The comfort of believing in monsters

Calling someone a monster creates distance.

It allows us to believe that people who commit terrible acts belong to a completely different category of humanity. 

They are evil. We are good. 

They are monsters. We are nothing like them.

That belief can be comforting, but it can also prevent us from understanding how harm actually happens.

History is filled with violence carried out not only by people who appeared outwardly cruel, but by ordinary workers, professionals, politicians, teachers, religious leaders, neighbours, and family members. People participated in harmful systems because they were afraid, obedient, rewarded, indifferent, misinformed, or convinced that the people being harmed mattered less.

That does not excuse their actions.

Understanding why someone caused harm is not the same as forgiving them. Recognizing someone’s humanity does not mean abandoning accountability. Compassion does not require us to tolerate abuse, remain in unsafe relationships, or deny the consequences of someone’s choices.

But when we treat harmful people as incomprehensible monsters, we risk missing the conditions that made their behaviour possible.

If evil is something that only belongs to monsters, we never have to ask how ordinary people become capable of extraordinary harm.

Dehumanization is how harm becomes acceptable

Before people can be mistreated on a large scale, society usually needs a story explaining why their suffering does not matter.

They are dangerous.

They are immoral.

They are unnatural.

They are corrupting children.

They are mentally unwell.

They are less civilized.

They brought the harm upon themselves.

Queer, trans, racialized and disabled people know these stories intimately.

For generations, our identities have been described as sinful, criminal, dangerous, disordered, predatory, or socially contagious. These narratives have been used to justify family rejection, institutionalization, conversion practices, censorship, discrimination, criminalization, medical neglect, and political attacks.

Dehumanization rarely begins with violence. It begins with language.

It begins when a person becomes a category instead of a human being.

Once someone has been reduced to a threat, an ideology, a diagnosis, or a political problem, it becomes easier to justify harming them. The people participating in that harm may even believe they are doing something righteous.

That is what makes systemic harm so frightening. It does not always look like hatred. Sometimes it looks like policy, procedure, tradition, professional responsibility, religious obedience, or “just doing my job.”

What coming out taught me about good vs evil

As a coming out coach, I speak with people who are trying to understand who they are while also trying to survive the reactions of the people around them.

Coming out is often framed as one brave moment when someone finally tells the truth. In reality, it can be a complicated process of grief, fear, hope, boundaries, and rebuilding.

Many queer and trans people carry deep wounds from families, faith communities, schools, workplaces, and medical systems. When someone rejects us at one of the most vulnerable moments of our lives, it can be tempting to see them as entirely bad.

Sometimes anger is necessary. Anger can protect us. It can tell us that something unjust has happened and that we deserve better.

But healing eventually asks us to hold more than one truth at the same time.

A parent can love their child and still cause enormous harm.

A religious leader can sincerely believe they are helping while promoting teachings that destroy lives.

A friend can be compassionate in many areas and remain deeply prejudiced in another.

A person can be harmed by a system and still participate in harming someone else.

Human beings are rarely entirely good or entirely evil. 

We are complicated, contradictory, and shaped by forces we may not fully understand.

That complexity does not erase responsibility. It makes responsibility more important.

Compassion is not the absence of boundaries

People sometimes hear the word compassion and assume it means being endlessly patient with those who hurt us. It does not.

Compassion is not permission.

It is not reconciliation without repair.

It is not remaining in contact with someone who repeatedly denies your humanity.

It is not accepting an apology that has not been followed by changed behaviour.

Compassion can include understanding that someone’s fear, religious conditioning, insecurity, or lack of education influenced their behaviour. It can also include saying, “You are not allowed to treat me this way.”

You can recognize someone’s humanity without giving them access to your life.

You can understand why they acted as they did without pretending it was acceptable.

You can hope they grow while refusing to sacrifice yourself in the process.

For many queer and trans people, one of the hardest lessons is that compassion must include compassion for ourselves. We cannot make our healing dependent on whether the people who harmed us are willing to understand.

Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is leave.

Evil can live inside systems

We often imagine evil as an individual choice, but some of the greatest harms in history were built into institutions.

Governments, corporations, churches, schools, hospitals, and legal systems can all cause harm while allowing each individual participant to feel only partly responsible.

One person writes the policy. Another enforces it. Another processes the paperwork. Another benefits financially. Another looks away.

Responsibility becomes scattered until no one believes they are responsible at all.

This is how harmful systems survive.

The system does not need every participant to be personally hateful. It only needs enough people to comply, remain silent, or decide that challenging the harm would be inconvenient.

That is why personal kindness alone is not enough.

A person can be polite and still support an unjust policy. A corporation can celebrate Pride while funding politicians who attack transgender rights. A government can issue an apology while preserving many of the structures that allowed the harm to happen.

Compassion without systemic change becomes sentiment.

Real compassion requires us to examine who has power, who is protected, who is harmed, and who is expected to carry the cost.

Are we all capable of harm?

This may be the most difficult part of the conversation.

We want to believe that we would always recognize injustice. We imagine that, had we lived during a terrible period of history, we would have been among the people who resisted.

Perhaps we would have been.

But resistance is rarely as obvious in the present as it appears in hindsight.

When harmful ideas are normalized, they can feel reasonable. When powerful institutions repeat the same narrative, people can begin to mistake consensus for truth. When fear is constant, compassion can start to feel dangerous.

None of us are immune to propaganda, ego, resentment, group loyalty, or the desire to feel morally superior.

Queer people can dehumanize other queer people.

People who have survived oppression can still participate in racism, ableism, sexism, transphobia, classism, or colonialism.

Being harmed does not automatically make us incapable of causing harm.

That does not make everyone evil. It makes self-examination necessary.

The question is not simply whether we are good people.

The question is what we do when our comfort, reputation, community, or sense of certainty is challenged.

Choosing to remain human

Perhaps evil is not a permanent substance that lives inside certain people.

Perhaps it is a process.

It is the repeated decision that another person’s pain does not matter.

It is the surrender of responsibility.

It is the story we tell ourselves to justify cruelty.

It is what happens when fear, ego, obedience, and power become more important than another person’s humanity.

If that is true, then resistance can also be a process.

It happens when we remain curious instead of immediately condemning.

When we interrupt a cruel joke.

When we question a harmful policy.

When we believe someone who tells us they have been hurt.

When we refuse to allow fear to decide who deserves dignity.

When we educate ourselves rather than demanding that marginalized people continually explain their humanity.

When we apologize, repair, and change our behaviour.

When we choose compassion without abandoning accountability.

These actions can feel small, but systems are maintained through countless small decisions. They can also be changed through them.

A better question

Instead of asking only, “Who is evil?” perhaps we should ask:

What conditions make people capable of causing terrible harm?

What stories teach us that some lives matter less?

What systems allow responsibility to disappear?

How do we hold people accountable without repeating the same dehumanization we claim to oppose?

And how do we confront cruelty without allowing it to transform us into cruel people ourselves?

The existence of evil may be impossible to settle in a single conversation. But the reality of harm is not.

Our responsibility is not simply to identify the monsters.

It is to recognize the moments when humanity is being stripped away—from others, from our communities, and from ourselves—and choose something different.

In this episode of Maple and Myrrh, Britt and I explore the nature of evil, the systems that normalize harm, and whether compassion can become a pathway toward accountability, healing, and meaningful change.

Listen to the full episode and join us as we ask one of the most uncomfortable questions of all:

Is evil real—or is it another way we dehumanize each other?