GOOD AND NICE

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

and in Spanish speaking circles online they sharing gore pictures of dead African babies in online chats so much it has a label named “BND”? Another Black teen was murdered recently by an Asian American store owner convinced he was stealing despite putting items back. He shot him in the back.

yall dont deserve nothing from Black people in any part of the diaspora, irdc. this shit makes me so angry but the demands for an expectation of actionable organizing and dismantling of the white supremacist project that is the US is laid at our collective feet and no one else’s is so crazy to me. how are Black ppl supposed to generate trust for nonblack ppl that hasn’t been demonstrated in a sustained, recent, manner, without us having to force the rest of the world to see us?

Idpol is divisive until it’s time to self adopt the moniker of the Global South and that often doesn’t include & backseats Black African exploitation/extraction. it’s hella transparent how nonblack leftists only mention Sudan, Congo, Somalia, etc. as afterthoughts to their awareness and solidarity posts focusing on Palestine but feel entitled to call Black leftists “zog slaves” for not making dedicated media to the issue they feel the most important, regardless if to these Black leftists making Black issues their focus and niche.

republicans hate black/brown/poor people with the white hot intensity of 10,000 suns

it's not only pointless but actively harmful that blogs exist dedicated to telling people that any and everything that makes them feel bad or excluded in any way is the result of systemic bigotry against their identity groups. like take a look at this one:

this is someone who got made fun of for their music taste and is now embarrassed to talk about it. which sucks. thats a very understandably upsetting thing to happen to you! most of the people who interact with these blogs seem to be teenagers and i understand that shit like "other people think my music taste is cringe" is dead serious at that age.

but there is no actual bigotry happening in what's described here unless you believe that either the music of lemon demon and will wood actually have some innate tie to transmasculine identity, or that being considered to have a lame and embarrassing taste in music is unique to a transmasculine experience.

i am sure everyone in the world in every demographic has experienced an instance where they have felt like they can't be open about their interests or hobbies because they've watched other people get bullied for the same things. or been otherwise given the impression that liking those things reflects on them poorly in some way. this person does not need to be told "you are being subjected to targeted bigotry," this person needs to be told "anything you like will be thought of as cringe by somebody, so you should try and find social groups that are less judgemental or have similar interests."

the biggest problem with these blogs is they have no interest in degrees of severity. nothingburger stuff like this is presented with equal legitimacy as evidence of bigotry alongside stuff that's like, an actual problem. like literally sometimes its just just "an individual woman expressed a negative opinion about men as a category"

back to back with stuff such as talking about being subjected to medical neglect by their doctors, transphobic abuse by their parents, or being rhetorically excluded from discussions of their own reproductive rights.

and im sure the intent is for the weightier complaints to legitimize supposed "microaggressions" like these, but it instead has the opposite effect where it just delegitimizes you entire way of framing things by instead making even the legitimate complaints about real problems look like the insular griping of people with persecution complexes. and that's bad! that's a very bad thing!

obviously anyone actually dismissing legitimate complaints as overblown because of their proximity to illegitimate ones is in the wrong, and instances of that happening are not the fault of these kids who are trying to deal with their issues via questionable blogging choices. but it sure as fuck does not help anyone's case to conflate real problems and fake ones to this degree.

and to be clear even though the screenshots here are from the this-is-transandrophobia blog because thats the one i was just looking at, this isn't unique to them, this is not A Transmasc Problem, it's the whole format. this doesn't help anyone actually understand their own or anyone else's problems, regardless of to what degree bigotry is actually factoring into any discrete example.