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I’m not involved in direct action anymore (thank fucking god), I’ve got no desire to return, and I don’t intend to. I still have a lot of feelings about what’s happening around (current events) and to side step the leftist males who are almost definitely the disappointments of their families whining about “bro you weren’t even there”. I have elected to say (current events) every time I mention the (current events). because I know exactly the kind of girls watching all of this and know the exact kind of girls leftists love to walk into a meat grinder. And I keep wondering what it means for them.
Consider this something I’m handing you before you walk into the woods. You’ve got estrogen in your bag, your phone’s already dying, somebody you met three weeks ago has promised you a couch, your girlfriend’s pissed because you disappeared for six hours, and half the dolls around you are convinced they’ll become disciplined revolutionaries the second the state looks directly at them. They won’t, and neither will you. Neither am I.
There’s ecstasy in the riot, and terror sits so close beside it that sometimes you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. There’s a moment when a crowd realizes that the ordinary arrangement of the world can actually be interrupted, and that feeling crawls straight up your spine. For a second you can feel the thing we’re always talking about, the real movement underneath all the theory and fucking discourse, and the world suddenly seems less permanent than it did that morning.
Then somebody gets grabbed. Somebody starts screaming because she can’t find her girlfriend. Your stomach drops through your asshole, your hands start shaking, and your body reminds you that it doesn’t give a fuck how much theory you’ve read.
I’m not cleaning any of that up for anarchist doctrine, communist doctrine, feminist doctrine, or whatever the fuck you want to call the mess of ideas in my head. You can believe completely in what you’re doing while desperately wishing you were home with your girlfriend, your face buried between her tits, listening to her complain about dishes because suddenly dishes sound like the most beautiful problem a human being has ever had.
If you stay around direct action long enough, somebody’s going to get hurt. The state may do it, one of your own people may do it, or you may help do it to yourself because you confused political commitment with pretending your body had no limit.
The girls deserve to know that before anybody starts making suffering sound romantic.
Lesson One: Don’t expect your male comrades to protect you.
I’m starting here because transsexual women can become astonishingly optimistic about men once those men learn the correct vocabulary.
Some leftist men absolutely use politics to get laid, and girls need to understand how that works because being the Safe Guy in the scene can get a man an incredible amount of pussy.
He learns how to say “patriarchy,” “transmisogyny,” “abolition,” and “mutual aid.” He learns which books to mention and which shitty men to denounce. He figures out which tone makes women unclench around him. He learns exactly how to talk to some newly out doll who’s spent the previous five years being treated like a freak by ordinary straight men and who almost cries the first time a man looks at her and talks to her like she’s simply another woman in the room. That can mean a fucking lot to a girl. Some men figure that out.
Then somehow this deeply principled male feminist keeps ending up in bed with trans girls who’ve been in the scene for six weeks. Every conversation about revolutionary care somehow ends with his hand on your thigh at two in the morning. He’s always available to explain your oppression over cigarettes, and his analysis suddenly gets much less sophisticated when you tell him you aren’t interested.
Being “one of the good comrades” becomes part of the courtship ritual.
Political language can become sexual currency, and some men spend it exactly the way men have always spent power.
A man can sincerely believe every word he says and still enjoy the access those words give him. He can read every feminist text on the shelf and still expect women to reward him for being better than the other men. He can call you comrade while expecting you to manage his feelings because he once drove you home from an action and listened to you cry in his passenger seat.
The man who says all the correct things about women can still get pissed when a woman tells him no.
The male feminist who lectures everybody else about power can still fuck the youngest girls in the scene.
The guy who talks constantly about protecting trans women can still decide that the trans woman accusing his friend is crazy, vindictive, unstable, jealous, or conveniently impossible to understand.
You can work with men. You may trust some of them deeply. You may love some of them. Keep enough sense in your head to remember that radical politics doesn’t perform an exorcism on male entitlement.
You usually learn this when something goes wrong.
A man everybody likes hurts a woman, and suddenly his friends need context. A transsexual says something felt wrong, and people who spent the previous month talking about believing women develop an abrupt fascination with forensic procedure. A girl starts drowning under everybody else’s emotional labor, and the men around her barely notice because women cleaning up messes is so fucking ordinary that even revolutionaries can stare directly at it without seeing shit.
Your safety can’t depend on men noticing what’s happening to you.
Know which women will come looking when you disappear and which doll has your legal name. Know who’ll notice you never made it home. Know who’ll start calling people when your phone dies. Know which woman you can tell when the male comrade everybody loves becomes the reason you’re scared to enter the room.
Male comrades may become good comrades. Your safety still needs to exist independently of them.
If that independence bothers one of them, you learned something useful before learning it inside a jail cell.
Lesson Two: Understand what community means when the world already feels like it’s ending.
A lot of transsexual women are living with the feeling that every month brings another reason to wonder whether life’s about to become harder.
The political weather gets into your fucking bones after a while.
You wake up, grab your phone before you’ve even put your glasses on, and there’s another court case, another bill, another fight over a clinic, another politician discussing your body like it belongs to the public, and another headline written by somebody who’s apparently never met a transsexual but has developed very strong opinions about what should happen to us.
Then you roll over and your girlfriend’s asleep beside you with one tit hanging out of her shirt, and for a second you’re looking at the entire contradiction of transsexual life in one fucking room.
The world feels like it’s trying to make your existence into a legal question while you’re still arguing about whose turn it is to buy toilet paper.
That does something to your sense of safety.
Then you find other transsexuals and everything starts mixing together.
The girl you fucked after the reading group knows how to fight an insurance denial. The doll whose tits you were biting last weekend knows a landlord who’ll rent to you. Your ex knows which pharmacy has needles. Somebody’s polycule has somehow become the regional hormone distribution network, and nobody remembers who originally ordered the syringes.
There’s something beautiful about that in the uniquely deranged way trans life can be beautiful.
There’s also a serious problem because one tiny social world can start supplying almost everything you need.
Your friends are there, your sex life is there, your housing leads are there, and the person who might lend you rent money is probably fucking somebody you used to fuck. The woman who’d bring your estrogen to jail appears somewhere in the same six-person relationship diagram as your ex, your girlfriend, and the girl you’re both pretending nobody has a crush on.
When everybody gets along, it can feel like we’ve built our own tiny country.
When everybody stops getting along, you discover who controls the border.
That’s the part girls need to understand.
Being loved by a lot of people doesn’t guarantee you’re materially secure. Twenty dolls can call you family on Monday, and by Friday you can still be sitting on the curb with your clothes stuffed into garbage bags because the person who owned the apartment was closer friends with your ex.
You need something underneath affection.
Lesson Three: T4T has to survive after everybody stops wanting to fuck.
I love T4T. I’ve built an unreasonable portion of my life around it. I understand perfectly well why transsexuals keep finding each other, falling in love at medically inadvisable speed, moving in after seventeen minutes, merging wardrobes, sharing estrogen, fucking like the electricity’s getting shut off at midnight, and then acting surprised when the breakup develops the geopolitical complexity of Yugoslavia.
We’re ridiculous, and we’re trying to survive at the same time.
T4T has to carry more weight than desire.
Your ex should still tell you which clinic has appointments open. The girl whose name currently makes you roll your eyes hard enough to see your brain should still be able to access the emergency fund. A breakup shouldn’t sever somebody’s route to healthcare, and a political disagreement shouldn’t determine whether somebody gets told that a room opened up.
Sometimes solidarity is incredibly sexy because you’re naked with another trans woman, both of you are laughing, somebody’s thigh is between somebody else’s legs, and for a few hours the whole rotten world outside the bedroom feels very far away.
Sometimes solidarity is texting the woman you currently fucking despise because Walgreens finally has the right needles, knowing she needs them, and then returning to hating her in peace.
That second kind tells me whether we’ve actually built anything.
Mutual aid can’t mean your girlfriend’s Venmo, your ex’s spare room, and whatever estrogen somebody happens to have in her refrigerator this week.
We need resources that keep working after affection disappears.
Otherwise our beautiful little T4T civilization is one catastrophic lesbian breakup away from losing electricity, running water, three housing arrangements, and half the estrogen supply in the county.
Lesson Four: Stop turning survival into the prize you get for being a good girl.
Transsexual women already spend enough of our lives being evaluated.
The world wants to know whether you’re feminine enough, stable enough, employable enough, respectable enough, and whether you’re transitioning in a way that makes strangers comfortable.
Then we enter the scene and somehow invent another fucking tribunal.
Now you have to be politically coherent enough. You have to react to harm correctly. You have to apologize correctly. You have to remember the right terminology while somebody’s screaming at you. You have to explain your trauma in a way that makes everybody comfortable enough to keep caring about you.
Eventually somebody fails.
Maybe she actually did something horrible. Maybe she lied. Maybe she became exhausting. Maybe everybody has completely legitimate reasons to stop inviting her into their homes.
Then social distrust starts leaking into material support.
Nobody says, “We’ve decided this bitch doesn’t deserve estrogen anymore.”
Nobody usually announces that homelessness is part of the accountability process.
The language stays clean while the girl loses the couch, the ride, the emergency fund, the people who know how to navigate her healthcare, and every fucking person she thought she could call at three in the morning.
That’s when social death starts becoming materially dangerous.
We have to learn how to withdraw intimacy without turning survival into leverage.
You can decide somebody’ll never sleep in your bed again. You can bar her from your home. You can stop answering her messages. You can decide you never want to see her fucking face again.
She still needs food and medical care. If the state cages her, the state still doesn’t gain the right to abuse her because everybody outside has decided she sucks.
If your abolitionism evaporates the second the prisoner becomes personally irritating, I’m going to start wondering what exactly you thought abolition meant.
Lesson Five: Take care of the bitch everybody hates this week.
Every community loves solidarity when the person receiving it is easy to love.
The real test arrives when the woman in trouble has become socially radioactive.
Maybe she cooperated under pressure. Maybe she betrayed somebody. Maybe she harmed another woman. Maybe she behaved like such an unbearable fucking nightmare that seeing her username makes your pussy dry up from across the room.
She still has a body that can be hurt.
She still needs medication. She can still be denied healthcare in jail. She can still be assaulted. She can still die while everybody outside congratulates themselves for having arrived at the correct moral position.
I refuse to participate in the little trick where radical politics forgets everything it supposedly knows about institutions because somebody became unpopular.
You can condemn somebody’s choices while understanding what prisons are. You can understand why other people feel betrayed while refusing to treat medical neglect as a deserved consequence. You can stop trusting somebody while still believing the state should keep its fucking hands off her.
People love imagining themselves under repression because the imaginary version of themselves is incredibly brave.
Imaginary you never panics, never talks, never misses your girlfriend, never thinks about how badly you want your own bed, and somehow handles isolation with the composure of a revolutionary saint painted onto a fucking church wall.
Real you’s barely slept. Your hormones are fucked up. You don’t know what time it is. You smell like jail. You miss your girlfriend so badly your chest hurts. You’re thinking about your apartment and wondering whether your landlord knows. You’re thinking about your job and wondering whether you still have one. You’re thinking about whether anybody remembered your injection day.
You’re scared you’re going to lose years of your life.
Every guard who walks past reminds you that your body currently exists under somebody else’s authority.
Real you is fucking terrified.
I care much more about whether somebody can keep another human being alive after she breaks under those conditions than I care about fantasies of how perfectly she imagines she’d behave.
Lesson Six: Be honest about how much fucking structures our little world.
Transsexual communities have a lot of sex, and I support this development enthusiastically.
Sex still happens inside material relationships.
Your girlfriend might also be your roommate. Your situationship might control access to a social circle. Your ex might know every person you organize with. The girl whose face you sat on after the fundraiser might also be the person everybody calls when someone needs emergency housing.
Desire gets tangled around access very quickly.
A woman needs to be able to stop fucking somebody without losing everything surrounding the sex.
She needs to be able to say, “I love you, I’m done, and get your fucking toothbrush out of my bathroom,” without waking up the next morning to discover that the entire transsexual population of three zip codes has divided into military alliances.
She needs to be able to refuse somebody sexually without wondering whether a ride will disappear, a room will suddenly become unavailable, or people she thought were her friends will start treating her differently because they’d rather keep inviting the other girl to parties.
This gets especially ugly in political scenes because sex and politics can start validating each other.
The girl everybody thinks is brilliant becomes desirable because she’s brilliant. The girl sleeping with her becomes socially important because she’s close to her. A breakup happens and suddenly political disagreements everybody tolerated six months ago become evidence that one of them was secretly evil the whole time.
We’re transsexuals. We’re horny. Half of us met through somebody’s ex. I’m asking us to have enough fucking sense to keep that from becoming a system of government.
Nobody’s pussy should be load-bearing infrastructure.
Lesson Seven: The couch is political.
I’ll never romanticize the couch because I know what the couch means.
Sometimes the couch means somebody loved you enough to keep you from sleeping outside. Sometimes it means you’re lying awake at four in the morning staring at a ceiling that doesn’t belong to you and calculating exactly how much disrespect you can afford before the person whose apartment this is tells you to get the fuck out.
Housing changes everything.
A girl with her own apartment can tell somebody to go fuck herself with considerably greater confidence than a girl whose backpack contains most of what she owns.
A transsexual woman might stay in a relationship because leaving means losing the bedroom. She might tolerate a political environment she despises because everybody she knows with a spare room belongs to the same scene. She might let someone treat her like shit because whatever waits after that front door closes feels worse.
Then people ask why she didn’t simply leave.
Leave and go where, exactly? To whose apartment, with what money, using which car, while carrying half your life in a CVS bag and trying not to sob in front of the doll who came to pick you up?
Where does your estrogen go?
Where does your cat go?
Where do you sleep tomorrow?
How many nights can somebody let you stay before you start feeling that horrible little pressure to be useful, pleasant, sexually available, politically agreeable, or simply small enough that nobody regrets letting you in?
This is what material analysis is supposed to help us understand.
An exit route that requires resources somebody doesn’t possess barely functions as an exit route at all.
Transsexual communities need housing systems designed around that fact. There should be somewhere to go after the breakup and after the political split, including when your entire social world has decided you’re currently the villain and you still need a door that locks behind you at night.
Nobody should have to remain ideologically obedient because the revolution owns her mattress.
Lesson Eight: Direct action can fuck you up, and fear can rot the inside of a community.
There’s something intoxicating about discovering that the world can be interrupted.
I’ll never pretend otherwise.
There are moments when collective action produces a feeling so intense that ordinary life becomes almost embarrassing by comparison. You can feel history stop being something in a book and become something underneath your feet. For a second, the machinery looks vulnerable and everybody around you can feel it.
Then somebody gets hurt.
Somebody disappears into custody. Everybody goes home and starts checking arrest records. Somebody can’t find her girlfriend. Somebody’s phone is dead. Someone swears she saw an unmarked car twice. Your body stays awake long after the action ends because adrenaline has apparently decided that sleep is counterrevolutionary.
Then paranoia starts creeping in.
You replay conversations from three weeks ago because somebody asked a strange question. A comrade misses a meeting and suddenly five people have theories. A stranger follows an account and somebody decides it must mean surveillance. One doll acts weird because she’s scared, another reads fear as guilt, and soon everybody’s doing amateur counterintelligence through screenshots, intuition, and sleep deprivation.
Security culture matters because repression is real. It becomes fucking useless when every weird vibe becomes evidence and every socially awkward transsexual is three group chats away from getting fedjacketed.
Fear makes patterns out of wallpaper.
Somebody says a girl was asking too many questions, nobody can explain exactly what she asked, and twenty-four hours later people who can barely organize a grocery run have apparently established their own counterintelligence bureau.
Keep sensitive information among the people who actually need it. Let a doll say she doesn’t want to know something. Your affinity group doesn’t need everybody knowing everything simply because you all trust each other today. Deal with concrete concerns when they exist, and don’t turn security culture into permission to destroy somebody because your sleep-deprived nervous system decided she looked suspicious.
Fear already fucks with your head enough.
You may discover afterward that you were more scared than you expected. You may feel guilty because somebody else took a risk you avoided. A knock at the door may make your heart slam against your ribs weeks later. You may start checking mirrors, windows, cars, messages, and the location of every person you love because some part of your body still thinks the danger never ended.
You might wake up beside your girlfriend at four in the morning, hear something outside, and lie there completely still while she sleeps because your brain has already written the entire story about who’s coming through the door.
Sometimes something hurts you and the political importance of what happened does absolutely fucking nothing to help you sleep.
Sometimes you need to admit that what happened scared the shit out of you.
Sometimes you can’t do it again.
Our bodies already carry plenty. Transition can be physically exhausting. Surgery can wreck you for months. Poverty can keep your nervous system on fire. Family problems follow you into every room. Half the dolls are already managing some deranged relationship crisis while pretending the apocalypse can wait until after injection day.
You don’t owe a movement the destruction of your nervous system.
If police detain or arrest you and start asking questions about what happened, don’t start explaining yourself because you’re scared and think you can talk your way free.
In the United States, clearly invoke your right to remain silent and ask for a lawyer. Then stop discussing the incident until your lawyer’s there. Comply with lawful identification and booking requirements where they apply, and keep your mouth shut about everything else.
Police know silence feels unbearable.
Let it feel unbearable. Let the room get so fucking awkward that you can hear the fluorescent lights buzzing.
You don’t owe them context, a timeline, an explanation of what your friend meant, or information because they claim another girl already told them everything.
They may tell you your friend blamed you. They may tell you everybody else talked. They may act sympathetic. They may make you think one tiny clarification will fix everything.
Your frightened brain will desperately want to fill the silence because human beings hate uncertainty and cops know exactly how to use that.
Your lawyer can handle the conversation that actually needs to happen.
Your terrified ass needs to stop talking.
Lesson Nine: Look at who can actually afford courage.
People love courage because courage is visible.
Resources hide underneath it.
One person gets arrested and calls a lawyer her parents are paying for, while another girl misses one shift and suddenly can’t make rent. One comrade goes home afterward to a safe apartment while another returns to a bedroom she shares with somebody she desperately wants to leave. Somebody can disappear from work for weeks while the doll standing beside her is one attendance violation away from losing the job keeping her fed.
They can stand beside each other during the same action while risking completely different futures.
This matters when the scene turns willingness to accept risk into a measure of political worth.
Sometimes the person taking the biggest risk also has the thickest mattress underneath her.
The girl who leaves early may know perfectly well that nobody’s paying her rent if she gets arrested. The woman who refuses a role may know that her body, immigration status, employment situation, or medical circumstances make the consequences far more severe for her.
It’s very easy to romanticize somebody else’s sacrifice when you aren’t going to be the bitch calling her landlord afterward.
People need room to assess their own capacity.
Nobody else gets to volunteer your body for martyrdom or spend your housing, your hormones, and five years of your life because sacrifice looked beautiful from the sidewalk.
If somebody wants a martyr that badly, she can climb onto the fucking altar herself.
Lesson Ten: Build something capable of surviving the fact that transsexuals are a fucking mess.
This is the part I actually care about.
We keep talking about revolutionary movements as though the right organizational structure will eventually solve the embarrassing problem of human beings behaving like human beings.
It won’t.
Transsexual women are going to fall in love with terrible ideas attached to gorgeous faces. We’re going to move in too quickly. Somebody’ll fuck somebody’s ex. Somebody’ll panic after spending six months insisting she’d be brave. Somebody’ll lie because she’s scared. Somebody’ll betray somebody she genuinely loves. Eventually somebody’ll need an amount of care that everybody around her feels too exhausted to provide.
These are the women we have, and these are the women I care about.
They’re trying to live through a period where the political ground feels like it shifts every fucking week.
A girl wakes up and wonders whether her medication’s about to become harder to get. Another wonders what happens to her documents. Somebody else is trying to figure out whether she can afford to leave her state if things get worse. Meanwhile rent is still due, somebody needs groceries, your girlfriend is crying, you’re three days late on laundry, and you still have to stick a needle in your ass on Thursday because apparently the apocalypse doesn’t cancel injection day.
That atmosphere gets inside relationships.
It makes us cling harder. It makes community feel enormous. It makes betrayal feel apocalyptic because sometimes losing five friends means losing half your actual world.
It makes us build tiny T4T ecosystems where the same woman can be your lover, roommate, ride home, comrade, emergency contact, and keeper of the spare vial in her refrigerator.
Then one relationship explodes and sends a blast wave through everything around it. Three girls suddenly need somewhere to sleep, somebody’s crying in a parking lot, two exes are threatening to leak screenshots, somebody else has stopped answering messages, and the only bitch with a car has announced that she’s staying neutral because apparently transportation infrastructure has declared Switzerland.
We need to build something sturdier than that.
I want the girl who fucks up to keep access to medication. I want the woman she hurt to have enough independence that nobody has to pressure her into forgiveness. I want a breakup to end without somebody losing her bedroom. I want the transsexual everybody currently despises to remain outside the state’s entitlement to abuse her.
I want girls to have enough material power that community becomes something they can actually choose.
This matters because the political onslaught around trans life has made the world feel apocalyptic to a lot of us.
Every election, court decision, healthcare fight, arrest, and headline can feel like another horseman coming over the hill with your fucking name written down.
Sometimes fear outruns the facts. Sometimes the danger is exactly as bad as it feels. Either way, people still have to live inside what constant threat does to the brain.
Fear makes us cling harder and fuck harder. It makes us paranoid enough to stare through the blinds at a car that’s been parked outside for twenty minutes and wonder whether our life just changed. It makes a girl fall asleep with her girlfriend’s arm wrapped around her because for six fucking hours she wants to believe there’s one place on earth nobody’s coming to take away.
Then morning comes, somebody checks her phone, and the world starts again.
Fear can also make people cruel when they start believing cruelty will keep them safe.
That’s why our politics has to survive the panic.
I refuse to accept “we treat you better than the people who want you dead” as the horizon of transsexual community.
That standard is so fucking low that clearing it should humiliate us.
I want relationships where you can tell somebody to go fuck herself and still know she has somewhere safe to sleep that night. I want a scene where somebody becoming unpopular doesn’t cause everyone to rediscover a sudden affection for prisons. I want T4T to mean that when the world outside feels like it’s ending, we refuse to build smaller versions of that world inside our bedrooms, group chats, collectives, and organizing spaces.
If you’re going off to fight the Leviathan, I won’t lie to you about the monster, and I won’t lie about the people standing beside you either.
Some leftist men will use revolution as foreplay. Some comrades will become cowards once jail stops being theoretical. Some girls you love will make decisions that break your fucking heart. Some suspicions will prove justified, and some will grow teeth because you haven’t slept for two days and your brain has decided every parked car contains the FBI.
You still have to remain human through all of it.
Take care of yourself while you take care of the girls around you. Pay attention to who controls the things you need, keep your own exit routes open, and love each other fiercely enough that disappointment never becomes permission to destroy someone.
If the cops start asking questions, invoke your right to remain silent, ask for your lawyer, and shut the fuck up.
If everything really does feel like the end of the world sometimes, then we should at least refuse to make the end of the world worse for each other.
Lesson Eleven : Snitchjacketing, rapejacketing, fedjacketing. Just stop wearing fucking jackets altogether.
I’m serious about this one because I’ve watched political scenes take one of the most serious accusations you can make about another human being and turn it into fucking slang.
Somebody becomes “a snitch.” Somebody becomes “a fed.” Somebody becomes “a rapist.” The noun starts circulating faster than the actual story, and within a week there are people repeating it who couldn’t tell you what the person supposedly did, when she supposedly did it, who originally made the allegation, or whether anybody involved has even spoken to the person they’re now warning half the fucking country about. Stop wearing jackets altogether.
If somebody sexually assaulted someone, say what you actually know about the allegation and take it seriously. If somebody gave information to police, say what information you know she gave and under what circumstances. If you have concrete reasons to believe somebody is gathering information for law enforcement, describe the conduct you’re concerned about instead of turning “fed” into the leftist version of calling somebody a witch. These things are serious enough to deserve actual sentences. “Rapist” shouldn’t become shorthand for “a girl I heard had a fucked-up sexual situation with somebody.” Sexual violence is real, and survivors deserve better than watching the language used to describe what happened to them become ammunition in somebody else’s lesbian civil war. “Snitch” shouldn’t become a magic word that lets everybody stop thinking about what fear, interrogation, coercion, plea pressure, or confinement can actually do to a human being. If somebody talked, then talk about what she actually did. You’re allowed to think what she did was wrong. You’re allowed to decide you can’t trust her with sensitive information anymore. You don’t need to turn her into a fucking folk demon to reach either conclusion. “Fed” might be the most abused jacket of all because paranoia loves an explanation. The awkward new person asks too many questions, somebody’s politics suddenly change, somebody disappears for a while, or one doll simply has the social skills of a concussed raccoon, and suddenly people are whispering that she’s federal law enforcement.
Then the whisper becomes a screenshot, the screenshot reaches another group chat, and now some girl who can barely get through a phone call with Walgreens without having a panic attack is apparently COINTELPRO.
Fedjacketing can wreck security because people start looking for a cartoon infiltrator instead of practicing ordinary security culture. You don’t need to know whether somebody is secretly a cop to decide she doesn’t need sensitive information. Your affinity group doesn’t need a fucking trial every time someone makes you uncomfortable. Give information according to need, keep your boundaries, and deal with actual behavior when actual behavior gives you something to deal with. The same principle applies to sexual harm.
Take allegations seriously enough to resist flattening them into scene gossip. Listen to the person saying she was harmed. Protect people who need distance. Pay attention to patterns when there’s evidence of a pattern. Keep enough humility to distinguish what you personally know from what somebody told somebody who told your girlfriend’s ex at four in the morning. There’s a difference between believing someone deserves support and pretending you personally witnessed events you didn’t witness. Our communities are already tiny. Our lovers are our roommates, our exes are our comrades, our comrades fuck each other, and everybody somehow knows the same fifteen dolls. Information travels through that mess at the speed of light while accuracy limps behind carrying its fucking shoes. That means we need more precision when the stakes get higher. If somebody harmed another person, name the conduct as clearly as you can. If somebody gave information to the state, deal honestly with what happened. If somebody’s behavior creates a security concern, limit what she has access to while you figure out what you actually know. A jacket feels satisfying because it turns uncertainty into certainty and a complicated human being into a category. That satisfaction should scare you. We’re living through enough fear already. We don’t need to manufacture additional enemies every time the group chat gets nervous. And for the love of every transsexual who has ever been accused of being a federal agent because she asked one weird question at a meeting, stop wearing fucking jackets altogether.