I'm gonna try to find other places my favorite people here are, that are not X or Tumblr. I'm gonna try to retain my contacts here. But I'm leaving again. I don't feel a need to get myself banned to make some point, and it looks like that's easy to do for now. He wants us off this site? Fine, I'll go. There's better places to be anyway.
But before I go.
I apologize in advance to any Christians who feel unfairly hurt by what I'm about to say, but: I don't hate Christianity, but I hate being unable to escape it anywhere I go. In the same way that a Christian atheist may still have a rabid hatred of Muslims, I find Christian and ex-Christian trans women still want our suffering to be holy, to be martyrs. Mostly they don't go running into the mouth of hell to suffer, if nothing else because that'd hurt and most of them aren't that devoted to this mindset; and some of us fly too close to the sun not out of masochistic death cultism but out of just being at heart a bunch of pains in the ass, so I ain't talking about that either. I'm talking about needing to be seen as suffering, as more suffering than others, as a kind of social oneupsmanship. And it's not better to do so in some kind of communion or solidarity or whatever, it's still ridiculous no matter how you do it.
We should be learning about the means of each other's oppressions, to better understand our own, not turning it into a fucking pissing contest.
And I cannot escape these mindsets. I see these baffling crab-bucket behaviors in these shitty online spaces that I almost never see in real life, with real world groups and people, because... iunno, maybe because I live in the PNW and a lot of folks didn't grow up being told that suffering is the highest form of virtue and therefore that if you are not suffering enough then you are not virtuous enough, and since real suffering sucks, it's best to just make people accept that the level of suffering you're going through, which is bad, is superior and unique and untouchably awful.
My friend Michael says it's also kind of a white thing. By creating a hierarchy of who is most oppressed and placing yourself on top, you can make yourself feel immune to criticism, and apparently this is just something a lot of white folks feel they need. Myself, iunno, I'm white too, I hope I don't do that, but I suspect my particular brand of OCD means my anxieties in that regard can't be alleviated without significant therapy and medication, which is not better but it does seem to make me a little less likely to try to put myself on top of hierarchies out of sheer terror of myself.
I seriously cannot escape this shit. I dunno how much I've got to go dismantling my own bullshit, but at least I wasn't raised Christian. It must be so exhausting. If you see me posting something positive that's happening, believe me, it's not intended as toxic positivity. It's intended as a radical statement that a better world is possible. It's radically asserting that life is not pain, and that our pain has causes that can be dealt with. And I dearly do hope it pisses someone off to see someone living their best life in spite of the horrors. A car outside our homeless shelter says, "Birds sing after the storm, so shall we," along with countless Christian statements scrawled all over it, and I am not waiting for some storm to pass. It won't pass in my lifetime. I'm singing now. And some of those songs are happy, and some of those songs are angry, and some are both.
If all you want is the aesthetics of suffering or the aesthetics of social justice, fuck off. I don't need more Christendom. I'm trapped in this place, and I am so fucking tired of it. I feel like Shrek yelling at Donkey, "can you please stop being yourself for five minutes!"
