Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Notes from a student showcase on hair, drag, trans and the quiet architecture of allyship

I went to my daughter’s school last week,  the SAE Institute Film,  for a screening of student documentaries and short films. I expected to sit through some earnest final-year projects and clap politely. I did not expect to leave with a question I’m still turning over: why is it so hard for us to simply let people be?

Three films did it to me.

Natural Hair
My daughter’s documentary was about black hair. Natural hair, the growing of it, the accepting of it, the loving of it. It told the story I know too well from the inside: how we’ve been taught, generation after generation, to see our own hair as a problem to be solved rather than a crown to be worn. She traced the journey from relaxer burns to big chops to the slow, deliberate work of learning to love what grows out of your own head without asking permission from anyone. It is undoing, this work. Undoing what was put in us before we were old enough to object.
Drag in Cape Town
Then came a short film called Dragged Down in Cape Town, about the city’s drag scene. One line has stayed with me since.
“Let’s learn acceptance, if not just respect. You do not have to like me. You do not have to agree with me.”
That sentence does something clever. It lowers the bar on purpose. It doesn’t ask you to celebrate, to understand, or even to approve. It asks for something much smaller and, it turns out, much harder: leave me alone to be who I am. I’ve Gotta Be Me. I cannot pour into someone else from a version of me that isn’t whole.
Trans and Transitioning
The last film followed a young trans woman’s transition. One line has sat with me since the lights came up:
“Before I transitioned, I felt excluded from the world.”
Not from a room. Not from a relationship. From the world. That’s the size of the exile we’re talking about and the size of the relief on the other side of it.

Why We Struggle to Accept
Sitting in that dark hall, I kept asking myself why this is so difficult for us,  for me, for the men I write about, for the country I grew up in. A few answers came, none of them flattering.
— Fear of the unknown. The brain is a prediction machine. It doesn’t like what it can’t categorise, and it will manufacture discomfort rather than sit with the unfamiliar.
— Social conditioning. We are handed rigid scripts about gender, beauty and success before we can walk. Someone living outside those scripts isn’t just different,  they’re a threat to the script itself.
— The zero-sum fallacy. Somewhere in us sits the false belief that someone else’s dignity is rationed from our own supply. It isn’t. Nobody’s freedom shrinks mine.
— Confusing approval with respect. This is the one I think trips up South African men especially. We were raised to believe that tolerating something means endorsing it, so we withhold the tolerance to avoid the endorsement. But respect was never a vote of approval. It’s a baseline.

From Toleration to Allyship
Being an ally does not require you to understand every experience, or to choose it for yourself. It starts lower than that,  with something closer to Ubuntu than to ideology: I am, because you are permitted to be.

Lack of Awareness   ➔   Passive Respect (Do No Harm)   ➔   Active Allyship (Support & Defend)

1. Do no harm. Accept that every person owns their body, their identity, their expression,  full stop, no committee required. You don’t have to walk someone’s path to respect their right to walk it. If their existence makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is yours to process, not theirs to absorb.
2. Listen without correcting. Let people tell their own stories without editing them for your comfort. Use the books, the podcasts, the documentaries, like the three I sat through that night,  to close the gaps in what you don’t know.
3. Protect the space. Speak up in the WhatsApp group, the braai, the boardroom, when the casual joke lands. Silence in your own circle is not neutrality. It’s a vote, cast quietly, for the way things already are.

Closing Thought
I left that hall thinking about my daughter, who chose to tell a story about hair because she’s lived it, and about two other students who told stories that weren’t theirs to live but mattered enough to tell anyway. That, maybe, is where allyship actually starts,  not in agreement, but in the decision to sit in a dark room and pay attention to a life that isn’t your own.

You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to agree with me. But,  let’s at least agree to let each other be.

Listen to Sammy Davis Jr.’s signature anthem: “I’ve Gotta Be Me”.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..