My dad has 4 half siblings and two step siblings. They're all a decent bit younger than him. When I was a teenager, we went to a family reunion, and I realized something—my dad did not respect his siblings. He looked down on all of them. He saw them as fuck-ups and overgrown children. My dad had the American dream: well paying management job, suburban house, wife, and three kids. My aunt and uncles did not. Excluding my aunt, none of them were married or in serious relationships. They hadn't really settled into long term careers. Several of them were working the kind of jobs that get called "Unskilled labor." So he looked down on them because the youngest one was in his thirties (and several were much older), and yet none of them had "settled down" into what he saw as lifelong, permanent careers and relationships and lives. He was polite to their faces, sure, but I heard how he talked about them behind their backs, to my mother.

And then a few years ago, we visited his brothers again for Thanksgiving. And I realized something again--he respected them now. He saw them as equals. Why? Well. All of a sudden, every single one of them had serious, committed romantic partners. They didn't even need to still be with those partners—one of my uncle's fiance passed away from cancer before they could marry—just having had one showed that they matured into a real adult participating in society. In fact, at one point, my aunt was telling my mom about how one of my uncles was no longer living in an apartment she owned, but instead, after having a steady girlfriend for about a year, he moved in with her. And my mom literally said to my aunt, "wow. Look at that. He finally grew up."

One of the lines that frequently gets repeated about anti-aspec sentiment is "why would anyone hate asexuals/aromantics/etc? They aren't even doing anything." And that's exactly it. In the eyes of amatonormative culture, we aren't doing anything. Adults are supposed to do things. That's how you become a member of society.

Many neonazis and their ilk are okay with their icons being portrayed negatively as long as that negativity takes the form of a powerful and threatening figure. They like identifying themselves with Big Scary Destroyer. It's a power fantasy for them.

That's why, for instance, Trump's incoherence when speaking doesn't bother them. His incoherence is taken, by and large, very seriously. The man opens his mouth and drops a bunch of verbal turds - and the world panics, or at the least gets very, very nervous. Not unjustifiedly, it's true, but the power fantasy of being able to say whatever they want and get taken seriously is still vicariously fulfilled.

But the Reflecting Pool? The Reflecting Pool wasn't supposed to be broken. It's not something Trump destroyed for the sheer pleasure of destruction, which is how Trump's base experienced his gutting of the government via Musk. The Reflecting Pool is something that was supposed to be improved, which he boasted about improving, and instead it's clearly turned to muck. There's no power fantasy there. There's nothing to gloat over; it's just a damp gross failure. It isn't even a catastrophic failure! Tearing down the East Wing of the White House was dramatic, and had the value of making a big, indelible change to a national icon. No matter what happens, the East Wing as we knew it is gone. Power fantasy. By contrast, the Reflecting Pool? It's just fuckin dirty. It's gross. It's your neighbor's neglected cheap pool that's full of dead leaves and slime. An entirely pedestrian, grody, pathetic failure. It would literally be more salvageable as a PR thing for Trump if it got hit by a meteor and turned into a smoking crater.

People will say things like, "Holding onto anger isn't healthy," and I understand what they're trying to say. If years go by and anger is the only place you're able to live, it can absolutely keep you stuck.

But I also think there's a difference between staying angry forever and allowing yourself to be angry while you're healing.

For a lot of survivors, anger is actually an important part of recovery. It can be the moment you stop blaming yourself. The moment you stop minimizing what happened. The moment you realize that you deserved better.

Many of us spent years making excuses for the people who hurt us. We focused on their trauma, their intentions, their struggles, and their pain. We understood them so well that we forgot to make room for our own feelings.

Sometimes anger is what creates that space.

That doesn't mean anger should be taken out on other people. It doesn't mean every angry reaction is healthy. But the feeling itself isn't automatically a problem.

Sometimes anger is simply grief with boundaries.

Sometimes it's self-respect showing up for the first time.

There is a reason why legislation and social pushback is typically focused on preventing you from coming out, preventing you from transitioning from the start, or detransitioning and/or closeting you. That is state violence, but the state is hoping you will either do the dirty work yourself (suicide) or fall in line with the White Supremacist Patriarchal gender roles it expects of you (closeting/detransition). I know that is bad. It's abysmal. It's awful. We are not here to downplay the violence that happens broadly to queer people at the hands of the government.

However, under White Supremacy, as a white queer person, you can be "saved" from the "lifestyle choice" you have "made". We're in a country dominated by Christian savior complexes, conversion therapy is a regrowing industry, the laws targeting us are laws of restriction, laws of "prevention". White queer people are a "problem" to be "solved" by trying to "save" us from ourselves so we can reintegrate into broader white, Christian society alongside other white people. We need to be "corrected" and "saved" because our whiteness is still valuable to Christian, Patriarchal, White Supremacy.

White Supremacist state violence in the United States murders Black infants on the false allegation that their mothers are stealing diapers. White Supremacist state violence murders Black children for playing with toy airsoft guns. White Supremacist state violence murders Black women for experiencing a mental health crisis. White Supremacist state violence murders Black men on the unproven allegation that they used a counterfeit $20 bill. White Supremacist state violence murders Black people for simply existing in their homes. Kohen Wiley, Tamir Rice, Sonya Massey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Roger Fortson. The list could go on because just existing while Black is dangerous under White Supremacy.

Your analysis of your own place in society as a queer person is incomplete without this analysis. It is not enough to say "well trans WoC have it harder than me but cishet people all have it easier" because that is incomplete and ignorant at best and flat out wrong and racist at worst. Why do trans WoC, particularly Black trans women struggle and experience so much violence in our country? Why does that violence happen? You can't just say "because they're transgender and they're women and they aren't white" and leave it at that. What are the institutions, the power structures, the long standing histories of violence and subjugation at play here? Why is it dangerous for someone to exist as a Black person, everything else aside, in the first place? Why and how does your whiteness protect you where their Blackness creates a target for them and how do the systems around you exploit that and target you differently on a material level?

some other mostly well-known texts by Black writers that may be useful here:

Audre Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”

The Combahee River Collective Statement

less well-known but really useful: Angela Davis and Jane Elliott in conversation on race and privilege

and, how to use all this work: bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice”

several of these authors were or are lesbians or queer and those who ever commented on trans experience were or are trans allies (to my knowledge), therefore specifically relevant to this post. :)

two extras:

this 1975 conversation between James Baldwin and Maya Angelou is much clipped and GIF’d (you’ll probably recognize the imagery if you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time) but I actually don’t know if I’ve ever seen a link to the full thing before - enjoy; it’s beautiful and worth watching

Tema Okun’s From White Racist to White Anti-Racist Ladder, a step-by-step resource designed for white allies who want to do what OP is telling them to do but need help figuring out how to manage their defensiveness/emotional reactions to trying to learn to become anti-racist and unlearning the structural racism in which they have been raised. these reactions are not something we have to be terribly ashamed of (in fact, shame can make us dig our heels into our racist behavior, so learning to forgive ourselves and behave differently is an important part of unlearning racism). feeling defensive is a totally normal part of unlearning racist patterns and white supremacy, just like it’s a normal part of unlearning any kind of privileged pattern we hold. what matters most is that we do our best to keep trying and not to push our emotional reactions onto the people around us and the people we love who are impacted and oppressed by white supremacy.

And you'll have a trans woman stick up for trans men and then get the most vile transphobic language sent her way and you're like damn, people love being really shit to trans women on this site and then the person saying this shit *is* another trans woman. And then suddenly it's like ohhh you are so consumed by the idea of some sort of inherent curse by being assigned maleness that the way to atone is to distance yourself as much as possible and punish anyone who blurs the line you need to keep to "maintain your innocence."

AMAB =/= penis, prostate, testes

AFAB =/= vagina, uterus, ovaries