U.S. POLITICS AND YOU: A QUEER AUTHOR’S EXPLANATION OF SOME RATHER SICKENING EVENTS

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Submitted Date 05/17/2023
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If you're keeping up with U.S. politics, then you're likely either very sad or very confused--or maybe both! Don't worry, pal, that's where a lot of us are at right now, because would you look at what a fucking shit show it all is?

The good news is it's not really something new--because it's a lot of shit we've dealt with historically, and it's not that it's so much as returned so much as it seems to have boiled over and drawn the public eye again, which has been happening a lot in the U.S., what with the Black Lives Matter Protests and Roe V. Wade being overturned, and all that jazz--and it's hard to know where to start with it all, because I could start in two places--we're gonna start with the more current one.

So, there's this one chick on Twitter, a lot of people call her Posie Parker and she showed up to New Zealand with one of her anti-trans... I don't know what to call them, but we're going to settle on "protest" as much as I hate to give it the dignity of that. The thing with this protest was literally nobody fucking wanted her there, not just because New Zealanders apparently dislike everything this chick stands for, but also because at a previous one of her protests, a group of neo-Nazis showed up with their loser salutes and everything. Her protest was met by shouting and some tomato soup, and honestly, I (like many queer Americans) have seen way, way worse at fucking Christmas dinner, but it's a big deal because she shed some white woman tears. There was a video going around of her being escorted by police--they ask if that soup on her's blood, she says no, somebody just threw tomato soup at her, and she asks if every other place was going to be as bad at this one, in which the cops tell her, yeah, probably! It was a big deal. But it's also kinda started this resurgence of not just this pick-and-choose-feminism, but also everything that seems to go hand-in-hand with that--white supremacy, racism, and believe it or not, misogyny. It's important to get well-versed in the 101 shit of feminism, equality, and decolonization to understand it all, so I'm going to spell out the more simple concepts.

 

First of all, just because you are marginalized in one way doesn't mean you're incapable of doing marginalization yourself or holding your own biases. Yes, in the U.S. women are often paid less, discriminated against, have their own hoops to jump through, hurdles to leap over--tons of stuff. But it's still significantly better for white women than it would be for a Black woman, on average. It's a little easier to exist in this world as a white, rich, conventionally attractive, cishet woman and just because the government thinks it has a right to what she may or may not grow in her uterus, or she might be paid less than her co-workers, or expect to quit her job if she does end up carrying a child doesn't mean she can't be racist, or classist, or any type of bigot. People have thousands upon thousands of stories of white women crying to the police to try and incriminate black people minding their own business, usually because they mildly inconvenienced her and simply because she wanted to--and I mean really, really stupid shit, like parking too close to that woman's house, having a dog unleashed, maybe being slightly cold or mean (or doing something that could in the slightest be interpreted as that) that gets blown way out of proportion, and now the cops are on the way, and people are afraid of getting shot because Karen (in the actual, non-watered-down way of a middle-aged white lady trying to throw her weight around to hurt people, and not just a mean lady in the McDonalds parking lot) escalated things way more than they needed to.

This obviously isn't just white women. This goes for literally all people, ever--a man from a racial minority can by misogynistic, a white queer can be racist, someone of one ethnicity can wrongly treat another ethnicity poorly for the sole fact that they are a minority, a rich person of color can look down on the poor and consider a lack of wealth some lack of morality--it's not rocket science. There is no minoritizing ourselves or identifying out of these structures and biases.

 

Similar to the above, you can hold biases for any group you're a part of. Sometimes, this falls into things like colorism, like when Latino parents remark that their light-skinned child "came out clean" or Black comedians talk about seeing how a Black woman's hair looks like after she comes out of water. This is becoming more and more prevalent in my corner of Twitter--we got the "Gays Against Groomers" folks (now going to be called GAG because that's what they make me do) who have been trying to claim they represent the part of the community that wants to "drop the T" (1) because they believe that transgender people are holding the community back from social acceptance, which... they're not, because the minute the Right™️ are done with trans people, they will switch their sights on every other queer person, and really, they already have. Just because the Gays™️ is a shield a handful of bigots are using to hide the worst of their biases (claiming that they're trying to protect lesbians from these evil, masquerading men!1!!), the vast majority of them don't care. The Right™️ won't discourage between which flag is the right one, and which movies can be shown in classrooms (ther'e already a teacher under investigation because they showed their class Disney's Strange World which featured a same-sex couple), because to them, the whole community has gone against the colonialist standards they want in all of society. All queers are a bad queer to them--but this is paired with GAG exclaiming that, even as "gay people"(2) themselves, they believe it somehow goes against human nature. No, seriously. Nobody behind that account has read the picture book about the two gay penguins, apparently.

It's not just anti-queer bigotry, though--white supremacy has become a hot topic because a lot of people are under the impression that a white supremacist has to be white, and this is because a shooter with a racist manifesto and with swastika tattoos on them isn't being labeled a white supremacist because he was Latino. People on Twitter are going um, ackshully, I think you have to be white to be a white supremacist but you don't. At all. You just have to believe that white people are somehow above other races and are supreme, and white it's more common in white people, white supremacy exists not just as a pattern of beliefs, but a series of structures that has valued whiteness and white people above all else, and can be carried out by anyone. But the Right™️ is claiming that it's meant to make them look bad, and was clearly a manufactured lie by the left? Super weird shit going on--but this man was, without a doubt, racist.

 

(1) This is in reference to the LGBTQ+ community, with rising anti-trans rhetoric claiming that transgender people are groomers and somehow unnatural, and all sorts of harmful, cruel things.

(2) "Gay people" is in quotation marks not just because a lot of people suspect that they're straight bigots trying to masquerade as gay ones to make it seem like their argument holds more water, but also because I think their humanity amidst their misinformation and hatred is questionable.

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