#i could literally imagine nothing more viscerally unpleasant here

[normalbrothers]

ilu all but if i have to listen to alfie talk for more than five minutes in the movie i'm going to kill myself

[neon-junkie]

Hey everyone,

This will be my final post addressing the fandom conflict that has quite frankly gotten out of hand. Although it’s very likely this post will be picked apart, no matter how well intended it is, I will no longer be addressing, interacting, or responding to any further accusations made against me. Of course, if people have questions from a genuine place of interest, I will be happy to clarify anything for you, either via DM’s or non-anon asks. I will not be answering anonymous asks on this, as I do not want anything else posted on this topic. 

As a side note: For anyone tempted to wade into the debate, I sincerely ask you not to get involved. Do not make yourself a target, do not feel you need to ‘pick a side’, and please do not think you have an obligation to reason with either side. It seems to be well past the point of that, so please find people you get along with in this fandom and curate a space for yourself away from all this conflict.

Warning: This post will contain uncensored slurs, mentions of racism, paedophilia, transphobia, LGBTQ+ phobia, death threats, threats of violence, targeted harassment, and abusive language.

To start off, I want to apologise to everyone who has somehow gotten drawn into this mess by either defending me, following me, or interacting with my content. This whole situation with me began well over a year ago when I wrote a crack-smut fic featuring Javier/Micah, posted back in August 2019. A crack fic is defined as “a work of fan fiction that is absurd, surprising or ridiculous, often intentionally.” It was inspired by a camp interaction between Micah and Javier, and like many other fanfiction writers, I decided to write smut about it. The fic was titled ‘Dirty Fucking Greaser’, and if that shocks you, I’m sure you can imagine how shocked I was to be informed afterwards that ‘Greaser’ was in fact a very serious 19th century slur for a Mexican individual. My first encounter with this word as insult was via RDR2, where it was used like a very casual insult. My only prior knowledge of this term was in regards to the greasers youth subculture, so the severity was lost on me. This obviously does not excuse my ignorance, and I should have researched the term better, but this is just again to apologize for that oversight, the insensitivity, and to highlight that my use of this term was not meant maliciously. Following this being pointed out, I proceeded to make 3 separate apology posts [Unfortunately I can only find the third one: HERE], renamed the fic, and added slur warnings in both the tags and the fic description. When I continued to receive complaints and increasingly aggressive abuse (which included being told my apologies weren’t good enough and I should delete my account and even kill myself), I attempted to delete the fic and mistakenly abandoned it instead. I contacted AO3 to see if it could be removed, but they said there was nothing they could do. I contacted their DMCA takedown team, who also said they couldn't remove it. Please note that all this happened 7-8 months ago, and has been dragged on for almost a year. 

So, from this one unfortunate incident, I’ve been branded a racist, and someone who attacks POC, when all I have done is tried to defend myself and correct my past mistakes. I could have done this more gracefully in the past, but frankly when you’re suddenly the target of unrelenting callout posts and nasty anons, it’s very hard to be open to criticism of this sort, but this is what I’m trying to move past.

Over the course of the year, this one mistake has spiralled, and the crusade against me has somehow coincided with moral conflicts over certain characters and ships. This has devolved into dehumanizing abuse, witch hunts, death threats, doxxing, anon hate, and much more unpleasant behaviour.

I have been in fandom for a very long time, and at the heart of all fandom circles is the fear of censorship and subsequent purges, so the ‘ship and let ship’ mentality was more or less the pinnacle of fandom philosophy. And yes, this can be problematic in some contexts. People have their right to be uncomfortable with content, have a right to be offended by content, but that is not content meant for you. This argument has devolved into ‘what material is morally right to engage with’ and that is a mentality in which fandom will not survive, because for every person who is telling me I’m an awful person for writing about Micah, there are three other people telling me how much they appreciate me making that content. For every fic in which I characterize Javier and Flaco a certain way, some people are made uncomfortable by it and others tell me they enjoy it. And this isn’t just white people, but POC too, which makes it very difficult to know whether I am genuinely in the right or the wrong, especially when it comes to the concept of ‘fetishization’ which I have been made aware I need to educate myself on. I intend to do so, but I disagree with the common accusation that finding non-white men romantically and sexually attractive is inherently fetishistic and makes me racist. It’s pushing a catch-22; don’t find POC sexually attractive? Racist. Find POC sexually attractive? Racist.

I am always willing to be (politely) approached about anything my readers may be concerned about, but if it’s something I’ve specifically tagged for (such as themes, scenarios, etc.) I’m afraid you consented to reading it and with that I cannot help you. You are just as responsible for curating your space and what you see/read just as much as I am responsible for tagging it appropriately.  

On the topic of racism, I want to bring up my prior use of ‘white racism’ which has obviously been a point of contention among both white and people of colour. The (literal) black vs white concept of racism is incredibly American-centric, and as someone from Europe, which has a history of oppression against white cultures and those of people of colour, it feels inaccurate. However, this has recently been discussed with me and I came to the realization that while growing up, especially in the UK, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘racism’ were marketed as one and the same. So, with this little revelation in mind, I will no longer be using ‘white racism’ (Or ‘reverse racism’) to identify the abuse I have been receiving, but will instead call it by what it really is; dehumanizing, debasing, xenophobic, puritanical.   

Very briefly, I will also touch on the NewAustin situation, which has also been dredged into this. I did not ‘chase a POC from tumblr’. NA was a minor who for some reason was on my 18+ blog and took issue with me, likely from the ongoing discourse regarding my fic and initial mistake, as well as my interest in Micah. They were subsequently harassed into deleting their account by anonymous hate following various conflicts with other users for their support of me or their ships in general. I have never encouraged my followers to target anyone, and have always asked to be blocked and blacklisted by those who do not like me or my content. When NewAustin messaged me following the deletion of their blog, I was admittedly indifferent to the point of being unkind, and accused them of sending the hate themselves. This was based on the anon hate being racially-driven without there being any prior knowledge or publication that NA was a person of colour. This aside, I should have at the time, whether I believed it was my followers or not, condemned this behaviour. Regardless of the issues I’ve had with these people, it is never ever ok to send hate to anyone, no matter the motivation behind it, and that should have been stated at the time.

All I can do at this point is acknowledged and apologize for my past mistakes, and try to improve myself going forward.  

It is not my place to dictate the morals of the character/ship-aspect of this argument, and I am not interested in waging a war of opinion. This post is simply to clarify how I am involved in this, and why I am so viscerally targeted. You can draw your own conclusions, but I am no longer interested in this endless back and forth.

To my mutuals/followers, I stand by my request to not interact and to block and move on, as this is what I’ll be doing too.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope it makes things from my perspective a little clearer.

-RAT <3

EDIT: Just after this post was made, the fic in question was finally removed. I had to go through a DMCA take down, which can take months, since I originally abandoned the fic, thinking that meant delete. I explain this in more detail above. Said fic is gone, and has been gone since this post has been around.

[riverforasong]

The Naked News

So, When I answered a bunch of questions about nudism on tumbr the other day, a lt of people seemed interested in the whole rundown of events, So I wrote the whole story down for anyone who wants to read it, Any questions or concerns, lay ‘em on me.

Being naked has this weird stigma on it. Like it's uncouth, unnatural, shameful, and should be saved for only a very very small percent of times. Basically bathing, and sex, and you can't talk about either of them, because somebody deemed it makes other people uncomfortable. But because we never talk about it, but stigma grows deeper, and it makes being naked seem more and more unnatural when in fact is about as natural a thing as humanly possible. This is something I never understood, even as a young child before I knew what a nudist was I could never really grasp the fact that people hated the naked body. I was always the naked kid, I can never keep my clothes on no matter where I was, banks, restaurants, school, wherever. I was told I would grow out of it, and, "See the error of my ways." That's real, that's a real thing that was said to me. Well I'm here to tell you I'm almost 30, and I haven't really grown out of anything. This does not usually go over well. See my parents have a thing about looking like bad parents. If I did anything that reflected poorly on them, maybe be too loud in public, not clean up right away, not look a certain way, stuff like that, I was meant with... Why don't we call it resistance? Let me explain, see when I was a kid my parents were very liberal with certain things. I never really had a curfew, I could drink, I could party, I could do a whole lot of stuff because my parents trusted me. But they had very conservative views about a very small number of things. One of them, was nudity. Now I don't mean galavanting around the town in nothing but shoes and a smile, But if I was without a shirt for longer than a couple of seconds I was accosted. My bedroom and the bathroom was literally three steps away from one another, but if I went from the shower to my room in just a towel, I would never hear the end of it. This was their hard line, this was the thou shalt not pass of their parental guidance. I never really understood why. Now I was always a good kid, I did okay in school, I almost never got detention, I had friends, I didn't do drugs, I didn't drink, I didn't get somebody pregnant when I was 15. I followed every single one of my parents restrictions, except one. I hated wearing clothes. I was always more comfortable without them, I found them restricting and unpleasant. Like an almost made it difficult to concentrate, I feel like it also kind of makes my anxiety go up sometimes, but I don't think science is substantiated that yet. So I would come home from school, throw my bag back to the side, grab a snack from the fridge, head to my room and immediately get naked. This is how I came down from the day, and we kind of forget about it now, but school was stressful yo. We all needed this chance to relax and unwind for a bit. This was mine. It didn't hurt nobody, I wasn't doing anything wrong or illegal, I was just trying to get my mind back together. However there was always this Halo of shame hanging over it. I have been taught, and I had learned for however many years it had been, that this was wrong. What I was doing was bad and I should feel ashamed about it. It taught me on a subconscious level that this is something that makes me feel good, and I should feel bad about that. I never knew why my parents were so aggro about this particular thing, and wasn't until I started going to therapy that I realized what it was. My parents took anything and everything that made them look like they weren't the world's best parents as a personal slight against them. To them, anything but being fully dressed at all times was seen as a bad parenting decision from them. I made them look bad, and that was my fault. So I would get punished for it. Not in any real tangible way, I wasn't grounded or I wasn't disciplined in any way, But I was constantly treated with derision and from my dad's side passive aggression. That was their big go-to. This was a confusing time for me, because I knew being naked help me, and it was a positive thing overall, but I just couldn't get over the shame I felt from it. You can imagine what this did to my body confidence and image. I'd always been an overweight kid, this wasn't a surprise and I had learned to deal with it, usually through being naked. I grew to maybe not love my body, but accept it for what it was and all of its idiosyncrasies. I knew that nudity was the thing that helped me, I tried to bring this up to my parents once, under the guise of the show we were watching. A biography on the comedian Jack Black, now fun fact Jack Black's parents were nudists as well, and I thought this was an interesting way to lean into the conversation. I said how I thought it was a cool way to live, and how it helps people feel good about who they are and about how they look. My mom replied, disgustedly, with "Don't these people have any shame! How do they live like that? Nobody wants to see fat people naked." And there it was, they didn't know they had admitted it to me, but they had. It clicked into my brain, my parents wanted me covered up at all times, because they were ashamed of how I looked. Then a lot of memories kept flooding in. My mom always bought clothes that were a little bit too big for me. If I wore a large, she bought an extra large. She always said it was for comfort, so I wouldn't feel constricted in tight clothing, but I realize now that I think she was just doing it so it would hide me a little bit more. My parents, unknowingly told me that I should feel ashamed for looking how I do, and being okay with that and showing it to anybody, ANYBODY, was the worst mistake I could make. And boy, have you ever been in the shame spiral? Cuz this kind of parenting will send you in one real quick. The one thing that helped me, was immediately shattered. I became very insular, I didn't know how to react anymore. I hated the fact that I was a nudist, I hated that it brought me comfort, enjoy, and ease my anxiety. I wanted to be just like everybody else, I wanted to be repulsed at the sign of a human body, I wanted to be modest and feel like I'm everybody else felt. Most importantly I wanted to feel like I belonged, I didn't want to feel like a disappointment, I wanted to feel like I had people on my side, and to do that I had to throw away the thing that helped me the most. I had never felt so alone in a room full of people before. This was seen as my one big secret. like a drug addiction or alcoholism I had to hide. I could never tell anybody about it, and if I ever did I would have such a visceral physical reaction, I would shake, I would panic, my heart rate would go through the roof, and I would wait for the shame to hit once again. This feeling lasted for years. Years and years. It still lasts to this day, if I'm to be perfectly honest. I've taken to trying to speak on it more, and more positively to shake myself from that. Answering questions that people invariably have used to terrify me, because I always thought it was a sort of laughing at me not with me sort of an idea. But now I realize, That more often than not people are just curious. I'm still trying to work through everything that was built up in me. when you find out that you've lived through an abusive childhood a lot of your perceptions get shifted massively, especially when the one thing you used to cope that you thought was a positive step was for so long a point of derision. It's hard, it's really hard. Especially in the time of coronavirus when anxiety is at an all-time high, and here I am making my anxiety worse on purpose so I can break through it. So I wrote this down, so I could force myself to put it out into public, and to answer the questions a lot of people seem to have. I need to do this, so I can prove to myself that the shame that I lived with for so long was just a manifestation of my parents, and not how reality actually is. So the biggest question I get on a day-to-day basis, is how did it start. The answer that is kind of a simple and unfortunate one, which is that I don't really know. I had never been a type of guy to wear clothes that often anyway, and it just turned out it had a name attached to it. So really I had always been the naked type, and I just slid Secondly is what exactly does a nudist do? Well pretty much the same thing everybody else does, just naked. I cook, I clean, I watch TV, I write, I just played through control on the Xbox, right now I'm working through Batman the telltale series. There's no real activity that separates nudists from textiles, it's just a lack of clothing that does it. There are specifically nude beaches, resorts, and camps that people can go to, but it really is just like every other resort camp or beach you've ever been to. Is it ever awkward? Not after a while, I imagine people's first times can be kind of unsettling because they have to break that barrier that they've been told not to break their entire life, but once you get through it it's really easy, and you kind of forget you're naked. Actually a bit of a fun story, the first time I went to a nudist gathering, it was the naked bike ride in Portland, I had never been to something like this before so I didn't know what to expect. My wife and I got there, and you saw everybody in various states of clothing, body paint, hairdos, and nobody was really paying attention to any of it. Nobody cared what you wore, or what you look like, we were all just hanging out and having fun. In fact the longer we stayed clothed, the more awkward we felt. It was a weird reverse of everyday life. What do your friends think? Well if It's ever bothered any of them they've never told me, nudism's all about being comfortable, and that's for us and them. So if it ever made them uncomfortable, or awkward, you stop and get dressed. What about being nude with the opposite sex I'm here to tell you right now, there's nothing less sexy than a nudist gathering. Not because of how anybody looks, but because there is no charge in the atmosphere at all. Nobody's here to get laid, we're all just here to hang out and have fun. It's not awkward unless you make it awkward, and nine times out of 10 everybody's cool with it. We as a society have to learn to separate nudity from sex. Yes they're kind of intertwined in a certain way, But it's not a necessity. Basically, ain't nobody looking. In fact, sitting naked with a group of friends all of whom you're comfortable enough with, and you've been together forever, it's one of the best ways to bond Think of all the stuff you've been through with your friends, if seeing each other naked is going to ruin things, maybe you're not as good as friends as you thought.

What about kids?

This is another thing I get quite a bit, can children be nudists. I often hear parents say they don't want their children parading around naked, because it might attract unwanted people. The only question I have for that is why are you sexualizing your own children? I can always speak for myself when I say how important it is for children to have a good image of their own body, and if we tell them from a young age That who they are at the very core is shameful, it's going to mess them up for a long long time. Nudity important for children So they can learn that who they are is not inherently shameful. That's how we'll eventually raise our kids, so they know that they have nothing to feel bad about, I don't want them to go through the thing I had to go through, because they deserve better than that. So that's being nudist in a nutshell, it's taking me a really long time to get to a point where I can talk about it without feeling like I'm about to have the righteous fury of God to send upon me and destroy all that I hold dear. hopefully this has been educational, and a little bit interesting for those of you who wanted to learn about it a little bit. if you got any more questions, concerns, or interesting facts nobody else cares about I suppose you can throw it in the ask box. My therapist told me the more I talk about it, the better it'll be in the long run. It's been a really difficult journey to get to where I'm at, and I want to thank the people who helped me through it for helping me through it. It's so hard to basically knock your house down, and start from the foundation again.But hopefully this time, with  little luck and a lot of work, I can build it up better.

[argotmagazine-blog]

Hysto

I had my reproductive organs voluntarily removed at twenty-two years-old. I’d like to imagine they’re pickled and floating in a jar waiting to be dissected. This is not the first time the distance between myself and my body has become literal; my perfectly healthy flesh and blood are my own worst enemy. My body is company I can only hold at this distance, like a prism against the ceiling light, a spectrum full of indecipherable color. A piece of me, somewhere, is gone.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about what it means for a transgender person to have surgery. I had to refuse any and all food and liquid, a seemingly impossible task for raging coffee-addict. I gingerly walked up the women’s and infant’s clinic front-desk alone, and told them that I was indeed, the patient being operated on this afternoon. To any passing stranger, I was a young man asking about his partner, wife, child. The reality was I stumbled over my words, with sweat on my forehead as the clerk found my name and said I needed to sign paperwork.

“Are you the patient?” the clerk asked me. I don’t recall anything unique about her. She looked me over with the type of familiarity she might give an unpleasant co-worker’s child.

I say yes. At this point, there’s no going back.

Cue me being asked to follow the dotted yellow lines into a room where I’m met with a dark hallway—not unlike the one from Barton Fink. It was surreal and slightly off-putting, like a dim forgotten corner of a movie set. I walked into the office to sign the consent forms and am asked to follow more yellow dotted lines to another department. In a matter of hours, I would be put to a sleep and operated on, as if none of this preamble ever happened.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the yellow-brick road Judy Garland and her dog dutifully traveled on to see the wizard, a mystical hermit in his emerald towers. The Wizard of Oz was an obsession in my single-parent household. The stripes on the floor are intended to guide patients and their families, but I went through this all alone, feeling like Dorothy after her house crashed on top of a poor witch. I want to apologize for intruding, for bringing this body into a women’s space, but because of my sex this is where the surgery must take place. It’s frustrating introducing myself; I’m ready as I’ll ever be for the procedure.

When a trans body enters a hospital, it’s as easy as being sucked up into a tornado. It’s swept away from a sepia-hued world into a hyper-visible, technicolor land of prying eyes and confused stares. It’s enough to give anyone cold feet. But there are medical fees for that. There are dollar signs flying like winged-monkeys everywhere. Legal paperwork saying I’m someone else might as well be a house dropping down on my head. That it clearly says they have the wrong patient.

But I had a letter saying I was supposed to be here, for this, I emphasized to the clerk, being as vague as possible. The surgery. I’m piss-broke and have just signed away a significant amount of money to pay for a surgery I would never be able to afford without my Ivy League college insurance.

Nice people get what they want and I wanted to have my organs removed to become a better, more whole person because of it. I was determined to find my ruby slippers, slap them together, and walk out to attend class next week like nothing happened. In retrospect, this is the apex of the overachiever mentality: going in for major surgery on Friday and talking about Foucault the following Monday.

I was used to trying to appeal to others for respect, so I smiled and nodded with every well- intentioned “miss” and “m’am” knowing all too well that the clinical description of “gender identity disorder” was stamped on every page of my paperwork. This was the nature of the beast, and I was lost in this Oz world, stumbling my way along, doing my best not to make myself too noticeable. All I wanted was to go home, metaphorically, into a body I could better recognize myself in. I had a big house crash in on my life and it was the body I lived in.

The DSM-5 now calls “gender identity disorder” “gender dysphoria disorder,” which supposedly lessens the stigma attached to transgender people. But bodies are messy and on principal, they’re subject to change regardless of how we choose to talk about them. This is inherently a problem with language and how culture violently twists and depicts trans bodies. I’m not here to entertain baseless arguments about people wanting to cut off limbs because they “think they should be an amputee.” Here was the brick wall in my transition: squishy organs, ripe for the picking.

Fixating on what people ought to do to their body isn’t new or exciting. I’m interested in the visceral messiness of the experience, the bureaucratic ritualism that preludes any endeavor to present ourselves to medical institutions. The mechanical process of sex-related surgery isn’t exciting. I doubt those other than the morbidly curious and skeptical would find the technicalities illuminating. It’s boring being a transgender person going under the knife. Waiting for surgery is like watching grass grow—nothing ever happens. It’s miles upon miles of dotted lines, signatures, and the sound of your own urine splashing against a measurement cup minutes before you’re on the gurney.

I spent my recovery watching gross, schlocky movies. It’s comforting losing myself in the screen, doing my best to get into another person’s head. It’s a good enough distraction from picturing the sinews of my abdomen healing together, my pelvic muscles recoiling after being sliced open for the surgery to take place. My gruesome tendencies go wild—I want to imagine all sorts of morbid transformations taking place where my uterus once was. I pictured it like the scene in The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum realizes he’s growing tiny insectoid feelers on his forearms. This scene is not unlike my own discoveries of individual chin hairs after years of injecting testosterone.

Compared to most transgender men, I’m about as masculine as a naked mole-rat. My body will now require synthetic hormones to be injected on a weekly basis in order to maintain itself. This is something I of course discussed at lengths for months with my doctor. There’s no problem here—I became obsessed with my own boredom waiting for my body to heal. I felt abnormally well.

I fantasized about a creature inside of me ready to burst out like an Alien parasite, announcing that I’m here, finally in this new home I call my meat and flesh. But no abomination will come tearing me open from the inside-out. Only my own ennui ready to swallow itself whole like Ouroboros.

The monster analogies are easy—Frankenstein, Chimera, test-tube creatures. Walking through the world with this body is the equivalent of hiding the fact you are, partially, the product of someone else’s handiwork. This is how I’ve come to terms with own sense of monstrosity, the jagged edges of my body that don’t quite all fit together.

Scholar Susan Stryker describes the trans body in her essay/performance piece My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix:

“The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”

The trans body is both the site of medical and technological impact, crashing into each other violently to make beautiful results. The Frankenstein-qualities of a body that will need hormones to survive is admirable to me—it’s a powerful announcement of my own autonomy, the desire to live in a world constantly trying to kill me. I cut ties with the old biological demands of my old body for a new one, tailored to fit, in a form from “flesh torn apart.” This cycle began when I had chest reconstruction surgery and my hysterectomy is another symbolic middle-finger to the world. I have the agency to sew this body back together, transform it an optimized, beautiful living being.

When I inject my weekly hormones, I feel euphoria. I feel my body re-organize itself when I complete a dose. It’s an all-consuming experience that demands a concentrated up-keep of syringes, doses, needles, and gauges. To reject what I was given, I reach out for the tools at hand, become my own cyborg, someone who builds out of what’s despised.

From Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado:

“I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is post-pornographic, add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgender identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; I do it to avenge your death.”

Letting myself be used, medically, is an act of freedom. In his introduction to Testo Junkie, Preciado announces an “low-tech transgender identity” in conversation with the death of those he knows and loves. The consequences of dying, either on or off the surgery table, are all the same: the muscles give out and the body finally rests. Preciado and Stryker speak on the dissociation and pain of the trans body better than I ever could—the body isn’t one object, but a collection of “Frankenstein-qualities” and “dildos, texts, and moving images.” It’s an amalgamation of lost pieces sewn back together to make a façade that lasts just long enough, a shelter that endures just enough rough weather to survive. It’s a house, albeit one that crashed from the sky long ago.

Strewn on my bed, with my flesh bending itself back into shape, I couldn’t help but return to the image of bloodied meat. The recovery process is blinding, painful, and full of medication. My mind wandered to Elvira Weishaupt’s monologue in the climatic slaughterhouse scene of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons, in which a transgender woman recounts her childhood nostalgia with a friend. The scene is brutal, with vivid, long shots of cows being partially decapitated, their bloody flesh bare as Elvira speaks. Elvira is abused and traumatized by the men in her life after genital confirmation surgery, after which she commits suicide. The film, released in 1978—only one year before Janice Raymond published her hateful The Transexual Empire—explicitly associates the transformation of Elvira’s body with the carnage and violence that comes with production-line slaughterhouses. The transgender body is a site of mutilation and damage—surgeries only leave emotional and physical gashes that cannot heal, according to Fassbinder. The sentiment of the film is not empowering nor approving of transgender people’s autonomy in determining their own biology. It’s a moment of disgust and the re-opening of traumatic wounds by recollecting memories of a past body, one that the speaker cannot cling on to anymore.

The body is easily destroyed. It is also easily rebuilt, as sinews and connecting tissue regrow, the body regenerates itself, waking up again after being dormant. It’s amazingly resilient. A new flesh can spawn from the shrivel and bloodied remains of the last occupant—the meat of the body isn’t a dying thing. It grows and becomes—my scars now are just that now, only scars.

I still don’t know what the proper response is when people ask about the surgery.

It’s just a pinch, I want to tell them. A snap of the wrists. A crack of the skull.

A bullet to the heart. A fist to the eye.

That word, transsexual, hanging heavy and wet on a company’s tongue, because you had the dollar to your name and the will to live. Sticks and stones.

My body is vetting itself down the yellow brick road, hitting all the speed bumps along the way. It’s as good as broken. I like it this way.

Blake Planty loves crawling the web at the witching hour. He has fiction and essays published and forthcoming in Nat Brut, DREGINALD, Heavy Feather Review, Waxwing, The Fanzine, Tenderness Lit, and more. Find him talking about cyborgs and coffee at @_dispossessed on Twitter and online at catboy.club.

[wowsuchjake]

Y'all. This weekend, there were white supremacists marching in the streets—Nazis, KKK, neo-Confederates, the whole lot. This is horrific and wrong, but it's far from new. These people, white supremacists, have been in America literally since the beginning—in fact, they *were* the beginning. The difference is that we had made some progress—not so much toward fixing the actual problem, but at least towards people realizing that they would face consequences for expressing their disgusting bigotry too openly. They still expressed it, of course, just not in Polite Society™. They banded together, always hiding behind masks, whether those were white hoods or white egg avatars. They carried fire as a threat, literal torches and burning crosses, and the figurative flames of online hate speech. They brandished the means to control and, if they felt like it, to destroy the bodies of those they hated. Not only nooses and sticks and guns, but rules and laws, and the very right to vote for the people who crafted them, an entire system that could selectively enforce its rules and adjust the severity of its penalties, or overlook them entirely, depending on what was necessary to protect its hierarchies.

We had ostensibly made progress, but we had not fixed the underlying problems on which our society—which still defines whiteness as normalcy, as purity, as correctness—was built. That progress made it taboo to speak those prejudices publicly, but did little else to address the ways in which taboo talk became accepted practice. The only consequences for being a bigot, a Nazi, a Klansman, or anyone else just one or two steps removed from actual genocide were that they couldn't talk about it at the dinner table—as in, they couldn't have *conversations* about it. We built a society where we just ignored what our racist uncle or whoever said at Thanksgiving (or apropos of nothing on a Tuesday, or whenever) because it made us uncomfortable, and because everybody knew it was wrong anyway, right? Why ruin such a lovely gathering with that kind of unpleasant confrontation?

But that so-called progress is now gone, undone in part by a president who campaigned on this kind of rhetoric (then had the audacity to say "let's all come together now" when he was elected, as though that could somehow undo everything that he had set in motion). A president who then appointed white supremacists and Nazi supporters to his senior staff. A president who daily takes to Twitter to criticize and threaten not only his political foes, but even his supposed allies if he perceives "disloyalty" from them—yet one who suddenly had nothing to say there when actual Nazis and Confederates (two ideological groups America has literally fought wars against) marched in the streets of America chanting slogans like "white lives matter" and "Jew will not replace us." And now, a president who, when asked point-blank to condemn actual Nazis who actually murdered somebody at their actual Nazi rally, refused to do so, but gave a statement that avoided directly mentioning them and instead talked about violence "on many sides"—essentially the equivalent of looking at World War II and everything leading up to it and saying "well, yes, these Nazis are a bit unorthodox, but they've got a right to express their beliefs, too, so let's not be too hasty here." A president who, through all of these actions and inactions, has encouraged these people not only to march with Nazi and Confederate flags, but, unlike the idea of white supremacists we are accustomed to, to do so *unmasked*.

But again, here's the thing: None of this is new. Yet we—white people in particular—are acting like all of these people just materialized out of nowhere, bought up all the tiki torches at Walmart and Home Depot, and started marching in the streets, just like we acted surprised last November when we couldn't imagine Donald Trump actually being elected. Yes, he lost the popular vote, but he still amassed nearly 63 million votes—if these people are so fringe, so utterly Other, where did all those votes come from? These people have been here since the beginning. They *were* the beginning. And we have let them persist because we *know* them—they're our classmates and coworkers, our relatives, our friends, and outside of those things we don't talk about, we know them to be "good people." (This is, not at all coincidentally, also the exact description given of the perpetrators of a lot of mass shootings: "I never knew he was capable of something like this—he was such a good guy.") We don't stop them because it makes us uncomfortable, because we don't want to throw away a relationship over a difference of opinion—except being a couple steps removed from genocide is not a "difference of opinion." We would rather say nothing than disrupt the status quo, because we are more concerned with protecting our own comfort—something immediate and visceral—than with the nebulous idea of the large-scale suffering of people we have never met, and which doesn't directly affect us. We don't stop them because, whether or not we are consciously aware of it, we benefit from this system, and we are afraid of losing its protection in dismantling it. We may not all be Those People, but 63 million of us heard one of them campaigning on that exact rhetoric and were willing to look the other way because we thought he cared about *our* needs, and most of the rest of us had been too quiet about it for too long to prevent all of this from happening. This is on all of us—yes, the president said "go," but we should have said "stop" a long time ago. And just as it always has, just as it did the last time we fought actual Nazis, it has taken the fight finally landing on our doorstep, on streets we think of as ours, for us to decide to step in.

White people, we need to get our shit together. If we are outraged by Nazis in the streets, but not by the people close to us who express the same bigotry without all the regalia, we are part of the problem. If we are outraged by Nazis in the streets, but cannot find a way to translate our anger into meaningful action, we are part of the problem. We may not have personally built this system, but we are all complicit in it. We are part of the problem. If we want to be part of the solution, then we need to stand up to the hatred and bigotry we see in those closest to us, in ourselves, not just that which we see in anonymous strangers on the other side of the country. We need to educate ourselves on the movements we are joining, because they've existed long before this weekend, even if they are new to us, and because it is not the job of people of color to educate us—they literally bear all the burden here already—and then we need to educate others. It's going to be hard. We are going to make mistakes. We need to understand that our allyship does not exempt us from criticism or wholly erase our complicity in this system. It is our job to humbly take ownership of our mistakes when we are called out, correct them, and learn from them, to do our best to avoid repeating them. None of us can fix this on our own; it is going to take the consistent actions—small and large—of all of us together.