in response to some random tumblr post yesterday, that discussed how tumblr isn’t a loving community, i wrote this:

i love freedom

(or imagine that i would, were i free of oppression)

but i find it interesting

continuously

that this love

gets recast as hate

because I fight for it

i’ve been mulling over this politics of ‘love’ ever since running into two prominent activists on twitter (@indaliapoetry and @spectraspeaks) who, based on a commitment to love, find it appropriate to dismiss the and silence the voices of trans feminine people of colour, when discussing our erasure by their hands and deeds.

I didn’t screencap it at the time, but after the exchange I linked to above, there was a brief convo between those two talking about how they don’t have time for people who don’t come from a place of love. or some bullshit feel good stuff that allowed them to feel superior while oppressing us.

and you get a lot of this shit both from activists and their critics. be positive. be about love. and this comes even from people who’ll make lip service to the right for people to feel and express anger.

My only real question is, again, why the fuck aren’t we ever allowed to be complex human beings?

I can be angry and full of love. I can be negative and full of love. I can be bitter and, you guessed it, full of love.

because, ultimately, these types of people aren’t actually concerned with love, but more about tone policing and respectability politics.

because i love freedom. i love life. and all i do

is fight to be free of oppression

and to survive and live

i’m positive because i truly believe that i can be free and that i will survive. what greater positivity can their be? what greater hope? what greater faith?

(but of course, loving myself enough to fight for these things somehow never figures into this respectability politics of ‘love’)