FAQ
Got a question?
These are an evolving list of questions. Have one? Ask here or, if you’re not that brave, you can do it anonymously.
Who are you?
I am Saraid Taylor.
Who is Saraid Taylor?
This is Saraid Taylor.
That is thist. What is thist?
Why do you specify pronouns? It’s so silly.
I think of all the silly things out there, recognising the way someone feels about themselves is not actually up that high.
It’s a couple of words with a forward slash in between. Why be so weird about it?
Language matters: in what it says and doesn’t say, in how it defines or distorts or ignores, in who it allows to feel normal and who it isolates.
Trans kids are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than cis kids. Their vulnerability does not come from being trans, it comes from how they are made to feel for being trans. It comes from how much hope our societies allow them to feel. Respecting somebody’s identity can be the difference between despair and dreams. It can save their life.
Is your writing always ridiculously politically correct?
I wouldn’t say ridiculously.
Is your writing always politically correct?
I don’t like the term politically correct.
Is your writing always?
Yes.
Why don’t you like the term politically correct?
Because I think it’s a scam: a cheap, easy way for some people to convince others that fundamental empathy is too complicated or tedious or, worst of all, unrealistic. I want to be somebody who does all she can to make the people around her feel welcome and loved.
What is the difference between seeing and seeing?
It’s a good question, one I try to explore through the Drawings series.
What is the difference between remembering and remembering?
Do you really have to acknowledge Country on every post?
Maybe not, but I value the truth. The land now commonly referred to as Australia was never empty. It consisted of a myriad of nations — with their own distinct cultures, languages, economies, histories, futures — before it was brutally and methodically violated. Colonisation is not an obscure section of an ancient archive. It is living memory. It is a fact that continues to impact our understanding of, and connections to, land, water, animals, each other, ourselves. It continues to hurt many people. And it spreads further than these shores: forward and back and forward again through time, dictating decisions across the world.
I acknowledge Country as an act of basic compassion — innumerable people suffered and, in an ongoing colonial project, continue to be made to suffer — and as an act of accountability — even if I can’t trace it directly, even if I feel bad, I have benefitted from someone else’s land being given away for free and sold or passed down until my family could buy it. I don’t think that’s fair, and I want to do what I can to make it fairer. It is also an act of hope: that we can imagine and work towards a community, and world, centred on justice for everybody. Acknowledgements of Country show how much power and complexity language has, but they still remain a symbol. Tangible efforts of allyship are crucial.
