Bash Back
Notes on Violence, Two
A chàirdean,
This week I’m going to write to you about violence, queerphobia and childhood. I wasn’t sure when I started this series that it was going to be a series: I went to a protest, had a traumatic flashback, and needed to write about it to find my way through. I’ve been thinking and writing about political and interpersonal violence for years, but that experience unlocked some kind of readiness to write I know, though, that it’s heavy material. Look after yourself whatever way you need when reading.
*
It’s a winter’s night, dark and clear. I’m home, in the Northern Isles, so dark comes early and sets deep. I’ve been rehearsing for a play, but we finished early, so I’ve forty minutes or so to spend before my Dad comes by to pick me up. There’s nowhere for a teenager to go, and it’s cold. I walk around and around the same block in the centre of town: past the cathedral, where we sing; past the garden, where we find a corner to kiss; past the new library building, where I pick up new books each week; past the old flat, from when we lived in the island and my Mum worked in town. Cathedral, garden, library, flat. Round and round. The walls of St Magnus are lit up dark red, like they could warm me.
“Hey faggot!” The voice is behind me. Like mine, it’s newly broken. Two other voices laugh. I turn. “Why’s your hair so long, faggot?” The three of them are swaggering towards me. Haven’t I seen these boys before? I’ve seen these boys before. What are their names? One of them leans forward, his face reaching up to mine, grinning. “Cut your fucking hair, faggot.”
Then my hands are on his shirt and I’m spinning him against the heavy wooden door of the town hall. He’s pinned before I know what I’m doing. The turn is so shocking – to him, to his friends, to me – that for a moment none of us move. I look at him. I realise that I’m bigger than him. We’re neither of us more than skinnymalinky, but I’m the taller. It was only his words that bigged him up, and now words come to my mouth. “Don’t you talk to me,” I spit, my lips close to his. “Don’t you ever come at me again.”
I drop him and walk away before there can be another turn, before his friends realise what they could do. The three of them laugh and jeer at my turned back, but there’s no real fire to it, and besides, they’re walking away too. None of us want to acknowledge what’s happened. None of us want to take it further. I turn the corner to the lane past the garden and lean against the old stones. There’s bile in my throat. There’s blood in my ears. There’s a heavy sound that it takes me some minutes to realise is my heart. A hand against the wall. The stones are cold, gritty, firm. I walk on, clockwise around the town. When I turn back onto Junction Street, the boys are nowhere to be seen.
Fifteen minutes later, my Dad’s car pulls up and I slide in. “How was rehearsal?” he asks. “Fine,” I say. And then we drive home in silence.
Years later, I learn the slogan “Queers Bash Back.” And I think, “Do I?”
*
When I was a child, I fought back wildly. Autistic and stuck in an education system that didn’t know what to do with me, in a social setting that despised me, I was the child that other children liked to make explode. They would pile on the pressure, the taunts and the slights and the shoves, until I snapped. The snap was the point. I would fight back with my mouth and my little hands. I was made to sit in the headmaster’s office for weeks at a time, which was meant to be a punishment, but really meant that I got to read a book without anyone bothering me. At least once I was suspended for a week and made to stay at home, which meant that I got to read a book without anyone bothering me. As far as I can remember, none of the children who bullied me – other children who also didn’t understand their own capacity to cause pain, and who were also being taught who deserved to be hurt and who didn’t – were ever punished for what they did as I was punished for fighting back.
My memories of the learning support I had at school are confused. The speech therapy and the occupational therapy are muddled together with the time sitting in the headmaster’s officer and the time with a teaching support staff member talking to me about anger management. She said that I should try counting to ten, try walking away. Children don’t always know what’s support and what’s punishment. I’m not sure adults do either. I do remember learning that my anger was a problem that needed to be controlled. That my capacity for violence was dangerous and shameful.
This is what I think about when I remember the night I bashed back. The night when, faced with three boys who could hurt me badly, I showed that I could hurt them instead, and we all walked away. I have to think hard to remember the cool of the air and the red glow of the cathedral. But the memory of shame, nearly 25 years old, is as alive to me right now as the woolly jumper scratching my neck and the aftertaste of coffee on my tongue. I remember sitting in my Dad’s car and feeling sick with shame that I had let my anger loose. The shame still burns.
I’ve never again laid hands on someone else in violence.
A grab, a lift, a push, and a walk away.
*
Six years ago, a friend and I found ourselves on opposite sides of an emerging divide. I had begun transitioning publicly a few years earlier, and she had begun moving towards the anti-trans wing of contemporary feminism. It was all playing out on social media, a place where we were both noisy with our opinions, though never directly at each other. I texted her and said we should sit down and talk it out. We met in a pub and didn’t get far, but we did speak, we did at least make attempts to listen to each other. A couple of months later, I suggested trying again. We made a date. But in a few days she texted calling it off. “You’re not safe,” she wrote. “You believe in violence.”
The feeling that swept over me when I received that text, sitting on the edge of my bed, getting ready for sleep, was the same feeling I had sitting in my Dad’s car, the same feeling I’m experiencing right now. Shame. It feels like hot-legged ants crawling up my arms. There’s a buzzing at the back of my neck, a pressure in the front of my head. I’ve just thrown a chair across the classroom. I’ve just flailed my arms in the playground and now everyone else has backed away and a teacher is approaching.
I’ve been thinking about this text ever since. I’ve been asking myself, “Do I?”
The answer is that of course I believe in violence. Almost everyone believes in violence, which is to say, in using pain and the threat of pain to make other people do what you want. We just disagree about who should mete out violence, who should receive it, and when it’s justified. People believe in war and the police, they believe in animal farming and evictions, they believe in armed resistance and national security, they believe in prisons and self-defense. It is true that violence begets violence, except that almost everyone acts on the belief that sometimes you need violence to stop violence, and non-violence sounds appealing until you see how it protects state violence. Recognising this near-universal belief in violence is the first step to being honest about what it will take to actually reduce the violence of the world.
This is not what she meant, of course. I think my old friend – and of course the friendship never recovered from this text, and the repurcussions have only grown worse – was referring to my writing on police abolition and physical resistance to street fascism. I’ve used my poetry to explore complex and sometimes disturbing feelings about state violence and resistance. I also know that she was only able to work up my anarchist commitments into a fantasy that I personally was plotting to physically harm her – a fantasy which has only grown stronger – because I’m a trans woman, because I’m marked as someone with an inherent potential for violence.
This idea – that all trans women are inherently dangerous, because we’re actually men (who are universally and uniformly dangerous), and more dangerous still because we’re trying to hide it – has since taken over media writing and popular consciousness. I contend with it every day. I see the looks people give me in the street, looks which say “You’re not safe.” I think about it whenever I work in a school, readying a safety plan in case someone decides I’m an inherent threat to children. It shapes how I dress myself, how I carry myself, how I protest.
Once I was in groups that have chased street fascists through Scottish towns to prevent them from demonstrating. Once I was in groups using our bodies to push through police lines with physical force. I’ve never laid hands on someone else since that night outside the cathedral, but I’ve made the threat apparent. I’ve used my body to resist.
But since my transition, I haven’t used my resistant body other than to put it quietly in the way, letting it be moved if that’s what the state chooses to do. A sit-in is the limit of my physical resistance. This is, partly, out of fear of what would happen if I were arrested. I’ve spent the night in the cells as a feminine boy and I have no desire to do it as a trans woman. But more than that, it’s because I’m finally doing what all my teachers tried to make me do, and bottled up all my anger inside. It’s not safe for me to show my anger, not in my words and not in my hands and not in the curl of my lip, because any hint of that rage will only confirm what people already think of me: You’re not safe. You’re violent.
Whether or not I believe in violence is immaterial now. I can’t act on it. All I have is what I write, and even that I police. I’m scared to even write this blog, knowing that it can be taken as evidence of how dangerous I am.
*
I am, theoretically, proud of that faggoty boy who pushed back. She faced down a threat and walked away without making it worse. Theoretically, I celebrate what she did, just as I can laugh about memories of resistance, at videos of police falling into the burn at RBS headquarters and of fascists being pelted with eggs and milk on the Scotsman Steps. In my gut, though, I don’t know how to love my adolescent self. Maybe I’m frightened of her. Maybe I’m frightened of how other people would see her. Maybe I’m frightened that she tells some hidden and undeniable truth about me. Maybe I’m frightened I can’t live up to what she could do.
What is my shame trying to tell me? My anger? My fear?
And what can I do with it now?
Love,
Josie
What I’m Doing
On Thursday 7th Novemeber I’ll be in Dundee for the Blether storytelling night as part of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival.
And 21st-23rd November I’ll be at Push the Boat Out, chairing a panel on minority language translation and conducting a sound poetry choir.
What I’m Reading
Amanda Thomson’s Belonging helped me look at Scottisdh landscapes with history and care.
Jen Calleja’s Fair is passionate and persistent on what matters about translation.
Hal Schrieve’s Fawn’s Blood is a vicious delight and also features vampire Pat Califia.