lazy. And I don’t use that term lightly because I know obviously that’s a very shame triggering word with ADHD. But sometimes I’m just like, ugh, I don’t wanna talk to this person who has these bigoted views, but that is also good allyship because there is no perfect allyship.
We all started out somewhere, we all started out as ignorant, like idiots, for lack of a better term. And through the many, many patient conversations that people have had with me, both marginalized people who occupied whatever identity it was and good allies, helped me to develop my more nuanced understanding of whatever the case may be. And, as a good ally, it’s my job and my responsibility to not be unwilling to have those conversations with other people because it takes the weight off of the shoulders of people like Ash or a person of color or a person from a different background who doesn’t wanna have to explain one more time why it’s not okay for you to touch their hair or whatever, or like why all Muslims shouldn’t have to apologize for 9/11, you know?
[00:21:32] Ash: Dusty, I agree with you that having tough conversations can be a part of good allyship, but I also think it’s really important to pick your battles. There is no sense in trying to talk to somebody whose views are not going to be changed. That is really just an exercise in futility, but I think the real opportunity there is to pay attention to who’s in your circles, who’s in your life, how they talk about people like me or people of color, and are you signaling acceptance of those views or not?You don’t have to change everyone’s mind, it’s impossible to do so. I personally do not even engage with people with bigoted views in 2025. There’s no point. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s difficult on me and gets me in a bad emotional state, and it doesn’t add anything to my life.
There’s just nothing positive to come from that. So, those conversations can be good if there’s an opening for change, if there’s an opportunity there to help someone do better. But if you’re just gonna be slamming your head against a brick wall, I think there are other, better ways to show allyship.
Which kind of brings us to our next point, which is the ADHD of it all in terms of matching our intentions with action. So we can carry around a lot of guilt for what we’re not doing. And this is something, by the way, that is showing up in all of my coaching sessions right now with the state of the world being what it is.
It’s having an impact on all of my clients emotionally. I think that ADHD folks in general are particularly justice sensitive because I do think that ADHD folks understand something about being othered in a way that the general population doesn’t. We live this experience where people don’t get us, don’t understand us, where we don’t tend to fit in, in normative spaces.
And so, at least among my client population, justice sensitivity and empathy, these things are all really, really high. So the world is on fire and all of my clients are like what can I do? What can I possibly do?
[00:24:00] Dusty: Yeah. Just before I move on to that, I want to quickly address what you’re saying about banging your head against a wall. So I totally agree 100% and I wanna clarify – I do mean like the people who, like you said, there’s a crack there.For example, this past year I had a coaching group where I had one client who was a young able bodied, cisgender man say something that he didn’t mean to be fat phobic, but came across fat phobic. This is something I totally don’t tolerate at all in my group coaching but I could tell that he felt bad as soon as he said it. It was something about exercise and weight loss and I could tell that as soon as he said it, he kind of knew it wasn’t the right thing to say, but he didn’t know why and he tried to backpedal and I just shut the conversation down and we moved on. I spoke with him later and he was really struggling because he was all or nothing thinking in regards to this is what healthy means and this is what healthy looks like and everyone should wanna be healthy. And I don’t really understand how this is hurtful or harmful.
And so, in that situation, I was comfortable to do a little bit of teaching about the concept of fat phobia and we had a really good conversation. I think it was really helpful to him because he was struggling with understanding that and trying to figure out where he was missing something. Do you know what I mean? Because he was struggling with these rules of everyone should eat healthy and exercise is good for you – so why wouldn’t everybody want that? And like, I can do it and why can’t everyone else?
But at the same time, I’m not trying to make everyone feel bad. And he was spiraling a bit. So that was a really good opportunity. And so that’s kind of what I mean by there are times that I meet people with whom I’m like, ooh, we could have a really good conversation, but I’m so tired. But I know I need to rally because this is worth it.
I think there’s something about ADHD and drama. We can get into these online fights with bigots and idiots and that can be a real source of dopamine. That was my sole source of dopamine for years – Facebook fights with dudes, but is that allyship? Is that changing anything? No. I needed to be honest with myself about that, and fill my cup in some other way. That was just me getting my rage out and getting my rocks off online basically, and not really actually helping anybody. It was just a cheap source of dopamine. And now, I’m a proud, recovered drama addict. I’ve been drama sober for several years now. You know, it’s a battle every day, guys. It’s a battle every day. But here I am anyway.
So as to what you were saying, we did that episode a while back on ADHD and activism, which I would strongly encourage people to go back and listen to if you are struggling with this, but this is something that I personally struggle with all the time, it’s so hard to just get through your day.
Sometimes with ADHD, especially, if you’re a student or you’re a parent or you have other chronic illnesses, there may be very little space and capacity for doing good in the world. And again, we take things so literally sometimes. Sometimes it is assumed that if you’re a good person, you care about these issues, then you should be doing everything you can to do good in the world. And there’s that thing that people say about giving your best every day doesn’t mean giving 100% best every day.
But I think that when it comes to being an ally, especially, it’s easy to feel like we’re all not doing enough. And if there’s very little capacity, it’s like, well, where do you pull from and how do you do it? I have thoughts on this, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
[00:27:35] Ash: First of all, Dusty, none of us can do something for every marginalized community that exists. That’s just not possible. Even if you are independently wealthy enough to not have to work, there is simply not enough time in the day, not enough resources. You are one person. You cannot enact meaningful change for every marginalized community that exists.So if there’s one in particular that’s near and dear to your heart, put your focus there. Local organizations are a great place to look for either volunteer opportunities or donation opportunities. Here in St. Louis, we have the Metro Trans Umbrella Group, which does the most in our community for trans people. That is an organization that gets my charitable dollars because they’re local, they’re here, they’re serving trans people in my community.
It’s also really important to remember that tiny little actions can make a huge difference here in the state of Missouri. We are a red state, unfortunately. A couple of years ago, a form was put up on the Governor’s website that was a transgender tattle. It was called Transgender Concerns Form and it was really alarming. And the perpetuity goal of this was to give citizens an outlet to share any concerns they have about transgender people in the state of Missouri. That form was taken down in a week because people flooded it with nonsense, with nonsense submissions, basically made it unusable and so it did not last long. And by the way, it was really cool to see this wasn’t just a statewide effort. There is a subreddit that I just love called Witches versus Patriarchy, which is just as awesome as it sounds. And this form ended up on that subreddit.
And so people all over the world were participating in this effort to have this form taken down and it worked. And I could give you dozens more examples of little things like this that are small actions but can make a huge, huge difference. So don’t feel like you have to do everything, but if you can do something, if you have a little extra money, find an organization for a marginalized group in your community that you can start making a regular donation to, if you’ve got a little extra time, find a volunteer opportunity. If you have neither, find little moments like this that may just be a one time action, but that can make a meaningful difference. And if you can’t do anything right now, maybe make it your work. And this is something I do with my clients, make it your work to have the time and space and resources to live up to the person that you want to be.
[00:31:05] Dusty: Yeah. You know, it’s really hard for me to get out to protests and things because I live in the suburbs and I have a child. Protests often take place at times in the evening and so I feel torn between being a bad parent and getting my kid home way too late or maybe letting them not go to school the next day or not showing up at something that’s really important to me.But for example, one thing I could do was buy a lot of eSims for Gaza online because there was not a lot of internet connectivity and people needed eSims and they’re not even that expensive. So, I could buy multiple of them and I could send them this thing that was just a couple clicks online, right? It took a few minutes or something. I’ve started doing it because I feel very, I mean this isn’t exactly allyship, but I feel very concerned about the environment. But again, I feel very powerless so I’m trying to follow more accounts that talk about environmental issues and looking for little emails I can send to my elected representatives.
As you say, Ash, there’s nuance between all or nothing, right? Like, being the perfect ally, showing up at protests, shopping only at businesses owned by this one group or avoiding businesses that support or do the wrong thing(s).
Even if you can just do one small thing a day, that’s so much more than nothing because days are gonna pass anyway. And if 365 days pass and there’s some sort of issue affecting a group of people that you love or care about or wanna be a good ally to, that’s 365 chances to do something and that something is more than nothing.
[00:32:46] Ash: And Dusty, I would say the goal doesn’t even have to be to do something every day. Just doing something when you can is better than doing nothing. And to speak to what you said earlier about the internet, just get off, get off the internet. In that regard, I think the internet can still be a great resource for learning.As you said, you follow environmental accounts, so one thing you can certainly do is follow people with lived experiences that are different than yours, that are talking about those experiences, and not in a shut down way, because that serves nobody, but in an informative way, start to bring voices that are different than yours into your world is one thing you can do, but otherwise just don’t even bother with the online “activism stuff”. It’s an emotional sink. It does nothing and it’s not real, right?
So many of the problems we are living with today are because the internet makes it feel like we’re way more divided than we actually are because everything is sensationalized and it’s easy to be as awful as you can possibly be hiding behind a screen. There’s money being put into people being awful like that on purpose to paint a particular picture, to make it look like this is the way things actually are.
[00:34:24] Dusty: Yeah, I think I’ve learned so much from following different accounts and so speaking of being a good ally, there’s a lot that I don’t need to ask for education for that I have learned passively through just following different accounts.And again, even this concept that we’re sort of you know, landing the plane around has so much more nuance. It’s not all or nothing. We’re talking about performative allyship now, right? And I said that earlier, people wanna perform allyship. I kind of was talking about how I think it’s funny, the way people do land acknowledgements. But here’s the thing, there’s not even an all or nothing or a right or wrong, it is still a really good practice for us to deconstruct and de-center cis genderedness as the norm.
So even in a room full of cisgender people, when we go “hey, what are everyone’s pronouns?” Knowing full well that all our pronouns are going to she/ her, if you’ve got a vagina, and he/him, if you’ve got a penis – even if we know that, it’s still good because it’s practicing normalizing and decentering cisgender. Even if we’re in a room full of white people and none of us are doing dick all for indigenous people, it’s still good I think for us to do land acknowledgements because it’s just changing our consciousness. And even posting stuff online, even if you’re posting it to an audience of people that you know, agree with you or don’t agree with you, I think there’s a lot things that we do that can be kind of a bit simultaneously performative, but then also shift that paradigm and also maybe helpful to one person.
So I think the thing is to get clear about what your motivation is. When I was going online and fighting with men’s rights trolls about feminism, I wasn’t changing any hearts and minds. I certainly wasn’t making the world a better place for myself or anyone else. I was actually just distressing myself as a woman. And, at a certain point, I had to sort of get real with myself that it wasn’t about activism or about feminism, or about whatever. It was actually just about engaging with drama.
I think with perfectionism, hyperfocus and with justice sensitivity, a lot of us do wanna be that perfect ally, which also means sidestepping, “performative activism”. But sometimes those things are tangled up in a way where you sort of can’t get clear about it.
For example, going back to your story about sort of showing up at the conference and a lot of people wanting to do the right thing so badly that they ended up unintentionally putting the work on you. Just like we say, if you’ve met one person with ADHD, you’ve met one person with ADHD. I think it is really important to remember that if you’ve met one trans person, you’ve met one trans person and they don’t all share the same attitude towards anything.
I used to be friends with someone who was a lesbian and she was the least lesbian, lesbian you’d ever met. Like, she did not care about gay issues. She didn’t really care about going to Pride. Her sexuality was the least interesting thing about her. I found it really surprising having known a lot of queer people and for them that queer aspect of their identity is so important for them but for her it was not an important part of her identity.
She didn’t really care that much about it. She didn’t like when people made it a big deal. Like she just happened to be gay. You know what I mean? She was kind of going off about how she hated that this was the big first thing that people knew about her, this big aspect of her identity, because for her, there were all these other parts of her identity that were the things she would prefer that people focus on.
So again, like if you’re meeting someone who is from a marginalized group, let them lead in terms of how much they want to talk about and make whatever aspect of their identity, “a thing” that they might wanna talk a lot about.
They might wanna educate you. And I think when somebody leads and they start talking about that aspect of their identity, it’s appropriate to maybe start bringing up questions that are in context. But if they don’t bring it up or they don’t talk about it, they may not be wanting to center that part of their identity.
And being a good ally might actually look like not calling attention to that part of their identity because maybe they’re just not in the mood. Or maybe that’s not the thing that they wanna talk about. Being a good ally might look like not bringing up trans issues or making the conversation about trans related things every five minutes when you’re talking to a trans person because maybe they’re tired of that too, right?
[00:38:51] Ash: Yeah, I think something that we can all work to do better at is just meeting people as people first, and that requires unlearning a lot of bias that you may not know that you are carrying around. And I speak from the experience that I would like to have at the CHADD conference this year. Just meet me as a colleague and an ADHD coach first. And I do talk about my transness. My life is pretty freaking queer – like it’s very, very capital Q, Queer. And so if I end up in a conversation with someone about my actual life, queerness, transness, those things are going to come up and that is okay.But, let me decide whether or not those things are in the room. Just as you wouldn’t pry into a white, cisgender man’s personal life without permission to do so. So a good starting place is to just think about how you would interact with anyone else. Treat me or treat people of color like you would treat anyone else.
And if you’re having trouble doing that, then there’s an opportunity to look inward and to figure out what your work is to do better there.
[00:40:17] Dusty: Can I add one thing that, to that Ash? [00:40:20] Ash: Sure. [00:40:20] Dusty: Treat everyone like everyone else but then also, if you’ve done your own education, you may sort of know the hotspots that you can be sensitive about without making a big deal about it. Like, I’m trying to think of an example, but okay, so, I don’t have that many like Muslim friends. I only have a few Muslim friends, but I know that marshmallows are not halal and I don’t know where I learned that, but I learned that somewhere along the way. So when a friend of mine and I wanted to go to this one event in the winter, I checked to make sure that they had halal marshmallows. And again, I wasn’t like, I just want you to know that I checked that the marshmallows are not halal. But instead, I was just like, “hey, just so you know, they’ve got halal marshmallows”. And my friend was like, oh, great.Whether that person has an ethnic identity or a queer identity, you can educate yourself about what are the kinds of “piles of shit”, you don’t wanna step in and then you don’t have to make a big deal about it, but you can just create a little bit more accessibility for them in different ways. And I can’t think of a great example there with how you might do that for a person who’s trans without making it like this big stinking deal, but you know what I’m saying.
[00:41:31] Ash: I actually do have a great example of that, Dusty. So, about a year into my transition, I’m still in a pretty tender place and I’m still very visibly queer at this moment in time, whether I want to be or not. I just am, you know, it’s not something that I can hide.My best friend from high school turned 40. Now we grew up in a pretty rural area, in a rural high school. We’ve been friends all the while. His reaction when I came out was actually, “huh, that makes sense”. So we were cool on that level. But he was having this 40th birthday party gathering at a bar that’s deep enough into the county and in a location where I’m not sure if it’s safe for me to be there being visibly queer. So when he texted me the invite, I texted back, is this going to be a safe environment for me? And he answered, “oh, I already thought about that. I actually went and checked out a couple of different locations. There were a couple I ruled out because they definitely wouldn’t have been safe for you. This place is really cool. And by the way, they also have single stall gender neutral bathrooms, so you don’t even have to worry about that.”
So here he was sort of thinking ahead to the things that I might be concerned about, but again, not bringing them up or showing that to me until I asked. That’s when he shared with me that he’d thought ahead about these things because he cared about me and wanted me to be able to be there. And so part of my decision making included thinking about your safety.
[00:43:12] Dusty: Yeah, that’s a great example! If he led with that, if he was like, everyone, we need to pick a place where they’re gonna have gender neutral bathrooms, so that Ash will feel comfortable, that might have made you feel weird.But then also as friends or allies, we are expanding our consciousness of what a person with this background, what might not work for them. Just the same way that we would choose where to eat carefully for somebody with a shellfish allergy, right?
We’re not making this big stinking deal, but if I have a friend in my friend group who has a shellfish allergy, then I’m gonna check that we’re going somewhere that they can eat. And there’s so many ways that as allies, we can make things more accessible for the people that we love who have marginalized identities or maybe not even the people that we love, just anybody.
And that’s why we do pronouns and that’s why we do land acknowledgements even when we know that it’s not super relevant to all of us because we are practicing creating spaces that are more accessible for people who have historically been dis-included.
[00:44:15] Ash: Well said Dusty, and I think that is a good place for us to wrap up for this week. So until next week, I’m Ash. [00:44:23] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:44:24] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
