Tell Me I'm Worthless(51)

What is a woman? That’s always the question, isn’t it? What was a woman, and what now is a woman, in the new world, can a woman be nothing more than a handful of flesh and skin shaped into offensive images, and, well, people say look at the Nazi’s, they burned the books on trans people, and she feels sick when they say that because her grandma actually fled the Holocaust and what did she get from that? A nose she hates and people not believing that she can be two things at once, and people thinking that she must have strong opinions on Israel either way because she’s either brown or Jewish but not both, but she feels sick when people say Hitler killed trans people, even if it’s technically true it feels like they are removing her own arteries and wrapping them around her throat and choking her with them. And Alice did once listen to a podcast where they said, well now we aren’t antisemitic, but it’s strange all this billionaire rapists are Jewish, and it had been meant as a joke probably but she’d never been able to tell, and who runs the factory, the factory that is a tower with the spectre behind her, whatever that presence had been, Ila or Hannah or her own mother or herself, who owned the tower, hey, that’s all she’s saying, that’s all she’s asking, follow the money, anonymously of course, she doesn’t want to have people coming for her, and would Ila have people coming for her in real life, now they thought she was a sex creep who liked to say slurs during sex (now they knew she was a sex creep who liked to say slurs during sex)? Just another Jewish sex creep, thinks Alice, and decides she only meant that as a joke. She decides this only after she has already thought it.





Are you a bad person, or do you just have reasonable concerns, are you a bad person, or are you just asking questions? In the crushed heat death you ask how to win a culture war, and when does a culture war become a real war, where is the line that is crossed, is it the spilling of blood and has blood already spilled? It must be a war to be called a war. If you call something something, it becomes something, if you call a tower a factory, then it’s a factory, and we have to take you for your word, take it as it comes, take it on the chin, keep calm and carry on in Churchill’s Britain with his statue all covered in protective wood to stop the masses from clawing at it. And what right does anyone have to think on any of this, let alone try and put it into words, especially a white woman, white women are symbols, white women as symbols, white woman are literally symbols and whether that’s somehow still too subtle, and why write when you feel guilty, where were you when we lost the culture war? This is how you lost the culture war: you were kneeling in front of a swastika made of white flesh, you were in a forest somewhere, a group of boys suspending a plank with a rusted nail over your young soft brain, you were getting raped in your girlfriend’s bed whilst Come on Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners played from her phone, you were meeting and drinking in a pub laughing with those names you aren’t allowed to print for fear of legal action – so much for free speech – but they are the new wave of British intellectual, dark web fascism creeping into, out of, through, and around the borders of the British academy. You talked to a Trotskyist and he told you that he thought the London riots were a bad thing, that they had no revolutionary potential at all. You nearly spat in his drink. You couldn’t believe he said it, although every person out of the sphere of leftism probably agrees with him. And then raining from the sky you see it all clear and lucid: free speech, de-platforming, suing students for calling you a TERF, getting an OBE but still being silenced, getting a book deal but still being silenced, wearing a mask which says CENSORED but still being silenced, being the establishment and the anti-establishment too, all at once, the King and the revolutionary as well, the whole discourse cycle one long endless ouroboros sucking on its own clit, it makes you scream, the state of the world and the state of the Union, it makes you scream because you know that truly you can’t change a single thing in this godforsaken country, a country so racist that it will vote to kill its own immune system right before a global pandemic, a country so racist that the very ground stinks, a country so racist that your seemingly left-liberal parents have a map of the British Empire hanging on their wall and don’t really question it at all, which, I suppose, means they aren’t left-liberal at all, doesn’t it, and your mum has a show called Trans Kids: We Need to Talk recorded onto the TV box but she’s never watched it, where every time travellers move into an area they find themselves in danger because I guess racism doesn’t count when it’s towards them for most people, because bigotry and hatred towards travellers is such an ingrained part of British culture that it is difficult to imagine a world where that isn’t the case, a country so racist that it might as well all be a red room in a eugenics paedophile house in an undisclosed location which is in Brighton or Portsmouth or London or somewhere else entirely. Where were you when we lost the war?

In a House. That’s where you were.

In a House where no live organism can continue to exist, you continue to exist. And now there you are again. And you will go back there as many times as you can until it fucking tears your guts out and leaves you truly, actually, dead and rotting, and then you’ll have to stay there, in its walls, pressed close to all those other women it martyred for the common cause of reproducing fascism over and over and spreading it as rain across this nightmarish island we call Britain. I don’t know what I believe, I just know I want to be free of it, truly. I just want to pull it out from under me, look at it beating in my hand and then crush it. This is what you should want, too. Try to make the best of a bad situation. British spirit, or something like that. Stiff upper lip.