A short, inexhaustive list of things I am tired of hearing

[tim]

CW: violence, homophobia, victim-blaming

• Gun control conceived as anything less than harm reduction, or anything more than harm reduction.
• Anything about mental illness from people who haven't been socially categorized as mentally ill, including but not limited to
  • "Mental illness causes violence"
  • "The minority of mentally ill people who behave violently behave violently towards anyone other than themselves"
  • "The smaller minority of mentally ill people who behave violently towards others do so because their mental illness makes them violent, rather than because it has a disinhibiting effect in people who already want to hurt others"
  • "It doesn't matter that mainstream sane society is telling everybody to hate and fear people you think are men who you think are acting like women, because mental illness"
  • "It doesn't matter that cis heteropatriarchy benefits cis hetero men and mental illness doesn't benefit mentally ill people, because it's all the crazies' fault"
  • "We all hear the messages authority figures bombard us with continuously about how queer people and feminine men are bad and shameful, but of course only a crazy person would act on those messages."
• Murderers are evil monsters, incapable of experiencing or acting on overwhelming fear and shame
• Surprise that decades' worth of queer-hating, sex-hating tyrants have managed to drive a few people to the brink.
• Failure to recognize how that the rest of us have not only survived that tyranny without hurting ourselves and each other, but also loved each other and cared for our fellow survivors.
• Anyone who kills queer people must themselves be a secretly self-hating queer person
• A queer person who kills other queer people must have decided to pick up a gun on their own, uninfluenced by decades of cis hetero people teaching them "you're lesser, your body is impure, your existence is shameful."
• Literally anything about Islam in the wake of half a century of war waged by self-identified Christians on queer and trans people.
• Blame-shifting away from the Western world and onto its immigrants, when Western Europeans invented are the biggest exporter of homophobia, gender binarism, and transmisogyny.[*]
• Feigned innocence about the direct causal relationship between rich white men's legislative violence against the most politically disempowered queer people and trans women, and desperate, disenfranchised people's gun violence against QTPOC.
• Pseudo-ally fawning about "love". Homophobes don't hate us because of who we love, they hate us because we pose a threat to domination by masculine cis men. And love isn't automatically good anyway.
• Attempts by rich white cis gays and lesbians to claim ownership of and victimhood from an attack specifically targeted at Latin@ and Black queer men and trans women.

[*] Edited 2016-06-14 -- a friend pointed out that some non-Western cultures do have a historical record of independently originated homophobia, gender binarism, and transmisogyny.

"I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two —
and see what worms are eating
at the rind."
-- Langston Hughes

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

yes.

[lindseykuper]

Damn, thanks for sharing that poem. I hadn't really thought about how the concept of "burn it all down" has a long history.