the uncertainty girl

fucking hell if you have "terfs DNI" in your bio but you cant be bothered to block “radblr” “terfsafe” “gender critical” etc so you can see which seemingly-innocuous posts are actually recruitment attempts before you reblog them, you are worthless.

Oh, no, my non-involvement with Black art is because I'm not Black. Black people have gone long enough dealing with appropriation and people like me (non-Black) have taken up enough Black spaces enough. So really, I'm actually doing a good thing by non listening to Black music, watching Black movies, reading books by Black authors.

No, you see, trans people are so chronically fetishized and belittled that it's normal for me to feel suspicious and wary to see trans people in sexual contexts, intimate contexts, nudes, artwork, etc. It would be best in fact if I did not engage in erotic or romantic works involving trans people at all.

❝Individually we are weak, like a single twig. But as a bundle, we form a mighty faggot!❞

~ The Simpsons, who on the next frame displayed a definition of faggot, per: "fag‧got (ˈfæ.ɡət) bundle of sticks for fuel. [Fr. fagot, a bundle of sticks]", to avoid getting inundated with quite so many complaints.

Anyway. When it comes to solidarity and unity in the queer community, sometimes it is said "We're all faggots in the eyes of the law", with the idea that our enemies will not distinguish between us; they want rid of us all.

And, while that's superficially true, it's usually brought out in order to undercut any talk about parts of the community being more targetted, oppressed, discriminated against, etc than others.

In reality, anti-queer legislation (and the associated hate crimes that such always emboldens) will generally disproportionately target those considered most "undesirable" by society, and work their way up.

Let's take a moment to consider one such person—namely, Sylvia Rivera. As an orphaned child of immigrants, her life path went from survival sex at 10 to activist at 18 to dead at 50. She's now remembered mostly for her role in American gay rights, trans rights, and especially for the "down to brass tacks" side of things. Less flag-waving, more doing unglamorous work for queer homeless youth.

If we break down the most focused-on spotlights of her activist career, however, people will always talk about two things:

How she threw the first brick at Stonewall (which she did not do—in fact, she was uptown in Bryant Park at the time, and not present for the uprising)

Her "Y'All Better Quiet Down" speech, against the exclusion of trans people at the Gay Pride Rally, NYC, 1973:

❝Y'all better quiet down! I've been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help! And you all don't do a goddamn thing for them! And they write STAR, not the woman's group! They do not write women, they do not write men, they write to STAR! Because we're trying to do something for them! But you all tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs! I will not put up with this shit! I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way?! What the fuck's wrong with you all?! Think about that! I believe in the gay power, I believe in us getting our rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights, that's all I wanted to say to you people. Come and see people at STAR House on Twelfth Street, the people that are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and women that belong to our white middle class club! And that's what you all belong to! Revolution now! Gay power! Know the gay power!❞

Let's quickly address a potentially distracting thing for younger readers who are used to today's more polished queer theory, before we get back to the main point. With regard to "they do not write men, they do not write women, they write to STAR"...

This in part is the third-gendering of trans women that it looks like. Sylvia herself used many labels over the course of her life and didn't consider it was what was most important.

It's also, more importantly, a commentary on the state of things. While gay men and women were busy celebrating recent civil rights advances, while the person before Sylvia on the stage was a transphobic wealthy white cis woman making a "polite society" argument to close down the drag bars (with no provision for those who depended on them for survival at that time) and stamp out transvestitism/transsexuality because they needed to polish their image, they were for the most part not lifting a finger for less privileged (being imprisoned is definitely a disprivilege!) gay people who needed them. So having given up on writing to gay men's groups and lesbian groups, they wrote to STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), because they knew that if anyone would have their back, it'd be the ones who most understood what it was like to be at the bottom of the pile. 

Which is why, of course, there is a well-established tradition of most of the real change for queer people in the US being built on the backs of impoverished non-white (mostly black and latina) sex workers, drag queens, transsexuals, and the like.

When it comes to any movement that seeks to effect liberation from oppression, there will be a spectrum from:

Those with most to lose

Those with most to gain

This often results in those with more structural privilege, actively seeking to "pull up the ladder behind them" to cut out those with least structural privilege.

This isn't a solely queer thing—see for example how the Suffragette movement for women's votes actively cut out black women. As a choice. Black women wanted in, and the white women running the show said no, it'd hold the movement back, and the best thing that could happen for black women was for white women to get the vote. But that if they wanted to help white women get votes, here was where they could volunteer work behind the scenes.

In Sylvia Rivera's time, the same happened with many assimilationist relatively privileged white cis gay people dropping the ball when it came to their less-privileged counterparts (if not actively pulling up the ladder behind them).

And today? In the US, UK, and various other places that follow such trends, the media (and laws) mostly hate trans people, and most aggressively, trans women. But it's not so simple as that, because of intersectionality.

A lot of people use the "Intersectional Pride Flag" without really understanding what intersectionality is. A term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has written mostly about misogynoire, the intersection of misogyny and antiblackness. How having two characteristics that are societally disprivileged (in this case, being female and black) will not merely stack, but compound, and create new kinds of oppression that people who are just one or the other will not suffer.

Some societally disprivileged characteristics to consider, in no particular order:

Being non-white

Being black specifically

Being female

Being trans

Being gay

Being disabled

Being poor

Being under 18

Being imprisoned

Being a "heretic"

This last may seem like an odd one, but it simply is the best short word I can think of to refer to having religious views that cause local power structures to view you with extra (adverse) scrutiny. In the US, for example, this mostly means: being Muslim, being Jewish, or, to a much lesser extent than those two things, being atheist (for example, atheists are barred from holding political positions in many states by state laws; Federal law overrules them, but in terms of implementation, it clearly means atheists will be quietly discriminated against).

In some cases, these traits will aggregate. A black trans woman is disproportionately likely to be poor, which could result in her imprisonment, and/or in causing a health condition that becomes a disability, for example.

People who are the opposite of all these things will call this kind of discussion "Oppression Olympics", because they want the talk to stop, because they are actively benefiting from the current system and have no wish to change it for the better. "You just need to work harder and smarter", say such people as Elon Musk and Donald Trump who have never had to work for anything in their lives and could not pour water out of a boot with the instructions written on the sole.

But we, hopefully, know better.

So... We pretty much all have privileges of some kind.

Let us use them, whatever they may be for us, to help those who do not.

As a white person, I can get away with fighting racism in ways that a black person could not.

A cis woman can fight for my rights as a trans woman in ways that I could not.

People with money can support people without.

Adults can advocate for under-18s.

And so on.

This is what queer solidarity and unity means. Not "we're all equal", implying "so stop infighting", which is commonly code for "so stop complaining about how X group isn't lifting a finger for relatively disprivileged Y group and/or is actively keeping them down", but rather:

"We all should be equal, so let's start by lifting up those who are currently being treated as much less equal amongst us"

And—with apologies to Sylvia Rivera, who had a solid contextual reason to bid the crowd "Y'all better quiet down" so that she could speak—this means: Y'all better speak up.

You know what IS an important issue? Getting called a fucking birthday boy. They get all hands on deck about it. They will write VERY long posts about how important it is you not use it, and that anyone who does must be punished as severely as possible

There's only one explanation. The lives of trans women are so worthless to them, so fucking disposable, that a trans man getting invalidated is actually more important to them. That's how these people, who demand we view them as family and allies, who think we should be ready to die for them, view us.