When I made the above post six weeks ago, five people reacted to it. I understand from this post that one of those five is now dead, and that it’s for reasons not-unrelated to what I was complaining about. I didn’t know POSS beyond that single interaction, don’t know what exactly preceded ’eir death, and don’t want to speak where it’s not my place while people in my community who did know ’em are grieving. But nonetheless I feel obliged to elaborate on what I said six weeks ago, because apparently that didn’t magically fix all harassment within our community. So the rest of this is about the general case, not about a specific person. Anytime I say “you” or “some people”, I don’t have any one person in mind; in a way, I have all of us in mind, because this is a collective failure, even by those of us who are trying to be part of the solution.
The general form of my earlier point is this: If you consider yourself against harassment and bullying and abuse, but you make exceptions if you like the person doing it, or you don’t like the person receiving it, or the thing being alleged is just extra bad and it resonates with you in some way, you aren’t really against those things. In fact, the people you criticize as bullies probably see things exactly the way you do; y’all just have different standards for what makes you set aside your half-hearted opposition to harassment.
I’ve said before that the most dangerous idea to ever enter the queer community is that you can’t tell people they’re wrong to be upset about something. This single norm, misappropriated from therapeutic contexts where it has some value within the four walls of a counseling room,[1] has been weaponized to devastating effect when applied to interpersonal conflict within our community. It becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card to believe unverified accusations, feelings of hurt that assume all experienced harm is intended harm, and thinly-veiled bigotry of the sort our community is supposedly so “woke” against. It seems completely lost on a large subset of the queer community that the people most targeted in this way—trans and especially nonbinary, neurodivergent and especially not-just-“regular”-autistic neurodivergent—are the same sorts of people who fascists target, and that often we don’t even know for sure that it isn’t those same fascists starting or amplifying the harassment.
But most of us stand by. And I won’t claim moral superiority there; I often stand by too, because telling people that they’re part of the problem isn’t fun, especially when it’s already established that they’re the sort of people who are willing to tear someone down on a whim. Do I really want to call out a callout when the response might be “Figures to hear that from someone who supports <some bad thing>”, with a link to a post from three years ago where I don’t support that thing, but could maybe be read as such by a loyal follower already primed to read the post that way? Do I want to be on the list of people who defended A who defended B who defended C and is therefore just as bad as C, who we are certain did all the bad things an anonymous stranger said they did? No. But this only ends when it becomes normal to tell people “I understand why that was upsetting for you but it doesn’t sound to me like that was that person’s intention” or “I’m not going to make any judgments about a situation where I only know one side of the story” or even “I’m troubled by that too but I don’t judge people by one moment in their life”. (Or, bonus anarchist edition: “My commitment to restorative justice doesn’t only apply where it’s convenient.”)
Part of what has made the queer community a better place than the world around it, historically, is being an abode from hysterical moralizing, from “think of the children”-ing, from associating queerness with degeneracy and degeneracy with violence. Some people have worked very hard in the past 10–20 years to import those obsessions, and it’s worked, largely because some people don’t know their history, don’t realize they’re throwing stones in a house built by radicals and degenerates who said edgy shit and pushed envelopes and were in many cases deeply flawed people.2 I’ve had a younger enby friend storm out on me when I asked them why they were so sure that the throwaway account calling out a trans musician on Twitter wasn’t an alt-right plant. I’ve listened to queer friends explain why some queer person’s post or fanfic was cancellable, where their objections were indistinguishable from a Christian nationalist’s except replacing “ungodly” with “uncomfy” and “degenerate” with “problematic”. I’ve seen queer people try to keep minors out of queer spaces because they’ve internalized the idea that their own queerness makes them a predator.
And I’m fucking sick of it. At this point I think the only solution is for our community to make that kind of toxicity as unwelcome as the behaviors it purportedly combats. Not to fight fire with fire—not to demand that anyone who engages in it immediately be shunned by what may well be the only space for that. But to tell people that that’s not welcome, and that if they want to make their own space where it’s welcome that’s up to them, but if they want to be in the spaces where the cool queer things happen and people don’t suck, they don’t get to make those spaces unsafe, not even if they’re claiming they’re making things safer.
So, what then? Let all the abusers and the bigots stay in queer spaces? No. Of course not. There’s a place for calling people out, based on actual evidence and non-hyperbolic assessments of that evidence. It’s hard to say where you draw the line, but I think the line draws itself if you can keep one thing in mind: What you say might kill someone.
A friend confided recently that they weren’t sure why they’d never told anyone in their community how their father had emotionally abused their mother.
I asked them: “Would you be okay with it if you did that and he killed himself?”
“No.”
“Well that’s why you haven’t told anyone.”
That’s a pretty good conversation to have with yourself any time you decide to do something that could ruin someone’s life. If your answer to that same question is “Yes”, then fair enough, y’know. I have some lovely pacifist friends who’ll disagree with this, but: There’s Nazis in the world, there’s serial abusers, and if you’re actually certain that’s what someone is you shouldn’t hold back out of sympathy. But if your answer is “No”, then what you’re really saying is you want to hurt someone, just not if there’s going to be negative consequences. Which is, not coincidentally, the same thought process a lot of those abusers have.
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- And honestly, even there, not as harmless as some therapists think. A middle-aged college professor I know once received a very uncomfortable text from a female former student of hers, saying that the former student couldn’t take the will-we-won’t-we romantic suspense and needed to know how the professor felt. This was rather a surprise to the professor, who is straight, had never implied otherwise, and had never done anything flirtatious; further discussion revealed that it was the former student’s therapist who advised confronting the professor about her feelings. The therapeutic wisdom of not challenging a patient’s experiences had perhaps been sound up to that point, but with that advice, resting on a set of impressions the therapist had no way to himself verify (and probably should have been somewhat skeptical of given the ages and sexual orientations involved), he became the agent of both his patient’s embarrassment and her friend’s discomfiture. ↩︎
- See generally Howl by Allen Ginsberg (1956) for something to which all of the above certainly apply, and which is nonetheless one of the greatest poems in the history of the English language. ↩︎