novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr this is why for all my faults I cannot bring myself to be anything but as sincere is I can be online, unless dealing with extremely overt ans obvious fash. Because every time I think to myself "I'd be more emotionally safe if I was just detached and sarcastic", I look into that headspace and see where that goes.
(This is why I don't follow Nina, too, it's so grating)
Skuppr
I'm gonna regret this post I reckon.
I wanna talk about an aspect of white trans girl culture that I often see being the source of conflict and racism on here. You only really see it online and (rarely) in meatspace with trans girls who don't get out much. For the sake of argument i'm going to name it Fortress Cruelty.
I think there is a cadre of white trans girls whose idea of being cool and funny (or even just how they do rhetoric fullstop) is this kind of... aloof, contemptuous, sneering, detached, insincere, arrogant (here used to mean, won't concede ignorance or fault) spitefulness. And like tbh though I personally find that insufferable and an indicator that someone is really lonely and awkward and anxious, I def was like that when I first came out and through a lot of my twenties, and when i'm not doing well there are contexts where I slip back into it as a defense mechanism because it's a very... emotionally safe fortress from which to engage with the world. It's absolute poison for your relationships and I think kinda feeds into cultish/cult of personality stuff because it attracts people who like cruelty, watching people get torn down and creates high control scenarios, but I do get the urge and yeah, being soft as a tran in this world is a great way to get hurt constantly so yes ok sometimes one might retreat into that fortress and most of the time it's not like, morally wrong even if it's pretty toxic and annoying for anyone who's been outside more than a few times (and lbr a lot of trans women don't have the luxury of going outside esp now).
If I was to look deeper I don't really think this is often anything to do with being transfem at all, I know this is pretty standard behaviour for both people with certain early childhood traumas and also for bad faith trolls of all stripes, and in some ways it's also a kind of never-been-to-a-drag-show (please young trans women, go to some drag shows, rupaul's drag race DOES NOT COUNT) funhouse mirror imitation of drag queen culture, and I respect the effort to connect with our culture in that way even if it's faltering and misses the point (drag will always be part of our culture. again, please go to some drag shows AND STOP WATCHING RPDR).
HERE'S THE THING THOUGH
Not being a techtran (at least not in the same way as the ones on here; I work with engines and power tools more than computers) and therefore being late in the game to fedi, i've been trying to catch up on the various conflicts around racism and transmisogyny that led to the present one... And Fortress Cruelty keeps coming up as the catalyst for that conflict! I could practically write a script, and in fact I think I will!
Step one: a white trans girl (let's call her alice) is making meanspirited posts about stuff because Fortress Cruelty
Step two: one of the posts alice makes is a Fortress Cruelty post about something to do with race, racism, Black people (intentional or not, this in itself is racist)
Step three: someone gives alice the context that her post is dismissive/disrespectful/reductive/dehumanising/degrading/demeaning of [an issue related to] People of Colour. Either as a call in or call out or it just comes up as further info in dialog with someone.
Step four: instead of being like oh my bad I didn't know that i'll look into it (which most of the time would be the end of it), Alice doubles down on the Fortress Cruelty and says more shit from a position of confident complacency, and/or goes on a subtooting rant about people strawmanning her or tells people upset to kill themselves or whatever, because admitting fault or ignorance is not on the table when you are in the Fortress.
Step five: people are obviously now pissed because alice is being all kinds of racist and using basically every accountability evasion rhetorical trick in the book to avoid engaging with that, BECAUSE ADMITTING FAULT OR IGNORANCE IS NOT ON THE TABLE WHEN YOU ARE IN THE FORTRESS. A mealy mouthed nonpology given out of one side of her face while she keeps talking shit is on the table, so long as it doesn't necessitate meaningful admission of fault or ignorance.
Step six: the earlier steps can pretty much repeat indefinitely, if a nonpology was given that will be pointed to as evidence anyone still pissed at her is acting in bad faith and probably is a transmisogynist (and lbr at this point the white tma jackals will have shown up to bait the angry tranny, so some of her critics ABSOLUTELY will be acting in bad faith), examples of hypocritical moderation/critique double standards will be brought up, etc etc.
Step seven: any trans women who are also living in Fortresses of Cruelty will start making aloof overconfident insincere mocking/degrading armchair observer posts about what's going on, sometimes backing up Alice sometimes just mocking/degrading the very fact anyone is having conflict (this is both racist AND pick-me behaviour imo). If Alice's Fortress Cruelty has attracted her a nice little cult of personality, those in it will likely be making Fortress Cruelty posts about the conflict, about racism, about the thing Alice's original post was about, about the people criticising her. If her circle has any ops/cryptofascists in it (and tbh being in these circles is, I suspect, a pretty good place for an op/crypto to hide and go to work) they will privately/secretsly be harassing/abusing PoC involved in the conflict to amp things up and make everyone look unreasonable/reactions look disproportionate, possibly playing both sides and doing this to the trans women involved, too. Both her cultists and the ops/cryptos will be doing public things that are... racist in ways that are hard to prove or where the racism is hard to spot without all the context, or that are hard to say whether they're racist or not, so they can both upset and create unsafe feelings in PoC and bait people into criticising/moderating those things to make them look paranoid/irrational. The cultists do this because the means (gaslighting, racism) justifies the end (defending their friend) regardless of the consequences (more racism, more conflict) and the ops/cryptos do this because it advances their larger goal of a white/segregated fedi, destabilised anarchist/resistance communities and removing trans people from public life.
Step eight: this whole thing can now loop, fractally, recursively and indefinitely, with new Fortress of Cruelty comments and new bad faith defensiveness and new instances of people not understanding that the REACTION to the initial racism is why people aren't letting it go. People start defederating from the servers of people who did the initial racism AND the servers of people who went to bat for those people, the ops and racist transmisogynists win as new defensive conflicts arise over the previous defensive conflicts.
I think this post is already long enough so i'll save the What We Can Do About It analysis for another time but as a stopgap, I am once again reminding you that if your trauma/coping mechanisms/mental illness/ways of keeping yourself safe cause you to be racist or instigate huge conflicts where PoC get hurt or harassed, and you choose not to pursue recovery and change with all your energy, you are racist. You have a moral obligation to try to get better if you not getting better leads to racism. DBT worksheets are available for free online. Other older trans women who have walked this road will help you if you swallow your pride, take one goddamn step outside the fortress and admit you need/ask for help. A good therapist for trans women is hard to find and can be expensive but they do exist and if you're on a tech salary there's no financial excuse. I know people who've had good success in peer-led self therapy groups also. If your masto experience is centered around one or a few central big name trans girls who act like this, look into the BITE model of cults (of personality) and watch some of innuendostudios The Alt Right Playbook videos on how to avoid getting radicalised into the alt right (because that is the eventual endpoint of all cults and of all racism for whites because the number one predictor of falling into alt right pipelines is ISOLATION and if you don't get your soul right wrt racism you WILL end up isolated).
And good god do not trot out nonBlack PoC who condone this shit to/about Black people specifically or do the same thing to Black people specifically as reasons why it's Fine, Actually. I am not here to tell nonBlack PoC what to do or what to think but we don't get to use them as tokens or a point scoring exercise or a cudgel to hurt Black people.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr yeah I'd definitely be okay with some pointed critique of what I've been saying. I've been directly accused of racism by someone (for what I've said about Ro's accusations of racism) and I don't think his arguments worked, but it's definitely put me in doubt (I haven't been able to sleep for two nights bc of the discussion with him). Maybe someone else can point out what he was getting at in a way that I can accept without feeling like I have to desert my senses. I know I have a lot of unexamined shit still at this point in my life and I want to work on that.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr this whole thing has completely exhausted me due to my disability though so I might be slow to reply
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr I was always planning on making a large thread and announcement about my mistakes and editing my comments to retract them if or when I decided they were unjustified so yeah I don't have a problem with having the discussion in public
(Although the way conversations on mastodon branch bc of threading gives me massive anxiety lol)
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr sounds good to me
Also yeah, why *wouldn't* I be as public as possible if I realized I was wrong and changed my mind? I definitely don't want people thinking I think the wrong thing still right? That would make reconciliation impossible!
Honestly a big anxiety for me is that if I admit I'm wrong no one will see it bc apologies aren't as popular yk
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr no worries, alright. I'm on Eastern Standard/Daylight Time
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr oh no worries, you're okay, and yeah migraines fucking suck, I'm sorry you have to deal with that :(. And sure, maybe tomorrow? It's a bit late now, and ive finally started to *not* feel like a complete horrible wreck bc of the fedi drama so I'd like to just have this night yk
And honestly, I might need a few more days to recover PPCS-wise bc I got involved in the drama after already having pushed myself extremely hard, and all the stuff I wrote and read during those few days made it much worse, and rhe last day or two ive been finally getting a chance to actually rest so I can eventually claw my way back to a space where I can think and am not constantly in pain, but its still bad rn. I know this seems like a dodge but I *really* need to keep resting and can't keep giving myself excuses not to
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@skuppr I think we should just reply when we have the capacity, although then this whole thing will continue hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, although that's kind of what I signed up for when I opened my big mouth. Just reply to me whenever you have the capacity
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