Hi

"Dr. King's policy was, if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none."

I'm just trying to boost this :>

Graphics by the awesome @lipsticksandmolotovs

“In the meantime… try not to lose your nuts.”

i made a kind of inflammatory post about this before (that i don’t regret in the slightest), but a significant factor that brought state-sanctioned trans oppression to this level in the US is the fact that the white majority of queer people (cis and trans) did not sufficiently feel concerned by the physical and state violence that was and still is disproportionately experienced by black people, namely black trans women in this case. for years, the ballpark of 80-90 something percent of trans people who were murdered were black. this is still the case today. this has never inspired national mobilization, at least for as long as i’ve been blogging with some of the vets here about it. now that most trans influencers who write about these issues are even more painfully white than ever before, i see even less social media coverage on all platforms about the deaths of black trans women then a decade ago on this lil website. mind you, most of the black tumblr users from that time and now don’t have publishing deals and aren’t being hired to write at major publications.

which directly brings me to the next thing i struggle with. the oppression of trans people has been likened to a genocide at the current moment because white trans people cannot ignore the state-sanctioned violence anymore. when black trans women were exclusively known to bear the brunt of deadly anti-trans violence, not a single LGBT-oriented publication or “ally” called it a genocide. the HRC had begun recording the deaths of trans people since 2013, and other organizations began to closely follow suit. the alarm should have been sounded by the people with some sort of political clout then, when we were all blogging about it. the saying goes that social issues generally aren’t taken seriously in the USA until white people feel the heat, and when they do feel the heat, the issue already ravaged a minority group of some sort and has reached apocalyptic levels due to their negligence. we saw this with the war on drugs, the 2008 stock market crash, and we’re seeing this repeat itself now. ignoring antiblackness has put all trans people in a serious bind with people slow to react.

and the question is, why has this specific form of negligence ballooned to more blatant calls of genocide? there’s a lot of reasons. and i hope the black queer people who publish research about this link something concrete together in the future. but from my observations, the fact that most of the people murdering black trans women are also black presents an optics problem for the majority white queer writers who occupy the largest platforms yet experience the least of the violence. not only do they ignore black trans people based on antiblackness but something tells me a lot of them perceive this to be a “black-on-black” problem that can be dismissed, while the white men and women who feel emboldened to pass anti-trans legislation is a “white-on-white” problem and should be mobilized against because the victimhood of white people is respected as a crisis. and on the flip side, black people have significantly less political capital with regard to queer issues. many straight (and queer!) black people agree with patriarchy and don’t see this as a problem worth fighting for to enable “black unity,” and the black people who do attempt to write about this have far less social reach unless a mainstream publication picks them up. the result is black queer people end up politically isolated in much the same way that black women are—-the feminist majority tend to be racist and anti-racist majority tend to be misogynists.

allowing white people to be the primary voice for all gender related issues all women related issues has its own set of problems that i have been blogging about for literal years lol but i’m not gonna get into that on this post. i’m numb to what is going on; not because i don’t care, because i’ve been hollering about it for years. i’ve been tongue lashing everyone for years. i’m numb because the reason why we’re here is because yall ignored and continue to ignore black people. who, again, shoulder the brunt of the recorded violence and the state-sanctioned repression that enables it. it’s totally fine that white people speaking up has finally inspired people to join an organization, mobilize with their local LGBT community, offer significant financial assistance to causes that help, all that. i’m happy for you that must be nice…

Taras Shevchenko and Ira Aldridge by Heorhiy Melikhov, 1963