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the same thing happened over those rapes a few months ago, in the name of protecting women and children. you do not care about women and children. this is the same population with one of the highest femicide rates in europe – the perpetrators of which are almost always white men – and yet you don't riot over that. you only riot when it gives you an excuse to profile entire racial groups and harm innocent people.

An Australian fiction author was arrested over a book she wrote recently (read more here). The police said they did this “following reports of a fiction novel containing child abuse material”.

I haven't read the book, nor do I know anything about the author or what she's written beyond vague social media references. Readers are allowed to feel how they want about it, they're allowed to DNF it and give it bomb reviews, they're allowed to boycott the author.

But she's been arrested. She could go to jail for writing fiction. This is terrifying and it should be terrifying to everyone.

You know what books get banned if we ban CSA in books? The Colour Purple. Beloved. Lolita. Any memoirs from CSA victims.

And I know there'll be some internet warrior out there ready to tell me all the nuances and differences between these books and the arrested author's book: that her book sexualised this dynamic, it was romanticised, it was for erotic purposes, it was disgusting and triggering. You know what? Yeah. From what little I've seen, I agree. There's no comparison to be made between 'Daddy's Little Toy' and 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'. But this isn't about that; it's about the law, which eventually won't distinguish between them if the vague definition of CSAM is allowed to encapsulate fiction.

You can't make fiction illegal based on your own personal distaste for certain subjects, even if they're presented in a simplistic or sexualised or problematic way. Conservatives have been open about their beliefs that drag storytimes are child abuse, that exposing children to any form of queerness is child abuse. What if CSAM expands to include that? Do we arrest every author who's written queer young adult fiction?

The truth is, our heads are on the chopping block next. They will come for you. You can't be a little bit fascist and expect it to stop there. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou have all been banned before, which is why I used their work as examples. Black women will be first on the chopping block, right alongside trans writers.

If you support criminalising authors, but think it should be solely contained to what you find offensive and dangerous, you are doing exactly what fascism wants you to.

I'm terrified. I'm terrified that I'm seeing hordes of young, left-leaning people celebrating this across social media, to see people who love books celebrating this, to see anyone saying that is a bad thing being shut down and labelled a predator and paedophile.

This author was arrested in Australia; in the US, Trump is defunding the Department of Education and supporting mass book bans to protect children from "woke" ideology; in the UK, puberty blockers have been banned on the grounds of "protecting children". All of these things are interconnected. In our English-speaking Western world, trends catch on fast. The guise of "protecting children" has always been used as a cover for fascism.

And the irony is, children aren't being protected. As someone who's worked in child safety, I know the things we need to do to ensure children are protected from sexual abuse - and those are social security, teaching body safety from a young age, and supporting parents to watch out for the warning signs. We need to particularly support communities of colour, particularly Black and Indigenous communities, and poor communities.

But of course, we defund education and healthcare and benefits instead, we blame parents, we hush up institutional abuse. We continue bombing Palestinian children with those tax dollars instead. We continue our White supremacist hurricane.

Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.

from @/vero_muerte on tiktok!!

I'm not dating or married or related to anyone I live with, and our household of four adults can't get any kind of financial or food or housing aid because we count as three separate households despite our semi-blended finances and living together for a decade. There are laws that have been proposed (at least, I don't know if any passed) that limit housing to nuclear families.

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

Here's the r/piracy megathread if you need it. & you can pair that viewing with this article on the real-life history of Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners; they don't make it explicit in the film, but every founding member was a socialist / communist, and that article goes more in depth about the movement.

Notably: LGSM did not wait for the mining communities to be openly supportive of queers and anti-homophobia before showing solidarity. They saw the connection between oppression of Welsh miners and the oppression of queers, and chose solidarity first. It was this choice to materially support other oppressed people, and see the queer community and mining communities are inherently connected through their experiences of oppression and resistance, that allowed the relationship seen above to exist at all.