by COMRADE HERMIT (NICKY REID)
Being a mouthy genderfuck internet personality, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing some pretty caustic shit online and I’ve generally come to except it. After the sixth or seventh time being threatened with gang rape by yet another alt-right troglodyte, the shock runs a little thin. I’ve actually become rather skilled at the digital-jujitsu that’s become a necessity for existing as an openly trans person online. I’ve even made a few hideous friends on the far-right in the process. Generally speaking, most trolls are either childish pranksters or sadistic psychopaths. If you keep a razor sharp tongue and a sense of humor, either one can be handled with relative ease. This isn’t to say that they aren’t despicable human garbage or that words don’t hurt, but there are things far worse than hate speech online and I personally have never felt more dehumanized or offended as a queer person than I have by the way Facebook treated me this past week, all in the name of policing hate speech and patronizing marginalized creatures like myself.
It began as a pretty typical week for a mildly agoraphobic gonzo visionary. Writing, volunteering, therapy, more writing, hyperventilating, more therapy. All through out this literary basket-case existence, I try to keep the handful of my very dearest motherfuckers who follow me online informed and entertained with a withering barrage of foul mouthed snark and incendiary rants. After coming home from an extra soul digging, come-to-Jesus, round of group therapy, still basking in the teary-eyed afterglow of cathartic trans sisterhood, I went to log offline for the night, only to discover that Facebook had banned me for 24 hours. Now usually this kind of authoritarian negative reinforcement would be reason for celebration. I work very hard to upset the normies in the straight world and if you haven’t been suspended from Facebook in this line of work, you’re probably not doing it right. Right? But it wasn’t simply being banned that disgusted me. What really drove the proverbial screws into my thumbs was their excuse. You guessed it, ‘hate speech’. And what heinous thing did I dare post to be deserving of such virtue signalling corporate censorship? I can’t remember the exact words because they dutifully expunged them from my permanent record, but it was something to the effect of-
“Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Maybe we should send the Taliban a gift basket, “Knock it off with the fag-bashing but keep up the good work. Hugs and kisses, Some Tranny Anarchist””
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