#anyway this is unproofread sorry i didn't plan to write it or really have time to do so.

[wild-at-mind]

I skipped a reblog on the last post tbh even though it was overall fine, because it did the whole 'of course there is a place for violence in our activism!' thing and I no longer endorse that, honestly. Ever since Richard Spencer got punched on camera I've watched people practically salivating for an opportunity to do the same to an acceptable target.

But so much of activism is about optics. The optics of Richard Spencer being punched on camera are extremely good, because not only did everyone know he was on record saying stuff like 'Heil Trump', he was also right in the middle of giving an interview about his shitty views, and he was putting on that calm, composed and dignified act that he was using as a way to raise respectability for his movement. (I remember Kat Blaque a few years after described it as dressing like a church boy.) The anonymous assailant punching him shattered all of that. It was unquestionably a triumph during one of the dirtiest and ugliest times for US right wing politics in recent memory. In the years after this happened, I remember seeing a number of left wing people, online and in person, who clearly were not normally comfortable with violence suddenly paying lip service to the idea, and it just felt so disingenuous. I wanted to ask them what they meant specifically- were they about to go out and start something? Or did they just mean they didn't condemn every incidence of violence in activism? (Which as I hope I have shown, is the category I fall into.) But the thing is, very few opportunities are as clear as the Richard Spencer incident. You can say punch nazis all you want, but many of them do in fact realise that going around being obviously nazi in public is an escalation, so they hide it. The man who killed UK MP Jo Cox was found to have a large amount of materials in his house from extreme right movements from across the world, and had some of the most extreme views imaginable, but he had sense enough to hide it in his day to day. If before he committed the murder you found out somehow and punched him, you'd just be seen as punching a random middle aged man.

The times there have been violence against TERFs have, I guarantee, done nothing but handed them the moral high ground plus an even bigger victim complex on a silver platter. Their entire movement revolves around being the downtrodden victims of some kind of organised trans agenda looking to victimise them. Even though I am certain they have started some physical fights and trans people reacted in self defense, trans people will always be framed as the aggressor in these encounters, and no that is not fair, but I think it is reason enough to do everything you can to avoid putting hands on a TERF if you are ever in that situation. (No matter what your gender identity is, you will be called a trans woman in any backlash also, leading to more harm for trans women specifically.) I feel like people try and hand wave this as respectibility politics, but I prefer to see it as optics. And your audience is people whose first and only idea about the issue of trans rights will be this encounter. At some point while particating in non-violent direct actions in the environmental movement, I realised random people are very eager to overstate the harm of anything you do. For example, if you block a road for any length of time, someone will find a way to say that cause a death, through some convuluted means. I've told this story before, but one time during a longer period of protest I was involved in, a friend of mine had a random woman run up to her and scream at her that a little boy had died because of the road blocking, I guess he was supposed to have been in a car and not an ambulance (NHS cuts yadda yadda) and couldn't get to the hospital in time and it was the fault of my friend specifically that he had died. This upset my friend very much. I have heard of stories like this many times, the person who died because of our road blocking, a couple of which are verifiably true stories but most which remained rumour, like this one.

Road blocking is a non-violent action, but people still find a way to twist it into a violence you personally have done if you participate. The only way to make some people happy is if you never do anything that might inconvenience someone in any way in the course of your activism. But it's not hopeless, because there is a massive freedom to realisiing this. After I saw my friend accused of murdering a little boy because she maybe sat on a road with some other people, I lost interest in any idea of deliberately violent activism. I do not believe that violence is never justified, but I do think that when you try and use it as an activism tool, it's like lighting a fire. You can control it up to a certain point, but then you can't, and it escalates. People talk a lot about rioting on here as if riots are a special advanced kind of protest, but they are not things people plan. They happen because of tensions coming to a head, and once the riot starts, you no longer have control of what it does. Property damage is not inherently violent but it works best when strongly targetted, and during a riot there is bound to be a tonne of collaterel damage done to the everyday lives of people who live in the area. And even though rioting can lead to changes for the better, this is not a situation you can manifacture in a lab, just go out and do one day. And when you see that quote the rioting is the language of the unheard, remember that applies to the right wing as well. The people rioting against immigration in Dublin I'm sure felt unheard.

I hope this not particularly thought out post made sense.