Tell Me I'm Worthless(31)
If you keep talking like that you’ll get us banned you daft bint.
Next to her on the bed, Ila’s phone suddenly bursts into panicked life. She looks at it, like it is a strange creature that she is unsure is safe to approach. But then she sees the words on the screen, and knows that no. It is unsafe to approach. She picks the phone up slowly and looks at the screaming notifications that come tumbling in over Twitter and through her email, and texts, too, one or two at first, and then a whole flood.
Is it true? Is it true Ila? Did this really happen? Jesus Christ you make me sick I thought better from you.
She scrolls down. She can’t actually work out what has happened. Nobody is saying. They’re just talking around the subject. But fuck, the thought’s there, isn’t it. What if? What if: Alice has come forward, told people about what she did, no, what Alice says she did, it didn’t really happen surely, she knows that, she knows. She didn’t rape Alice. This is like a mantra. A grounding wire. If Alice has said that, then she can deny it, and she can be truthful in that denial because she will know she is genuinely, from the heart, saying the honest-to-God truth.
But it isn’t Alice. In some ways that would have been easier to cope with. The Alice that lived in her head was barely a person now and had become something closer to a monster from a horror picture, some psycho man who wears women’s skin, or dresses as his mother. But it isn’t Alice, it’s Joyce, the bespectacled gender critical lady from the pub toilets. She tweeted the accusation out into the abyss @ilafurvors (which is her username) after the meeting @ilafurvors approached me in the toilet and tried to initiate sex. I told her I was flattered but she was much too young for me but she kept pushing. Then a second tweet I kept asking her to please stop but she pushed me into a stall and assaulted me. I can’t believe someone who is part of our movement would do this.
The fucking bitch. How dare she. After what she’d done, after Ila promised to not tell anyone, she does this, for no reason, no reason at all. Apart from to insure against the possibility that Ila might break that promise. Ila is still high, far too high for this. The phone screen is sharp against her eyes. More words pouring in, asking her if it’s true, which is pointless because it isn’t. But Joyce has so much more power than her, and she got there first; if you hear an accusation against someone then that biases you, even if the accused leverages a counter accusation.
Is it true? She tweets anyway, despite how pointless it is. No, it isn’t true. In fact, Joyce has accused me of something that SHE DID TO ME. or tried to, at least. She pushed me into a bathroom stall after that exact meeting.
She can barely read the words, and her breaths are short and not bringing enough oxygen to her brain to think properly. And then she is tagged in something, from a different corner. In the replies to a tweet that says that accusation is probably true because Ila Sunder attacked me and tried to penetrate me anally nonconsensually six months ago during sex and then when I resisted she called me a transphobic slur. It’s the girl, the one who freaked out on her. She looks different in the profile picture of her account, but it’s definitely her. Then, underneath that were replies, questioning why she had slept with Ila, why this was only coming out now, asking for evidence (which the girl did not have). Ila was being messaged and mentioned by what seemed to be everybody under the sun, everybody who had ever had a Twitter account, asking her if it was true, asking the girl if it was true, asking Joyce if it was true, asking the world if it was true. It was shared by trans rights people with an undeniable glee. The girl followed up that tweet with she had a black cock strap-on, which was pretty weird anyway, it was the first red flag.
What had she done? What had she said? The girl said she didn’t want to get into details, but she had called her “a tranny,” which is not a word Ila had ever used before, or ever even wanted to use. The girl tweeted that. She said she called me a tr*nny, asterisk and all, but then someone replied to that tweet telling her that even if she was censoring it, it still wasn’t okay for her to use because she wasn’t trans, so she deleted it. Ila couldn’t keep track of anything anymore. Her high little brain was doing somersaults inside her skull. She held her finger down over the app icon for Twitter until it shook, and a small cross appeared next to it. She pressed that, and the app went grey for a moment before vanishing. But then she looked up at her laptop screen and there it was. Twitter was still open as a tab and, knowing it was a terrible idea, she clicked onto it. Somebody was alleging that terfs (meaning her) actually get off on transphobia. why do so many chasers become terfs?
Back before the House, Ila had slept with transwomen, including Alice. She had loved the idea of riding a woman’s dick. But, Christ, that didn’t make her a chaser, did it? That didn’t mean anything at all, surely. She had never purposely sought out transwomen to fuck, or to fuck her. She didn’t know what anything meant, and cursed herself for getting high, for ever having touched weed in the first place, you piece of shit cunt stoner, she said to herself, piece of shit cunt traumatised stoner.
She shut off the tab. If you don’t look at the wound, maybe it isn’t really there. Maybe that isn’t blood that you feel flowing down you. And anyway, online life moved fast. Maybe by tomorrow everyone would have forgotten about who she was. Maybe they would never forget.
She pulled herself off of her bed and went to the bathroom. It hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Long black hairs curled around the inside of the sink and covered the bar of soap by the shower. She didn’t have a bath, just a shower. The light in the bathroom was harsh, made her look strange in the smeary mirror. Ila stared at herself through the filthy glass, asking who she was. Was she who she thought?