It's unbelievably fucking infuriating that TRAs are blaming us for the bot harassment, but not unusual. What's worse, to me, is the insinuation that because we make jokes about it we have something to do with it. This of course goes along with the belief that we're all prudish, stuck up, humorless nagging cows incapable of mirth <<<< women aren't funny, after all. Women aren't funny because men can't relate to our humor, and if men can't relate to it then it may as well not exist at all.
But that isn't what bothers me, because that is also to be expected. It's that it brings back memories of the self-policing expected and required of you to maintain your status within the TRA community, or really within any cult. When they mock us, when they twist our words and behaviors to make us look like we're to blame for the cruelty we suffer, when they tell us that we're unfunny and making ourselves look foolish it's a desperate bid to get us to self-police. To shut up. To stop confronting them with our diversity, of race, of culture, of experience, of sexuality, of personality. To stop being silly and goofy, to stop speaking candidly and from our hearts, to stop thinking, to stop being vulnerable and messy and angry and contradictory the way human beings are, to police each other in order to root out those of us who make us "look bad," to turn on those of us who are the most aggressive, the most hateful, the most unwell and to do the job our wider society wants us to perform by shutting them up, too.
When they find some post by some 16 year old blackpill radfem who has been so traumatized by her lot in life that the only relief she can find is in regurgitating some of that hatred forced into her soul back into the world through her little blog and they point at it and they go "this is proof they're all evil and corrupt!" what they want is for you to police her, too. They want you to gang up on her, to be yet another force in her life trying to make her shut the fuck up because her feelings make people uncomfortable. They know that these outliers make us uncomfortable, too, and they want to take our discomfort and transform it into hatred for their benefit. They want to pass along the job of silencing her to us for the sake of not letting our movement "look bad" in their eyes. When we see someone making a joke that could be misconstrued by them they want us to whisper in her ear, "hey, that was funny but you know, if someone else saw that they might think..."
They want us to see ourselves not as a wide spectrum of different women from different places all having different experiences of life, all good and bad and both and neither, all with the same right to be who we are even if other people don't like it, but as a monolithic hivemind the way they are, and they want us to police each other accordingly. They want us to flatten ourselves, to destroy non-conformity, to let them live inside our minds evaluating everything we think and say so that instead of allowing ourselves to exist as the full, messy people we are we become slaves to their perception of us. Joyless automatons repeating the same phrases over and over again, rejecting even the slightest deviations, respecting no one and nothing except The Message.
They want us to shut the fuck up.
Don't fall for it. Keep being silly, keep making jokes, keep being angry and ugly and hateful and mean if that's what you feel, be a person. Be a real person, because your humanity is what they're afraid of the most. That's why they're trying so hard to squash it out of you. That's why they want so badly for us to try and annihilate the humanity in each other for the sake of a soulless, brainwashed united front held up by paper and chewing gum. Be you. That is the most dangerous and powerful thing you can be.
