dan

people in every queer and trans community i go to set an expectation: i should ofrever abandon my muslim past, i should explicitly stop associating yourself with it whatsoever, you either get to be queer or you either get to be raised-muslim.

in reality, there's no such expectation for christianity, and none of them are ready to dismantle their "inner christian" in their heads as much as they expect be to dismantle my "inner muslim"

none fo them get to admit how most first world countries are culturally christian, because christianity is "default" to them, as well as first world, as well as white.

me having a complicated relationship with islam doesn't mean i absolutely despise every piece of it. it means i distanced myself from ummah, but won't hear islamic criticism from non ex muslims at all, because you expect us to dismantle "our inner muslims" in ways you aren't ready to dismantle imperialism and racism in you.

your expectation is us "acting white", you don't want us unless we're that, which means you don't want us at all.

a lot of people claiming to want to uplift brown queer voices and such don't procced to do anything meaningful for them, or for brown people at all. it's just virtue signaling, homonationalism. you'd only care of brown people being queer, and you want the "brown" part of it gone as much as possible.

a lot of people say they want the leftist agenda to stop being us centric and imperialist, but then it's just pretending to care about it. you already made is so little and unhearable you'd have to get out of your way to seek for us speaking. then you'd not seek or if you find us, you will just pass by. hoping someone else would amplify the voice you took from us? and that someone else would hope for that too, so what?

you want us only when we agree with everything usa says about us, you want us until our lives don't put you into too much discomfort. when they put you into too much discomfort, you don't ask why, you'll restore the comfort by banishing us again. your tolerability of us is so intricately conditional, to meet those a third worlder has to build themselves into a first worlder mindset. this is your (inter)nationalism hey.

queer-inclusive but still misogynist

don't have to be from the US, do have to act like you are

ostensibly welcoming to everybody, mysteriously white as hell

terrified of the idea that sex could be enjoyable for anyone

absolutely incapable of structural critique, everything is individual moral choices

enforcement through public humiliation and isolation accountability :)

fear of infiltration by a corrupting outside influence - asserting a right to privacy or failing to publicly demonstrate moral in-group status is treated as a confession

some people will hear this and think, well it couldn’t have been that bad if you didn’t even know.

but knowing you were abused is not a matter of severity. it is a matter of whether the forms of abuse you’ve experienced have been de-naturalized in a supportive social context, and thus made knowable as something that did not have to happen.

when people list common forms of abuse, many people will be in tags and notes saying “I didn’t know this wasn’t normal.”

it’s sad because this sentiment simultaneously misses and hits the point exactly.

abuse is normal. but what people mean when they say this is, “I didn’t know I was allowed to be hurt by this, to object to this, that anyone would ever recognize how violated, degraded, or dehumanized it feels to experience this.”

all of that is expressed through the word “normal” in these statements of realization because we all must constantly stomach being hurt, violated, degraded, and dehumanized in “normal” life, and we are taught from a young age that if something is “normal” it means we cannot object to it or escape it.

you’re allowed to feel violated by normalized forms of abuse. you are allowed to object to normalized forms of violation.

you don’t have to take on the loaded terms of Survivor and Abuser to describe things if you don’t want to or it feels inappropriate or inaccurate to you.

you can just allow yourself to recognize when people are abusing the power they have over you in ways that benefit themselves at your expense, and to recognize the ways that people with power over you coerce you to give up autonomy over your body.

something does not become less traumatic for being common and normal. the normalized trauma of being dehumanized and violated is part of what oppression is. it’s part of how subjugated classes within a population are constructed and maintained as distinct.

it’s okay to acknowledge it hurts. you don’t have to internalize it as something that was your own fault. you don’t have to suppress it forever.

you’re allowed to acknowledge that who you are was shaped by the people with power over you abusing that power.