@chris_evelyn same tbh.
the scene here doesn't understand what a gang is. people put "shitty boyfriend" or "ally with problematic opinions" at the same category of threat as cops and nazis. the ensuing fragility means that, as a result, people like me at a heightened risk of being deported or arrested get no support network due to everyone laying low in paranoid fear of a threat that, unlike cops, I can just punch and defend myself from, who cannot ever sign a piece of paper that decides the fate of my entire family (=shitty boyfriends).
actual examples that are real:
- antifa self-defense group falls apart due to 1 (one) guy shouting over me and another girl, once, and the resulting discourse over whether that was misogynistic or not.
- the only migrant-run left space in town, i.e. the single only one that wasn't Zionist, falls apart due to indymedia accusations that one (1) guy was a sexual harasser. leaving aside the matter of whether the accusations have merit or not and how often therapyspeak is weaponised—the whole physical space closing means that the local Palestine solidarity network now has literally nowhere to organise and must travel to another city to be able to meet. to fight, you know. LITERAL ETHNIC CLEANSING, paid for with German money.
- anarchist person has a friend jailed irregularly, in blatant political persecution. another anarchist person says they're considering a job as a jailer. person #1 explodes over this, shouts, says person #2 isn't a real anarchist. person #1, who's nb but male-read, gets banned from the space over problematic macker behaviour. three years later person #1 is trying to get an anarchist space organised. they are still refused to make a talk about it on the space where they shouted once.
- young trans girl has a heated discussion where she behaves assholeish. people call her out. she says it's because she's autistic. people say, correctly, that this is a shitty excuse. she obviously gets defensive, as most people would under heightened emotions. now because the other person in the discussion is a community organiser who's everywhere in the town, the young trans girl is ostracised from every queer space forever. she's currently alternating between suicidal and detransition ideation.
- young trans couple is found to be sharing suicide and self-harm ideation on private dark alts. one of them is 20, the other 17. the older one gets called an abusive homicidal groomer murderer, and people try to set up a trap to call the cops on them. trans people who claim to be anarchists, mind you. upon being rescued from the trap, the younger one says "she's the only reason I'm alive".
- trans girl is afraid her girlfriend is going to kill herself and locks her in the apartment. (different couple from above.) she gets denounced, correctly, for abusive behaviour. the other girl shelters with other people for a while. eventually she talks a lot with her gf, convinces herself she understands the problem and regrets it, they make up and go back together. they've been a happy couple ever since. many years later, the older girl is still ostracised and people tell me "that girl? that girl's an abuser" every time her name comes up. the putative victim disagrees but that only proves how much the older girl is a manipulative manipulator. meanwhile the younger girl gets spuriously accused of problematic behaviour too, also due to heated discussions, so now different nodes of the whisper network ostracise both.
- pro-Palestine queer org would be present in the CSD. orga finds out last minute, falls apart debating whether to allow it. the orga and the entire Pride parade get cancelled 1 (one) day beforehand. leftist fragility achieves what the nazis couldn't.
how would one build community in this culture? literal nazis are literally doing violence to us but a male-read enby looking visibly angry is as much a "violent agressor" as the genocidal supremacist who bashed my head with a metal bat? of course the weaponisation of therapyspeak lets *actual* abusers off the hook by diluting the words—punitive justice is like water, it always goes for the lowest level, the wealthy cis men don't give a fuck, it's trannies and immigrants who get destroyed by knee-jerk ostracism—but make no mistake, for every left group destroyed by a sneaky sexual predator, fifty are destroyed by fragility and trauma projection. when community is a coin exchanged for good behaviour, you have the incentive to shout "abuse!" at every conflict, lest the other side shout it first. you also have the incentive to join in every time a cryptoterf accuses a trans girl of being a harasser, lest you be pegged as an enabler and probably secretly a rapist too. believe victims, right? especially white victims.
"a community is, for better and for worse, a relationship of material interdependence. let's not fool ourselves: we have no community." (The Broken Teapot)