Anything could happen

Some days there just weren’t words enough.

Home was quiet and familiar and beautifully dim. Jack dropped his bag inside the door, avoided the kitchen and headed right to the bathroom, stripped with an efficiency of which he was proud. Sitting on the shower bench before he turned on the water he checked on his leg on some kind of autopilot, knowing by touch as much as sight that he was sore but would do.

The water felt sixteen kinds of exactly what he needed, blisteringly hot. He sluiced his disappointments down the drain as effectively as he could.

Their bedroom was dark, the curtains still drawn, but Jack didn’t need daylight to orient himself toward the bed, to lean his crutches against the nightstand or to ease beneath the sheets. Robby grumbled slightly as Jack pressed in close, as he rested his cheek against Robby’s shoulder, and Robby’s hand moved to cradle the back of Jack’s head.  Robby hummed softly, shifting slightly to take Jack’s weight, nosing into his damp, curling hair. “You want to talk about it?” he asked softly, his voice a welcome rumble beneath Jack’s ear.

i really don't have the words for how things have escalated to outright race riots in the last few weeks. just to collect a few of the stories the bbc is reporting in their live thread:

Families led to safety through flames (Dan Johnson) Homes were targeted and burned. Families had to be led to safety through the flames - rescued by emergency services risking their lives in the most dangerous situation. It’s what the authorities feared all day. What they warned against and pleaded not to see. The condemnation came quickly and was widespread. It wasn’t just homes, cars were also torched by young masked man in these predominantly unionist streets but the target here was immigrants and the message to entirely innocent families was: "You’re not welcome". In the north of the city, more people were forced to flee including an African family who’ve lived here for 20 years.

People being put out 'because they're black' - pastor A pastor who has been helping those in houses targeted in tonight's violence says people were being put out of their homes "because they're black". Pastor Jack McKee was at the scene where multiple houses were on fire around the Crumlin Road in north Belfast - he says some members of his church "who have been with us for 20 years" were "getting put out of their home, had their house attacked, windows smashed, houses beside them burned". "They're good Christian people and they're getting put out just because they're black," he says. "I'm doing my best to help them, it's as simple as that." [...]

Masked men shouting 'foreigners out' (Kelly Bonner) Last night on the Lower Newtownards Road in Belfast hundreds of masked men walked down the street carrying bottles, bricks and masonry. They set bins on fire and shouted "foreigners out". As they walked street to street, they were banging on doors, kicking doors down and breaking windows. Masked man set cars alight and at one point I witnessed them trying to burn a car until a woman came out of her home and told them it belonged to a "local and not a foreigner" and they stopped. A young family had to be moved from their home by police. The scenes of this young family fleeing their home were really quite shocking.

It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.

Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!

Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.

It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.

I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.

At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky™ person? She must actually be autistic!"

Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!

It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.

People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.

Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.

It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).

Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged

No, but everything in his writing that gets commented on is something that speaks to feeling out of place in society, or something that conveys emotional or social vulnerability.

So for someone to say “because of these things I think she was a trans woman teehee!” they are implicitly 1) denying that any other aspect of identity might cause these feelings, and 2) asserting that if someone feels these things, they must be a woman.

Ignoring his Judaism AND implying that men can’t feel alienated or vulnerable and if they do they must actually have been a woman. Doesn’t seem very respectful or deconstructing of gendered norms to me.

mine to please, mine to break