saint bergy, pray for us

He was a very talented photographer. If you're curious about his photography, check out this page over at R. Michelson Galleries:

We ALMOST made it to SF Trans March.

It's lucky we didn't make it. And that makes me SO FUCKING ANGRY.

Imagine if his first Pride memory had been witnessing someone being harassed and handled and yelled at, leaving, and then being mobbed again and followed for blocks by people screaming, "WE FUCKING HATE YOU! WE FUCKING HATE YOU! YOU DON'T BELONG HERE! WE FUCKING HATE YOU!"

I am. So fucking angry about this.

The worst part is that I've been avoiding going to Pride stuff for several years, because I was afraid something like this would happen. Because this is exactly how people act online.

Once you've decided that there's a global Jewish movement to commit genocide, you can justify a lot of things in the name of opposing that.

Which is funny, because of course when I write it out like that, it sounds like the antisemitic belief that Jews are orchestrating "white genocide" by bringing non-white immigrants into society to culturally and genetically "replace" the white population. The "Great Replacement" theory.

Ironically, that was the right-wing objection to Jewish immigration even before the Ottoman Empire fell.

Shit. Gotta be more specific than that.

Ironically, that was the right-wing objection to Jewish immigration to the region of Palestine even before the Ottoman Empire fell there.

(Also after it fell. Also ever since. I can't tell you how many people on Tumblr have just flatly told me that it was Bad, Actually, for Jews to immigrate and buy land there even under the Ottoman Empire.

Instead of "Jews are replacing white people with immigrants of color," it's "Jews immigrated to replace Palestinians.")

Meanwhile, in the 1930s, Arab leaders flat-out opposed all Jewish immigration across the region and demanded that Britain ban all land sales to "non-Arabs" in Palestine.

Meanwhile, in 1947, the Arab League told the United Nations that the land had "always" been "Arab-owned," always should be (by right of conquest), and any solution that didn't "preserve the Arab character" of the entire land was unacceptable. And would result in the entire Arab League invading to take the land back.

Which is exactly what it did. Which is exactly what the 1948 war was.

(As well as the "soft invasion" of volunteer armies for six months beforehand.)

God damn it why does everything turn into a history lesson my POINT IS THAT I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN. And I kept telling myself that of COURSE it wouldn't.

Of COURSE nobody would act like that at PRIDE. Of COURSE people are bold and vocal online, and say and do things they would NEVER say to someone's FACE.

The worst part is that, while most people (e.g. on the San Francisco subreddit) are appalled and supportive, and I've HEARD that there are tons of trans people who are also appalled and supportive, what I've seen is just people being smug little assholes about it.

Oh, yeah - a lot of people are also pretending that ACTUALLY, this was just "a tradition of politicians getting heckled at Trans March." And that "it's not because he's Jewish! It's because we hate his politics!"

If you want to pretend that this was Very Antizionist Of Them, And It's Impossible To Be Antisemitic While Being Antizionist, you have to explain why Connie Chan wasn't also harassed and kicked out.

Because I'm pretty sure that if Scott Wiener had also taken donations from an AIPAC-funded group, after promising not to take AIPAC money, everyone would be losing their shit entirely.

But in fact, nobody in any discussion about it has even been like, "They should have kicked both of them out!"

Nobody has the least idea that Chan took money from a group for women in politics that gets AIPAC donations. And they don't care.

Scott Wiener gets subjected to a totally different standard of scrutiny. Everyone suspects. Everyone checks.

When he says All The Right Things About Israel, The Same Ones Chan Does, it's "too late." It's "expedient" because he wants votes. It doesn't count.

When J Street spends its own money to promote his campaign, because “Scott Wiener will be a powerful voice in Congress for Americans who believe Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve freedom, safety and equal rights,” it's "Wiener taking Pro-Israel Money."

And TrackAIPAC calls it "Zionist" and says Wiener is "Israel First." And everyone eats that up and retweets it, or pastes it into their Reddit comment, or whatever.

It ought to be OBVIOUS that "Israel First" is the alt-right companion to Trump's "America First." It should be very clear from that phrasing that this is a far-right group at best.

It should also be obvious that this is playing the same boring old "You can't trust the Jews! You KNOW they're disloyal! They're only loyal to Jews/Israel!" card that people have played for literally centuries.

But no. People get too fucking high on this shit. The shot of adrenaline from that outrage bait is too strong.

The cost of actually questioning whether you've internalized any antisemitic bias from the world around you, much less unpacking and unlearning it, is too high.

I don't know what the cost even is. Having to think about shit and risk letting go of cherished beliefs. Challenging yourself. Risking the possibility that you've been wrong.

I would take this seriously and compassionately, except we were all supposed to have done this thoroughly during BLM and I thought we were supposed to be doing it on everything already. Also, once you've gone through "oh fuck what if I was wrong about everything" once, it kind of loses its charge IMHO.

Trans March hasn't said a damn thing. I was really hoping it had. Because everything they did was explicitly against its event guidelines.

Harassment. Bullying. Taking photos or videos without permission.

Its event guidelines even explicitly say to focus on issues that directly impact the trans community. Which I would THINK would make it hard to look at someone who

has gone to every single Trans March for 22 years;

has created GROUNDBREAKING trans legislation like the trans refuge act (which I think is the one that says California is a sanctuary state for trans people, and protects our rights here?);

and is really the only legislator that ALWAYS stands up for us…

….And surround them, yelling at them, touching them, intimidating them, and then following them to do it some more, because you THINK you know what THEY think, and YOU think what they THINK is BAD and therefore they're a BAD PERSON.

FUCK THAT SHIT.

Fuck the entire circus that somehow believes anyone who disagrees with them on anything SUPPORTS GENOCIDE.

I'm angry because I knew this would happen, and I told myself it wouldn't because I knew if I told anybody else it would, they would insist I was wrong.

Nobody would ever think something like this would happen. People would think I was being utterly ridiculous if I even voiced it. (People who weren't Jewish, mostly.)

And I finally have the spoons to bring a kid who finally wants to go. And this shit blows up in my face and betrays me.

(I'm also pissed that someone on Twitter was like, "you're all making the trans community look bad by saying this was about him being Jewish! This literally happened 30 feet from a trans Shabbos!"

Did the Trans March organize a Shabbat celebration at the rally? Did that magically wash away any and all biases that anyone brought to the march with them?

No and no. It turns out that the celebration was a totally separate event, organized by a bunch of Jewish orgs - including our totally amazing queer synagogue, Sha'ar Zahav - so that people could do Shabbat and then cheer on the March from the sidelines.

Did this person think that an event 30 feet away would be able to tell what was happening and intervene? Or that not intervening was somehow a This Is Not Antisemitic blessing from the entire gathering??

I've been lied to for years via woolly, vague thinking that just smashes together a bunch of semi-related stuff to support unchecked assumptions. Specifically on this exact topic. Over and fucking over. And I'm OVER IT.)

I'm upset because I don't know how I'm going to participate in Pride in the future.

I have lost an ENORMOUS amount of trust in the queer and trans communities over the past few years.

I mean shit, part of the reason we didn't make it to Trans March was that my kid got sucked into a small queer bookstore along the way.

And while we were in there, the white cis owner - who somehow has enough money to live three blocks away from her own bookstore in the Mission - told me all about how she couldn't POSSIBLY live in any other neighborhood, because they've all been gentrified by the techbros.

(Strangely, she did not mention why she couldn't live in, say, the Tenderloin, or farther up Mission, or any other actually poor and working-class parts of town. She didn't seem to know they even existed. How could that be. So baffling.)

She said "at least in the Mission, people are still willing to punch a tech bro." Then she went off about some rich tech dude and how if she saw him on the street, she would totally punch him. Then she said that if she saw Scott Wiener on the street, she would totally yell at "his Zionist ass" that he didn't belong here.

It was a real trip when I opened Instagram the next day and saw that people had done that exact thing.

Was she telling me this after the fact? Maybe she'd heard about it and was trying to brag that she would have done it too? Was she telling me before the fact? Did people go there planning to do exactly this? Was it both?

So like. I don't trust our community. Our community is full of conspiracy theorists and tankies.

WAY too many people have some idea that if Trump violently took over the country and established a dictatorship, THAT would be BAD - but if THE RIGHT PEOPLE did it , the ones with GOOD thoughts in their heads, that would be a glorious revolution. Power would not corrupt. Et cetera.

I don't want to feel hypervigilant at Pride.

I don't want to be looking around me, wondering if Gay Shame is living up to its name and graffiting "Fuck Zionists" on Manny's because the owner is the son of Israeli immigrants.

(remember kids, leaving Israel doesn't give you a free pass to be treated like a human either!)

Like in 2019.

Through 2021

And onward

I don't want to be waiting to hear someone say or do something awful. Pride is supposed to be a place where none of us have to experience that.

Also, Brenda Howard is rolling in her FUCKING grave. None of these people deserve her bi Jewish work to create Pride in the first place.

We all deserve Pride. I'm saying their actions are spitting in her face, and the face of all she created.

If the Trans March issues a statement against what happened, and outlining things it will do to educate people on its event guidelines and on what to do in this kind of situation… that would help.

"you stopped being queer the minute you started supporting israel" (a lot to unpack there)

And the most telling that this isnt about Palestinians, or Gaza, or genocide:

My dude, my brethren, my fellow comrade

This is just literally what being Jewish feels like

My grandparents were holocaust survivors that could barely talk about their birth country when they were alive. My great grandmother lost her entire family when nazis gunned down Jewish Latvian villages and left no survivors. My great great great grandfather lived in a desert with barely any water resources because that was safer than staying in Poland next to his christian neighbors. And then there’s also my ancestral grandmother that lost everything when her family barely escaped the spanish inquisition.

My family has more lost history than the library of Alexandria

And you know what’s the worst part is?

You learn it in bits and pieces, scattered across your lifetime.

The first time you hear about places we can no longer visit or ceremonies we can no longer perform, you’re too young to remember. It is always part of you. It feels more like a fantasy world then a piece of history you’ve lost.

One day, you are researching family history. So many of the branches of your family tree get suddenly cut off. You start to understand what that means.

One day, you are reading your great-great-grandmother’s story’s. You read about her sister who moved east when your great-great-grandmother moved west, and the day that the letters stopped coming. You know what it means, even before you look up the name of the city she moved to, and what happened to it.

(You are one of the lucky ones. The trauma is far enough back that you weren’t raised in its immediate shadow.)

One day, you learn about the Yizkor book, the collected memories about the inhabitants of a village that no longer exists, which talks about your family.

(You are one of the lucky ones. So many villages don’t have Yizkor books, because there was no one left alive who remembered them.)

One day, you visit what used to be one of the cultural centers of your people. Now, it’s a museum to what was destroyed.

(It’s one of the lucky places. So many of the memories have been paved over and erased.)

One day, “the last Jew alive in [country where hundreds of thousands of Jews once lived]” stops being a shocking statement, and becomes a genre.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You’ve never been the last.)

There is no one time your culture was violently destroyed. It happened over and over again, across continents and millenia. The survivors flee, and hope they will have a few generations before the place they flee to is also destroyed.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You’ve never had to flee.)

Your culture is still here, because you are still here. What you have is the fragments of a thousand burned texts and demolished buildings and extinct dialects, but it is real. It is alive. Multiple militaries and paramilitary organizations are actively trying to kill it.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You don’t live in their direct line of fire.)

You grow up being told it’s better now. People don’t hate you for being different; not like they used to. One day, you realize their acceptance is dependent on them not having to think about how different you are.

(You are one of the lucky ones. It is possible for you to pretend.)

You speak your language, and you are speaking for everyone who was murdered for speaking it. You study your texts, and your are studying for everyone who was murdered for studying them. You celebrate your holidays, and you are celebrating for everyone who was murdered for celebrating them. You live your life, and you are living for everyone who was murdered.

(You are one of the lucky ones. You are able to speak, and study, and celebrate, and live.)

Nothing you do will ever be fully for yourself. You are a memorial to everything that was lost. You are everything that has been salvaged. You are the hope that something can be rebuilt.

I'm not surprised when I see them under Jewish related videos. But I've seen several antisemitic comments under videos that have literally nothing to do with Jews.

And it's always a variation of, "This character/person I don't like must be Jewish." As in, they did something immoral, so the clear explanation is that they are Jews.

I f*cking hate people sometimes.