A little while ago, I went to a queer counter protest pushing back against a nation-wide anti-LGBT rally. We were vastly outnumbered. It was actually quite embarrassing. Ten or twenty of us stood at the top of this staircase while thousands of them gathered below. Embarrassing and scary.

At one point, some person looked up at me, holding a sign that said "hands off my children," yelling "we love you!" One of their gimmicks was that they were pretending the good, civil queer people were on their side, and it was just the evil, gross, degenerate transgenderists they wanted to take down. I got extremely angry at this person, because I didn't want them to have the privilege of living in a fantasy world where we were on the same side. They were everything I stood against. So, in what is actually quite a big emotional outburst for me, I yelled "fuck you!" and gave them the finger. I didn't feel much better, but it was cathartic

Then, a middle-aged cisgender ally looked over at me, scowled, and shouted "hey! Be nice. We're supposed to be the good guys!" Not wanting to escalate things with my own team, I apologized, but that moment has been plaguing me for weeks. It was more humiliating than anything I experienced counter-protesting a sea of right-wing extremists. More than anything I've experienced in a very long time. I thought, I've spent my whole god damn life trying to be the good guy for these people, and they've given me nothing but suffering. Not only was it my right to be angry, it was my duty. These people don't deserve to feel safe being fascist in public, and that person had absolutely no right to tell me otherwise.

I don't think yelling at the right-winger did anything substantial. Maybe it was a waste of energy, maybe it needlessly escalated a dangerous situation, but I think I can be forgiven for that, because I had every right to be angry.

A few weeks ago, someone called me a faggot in public for the first time in my life. I had never actually been verbally harassed for being queer before. Where I live, microaggressions tend to be a lot more common than macroaggressions. It was a really brief moment, and I was in no real danger, but nonetheless, it shook me quite a bit, and I was on edge for several days afterwards.

Ro (of the bad space), on the other hand, has been the victim of a racist hatestorm for the last few weeks. And, they're having their identity as a nonbinary person absolutely annihilated by queer fedi. I tend to be a very shoot-first-ask-questions-later sort of person when I encounter people who may be transphobes in the wild. It keeps me safe, being a little on edge all the time. So even if some of Ro's anger is misdirected, I feel like that should be forgiven, considering the whole racist hatestorm and whatnot.

Especially when you get targeted and dogpiled on, even if those people claim to be on your side.

Not to mention, the more I see mostly white communities repeatedly drop the bag on moderation and target victims of racism for speaking up, the less I think any of that anger is actually misdirected and think we probably are, in fact, part of the problem.

I feel ridiculous saying this, personally. I am completely rehashing things I've seen black people talk about on here. You definitely shouldn't be listening to me on this stuff, but I've been thinking a lot about it and thought maybe I should make my thoughts on whiteness clear, in case someone interacts with me and gets the wrong idea. I am a massive fediblock apologist and try my best to avoid people who go easy on and side with anti-blackness.

But again, I don't know shit about being black. I do know that in the future, we're probably going to be very embarrassed of this moment, or the fediverse is going to be a lot more white than it already is