Guest Writer! Doxxed by Bernie Supporters

I first met the young woman who honored my with her story when she was a campaign organizer for Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016. From the outside, she was powerful, self-assured, and hopeful in ways that put my Gen X when-I-was-her-age self to shame. I wouldn't have guessed, even with my election year + anxiety mind, how much she was going through for us. I'm really grateful to her and so angry that all of this happened to her--it's my hope that this story will spread far and wide, and that it will help folks understand why it's still and always important to speak out against the misogyny of our own side, no matter what threats we face from the right.

Doxxed

Written by an Anonymous Hillary Campaign Organizer

TW: Doxxing, Racism, Threats of Violence and Rape, Gaslighting

It’s no secret among people that know me that I worked for Clinton in 2016. My wall is still decorated in posters, my car is covered in bumper stickers, I even have a tattoo that reminds me of the good times on that campaign. However, the worst parts of the 2016 campaign still haunt me wherever and whenever I meet new people working in politics. It’s no secret among people I’m friends with that I was doxxed by Sanders supporters in 2016, but it’s something I’m not “supposed” to talk about. 

I joined the Clinton campaign while I was still a student. Originally it wasn’t because I liked Hillary any more than Bernie, as a woman I just wanted to know more about women running for higher office. My facebook was full of friends that supported Bernie, but were happy for me on the campaign. Until Caucus night in Iowa. 

The lucky part for Iowa was the Caucuses were so close and went so long that most people were asleep by the time the results came out and most people had to work the next morning, so I was left alone. By the time Super Tuesday rolled around, I had already been doxxed for the first time. 

I had gone to bed around midnight Central Time, but a few people I knew on the West Coast were still awake. I woke up to dozens of notifications on my Facebook. A friend-of-a-friend had made a post asking for people to tag the people they knew who were “sHillary sellouts” in the comments. I got tagged by someone I had worked on a class project with right before I left for the campaign. People started by replying with the generic “corporate cunt” or accused me of “voting with my vagina” until one of them decided to click onto my profile and things got a lot more personal. Whatever public info on me they could find, they commented about. In my messenger were people who screenshotted my parents and siblings profiles. They called my dad a “banana” or “coconut” and called him uneducated. I got messages that said my mom, my sisters and I deserved to be beaten and raped. 

I’m not sure if they actually sent anything to my family. If so, I never heard about it. But I spent the whole day with my supervisor reporting accounts and trying to lock my Facebook. Some of the threads I couldn’t mute or take down because the doxxers knew that Facebook hadn’t yet figured out a way to let people report comments and my name wasn’t in the original post. 

The most common comments and messages in between the threats and slurs were “you’re just too stupid to know Bernie is who is best for you.” 

We searched my name on Reddit and tried to get a few posts taken down. I didn’t have a Reddit so it wasn’t worth taking down more than the posts of my personal phone number, email, and address. Taking a look at the account, it appeared to be the same “friend” who tagged me in the first place. Luckily, it didn’t seem to have spread beyond Facebook and Reddit.

After locking down my account, I made a post about my experience. It was a little vague since I wasn’t ready to talk about the specifics, but mentioning “Bernie Bros” rained even more hell I wasn’t ready for. This time from actual friends. Comments talked about how the “Bernie Bros” didn’t exist, how I must be overreacting, how both sides had violent supporters and I was contributing to the violence by mentioning it when I couldn’t provide proof. 

The thing is, I was young and dumb. So was my manager. We didn’t know to screenshot the hate and report it up the chain, nobody told us that’s what we were supposed to do until we were trained again a week later. I couldn’t access the hate anymore, I’d already blocked the accounts. People were riled up in support of their candidates so the hate shifted from an anonymous barrage of insults to comments from friends denying my experience. I blocked more people. 

As I shifted around in the campaign and my role shifted, so did the hate. Since I was making calls from my personal phone, obviously my personal number got out. Prank calls, hate texts, my number was even scrawled in a men’s bathroom somewhere in Colorado. “A Monica Lewinsky hoe- one of Clinton’s bitches. Call for a good time.” Someone texted it, curious why my non-Colorado area code was in a Colorado bathroom. He was nice enough to scratch my number out, but not without a dick pic first.

From there the barrage of messages decreased significantly. Hate sent to my work email had to be saved in a folder, no deleting anything on the Clinton campaign, and flagged up the chain. I didn’t hear much back, there wasn’t much they could do. After the primaries were over, I did digital organizing for a state’s Democratic Party. Those messages weren’t nearly as personal, they didn’t know who I was, but my work email had 2 folders for the 2 different kinds of hate I was receiving- death threats, mostly directed towards the candidates and superdelegates from that state, and dick pics. 

I felt fairly safe and rather confident again, except my new state party was all former Bernie staffers. The email about Hillary “riding a rocket-sized dildo of corporate cash” that made me feel uncomfortable was laughed off by my coworkers and called well deserved. Cheap shots were made at the Clinton campaign’s expense on the Slack channel. The candidates and party chair had all supported Hillary, but the rest of the staff took shots at them too. As a “worker” people didn’t insult me personally or directly, but they insulted where I’d come from to get there. 

I sobbed on election night. My coworkers told me to suck it up. It was my fault for supporting the wrong candidate in the primaries. There were a lot of “I told you so’s” as I cried. 

The “I told you so’s” and “you just didn’t get that Bernie was what was best for you’s” followed me into a campaign in 2017. My full year of experience with Clinton wasn’t as good as the experience from the guy who volunteered on the weekends for Bernie during the primary. The insults followed me to a campaign in 2018 when one of my coworkers called me a “centrist pussy,” called me an “elitist rich bitch” on my birthday, and laughed in my face about how she drove across 3 states to Michigan just to vote for Jill Stein so the Hillary shills could “get what they deserved.” The gaslighting followed me into 2019 as the same thing started happening again to Warren staffers. I tried to come forward again with my new friends and instead was told “well we hear all these things about ‘Bernie Bros’ harassing people but I’ve never seen it. Hillary staffers don’t share screenshots because it was all made up.”

The thing is, it’s been years at this point. The email accounts I had for work are long gone. The phone that had all the screenshots broke after the primaries in 2016. The Facebook messages and tagged posts are long lost, and the list of blocked names on my Facebook has dwindled as people have deleted their accounts amidst Facebook’s many scandals. The internet has not lasted as long as my memories, especially as I’m continually reminded. 

“You just don’t understand that Bernie is who is best for you” has followed me into 2020 as I’ve watched Warren’s staff get caught in the same kinds of hate. 

It’s no secret that I experienced hell from Sanders supporters in 2016, but I’m not sure people knew to what extent. I’m watching the same things happen to the Warren campaign, often fueled by the same people as last time. I’ve been told that years have passed and my experiences don’t matter anymore and I should take down the posters and stickers that reminded me of the best year of my life. I’ve tried to move on and respect the best parts, but the worst parts of 2016 still haunt me as I look at the snakes spammed at Warren staffers on Twitter. It’s no secret that Bernie Bros harass people online, right?

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Six)

It all happened so fast. It seemed like the people at the front, with the big “NOVEMBER IS COMING” and “WE BELIEVE SURVIVORS” banners in Women’s March font had been ready for centuries—I guess in many ways they have. Maybe it’s my Chilling Adventures of Sabrina binge, but I’ve been thinking a lot about inherited pain and struggle, of power passed down between generations of women (ALL kinds of women: trans, non-binary, femme, cis, etc.) all witchy, all trained. We had their power with us that day, and it made everything easier for a while.

On a more earthly note, the training and organizing that has proliferated since the founding of Black Lives Matter, since Tarana Burke first tweeted #metoo, since the 2017 global Women’s Marches, and since Emma González called bullshit on gun violence has us SO READY to fight, SO READY to stand up against evil. We will only get better, more grounded, more interwoven, more soundly knit. We have built and are building something beautiful, every day.

The people (mostly women, mostly women of color, trans, non-binary, butch and femme and cis and so on) crossed the police barricades and made it up the Capitol steps so fast. They unfurled their banners and chanted “Join us! Join us!” so we did. I grabbed Amy’s hand and led her through a break in the barricade, streamed onto the Capitol steps with so, so many others. There we were. On the steps. Facing the crowd. I faced the “E.R.A. NOW” side of my sign toward the crowd and felt very classic and Seventies.

The noise was dazzling, shattering, reverberating off the marble of all of those white supremacist heteropatriarchal buildings:

“We believe survivors!”

“We believe survivors!”

“We believe survivors.”

I looked out into the assembled crowd and misted over from the magnitude of the moment. After a few more minutes, Amy said “Okay, now it’s time to decide: Do you want to get arrested?”

I saw what she meant: dozens of black-clad police started lining up at the corner of the steps.

I had no question of what I wanted to do. My first student on Monday would be a little boy, a first grader who asks me WAY more questions than I should answer about why we don’t sing “I Believe I Can Fly” anymore and about every single other thing. At that moment, he was the highest priority in my heart, pulling me back down safely into the crowd.

There, we had the chance to witness our steps-occupying compatriots’ bravery. As we chanted to the police “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” Layers of protesters left the steps, while many others stayed to get arrested.

The first two people to get arrested were a beautiful, middle-aged, full-figured goddess of an African American woman and the white clergyman she knelt beside, clasping hands at the front of the steps. Cheers erupted for them. As much as I wanted to side-eye the white dude, the symbolism was hard to resist.

Most of the arrested people wore brave, beatific expressions, some with a hint of “Are we really doing this?” in their eyes. There were people of all genders, many with a sort of wholesome, Unitarian-schoolteacher look about them, shiny-eyed and hopeful. A gorgeous femme trans women of color returned to the crowd, exasperated that they wouldn’t arrest her.

“Maybe it’s because I’m a candidate, I don’t know” she said.

Of COURSE she’s running for something. Magical fucking times!

One of the last people to get arrested was a blonde woman of about twenty. She had perfect red lipstick on and subtly punk rock eyeliner, and she was clearly having a panic attack. I saw the fear flicker into her eyes, so out of place and yet exactly right in this moment of plucky determination.

As the policeman put the zip-tie handcuffs onto the young woman, cuffing her at the front of her body, I could see her start to hyperventilate, could see her start to fight back perfectly reasonable tears. I could see her wishing she could just FREAK. THE FUCK. OUT. I started to freak out for her, sobbed from my safe place and wished I could run to help her. Her fellow arrested young women gathered around her to help, breathing with her and helping her to breathe. This young woman’s bravery, her vulnerability, her trapped fear, will stay with me forever, will help me fight.

So much of survivorship is about feeling trapped, immobile, voiceless. If you’ve never lived in a body that faces those conditions, it’s hard to understand the risk that that young woman, ALL those women, all those PEOPLE took. They faced the fears that I’m not always strong enough to face, and they did it for me. For you. For our fellow survivors. For America.

I promise that this sacrifice will never go unhonored or unnoticed. I promise to honor that panicking young woman and her brave compatriots every chance I get. I promise to always face my fears, to raise my voice, to stand as bravely as I can for women of every category. I hope you can make that promise too.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Five)

            After the conversation with the pro-Franken family, I needed to get away. On the way to finding a spot on the Capitol lawn, we ran into an art project. We were asked to write our thoughts on a popsicle stick (There was some kind of pun involved there, I forget.) to be glued onto a “believe” poster. I wrote “Fuck Al Franken too.” on mine and the young woman whose poster it was frowned at my contribution before placing it on a pile of also-not-fucking-cheerful-enough rape thoughts.

            Even protest art seemed to have betrayed me. It truly felt like there was nowhere to turn, like I would never be a part of anything ever again. This is a normal thing to feel during a panic attack but this was a NATIONAL panic attack, a GLOBAL one, fueled and pushed (I can only see this in retrospect) by all of my enslaved and exploited ancestors and precursors, by ALL of the women (especially the women of color) and girls and femmes and trans people and non-binary folks, all of the non-white non-men who had fought for freedom against colonialism before me. When I’m screaming, I’m screaming for all of us.

            I can see now there were generations, millennia, of pain and fear coming out of me in racked, animal sobs. I honestly didn’t are who saw. I hoped they saw. I hoped that the people around me could hear me but I ‘knew” in the way that a panicky rape survivor knows that no one could hear me, no one could ever hear me again. No matter how disruptive, how livid, how determined, no one in the world would ever be able to hear me.

            Amy’s policy, whenever scared at a protest, is to find a friendly tree, so we did. We sat on the grass and I tried to breathe. I was still starving so she gave me her sandwich. I wondered what she would have to eat and I nagged her about it for the rest of the day.

            I sat in the grass and scream-cried. I asked her if that women from China had really said “me too” to me and Amy said yes, she had. I shriek/bellowed “WHY?” Like a poorly written movie character. WHY does she have to go through this too? WHY do they hate us so much?

            I felt so dissociated and lost that it seemed like we were done with the protest. (Spoiler alert: We were not.) I wondered if we should start making our way to the Hope Diamond, my favorite post-protest reward. Instead, I kept crying, brokenhearted, feral, bereft.

            At a certain point, though, I realized that my crying might be disrupting the MAGA hat couple, who were engaging in performatively “reasonable” conversations with protester after protester. (I try not to hate those who take the Sarah Silverman, let’s-empathize-with-racists tact, but I kind of do hate them. Talk to somebody better!) When the spite started to re-emerge in my heart, I began to feel something like okay.

            Amy and I decided to go back to the protest for fifteen minutes and then call it mischief managed, but then we saw that the whole demonstration was on the move. It was magnificent to see: Mostly women (cis and trans), mostly people of color, mostly clad in black, fists held high. They were marching together for the Capitol steps.

            As Amy and I joined the march, I had an inkling that this was going to be one of the most powerful things I would ever see. I was not wrong.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Four)

            A really cool thing happened and then a really dreadful thing happened. Lots of protesters were sitting and having a rest along the planters that lined the sidewalk across the street from the Supreme Court. Amy and I went over there to relax for a minute and make sure our phones were charged. I opened the foil-wrapped PB& J from my purse and ate it with panic-hunger. We still joined the chants going on across the street. I wondered aloud why we weren’t BLOCKING the street. If this were Philly, we would definitely be blocking the street.

            Sometimes, tourists would come by and talk to us about what was going on. A group of Chinese women stopped to ask me what my “E.R.A. Now” sign meant. One woman in the group, tall and thin and brightly dressed, didn’t have much English at all, but she had two words:

“Me too.”

            Her face was shiny and happy, maybe just excited to have found the right words. A lightning bolt of connection, sadness, and heart from all across the world went through me. We smiled at each other. We had something beautiful and horrible and profound: Me too.

            Not too long after that life-altering exchange, a white, middle-aged, American man with a goatee, walking his bike and wearing yellow bicycle clothes, stopped to greet some friends who were sitting near me. In my freaked-out, hypervigilant state, I overheard what he was saying, and it FUCKING CONCERNED ME.

In an offhanded, chitchatty way, he said this:

“It’s just a shame because you know the ones voting yes today are the same ones who went nuts when Franken…”

“NO. NOT HERE.” I went from peaceful PB&J mode to spitting-nails mad in half a second. “YOU ARE NOT going to talk about that FRANKEN BULLSHIT HERE. NOT. TODAY.”

Like so many “liberal” men, he was super-ready with:

“You shut the fuck up, bitch. I’m just talking to my friends.” He shook his finger at me and said something physically threatening, I wish I could remember what.

“GO. AHEAD.” I said, holding my sign aloft and bracing for impact.

It seems so foolhardy now, but I WAS physically ready to fight him. I wanted him to come at me so I could rip him to FUCKING SHREDS and with him, all of the troll-farm- indoctrinated Bernie Bro rape-apologists I’d been tormented by for the past three years.

It felt like the crowd around him was treating me as a threat, but it’s likely that some of them were trying to protect me. NOT the white woman that the Bicycle Man had stopped to greet though--she stood between us, shielding the man from my attack. A black man with a very gentle manner tried to get between us on the other side. He was trying to help, I think, but I felt boxed-in and snarling. People were filming with their phones—I’m sure I’m on some feeds looking and sounding like a caged beast.

“You need to get some help.” The white lady acting as the patriarchy’s human shield kept telling me.

“You’re crazy,” the bicycle man kept saying.

1.      I am getting help! This protest IS me getting help.

2.      Nothing calms a girl down like some good old-fashioned gaslighting.

The worst part was that I ‘knew” in this moment that I was the threat here, not sleep-rape-joke making Franken (Who, in my fury, I kept calling Frankl. Sorry Viktor Frankl! Love youuuuu!”) not this man gaslighting me and telling me to shut up, not even Kavanaugh. To this little crowd, I was the scariest thing at the Capitol that day. Maybe I’m a little bit okay with that, except:

            “You’re making my daughter cry!” said the woman angrily.

            Her daughter, a curly-haired twelve-something, was indeed sobbing, in the same way my then-littlest nephew sobbed when I ruined the Thanksgiving before last screaming at the adults about Nazis and racism and the homophobic Catholic church and rape culture and Water Protectors and god knows what else. I recognized and empathized with both kids’ fear, but I tried to understand that neither I nor my anger was the problem.

            “YOU’RE making her cry! WHY DON’T YOU STAND UP FOR WOMEN?”

            “You need help,” the woman kept intoning, and I really can’t argue with her there.

            “What if it was HER in that fucking picture? What if it was YOU?” I screamed as I started to walk away.

            Although some people said words of encouragement (“Stay strong, you can do this.”) as I was led (by Amy, thank goodness) away from the scene in shock, I felt like the worst monster ever, like I’d ruined the movement, like I’d set back the Democrats by a million years. I was shattered, and ashamed of myself, but I can also see who did this.

            AL FRANKEN FUCKING DID THIS. He fucked women over in person and then he fucked us over as a party. Liberal men did this, by dismissing the concerns of all non-white non-men as “identity politics” and insisting that “real people” only cared about money.

            While I admit my anger was scary and I’m sad that that little girl cried, I hope she’ll remember my fury on her behalf. I hope, someday, it’ll spark some fury in her. That doesn’t make me not-ashamed, but it does make me a little hopeful.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Three)

            After my righteously unhinged encounter with the MAGA couple, Amy and I crossed the street from the Capitol and joined the biggest of the three crowds, in front of the Supreme Court itself. As we joined the throng, they were chanting my very favorite:

“Shut! It! Down!”

            I let so much fury out into those chants that even Amy, who has known me at my very best and VERY worst, looked a little surprised/impressed. I fully embraced the shrill, hectoring harpy-ish ness of my voice, let it all out into the sky with thousands of other rape survivors and our brave allies. The pain and anger that I screamed with felt like it came from the very center of the earth, as if I was screaming as nature herself, which is of course what’s really at stake here.

            In the midst their sadism, their selfishness, their entitlement, Kavanaugh supporters also call themselves “pro-life” and I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. What I see (what I always HAVE seen) in every single one of the Republican policies—from forced pregnancy to caging children to deregulating the environment, is a ruthless, bloodthirsty hatred for life itself.

            And I just realized why: Life, like justice movements, can’t really be controlled. It seeds and prevails itself in millions and billions of chaotic, mysterious, and ravenously resilient ways. Just like this protest’s voice and Dr. Ford’s voice and Anita Hill’s voice and Mamie Till’s voice, life is unstoppable. It’s a vine that keeps seeding itself, keeps sprouting and spreading in insurmountable ways, ways that make white colonialist patriarchs NERVOUS. As long as there is life, as long as there is VOICE, there’ll be something they can’t control. I think that’s where white male supremacists of both/all political parties get their horrible, bloodthirsty nihilism. They have to be stopped.

            So the fury that was coming out of me that day felt both firmly grounded and out of control—at no point for the rest of that day did I stop scaring myself. I decided that I wanted to go up the Supreme Court steps to see the crowd and stake my claim, to plant my feet. When a policeman told me I couldn’t bring my sign up there with me, then told me again after I tried to put down my sign and go up, I got in his face:

“Because GOD FORBID I should want to express myself IN AMERICA.”

            Cliché but true. I felt frustrated with myself for not having a handle on my emotions, but jangled fury seems like the perfect emotion with which to stand on the Supreme Court steps, glaring at America and looking lovingly at the crowd as they chanted:

“We! Believed! Anita then! We! Believe! Christine now!”

            This is my country. Our country, and we are SICK OF YOUR FUCKING NONSENSE. But even/especially on this wild, explosive, feminist day, there was SO MUCH MORE nonsense to come.

Screaming at the Supreme Court, A Love Story (Part Two)

We weren’t just headed to the Capitol for us. As always, I was aware that being able to express my political anger is a privilege and a gift. My check-in person, the friend and neighbor who has my mom’s phone number and the keys to come in and feed the cats if she doesn’t hear from me after protests, had said “Thanks for marching. I’ll be at work, seething.” I’d reached out to my mom directly for support this time, even though I knew this would worry her, and she said: “I’m confident you’ll be fine…you’re sensible and strong. Don’t be afraid.” My sister, the kindest and most conflict-averse person I know, posted on my facebook that morning: “Be safe, and loud!! Love to you and Amy—thanks for fighting the evil!” It was an honor to look forward to yelling on behalf of the women who don’t have the luxury of unabashed anger.

We weren’t sure the protest would go inside the Capitol, but I hoped that it would. I’d seen so many amazing C-Span videos (Just let the phrase “amazing C-span videos” sink in and think about how much has changed in the past two years!) of protesters occupying the Capitol for healthcare, for DACA, against the Muslim bans. I felt proud and brave to be part of that tradition, and my bitter heart was buoyed a little.

When we arrived, the protest was in three different places—one crowd in front of the Capitol, one crowd on the lawn between the Capitol and the Supreme Court getting civil action training with the Women’s March, and one group chanting in front of the Supreme Court itself. I almost immediately lost my cool when I saw a pregnant Info Wars “reporter” interviewing a protester. I almost jumped into the shot and screamed, but for Info Wars, where would I even start? I power-posed with my sign in front of the Capitol and that was the last time I felt festive, felt normal, for a long time.

There was a MAGA-hatted couple in the crowd, sanguine and smug, bothering the protestors and being bothered back. Seriously, who thinks “You know what we should do with our Saturday? Go show a bunch of rape survivors who’s boss!” WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? (Also, I know they could have been paid trolls. Somehow that would be comforting.) Having been on the protest grounds for all of five minutes, I forgot my whole put-the-kids-first-don’t-get-arrested plan. I turned around and started following the couple, sign held high, a beyond-grim expression on my face. This is where I started to scare myself.

I screamed at them. Not in a crowd, not in a chant that would soon be followed by an impromptu singing of “This Little Light of Mine.” I screamed at people, at strangers, at a (it goes without saying they were white and presented as hetero) man and a woman. I wish I could promise that I was at all articulate. The man started filming me with his phone and I screamed “That’s right, get it on tape. Share it with all of your racist, misogynist, rape apologist friends, they need to hear it.” (At least I hope I was that coherent. My memory slips a little here and there in this story.)

The woman, who looked about my age, said “I am not a racist. You don’t know my heart.” She said calmly.

“I can see your heart, it’s there on your fucking HEAD. Grow some fucking empathy.”

“Grow some fucking empathy” is what I pretty much always want to be screaming. But on some level, she’s right. I don’t know her heart. I shouldn’t assume it’s sadism or Stockholm Syndrome that’s inspiring her to act so DEEPLY against her own interest, against the interest of human beings in general, against LIFE ITSELF. The politically self-immolating white woman captured my imagination that day. I have been railing (RIGHTLY) for two years against over-empathizing with the white people who voted their hatred in 2016. But that day at the Capitol I grew a new empathy of my own, one that I didn’t entirely welcome. By the end of the day and in the discussions that followed, I would realize that #metoo isn’t a partisan effort at all, and that every woman, even the horrible ones, would have my loyalty from here on out.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part One)

If you're wondering how to manage/use/deploy your lady-rage (or even, dreamy guy allies, your on-behalf-of-ladies rage!) this book is one thousand therapy sessions. If you're in Philly, call the Big Blue Marble. https://www.bigbluemarblebooks.com/

It was a last-minute decision to go. On Friday night, October 5, Amy and I were watching Murphy Brown, newly rebooted and excoriating the fictional White House Press Corps. We were scrolling through our feeds and seething as the “on the fence” votes changed to Kavanaugh votes. I was double-seething because my “friends” on social media seemed to think that Susan Collins was the ONLY person to blame.

“I think we have to go,” I said, and I looked around on my facebook until I found the Flood the Capitol March, lead by the Women’s March and Planned Parenthood Action. I already had a sign I’d made for an anti-Kavanaugh rally we’d attended a few weeks before in Philly.

It didn’t feel like the other protests. As I cleaned the house, rearranged my Saturday plans, and went to bed early, I didn’t have as much power-to-the-people hopefulness buoying me up. Instead, I was SEETHING, so frustrated to still be doing this work, decades after my own rape experiences and millennia after women were enslaved. IT HAS NEVER NOT BEEN THIS.

Since I became politically active, this blog has often been about convincing people that protesting and other political work could be nice, friendly, loving, inclusive, and all of those things are true. But in the past few weeks, I have become less and less willing to perform polite, feminine, hopeful organizing and more willing to give voice to the feral fury that sometimes makes me feel out of control. Getting ready to Flood the Capitol, I felt almost none of my usual aren’t-humans-amazing feelings. It was more a feeling of “Survivors, let’s burn it down.”

For professional reasons, I’m hesitant to be honest about the fury. Because I work with children, it’s important for me to feel nurturing, loving, and safe. My clients and their families deserve a solid, peaceful presence in their lives, so I feel guilty to also be this raging, scary thing. But at the same time, it’s love, nurturing, and protectiveness—for myself (both adult and inner traumatized child), for my nieces and nephews, for the fear that my students, mostly children of color, will face in a future with Kavanaugh on the bench.

            As Amy and I drove Washingtonward at way-too-early-on-a-Saturday-o’clock, we decided: No getting arrested. The priority was to get safely back to the students, to not miss a single tutoring hour. As much as I admire those who get arrested (Later in the day I would sob watching a young woman have a panic attack as the handcuffs went on.) I knew my priorities were elsewhere. 

Why We Need Fat Liberation

Image Description: "Fat is Life" watercolored in pink, surrounded by orange stars, rainbow swirls, and blue sky.

While I’m well-versed in why other kinds of equality work is needed, I sometimes feel shy about activism on behalf of my fat self. With so much misery around us, with immigrant children in cages, with police being given more and more power to murder, with reproductive justice under constant attack, etc, etc, is this important enough to devote paragraphs to? Even if the topic weren’t ready to haunt me until I type it out, I would still say the answer is yes. Fat-phobia is part of how we got president Trump, both literally and figuratively.

Forty-Five has a lifetime of evil to brag about, but he first crossed my consciousness as a fat-shaming creep at the beginning of  his feud with Rosie O’Donnell.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32EapqqutM This form of othering might seem more innocuous than other Trumpish horrors, but it’s really just part of a methodical, misogynist, white supremacist (https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/fat-shaming-heather-heyer-white-supremacy) abuse campaign meant to frighten and cow us into obedience, meant to undermine women’s power and at the same time, democracy itself.

But this isn’t really about the stupid, hateful MAGA-monster, it’s about, as sooooo many things in this blog are, a cute boy. Monday morning found me in tears when a new friend, who is generally not super-careful about his relationship to privilege and on whom I’d been having a big friend crush, said something casually fat-phobic after I had already mentioned it to him a couple of times. I tried woke-splaining but he said he didn’t want to be “schooled.” He said that what’s offensive is subjective, and I said no, respecting others’ bodies is not optional, especially among friends. He asked me to explain and I refused, sick of trying to convince him to treat me like an equal. It was bad enough I was worrying about what I was wearing whenever I knew I’d see him, putting aside my Lindy-West-approved tent dresses for more “flattering” things, now I was crying in front of him too?

He eventually relented and apologized, and has done much better. I know it’s all part of the process of getting to know someone, teaching people how to be kind and thoughtful in ways that might not have occurred to them before, it still hurts. The emotional labor has a cost, and I am supertired of paying it.

Part of the reason I was feeling jagged Monday morning is that among the tsunami of bad political news, there was one thing that might not have registered as bad news to most. One of my most treasured heroes had slid subtlly rightward, and on top of that I had to feel guilty for being mad about it. On the surface, it should be good news: Roxane Gay had weight-loss surgery and she had leveraged that into a piece for ESPN about how she now has hope of reclaiming her pre-sexual-assault status as an athlete.

Being angry at ROXANE GAY for how she chooses to care for her body feels disloyal in the extreme, but that’s where we are. I’m not mad at her for having surgery or for returning to activities that feel better in a more-mobile body. I am angry that she has written a piece that not only implies that athleticism is not available to fat women, but also gives the body-colonizing twin evils of diet culture and rape culture the only narrative they find acceptable for fat women.

1.      Recognize that fat is a pathology, a result of personal trauma, but that it must be fixed for the public good.

2.      Apologize for the mistake of taking up space.

3.      Put your female body through pain and deprivation so that people can approve of you and welcome you back into the straight-sized fold.

As much as I root for my lost hero to prove me wrong, to feel comfortable in her skin, to swim her lighter laps to freedom, the thing about diet/rape culture is that no amount of shrinking will ever be enough. No matter how much we try to conform to their sadistic, abusive demands, we can never please those who would objectify us. Roxane Gay may trade fat for more catcalling (not that fat women don’t get catcalled, we do and we’re supposed to feel grateful) and will be beholden to public for the size of her body. Although, the fact that I’m writing this means that I think she already is. There is really no way for anyone to win here, except that fucking weight-loss narrative.

Funnily enough, I remember having a similar (though far less verbose) reaction when the woman I’ve come to think of was Roxane Gay’s opposite, Roseanne Barr, got similar weight loss surgery. That felt like a loss too. Back then, it was extremely rare to see a fat person unapologetically in the public eye. In my pre-teen eyes, Roseanne was so beautiful, so funny, and so clearly fuck-you-if-you-don’t-approve-of-my-body that she was a comfort to me as I started the process of understanding the demands that the world would put on my young body. I didn’t understand why the woman who’d coined the phrase “domestic goddess” would go through so much trouble to be thinner. I remember reading about her new portion sizes in a magazine, feeling slightly hurt and bemused.

Of course, Roseanne turned out to be an evil MAGA-monster herself, letting down my young self more deeply than a surgery ever could, so maybe the point is moot. But surely my young self got a message of that surgery, that who I was was okay until I could afford to upgrade. I’m sure young feminists (or “bad feminists” as the case may be) are taking the same message from Roxane Gay’s new piece. Who knows what they’ll do with the message, but it surely adds to the toxic soup of self-hating nonsense that women always have to face. In my kid-brain, Roxane was here to help us, but then she left us.

It isn’t fair of me to think of Roxane Gay’s self-improvement as a betrayal. It’s not fair to colonize another woman’s body with my needs and expectations at all. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that I, as one of her fat readers, am part of what she sees as holding her back, more poundage to be lost so that she can be her shiny new hopeful self. She never said that, it’s just part of the patriarchy’s narrative, but it hurts anyway.

Though we have never met, Roxane Gay has been in my head a long time as a protector, as a big sister, a powerful thread in the tapestry of support and love and self-love that I wrap around myself to preserve my sense of worthiness amidst a culture that tells me I am a project at best and worthless at worst. There are many other threads, but this one will be missed.

If my sense of belonging and self-worth can be rocked by other people’s medical choices, I would say it needs some reinforcing. As I diverge from my hero’s bodily journey, I wonder how many ways I can be kinder to my own, how many ways I can reach out to young women and femmes, how much I can do to serve this weird fight we’re all in, the fight to be able to eat what we want, to take up space, and to no longer apologize for existing. No narrative can take me out of that fight, especially when Dietland is a show. https://www.amc.com/shows/dietland/full-episodes/season-01/episode-01/episodes-1-2

Woke Misogyny Is Hard to Write About

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault, online violence

***PLEASE NOTE: I’m writing as a white cisgendered women, and every oppression that happens to me happens so much more often to women of color, trans people, disabled people, etc. My point of view is extraordinarily privileged in so many ways. As I write about the ways in which misogyny and rape-victim-blaming can intersect with the callout culture approach to social justice work, it’s likely it will seem like I’m forgetting that privilege. I am not. I’m interested here in what the identity of rape survivor really feels like in a body, and how misogyny and victim-blaming still exists even in the most well-intentioned circles. A disclaimer can’t assure that I won’t get it wrong, but this is the space where I get to get it wrong so I can learn. ***

A few weeks ago, I read the wonderful, wonderful, WONDERFUL book The Body Is Not an Apology (https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/) by Sonya Renee Taylor. The book came into my life at a time when I was feeling stuck, and it felt like a lifeboat. The theme of the book, to wildly over-simplify, is that radical self-love is a starting point for making the world a less-terrorized place for bodies. Not just an I-love-my-curves kind of love, well that too but also a deeper love that celebrates even the difficult, ESPECIALLY the difficult, parts of the process each of us is going through. The book gave me space to truly love myself, even to forgive myself, and I felt ready to grow and serve the world better.

I LOVED The Body Is Not an Apology, I still do. I evangelized it all over town, I couldn’t help myself. My neighborhood even has a body-positive book club, and I joined even though I am super wary of groups. The problem is, Sonya Renee Taylor is a friend of some former friends of mine, and the IRL side of the life-saving book knocked me off of my radical-self-love square almost as soon as I got on there. The world, like depression-brain, will always find a way to remind me to live in self-criticism, to remind me that nothing I ever do will be good enough. The depression-brain part is on me, but I didn’t get this way in a vacuum.

While I was going on a kickass self-love adventure with TBINAA, the book club’s Facilitator was having a spoken word journey. This is where things went awry. A few days before the group was meeting for the second time, Facilitator posted a video of a poem to her facebook group. Not Sonya, that would have been lovely, but Mean “Body Positive” White Lady. M “BP” WL was a sort-of-friend of mine until she wrote a blustery post attacking Hillary voters (There may come a day when I’m over the 2016 primary, but this is not that day.) and, when I pushed back, called me a “vagina voter.” How can you call yourself body positive if my anatomy rules out my enfranchisement? Anyway, the usual things happened after that, some people pressed like, some people collected cultural capital by piling on and saying GOD KNOWS WHAT, I blocked the thread and moved on. Mean “Body Positive” White Lady, through very little fault of her own, became a figure of fear in the trauma-soup that is my once-beloved National Poetry Slam community.

For almost a decade, the thing that has made it hardest for me to hear and be heard in online interactions with the NPS community is the pile-on. In fairness, in about 2010 when I secondhand-witnessed my first NPS pile-on, social networking was fairly new. Troll farms, 4chan, revenge porn, etc, weren’t part of the public lexicon, and there wasn’t as deep an understanding of the violence that the online world can perpetrate on women, particularly queer women and women of color. Because of my magic/annoying PTSD brain, the mob-mentality aspect of the pile-on jumped right out at me.

The First Big Pile-On (meaning, the FBPO that entered my consciousness, not the first they had) didn’t happen to me, but also it sort of feels like it did. The details are fuzzy to me, but I’ll do my best. A White Lady Slam Leader was sort of live-facebooking the finals of a national slam competition in…2010? She was making the point that the options for how to be a woman and get slam points are very limited, and in making that point, she said something racist—NOT OKAY. I’m glad people spoke up about her misstep, but the response was wildly disproportionate, with everyone weighing in, comment after comment. To her credit, WLSL saw the whole thing as a learning opportunity, and I learned a lot too, but alongside our progress toward awakening came a clear message: You don’t get to comment on poetry culture, and if you do, you are eligible to be ripped to shreds. At the same time that the mass-pushback was helping us make progress and learn, at the same time that it was helping marginalized voices be heard, it was also sending women a clear message to stay in our place, to keep ourselves small and stop trying to comment on the culture as a whole.

Not too long after that, my own work with the Philadelphia Poetry Slam started to feel like I was being used and like my work (We’d call it emotional labor now—YAY TERMS!) was being taken for granted, for only-sort-of-related reasons. For good and ill, the NPS community stayed with me through my friend feeds. That’s how, in that benighted spring of 2016, I got tangled in the tail-end of a much more upsetting pile-on.

A queer white woman had written a performance poem about her rape. Some of the language in the poem implied that her rapist was Mexican, when he was, in fact, white. THAT’S BAD! It’s upsetting and definitely a problem but also IT’S A POEM SHE WROTE ABOUT HER OWN RAPE. Even though she was a very privileged rape survivor, she was still a rape survivor, and I felt like a PUBLIC PILE-ON was maybe not the best way to address it. I’m a super-lucky rape survivor too, but I don’t think I could’ve made it through the NATIONAL TRIAL BY FACEBOOK that this woman survived. I’m sorry, but no one deserves that.

Like the WLSL, this poet was willing to learn from her mistake. The Woman Who’d Written Her Rape Poem Wrong wrote a public apology on facebook, including an apology for taking private time to heal. By now you’re yelling JANE! DON’T COMMENT ON THAT THREAD! Because I never learn, I commented. I told her she’s still a person, still entitled to self-care, and that taking time for herself was not going to make there be more racism. Then I blocked the thread, vaguebooked about how the NPS community can be shitty and misogynist and went to bed.

What I didn’t know was that the Queen Bully of Poetry Land, who used to be a friend of mine, was at the center of this pile-on. My phone buzzed around 3 AM, QBPL letting me know she thinks I’m as racist as Susan B. Anthony (There’s a certain line of thinking that suggests feminism can never be a thing because of Susan B. Anthony’s poor choices. If this same standard were applied to men, there would NEVER BE ANYTHING EVER.) She told me that I had failed at teaching not because I’d lacked self-care, but because of my own weakness and entitlement. Accurate, but not helpful. After I blocked her and went back to sleep, she texted my ex-wife/BFF to yell at her for having #blacklivesmatter on her facebook page, since clearly we both must be unredeemably racist for thinking a white rape victim is still a person.

No matter how much I distance myself from that NPS scene in my heart and mind and feeds, it still hangs like a tattooed ghost over my creative life. I was surprised when my jangledness about those years-ago pile-ons knocked me out of The Body Is Not an Apology Book Club, but I’m glad to give the Facilitator the chance to go on her spoken word journey without worrying about my weird residual triggers. Today, for me, radical self-love means admitting that this stuff still matters, that there’s still so much fear and un-worked-out pain, so much letting go of the ten-to-twenty-years-ago NPS community that still sometimes knocks me off balance. Mostly, that off-balance is good. Mostly, I’m getting somewhere.