we are all hurting all the time; the world is a machine that has been designed to hurt us. it is a rock tumbler, wearing us away, eroding our strangeness and our roughness, until we are smooth and we are featureless.

we hurt because this is what the world is meant to do.

[cw: animal cruelty]

in 1962, Roger Ulrich published a paper titled 'Reflexive fighting in response to aversive stimulation'. i won't go into the details because it's all kinds of fucked up animal cruelty, but here's a high-level summary.

if you put two rats together in a cage, and then you electrify the floor, they will fight. it doesn't matter how well they know each other, what kind of relationship they have, what other stimuli are present; rats in pain will attack each other.

his later research also demonstrated that rats will attack *anything* available when they're in pain. they will attack whatever's closest. they will lash out because they don't understand where the pain is coming from.

i might once have tried to dance around this analogy with clever rhetoric, but i'm tired:

we're rats. the hateful monster that is our society, with all its misogyny and racism and queerphobia, is the electrified floor.

everything hurts so much, all the time. moments of respite are rare and unpredictable. we don't understand why they keep electrifying the floor, or when it's going to happen, or how long it's going to last.

and our pain becomes aggression. it becomes reflexive fighting.

nobody is cruel to trans women the way other trans women are. nobody knows better how to get under our skins than we do. we may despise the fascist theocrats but it's a distant kind of detestation, an abstract hate for an abstract notion of a person.

they aren't nearby.

when the pain comes, we bite whoever's closest. we bite each other.

this doesn't mean we really do hate each other. it's reflexive fighting, not intentional. but when there's a pause in the savagery, we're still wary of each other. of course we are; we're all bleeding still.

there's a narrative of leftist 'purity culture', that we're all enforcing some kind of thought policing. but that's not really true, is it? we don't really care what people think. we care if they've transgressed in a way that allows us to feel justified in biting them.

we're so fucking *eager* to tear each other apart. whether it's warranted or not, it's horridly *enthusiastic*, the way we spread rumors and tweet out indirect dark hints about 'the discourse' and 'the main character of twitter'.

the architects of our pain are out of reach. we can do nothing to them.

but there's always some transgressor within biting range. there's always some proxy for the forces that we believe are causing our pain.

think about the last person you blocked because they were problematic. think about the last callout you agreed with.

did you immediately think 'yeah, but that was different, they really *were* bad or dangerous or problematic or hateful or whatever'? because i did.

the righteousness felt good, didn't it? the sense that you were justified in your anger and fury. that here was a target for your reflexive biting who *really deserved it*.

and god it felt good to just bite, didn't it? to just fucking express all that pain in the form of rage.

let me ask you this, though, and it's *really important*, okay:

When was the last time you forgave someone?

when was the last time someone was able to make amends? when was the last time you realized your lashing-out was unjustified?

when was the last time you apologized because you were wrong?

When was the last time you were wrong, and you admitted it to others?

we talk about restorative justice as though that's what we're engaged in as a community. it makes us feel good. we're not brutal assholes like those eye-for-an-eye types. we don't punish, we rehabilitate.

what's the real path back from transgression, though?

I've seen people apologize for things. simply or elaborately, sincerely or through carefully crafted messaging.

i've seen people be called out again and again for the same things they've apologized for. their identity as a transgressor is indelible. they cannot ever atone.

have you ever hesitated before saying something, because you wondered if it might get you called out? have you ever tweaked your wording just in case, out of a genuine fear of transgression for which you will not be allowed to atone?

i have. i have *in this very thread*.

the truth is, 'restorative justice' is the pretty words we play dress-up with, because we can't admit what's really going on -- it would cut to the heart of our narratives as the kind and good and compassionate faction in the culture wars.

what we're really doing is biting.

and as long as we're in pain and we can't reach the real authors of our pain, we will bite whoever's closest.

we will bite each other.

at least once a week i see another person being torn to pieces because they're nearby and we're in pain and we want to bite and they've transgressed in some way that makes them an acceptable target for our reflexive savaging.

i keep retweeting the same fucking thread about it.

the eloquent @sera9elliot says 'it's not a community, it's a demographic'. and that's true, but it doesn't help, because the demographic is still who's in range of our teeth.

the only thing that will help is to learn to stop biting.

i'm going to tip my hand a little bit here, because so far i haven't mentioned any names (though i bet you've thought of several, and i bet our lists of names don't have 100% overlap, which is fucked up and terrifying).

have you watched Natalie's video on Canceling?

what i'd like you to do is go watch it, and i'd like you to try really, really hard to leave your pre-arranged narratives and your sense of indignation behind when you do. it's fucking hard as hell to do this; i know, because i only recently managed it.

what i saw when i re-watched it with the interpretive layer set aside -- the part of me that was saying 'oh here she goes making excuses' -- is:

a real human

who is more like me than almost everyone in the world

who could be my sister or my partner

who is in *agony*.

folks, we *ripped her apart* and her pain is spilling out all over that video.

i was fucking *shaken* when i realized this. when i realized the kind of cruelty i'd allowed myself to be a part of.

not everyone we bite has the wherewithal or the talent to make an emotional plea for their humanity. most of the people we bite just... leave. bleeding and abandoned and alone, they just leave.

we drive them away.

not the terfs, not the transphobes, not the alt-right; *us*. we drive them away. we don't want the smell of their injuries in our den. like lions chasing off a sick male, because his stink is all wrong and frightening to us.

natalie can fend for herself (though she shouldn't have had to). she's rich (by our standards) and popular and pretty and has a deeply loyal network of real life friends and found family.

she's the exception. who else faced what she faced and didn't have her resources?

i know that biting the rats in the cage with us is a reflex. i know we can't help it; it's just how our animal brains are wired. we're not bad people for biting.

but we are humans, and that means we can learn, and we can try to do better.

we can learn not to bite each other.

we can learn to bide our time until we can reach the hand at the switch, the one that's electrifying the floor.

and then we can bite and bite and bite.

~fin~

i don't have a patreon or anything to plug, so if you want to do me a favor, go watch that video i suggested, in the framing i suggested? please?

and then try not to bite anyone for a few days?

please?

addendum: this is not a thread about natalie. if you can't cope with me having mentioned her, substitute the high-profile transfeminine person driven off twitter that suits you.

because there are so.
fucking.
many.