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

these mf fruit flies got me down so bad I'm considering cutting fruit from my diet

It's scary how quickly all this happened. I was sure nobody would come I only learned about it last Saturday. I wanted to put up posters and shit but I didn't have the time.

I hate to think that I'd need to start following right wing media to get ahead of this sort of thing. I also hate to thing these people have so much energy they'd be able to organize things of this magnitude at the drop of a hat. I've never seen the Canadian right this amped up in my life

It was bad

There were people who came out to counter-protest all across BC it seems, and in some places it looks like they managed to outnumber the fascists, which was really good to hear. In my city, it was like 200 to one against us

Not only that, but the people there were convinced we could talk it out with them. Obviously, they were extremely lost in the sauce of right wing conspiracy theories, so that wasn't going to happen. I got tone policed for the first time in my life, and I can now confirm that it is in fact a very shitty experience!

I'm pretty shaken by the whole thing but I'm happy that I was there. It looks like we have a lot of work to do ahead of us

@m @skrlet13 I remember what got people upset about snowdin! It wasn't particularly a guilt by association thing. I don't remember what specifically started the chain of events, but something something snowdin user gets called out for being racist, person doing the callout gets dogpilled on, and then ensuing fediblock posts. Snowdin seemed to have a reputation of being wholesome on the post-pleroma side of the fedi, and they obviously really wanted to protect that, massively overcompensating in the wrong direction

I have no receipts for this myself, for what it's worth. It's probably lost to time now that snowdin's shut down, so you're more than welcome to take this with a grain of salt.

I feel like 99 percent of the time I see stuff like this go down it's more or less the same recipe. People generally do not respond well to being called out. We get very defensive. And, of course, seeing people get defensive when you call them out in and of itself can be very triggering, since that's when things start to escalate, as it did with the snowdin user

I thought about joining snowdin.town before coming here, but I remembered seeing that chain of events and idk. It just seemed like the community handled it so poorly. But otherwise, they all seemed very nice.