#and be sure you're not dismissing or dehumanizing any of the real people

[princesssarcastia]

the way public discourse is profoundly failing both Palestinians and Israelis in turns isn't surprising, but it sure is a depressing refresher on the importance of refusing to dehumanize anyone. the importance of remembering that states are not moral actors; and that a nation's government is not its people, and often does not represent the will of its people.

i mean, shit, as an american, how fucked would i be if people in other countries tried to hold me responsible for the bloody things my government has done in my name? pretty goddamn fucked. so i should refuse to level that condemnation at anyone else.

so as we watch netanyahu call this terrorist attack israel's 9/11, and watch his administration gear up to carry out what might charitably be labeled ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide, against people who had fuck all to do with it, in some twisted strongman show of force and revenge, in a continuation of the same violence that will only beget more violence as it always does...

i can only see the specters of the american wars in afghanistan and iraq. and i can refuse to condemn israeli people for the actions of their government. all while expressing grief and outrage at the atrocity hamas committed against israel. its truly fucking horrifying what they did, and what israeli people suffered.

and also, as someone whose government has a long, torrid history supporting right-wing dictatorships and leaders, to the detriment of those leaders' peoples and also, to the eventual detriment of americans...

as someone whose country literally lived through the frame of reference that netanyahu is using to contextualize what israel's government is about to do...

i can say firmly that israel's government, much like america's government, creates its own demons. this is what happens when you visit nothing but war and cruelty upon a group of people. this is the end result! this is always the end result of oppression and violence. you reap what you sow.

that doesn't justify what hamas did, or what it will continue to do in the coming days. but goddamn, if you spend decades taking away people's homes, taking away their opportunities for economic advancement, refusing them any meaningful participation in their own governance, penning them in with no resources and no hope, and then gunning them down in the streets when they try to protest it or otherwise acceptably fight for change and progress—

you will always end up where we are right now. always. if you leave a group of people with no other option within a system but to wait for better days and kinder enemies and suffer horrors in the meantime, some of them will inevitably radicalize and seek violent options outside that system.

and millions of Palestinian people are now going to suffer, and die, and become further displaced, as they have suffered for decades. because israel's government, like america's government, can't stop sowing the seeds that inevitably grow into its deadliest enemies.

so long as they continue to oppress palestinian people, things like this will continue to happen. which is why we should take every opportunity to condemn that oppression, and why i can refuse to condemn palestinian people for the actions of hamas. all while expressing grief and outrage at the atrocity the israeli government is committing against paelstine.

[inkskinned]

no, but really, we need to talk about the casual objectification that has become the fallback discourse of the internet: if you're pretty and dressed nicely, you're a slut. and if you're even vaguely outside of their body standard, you're fucking disgusting.

too-frequently, people position sex workers as being "the problem". they sneer you're addicted to pornography, you don't know what a real woman looks like. but real women are in pornography. the real bodies on display are not the issue here: the issue is that other people feel extremely confident when commenting on someone's physique.

2000's super-thin is slowly worming its way back into the public ideal. recently i saw someone get told to "go for a run", despite the fact she was on the thinner side of average. not that it would ever be appropriate to say that: but it's kind of like sticker shock when you see it. people think that is fat? holy shit. do they just have no idea about things?

but what are you going to do about it? that's the problem, right. because chances are - you're a normal person. we can say normalize carrying fat on your body, but we are not the billion-dollar diet industry. we are not the billion-dollar fashion industry. we are just, like. people. who are trying to make content on the internet, without being treated shittily.

as someone who has been on both sides of things: you are treated better when you are thin and pretty. this is statistically correct. i am not saying that you cannot be bullied for being thin; i'm saying there are objective institutional biases against certain bodytypes. there are videos of men and women who lost weight all saying: i now know for a fact exactly how much worse you're treated. in the comments, some asshole inevitably says something akin to you deserved to be dehumanized when you were fat.

which means that ... the easiest thing to do is be pretty and thin. it is the path of least resistance, because of course it is, because any time you post a picture of yourself without a thigh gap, someone immediately comments something like you need to try a diet.

the other half is also dehumanizing though, huh, just in a different way. when i put on makeup and nice clothes, i am told i slept my way to the top as a professional. do you know how many women in STEM have told me they purposefully dress to "unimpress" because they already struggle to be taken seriously and if they're ever considered pretty - it for some reason takes away from their authority.

so they make it seem like it's your fault. you, existing in a body - it's your fault! if you didn't want shitty comments, don't have a body. they position us against each other like chess pieces; vying for male attention we don't even need.

and i can be an authority on this unless you think i'm fat and unattractive. when i am pretty and thin, i'm an activist. when i am just a normal person who makes a good point: i am immediately dismissed. nobody fucking believes you if you're not seen as attractive. you literally lose value. you cease to exist.

but the whole time, it feels like - is anyone actually grounded the fuck in reality? the line of "pretty and thin" keeps shifting. nobody seems to understand what "a normal weight" even looks like, because it's not something that exists - you cannot tell a person's health by looking at their body. even if you think you could tell that, even if you're sure a person is dangerously overweight - people are not your dolls. they do not need to be dressed up or displayed properly to soothe your aesthetics. you aren't concerned for them, you're stealing their agency. you don't get to say if they're "allowed" to take pictures and post them on the internet - you don't get to tell them how to exist.

people hide behind "the obesity epidemic" without any actual qualifications. they crow things about "normalizing unhealthiness".

but it's bullshit. i have visible abs. there is a pair of parallel lines on my body, even when i'm relaxed; where my obliques meet my abdominal wall. i am proud of this because it means i'm strong, because i overcame an eating disorder only to be ripped as fuck. it is genetic and physical luck that i even get any definition, i'm pleased as punch.

but it does mean that my abdominal wall sticks out a little bit. the other day i posted a video of myself dancing, and, for a moment, my shirt slipped. you could see a little bit of my stomach. i was cartwheeling to the floor. moments before this, i'd had my foot over my head.

a guy slid into my DMs. a row of vomiting emojis prefaced: you should really lose some weight before you think about dancing.

i stared at it for a long time. there was a time when i would have been triggered by this, where it would have encouraged me to starve myself. i would have ignored the fact i'm flexible, agile, good at jumping: i would have lost the weight for a stranger's passing comment. i would have found myself and my body fucking disgusting.

and for what? to please what? because why? so that he can exist in this world without an unchallenged eyeball? what would my self-hatred even accomplish? usually i write paragraphs. obviously. on this particular occasion, in this body i've been at war with for ages: i just felt exhausted.

it shouldn't be even worth saying. it shouldn't be hard to explain. all of this emotional turmoil when he cannot even comprehend the most basic truth: i am not an object on display for him.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

Hi! I have a Big Question about navigating a conflict in my local kink community, and I've appreciated the stuff you've posted about kink before. It's fine if this is too much work or takes a long time to answer :) I'd like to CW for sexual assault and anti-transmasc conversion therapy (feminist edition)

So there's a handful of cishet women who have formed a group dedicated to "making the community safer for queer people and women". I don't have all the details, but apparently there was a sexual assault that the ethics committee handled poorly, so these people are calling for the ethics committee to resign and a raft of other safety changes. I support them overall.

The trouble is that they're coming at the whole thing from an "angry cishet women who are fed up with Men!!!" stance, and I'm a bisexual trans man who was specifically subjected to conversion therapy about how being a man would make me a predator and I should go back in the closet as a woman. While the group has said that they're trans-inclusive, I've seen some events that are like "let's talk about how to make the community safer for queer people and women -- no men allowed", and one of them has some writings about how if men get sexually assaulted it should be the responsibility of other men to support them, because "we have to triage the people most affected by sexual assault". You can see why I might be nervous about them.

They're running an all-genders meeting next week to discuss their goals and code of conduct. I've asked to meet them in a more private setting -- initially this was because I couldn't make the meeting, but I'm intending to follow up and basically say "I know that my trauma is likely to trigger other people and I don't want to stop other survivors getting heard". However, even in a more private setting like a one-on-one coffee I'm not really sure how to pitch my concerns in a way that an Angry Cishet Woman will be receptive to. I've already had a lot of experience with my issues being dismissed as "MRA shit", it was one of the ways they kept me in conversion therapy (because if you're upset by people saying that transitioning would make you a rapist, you just aren't feminist enough). I'm also worried that it's going to be stressful and they're going to say stuff that triggers me, and that they aren't going to be willing to make any concessions for my needs even though I'm making concessions for theirs.

Ultimately what I want to tell them is that there's no one-size-fits-all culture that makes people feel safe, because some of us have diametrically opposed types of trauma, and so what we need is clear expectations about what behaviours are allowed in which spaces. This is kind of already solved by the fact that they have a "women and nonbinary" group I'm not in, where they presumably can talk about how they hate and fear men all they like, but I worry that they want to impose a norm of "people should be able to talk about how they hate and fear men anywhere they want, to make them feel safe" which would push me out of the spaces I'm in. But communicating that would mean getting them to understand how much it fucks me up to have to listen to someone tell me how much they fear men, and I'm scared they won't care and will just tell me that It's Part Of Being A Man.

I guess I was wondering whether you'd dealt with any situations like this before, and if you had any thoughts on how to meet these people where they're at while still looking after myself and getting my needs met? Thanks in advance!

Gonna be real with you.

I can't tell if the group is a clusterfuck or if you're already too triggered by what's happening and what's been said to convey an actual conflict to me. The pull quotes you've given me are horrific, but the way you are talking about the people who made them is actually fairly dehumanizing. It sounds like you, as well as the rest of the community, have internalized a pretty horrifying degree of identitarian/individualist alienation from each other and are not, in fact, in actual community with each other. Maybe never have been. The way you're all talking about this situation is making it very difficult for me to manage my own anger response right now, because I do not see any of what you describe ending any other way but a truly unspeakable level of interpersonal and lateral violence being wielded and then consequently denied by whoever wins control of the space.

But as you've written it, this is not a conflict situation, this is a "get the fuck out and let the group blow itself up where it can't hurt you" situation.

To answer your broader question at the end, I absolutely do have experience managing the aftermath of sexual assault within a community, and in fact am CURRENTLY dealing with it on a county wide level at work because The Shit We Don't Talk About Finally Can't Be Silenced Anymore.

Some Do's and Don'ts as a community aftersomething like this happens:

Do: create sexual abuse survivor support groups. While it is acceptable to utilize break out groups within the space to facilitate more specific conversations and peer care (e.g. temporarily sectioning the group out by gender or by cis vs trans or by race or disability status or etc to facilitate a specific kind of conversation), it is never acceptable to bar a person from a sexual assault trauma recovery group on the basis of a fixed/static identity or existence.

Do: set firm boundaries around what kind of behavior is accepted with the space of both peer support groups specifically (group facilitators are typically already trained to do this, but if, for example, your group is entirely volunteer run, they may need to OBTAIN that training.) and in the broader spaces of the community. Be open about how violations will be handled in their aftermath and utilize restorative justice techniques where possible to reduce the need to remove people from an essential space of safety.

Don't: make a habit of trying to base individual care responses off general data trends. Those trends are there to contextualize and inform our understanding of how a thing might happen and what resources may or may not already be in play. They do NOT *EVER* dictate the actual lived reality of the human beings you are making a plan for.

Do: establish sexual health and safety education programming that is introduced, reviewed, and proactively entrenched in the community culture, including information about domestic violence, sexual assualt, health-risk management, family planning, and other important topics.

Do: create private spaces in which people/survivors can seek more individualized support, ideally someone with training in conflict resolution/mediation communication procedures

Don't: silo sexual abuse survivors. I really don't like that I have to say this, but I've seen it enough times now to know that I do. I don't care what your reasoning is. You do not silo sexual assualt/abuse survivors away from fully formed and identified safety and recovery resources. The idea that your group might just abandon the care of male victims to the men in the community WITHOUT SUPPORTING THEM IN FACILITATING THAT CARE means the care won't happen. I know we hear about domestic violence shelters sectioned out by gender all the time but remember HOW we talk about them - as inhumane and cruel tools of misgendering, family separation, denial of abuse,and more. This is NOT an approach to replicate, which is why MANY shelters have been gradually transitioning away from it.

Do: organize and hold a long term-ongoing series of small group conversations. In a space I was in, we held what we called "The Taboo Talks" series once a month for six months every year. Each group had a set agenda topic, and clear rules and expectations around how people would interact with the space and each other, and was boundaried by a trained group facilitator who would step in and actively reorient within those expectatioms as needed. We talked about things like race, gender, sexual abuse, specific kinks or activities, historic events or experiences of intergenerational trauma, and so much more. These talks were a HUGE part of how we were able to really create a sense of shared community and unconditional regard. Attendance of certain events was dependent on participation in these talks. You didn't have to come to every single one, but you DID have to participate, or for the off months you would not be eligible for certain events that required a higher degree of mutual trust and safety. You could try again after the next talk session.

Do: create space for people to speak about feelings and thoughts that you absolutely do not feel capable of tolerating. The group isn't for any one of you. Unconditional regard means that they should be willing to make an effort to see and engage with your full humanity, sure. But it also means that when they inevitably fuck that up during the process of conveying emotionally difficult content of their own, YOU NEED TO RETURN THE FAVOR. Does it SUCK as a trans person to hear "men have no place in survivor spaces"? Yes. Is it something that needs to be gently explored and corrected? Yes. Is it going to help fuck all anyone for trans folks in this space to approach that from a perspective of trying to convince "cishet" (hey you know you do NOT have the right to make that assessment on behalf of the women in question right? And if they aren't all cishet women, you're gonna find yourself in a REAL fuckin pickle making that assertion about them OR their rhetoric) women that they're privileged and empowered over trans and queer people.

Don't: allow oppression olympics rhetoric to stand. From anyone. Including yourself. This is NOT a space to be trying to argue and pursuade people of a hierarchy of systemic oppression that means one portion of the group gets to silence or ignore the needs and feelings of the other. You will win yourself no allies and no favors walking into this space on the defensive against people trying to negotiate safety changes rather than as if you are in full collaboration from them but have different thoughts on what might be load-bearing.

Do: share your story and perspective in the space being made for victims. It's hard and scary, but that is what the space is FOR and the more people, the more perspectives are open there, the safer the space will be more often than not.

Do: ask reframing questions such as "if we plan to segregate sexual abuse survivor support programs by gender, how will we ensure that both spaces are functioning in support of each other and with an effective distribution of resources? Would we be able to have an over-arching, unsegregated program with specific meetings, groups, or activities being segregated when necessary? Why or why not?" Another good question might be "do we have access to formal resources and training on how to support survivors? Who in these programs do we believe HAS to have this training, and what kind of training do we think it needs to be?" An absolutely CRITICAL question is "do we have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the incidences of sexual assault and abuse in this community? If not, how can we obtain that understanding?"

Don't: make accusations. This is tricky because "accusation" is a FAR broader definition than people realize. In relationship counseling we sometimes say "if the word 'you' has left your mouth, no matter what came around it, start over and try to say what you're saying without ever using a pronoun other than I." Give it a shot sometime, itxs actually REALLY fucking hard to do. But I guaran-goddamn-tee you that "the way you're talking about this implies that my abuse doesn't matter" will net you a fight. Because no. No the fuck it doesn't. And also yes the fuck it does. The ENTIRE point of conflict resolution is that it's happening because two mutually exclusive things are trying to exist in shared space and that requires active negotiation and communication. Walking in with the statement "I am feeling anxious and afraid that a gender segregated space will be unsafe and alienating, as they historically have been, for myself and other trans people. I appreciate your stated goals of making the support program inclusive. Can you describe to me what that looks like in the current planning? What steps are you taking/planning to take to implement this goal? What conversations are you facilitating to ensure that myself and other trans people are included in the planning of spaces we are eligible for from the ground up? It would feel very painful and unsafe if we were only brought in at the end of the process." will get you way farther.

I'm sorry this is happening. It sounds scary and overwhelming, and it sounds like everyone involved is feeling very triggered (understandably) right now.