Respect
The Advance
I believe that, fundamentally, I begin with respect for every person. It is a kind of advance that I extend to everyone before I know who they are or what they have done. That is precisely why the phrase “Respect has to be earned” has always unsettled me. It sounded like a condition that contradicted what respect meant to me – a hurdle placed before recognising another person, even though I had always thought that recognition belonged at the beginning, not at the end.
But now I understand that there are indeed people – and the more I think about it, the less amusing this seems – whose respect has to be earned. Apparently there is a point at which that advance is exhausted, where automatic goodwill encounters something it can no longer sustain.
The Limits of One’s Own Respect
And the more I think about it, the more I realise that my own respect is not limitless either. When tolerance – and in other areas as well – towards certain groups of people is called into question, I struggle to respect the person doing so. It is as though, at that very moment, the advance is withdrawn because something more fundamental than a mere difference of opinion has been violated.
What Lies Behind Respect
And if you look at respect more closely, there is a great deal hidden within it: strength, status, self-confidence, presence, perhaps also power. These are the things we notice first when someone demands respect or appears to possess it.
You can see this, for example, with police officers or politicians. People who, by virtue of their office, their uniform, or their title, ought to be granted respect before they have even spoken or acted. Yet I repeatedly notice how little respect they receive – strikingly often precisely when they are doing what should command respect: raising their voice, enforcing a decision, enduring disagreement without backing down. As long as a woman remains within the role assigned to her – subordinate, accommodating, making herself appear smaller than the situation requires – she is granted something that looks like respect, but is not. It is merely the reward for conforming to the expected role. The moment she steps beyond that role, behaving in the same way that would be considered entirely natural for a man in the same position, that apparent goodwill turns into rejection, often even open contempt. This is neither coincidence nor simply a matter of individual sympathy. It is a learned pattern: what is respected is not the office, nor the achievement, but conformity to a prescribed role. And that is the exact opposite of the kind of respect I described at the beginning: an advance, independent of what the other person does.
And I believe this is not unique to women but a pattern that repeats itself whenever someone steps outside an established norm. I see the same with queer people, only at an even more fundamental level. The message then becomes something like: Fine, if it has to be that way – but do you really have to be so visible? It is not outright rejection of their existence but a form of tolerance attached to a condition that has nothing to do with the issue itself: do not be too loud, too visible, do not make yourself too noticeable. For women, the condition was: be modest in your behaviour, and you will receive something that resembles respect. For queer people, the condition is set one level deeper: be restrained in what you are, and people will leave you alone.
In both cases, respect is not granted to the person but to their conformity with an expectation that should never have concerned anyone else in the first place. And in both cases, rejection is conveniently disguised as mere opinion. People claim they simply have a different opinion about how someone ought to behave or present themselves. But that is exactly the point I made earlier: this is not a disagreement of opinion. It concerns something far more fundamental – whether a person is entitled to recognition regardless of how they behave or present themselves. To disguise that as opinion shifts a question of human recognition into a matter of personal taste, something people imagine is always open to debate. And that is precisely where the real disrespect lies.
What Remains: Trust
But if you strip all of that away – strength, status, and self-confidence – what actually remains?
A small, delicate plant called trust.
And trust itself is not something fixed. It is not a foundation laid once and for all. It is something that has to be earned just as much as the respect it eventually supports. It can be built slowly over time, through reliability, through what someone does when nobody is watching. But it can also be destroyed in a single moment.
Perhaps that is the true difference between respect and trust: respect can be given in advance because it is, at first, simply a stance I choose to take, regardless of what the other person does. Trust, by contrast, only emerges through contact, through experience with another person. It is what remains once strength, status, and self-confidence have been stripped away – but it is also the most fragile thing of all. A delicate little plant, capable of being crushed by a single careless step, yet if it is allowed to grow, it becomes the only thing that ultimately sustains respect.
The Fragility of the Façade
To return once more to the previous thought: if you look at these things from this perspective, it can be deeply unsettling for someone who is less open to these questions. Strength, status, self-confidence, presence, perhaps even power, all depend upon not being questioned.
They function as long as they are accepted as self-evident. The moment one begins asking what actually lies behind them, what remains when they are taken apart, something that once appeared solid suddenly becomes fragile. And that is precisely what makes people uncomfortable if they define themselves through these attributes, or simply do not wish to see them questioned. The very act of examining them is perceived as an attack, not because anything has yet been taken away, but because it reveals that these things could be taken away – that they are not a foundation at all, but a façade behind which, if anything remains, there is only that small, delicate plant called trust.
An Intuition, Not a Certainty
And I think it was precisely this fragility that unsettled me, long before I had the words to describe it. To be honest, this is still a thought that is working its way through me. That I notice it in people is little more than a suspicion, yet it creates a kind of disturbance that lingers in the space between people.
Something tells me that it cannot be certainty. Something else reminds me that human beings are complicated and that I have almost certainly failed to account for at least twenty thousand different factors. Yet the impression remains. In some way, a light has come on for me, and at the same time the irritation with which this text began has not disappeared.
Written on 3 August 2026 at 15:00. © 2026 Whisper7. All rights reserved.