This Queer Bashes Back

My journey with gender and being subject to violence.

A lot of people know I fight as my main form of physical exercise. Muay Thai, Krav Maga, BJJ, Boxing. Not a lot of people know why.

Short answer:

Because I got the shit beaten out of me growing up for being a 'faggot'. Not by my parents (thank fuck). But by dudes. Dudes at school, random groups of dudes in the street.

I wasn't even a particularly gay. kid I just didn't like a lot of 'boy' stuff I was meant to - I didn't fit the gender role. I was quiet, interested in poetry and clothes and music. I wore my hair long and played in a band.

For that, just for that, I was routinely beaten, shunned, spat on, cast-out and humiliated.

By the time I got to highschool, it was just normal for me. My nicknames in highschool were 'mop','faggot', 'freak'. It was at the stage that my friends and I referred to me as 'mop faggot freak' as a joke. It was a name I was forced to embrace.

So I started training in martial arts from when I was a child. As many as I could. The ones that looked best for self defence. I did it because I didn't want to be terrified to get on the school bus anymore. I did it so, if my survival or bodily safety required it, I could hit back in ways my abusers couldn't even imagine.

The music I listened to started getting harder and angrier.
Being called 'faggot','homo' or 'pussy' didn't have the same sting when someone had to scream it over pounding death metal.

The metal and punk communities had their problems, but they were largely safe and friendly places for people like me.

So I've been doing this. Training. Moshing. Learning how to organise and fight. Because I keep being attacked for simply being me - it still happens on the street to me in my 30s. Just for the way I dress. Just for who I am and can't change.

I've been doing it for decades.

Recently I learnt about being 'agender' aka 'no-gender'. I saw the gender roles society had given me - 'meek, subservient and soft' vs 'emotionless, brazen and hard' and I said fuck both.

I am happy if a gender suits you. It just doesn't for me. I've rejected it and feel so much better for it. My pronouns are they/them. Yes, it’s important to me. It means you’ve seen me for who I am.

How fascism and genocide begin:

By one group of people thinking they’re genetically superior to another just because they aren’t white. aren’t straight. aren’t male. aren’t Christain. aren’t something they can’t change without fundamentally revising their character or dying. Putting them down, making them want to die, gang bashing them - making them feel as if they have no place to survive as themselves in society. Singling them out. Humiliating them.

Fascism is the domestic abuser who keeps his wife beaten, isolated and helpless. The reward for the storm troopers of fascism is that they lick boots by day, but get to play the tyrant at home when they clock off work.

Fascism is the workplace which makes you feel worthless and alone.

Fascism is locking children up in conditions of torture for fleeing war zones, poverty or being from the wrong country.

Fascism is not being allowed to exist as your gender. It says ‘be subordinate. obey. be scared’. In 2023 there have so far been 583 bills across 49 states USA designed to block children's access to arguably life saving medical treatment, prevent trans people from pursuing careers in sports, going to schools, using the right bathrooms and so on.

In Australia, both politicians and actual Nazis are trying to enact similar things (and in the Nazis case, while openly advocating genoice).

We do not curently live in a fascist society, although as linked above, our government sometimes does fascist things (particularly to refugees). There are many ways to fight against it. This is one of my paths. You can also fight fascism just by being nice to people.

I hate hurting people. It makes me feel sick. But when 5 men are circling me on the street at night because they don’t like my jacket screaming ‘want to have a go, faggot? Let’s goooooo’ - what choice to I have but to escape and break as few laws as possible?

Fascists like hurting people. That’s why George Orwell described it as the joy of a boot stomping on a human face, forever. It is fundamentally a cocktail of sadism, fear and hieracrhy .

And finally,

To you sexist, racist, homophobes:

and anyone who puts people down, or beats them, or kills them because of who they are and what they can’t change:

You are angry at my pronouns?
My pearls? The way I dress?

Because motherfucker I’m not mad, I’m thermonuclear.
Triggered does not come close to describing where I am at now.

This black bandana round my neck is to let everyone around you know that I am ready to go full Valkyrie on your ass if I have to.

These three arrows on my arm are here to let you know that you have fucked with the wrong queers in the wrong part of town.

How many fights you been in? How long have you been training? How long have you been organising?
How many of these people around me are my friends?

While you're abusing people and sieg-heiling online, I'm doxing you. I will expose your abuse for all to see. This is what people like me call scalp collecting.

I collect your scalps.

There are a lot of beautiful and loving ways to be genderqueer. That's not me at the moment. Not now. You are killing my people.

I'm queer in the way that gives you nightmares. There are more of us than you think. Women, people of colour, queers - we outnumber you and always have.

We'll bury the hatchet once you bury the fascism.
Just be nice to people, for fuck’s sake, it’s not hard.
All you fascists bound to lose.