A white woman walks into a bar. She claims it.

Once upon a time, a white woman came into my life and proceeded to cast me as a background character in her life story.

It’s a perplexing feeling, being relegated to second fiddle in the course of living your own life. It feels strange to watch, almost from the outside, as you are repositioned far from the centre of your own tale so that you can be part of the scenery in someone else’s. It doesn’t stop feeling strange the second time, or the third time, or the tenth, or the hundredth. It never stops feeling strange, actually. It always feels the same – like you have been uprooted, shoved out of the way so that something bigger and more important than you can proceed without interruption.

To white people, that’s what I am – an interruption.

Intersectionality as a concept has been around since the nineteenth century, but it was given a name and definition by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 (the year of my birth!) in her paper, Mapping the Margins. Since then, it’s been adapted in theory and practice not just by women of colour, but by queer women, disabled women, trans women, non-binary people, sex workers, poor and uneducated women, women in the developing world and many others. Intersectionality gives us a framework within which we can discuss and try to understand the tangled webs of oppression and privilege that we’re forced to navigate throughout the course of our everyday lives.

No intersectionalist believes that oppression is some kind of competition. There’s no prize to be won for being “most oppressed”. What I love about intersectionality, in fact, is how open and permissive it is, how it creates a space for all of us to share our lived experiences and learn from each other. I share this space with native women who share my experiences of coming from a colonised culture; with trans women who share my experiences of feeling pressure to pass as a member of the dominant group in order to survive; with sex workers who share my experiences of navigating sexuality and agency whilst beset on all sides by people trying to rob them of both. Our experiences are not the same, but there is a thread of commonality that links us – we experience oppression and privilege in varying ways, and we understand on a very profound level what it means to eke out a life, as it were, on the margins, leveraging our privileges against our oppressions so that we might stake whatever claims we may on this territory people call “humanity”. We have found, by battling through our differences and disputes, an ideal many claim to aspire to but few ever achieve. We have found that thing called solidarity, and while it doesn’t mean we never step on each others’ toes, it means that at least we’re getting better at apologising for it.

Alas, to the last bastions of privileged cisgender white feminism, this rich and complex tapestry of human experiences we have woven is nothing but a backdrop, a mere insignificant detail adding a little colour to the scenery as they play out the stories of their lives on a stage that should belong to all of us.

I do not hate white women. I would go so far as to say I don’t hate anyone. This stage is truly big enough for all of us. There is space for every voice, a place for every story, and they are all important and valuable and worth telling and hearing. I do not believe a rich white woman’s experiences with sexism are trivial or that they should be dismissed. What I believe is that anyone who is willing to make other people into scenery so that they can become the stars of everyone else’s stories is not just dangerous, but malicious. On a stage with room enough for everyone, it takes a very specific kind of person – someone blinkered by greed and egocentrism and vanity – to demand that everyone else surrender all available space to them. It takes a mindset that is nothing short of toxic to expect that all concerns must always be and will always be secondary to one’s own.

No intersectionalist believes this, but many white feminists do.

I am not a supporting character in anyone’s story. I have eked out this space for myself on the stage, a space where I can tell my story, but also a vantage point from where I can listen to others. I am not particularly territorial about my space. I’m happy to share it, exchange it, hand the mic over to someone else with a story to tell, carve out sections for others who don’t have spaces of their own. I lose nothing by sharing my space. But I lose everything by having it taken from me. I lose everything by having myself relegated to supporting cast in what is meant to be an ensemble production. I lose everything by being denied my right to play out my own story because someone else has decided I’m in the way of them playing out theirs.

A white feminist walks onto the stage and demands the spotlight – and once she has it (and she will have it, or there will be hell to pay) – she insists it must be hers forever. No sharing, no exchange, no back and forth, no taking turns. The white feminist colonises the stage as she colonises the bodies of women of colour, the gender identities of trans women, the agency of sex workers. The white feminist takes our tapestry and rolls it up and bundles it off in a corner because it’s taking up space she wants for herself. And when we dare to protest – after all, this is everyone’s stage – she calls us bullies, bitches, beasts. She pushes us further outwards into the margins. She is not content until the spotlight does not shine on us at all.

This is the toxic and insidious work of modern-day white feminism. There is no solidarity in it. There is no sharing, no back and forth, no time or space for other people to live their lives and be acknowledged. There is just a white woman in the spotlight, demanding that everything be about her. And the sad thing is, had she just asked, we’d have happily shared our space with her. We are not greedy or selfish or grasping, at least not more so than any other human being – intersectionality is beautiful in that it is about the intersections between every kind of privilege and oppression we experience. There is no need for this false dichotomy of white neo-colonial feminism and intersectional feminism. It exists because white women created it, and all in a last-ditch effort to take over the entire stage for themselves.

It saddens me to see that so many white feminists refuse to embrace intersectionality. It saddens me and hurts me and makes me angry. It makes me wonder how insecure they must be in their power, if even the thought of sharing a stage with other people makes them blanch so. Mostly, it just makes me tired – tired of fighting, tired of being cast as a bully, tired of being pushed into the background mid-sentence so that someone who already has a platform a hundred times the size of mine can speak over me. One’s back can only be used as a stepping-stone on the way to a pedestal before it breaks, and mine, I fear, is close to breaking. I am very tired of being a rung on a white woman’s ladder to greater heights.

I find my strength where I always have – in the women here on the margins with me, staking their claim to whatever space they can find, sharing their stories and living their lives and banding together. We have no need to cast each other as background characters or use each other as props. Our strength comes from encouraging each other, amplifying each other, celebrating our successes together, commiserating together when we feel grief, helping each other up when one of us falls. This is that ideal they call solidarity – not unthinking devotion to one cause over another, not unresisting compliance, but a space within which we are free to raise our voices in harmony, not in unison. We are different in so many, many ways, but we have in common the only things that matter – humanity, love, compassion, a desire to create a better world for each other and for those who will come after us. We don’t always agree and we don’t always get along, but we always support each other and we are always there for each other in times of need. Solidarity doesn’t mean a lack of dissent – it means working together to overcome our differences and move forward. It means nobody left behind. It means humanity.

A white woman walks onto the stage and claims it. The rest of us shrug and find another stage, because whatever white feminists may think of those of us in the background, we play second fiddle to nobody. We are not bit parts. We are not props or pieces of scenery. We have our own stories and we will tell them whether white women want to listen or not.

I dedicate this to everyone with whom I stand in solidarity, and everyone who has ever stood in solidarity with me. Our stories are ongoing. In time, we will find a space to tell them all.

An open letter to my favourite humour website in the world

Dear Cracked,

I was going to start this with a bad joke about how your website’s name is well chosen because you are as addictive as a certain kind of drug that shares your name, but let’s be honest – I am no internet humourist, which is why my dreams of writing for you some day will probably never be realised. Seriously, though, I just got done with a several-hour-long binge-read of your articles. I had even read some of them before! I just couldn’t help myself. You are that great.

There are loads of things I love about you. Obviously, the dick jokes rank near the top, along with all the titties. But I also love that you manage to deploy humour the way it’s meant to be used: pointing upwards. You don’t take cheap shots at people of colour, you don’t mock the disabled, and you’re actually pretty damn feminist for a website run mostly by dudes. I have found better feminism in some of your timeless list-based humour than I have on websites run by actual self-proclaimed feminists. That’s pretty freaking impressive. You really get it, you know? You get that jokes are funnier, cleverer and about ten thousand times less douche-y when they challenge the status quo. If we could lock Daniel Tosh in a room with all of you and not let him come out for a month, I think he might actually emerge as a half-decent comedian.

(I’m joking. Nothing could make Daniel Tosh a decent comedian. But I digress.)

I only have a couple of really tiny nitpicks. You know how sometimes you love your best friend to death, but they have one or two habits that make you want to punch them in the face? Well, I’m not saying I want to punch you in the face (nor am I saying you’re my best friends – though, call me!), but there are just one or two things you could do to achieve the near-impossible and become even more awesome. Here’s what they are – in list format, because I get that that’s kind of your deal:

1. Please stop it with the “hooker” jokes.

Most of the time, your attitude towards sex work is actually pretty okay (again – surprisingly feminist for a dude-run humour site!), but there are a couple of things you could be doing better. Can you please stop calling the ladies “prostitutes”, “hookers” and “whores”? Pretty please? That’s a form of whorephobia, and it’s led to the kinds of gruesome murders you could probably feature in some of your Hallowe’en urban legend articles. Societal discrimination against a class of working women, often leading to violence and murder being perpetrated against them, just isn’t all that funny. It’s always a little jarring when I’m reading a great article and out of nowhere, a derogatory term for sex workers has been slipped in for no real reason.

Fixing this is really easy! Just refer to them as sex workers and to what they do as sex work. It’s not so much your attitude that needs to change – just the terminology you use. Words like the ones I listed above are hurtful and damaging slurs, and as you’ve proven time and time again, you can be hilarious without resorting to cheap shots like that.

2. Find another word for “unintelligent” that isn’t “retarded”.

This makes me wince every time I see it. I know a lot of the people you talk about are absolutely ludicrously dickbrained. What they aren’t is suffering from intellectual impairment, which is a real series of conditions for which “retarded” is a very nasty term. Ditto for “lame” – you’re inadvertently hurting a lot of disabled people by using this to describe stuff that sucks.

You’re great at coming up with creative new insults, and there are already plenty there for you to use that aren’t ableist slurs – fucksticks, dickwads, fucknuggets, shitlords, the list goes on. Maybe consider using some of those instead? As someone who knows and loves a lot of people with both physical disabilities and intellectual impairments, it always makes me a little sad to see you throwing around the r-word like it’s meaningless. It’s not that hard to erase it from your vocabulary with a little effort and a lot of creative cursing, and it would make your site a lot more inviting to people who are disabled or know and love folks who are.

That’s pretty much it, y’all. You run a great site that produces high-quality content, and I’ll probably still be reading you twenty years from now because as you wrote in an article one time, our tastes kinda get fixed when we’re young, and many of my formative years were spent reading hilarious dick jokes and staring at boobies on Cracked. (Related: it may have been Cracked that helped me realise I was also into ladies…but again, I digress.) There is roughly a 0% chance that anyone who writes for Cracked will ever read this, but hey – I can hope, right? And if you do, by some miracle, happen to stumble across this blog post, I know that being the decent, smart, startlingly attractive folks you are, you’ll at least think about what I’ve said here.

I look forward to many more years of sexy, sexy all-American humour delivered straight to my inbox/news feed/one-day-ubiquitous Google Glass device – hopefully with a little less of the nasty stuff thrown into the mix.

Thanks for the laughs (and, again, for possibly helping me come out to myself – you were right, titties are amazing!).

Sincerely,

Jay.

We need to talk about tone.

So here’s why I’m not “nice”.

Do you know what “nice” gets you? Nice gets you harassed on the street by guys who refuse to acknowledge that you are clearly uncomfortable with them hitting on you as you wait for the bus. Nice gets you passed over for promotions because you were the weakling who didn’t put herself forward. Nice means that when you’re raped, people will say it was your fault because you didn’t say “no” loudly enough, often enough or quickly enough to your rapist (who wouldn’t have listened anyway, but who cares about that?). Nice gets you not taken seriously. Nice is the inch you give that leads to a mile being taken.

Nice gets you a whole lot of nothing.

You may take issue with my anger. I’m here to tell you that I could not give less of a damn about your hurt feelings if I tried. I’m angry for a reason. I’m angry because nice has gotten me and other women like me and other women who aren’t like me at all absolutely nowhere, no matter how many times we’ve tried it. I’m angry because that is the only way people will sit up and take notice.

I’m angry because I have a right to be, and if you want to come into my spaces and try to police that anger, try to make me act nice because it’ll make my message more palatable for you, then I kindly invite you to take a rusty farm implement and fuck yourself with it, because you have colossally missed a point that I am getting very, very tired of explaining.

There is nothing militant or radical about anger. Anger is an entirely logical and reasonable response to decades upon decades of oppression, marginalisation, silencing and dehumanisation at the hands of the privileged.  Anger is what keeps us going in the face of man after man after man telling us that we do not deserve the fundamental human rights we are being denied. Anger is confronting, yes. It’s meant to be. You know why? Because the facts we’re dealing with here are pretty confronting things, and sugar-coating them so that you’ll find them easier to swallow is counter-productive.

It is a fact that women are raped and sexually assaulted in horrifyingly high numbers across the globe. It is a fact that women are being denied access to healthcare by men who think they are the best arbiters of what a woman should be allowed to do with her body. It is a fact that trans women, sex workers and women of colour are disproportionate targets of violence and other hate crimes. It is a fact that the system, such as it is, is so firmly rigged against women that compared to us, Sisyphus had it easy. It is a fact that women are paid seventy-five cents on the dollar to what men are paid in comparable positions. It is a fact that rape culture exists. It is a fact that women of colour are hyper-sexualised and fetishised, their bodies reduced to props on a white woman’s stage. It is a fact that female genital mutilation leads to morbidity and mortality of thousands upon thousands of women across the globe, even in the so-called developed world. These are confronting facts. They’re worth getting angry about.

You want to tell women to tone it down, to be less emotional, but the fact is that this is not a matter for abstract academic debate. These are our lived experiences. This is the metric fuckton of bullshit that we are forced to wade through every day in an effort to live our lives the same way the other fifty percent of the population are allowed to without impediment. What function would be served by being nice? Do you honestly think that if we piped down, stopped yelling, stopped marching and protesting and refusing to back down, that men would suddenly realise that we had a point and we needed to be listened to? Is that how you think the way the world works? If so, that’s a spectacularly huge rock you’re living under, because you are so out of touch that I have to question whether or not you’ve ever come into contact with any semblance of reality at all.

Nice gets us nothing. Nice gets us ignored, pushed aside, relegated to abstract academic arguments that can be debated by people in ivory towers who do not have to live what we live, who have never had to experience what we experience, who have never had their identities and humanity denied by a society that considers them second-best. Nice gets us no further to breaking the glass ceiling, no closer to liberation. Nice gets us crumbs from a man’s table and a pat on the head. Nice is useless.

Anger gets us heard. Anger is confrontational and in-your-face and impossible to ignore, and because of that, anger makes men uncomfortable. It makes them want to turn away because having the truth pushed repeatedly and persistently in your face by someone who won’t just shut up when you tell them to is not how men are used to experiencing the world. Anger got women the right to vote, the right to work, the right to have sex with who we choose, when we choose. Anger makes you listen, and just because you don’t like what you’re hearing, that doesn’t make the anger less valid or less justified or less necessary, because without that anger, you’d never have listened in the first place.

There is no room for nice in feminism. There is no room for nice in any movement for equality, because all nice does is uphold the status quo. It’s anger that gets us places. The fact that so many men feel the need to police it, to silence it however they can, is testament to its effectiveness. Anger works. And you’re damn right, it’s unpleasant and uncomfortable. That’s because “unpleasant and uncomfortable” is the reality of female existence in this society. It’s unpleasant and uncomfortable to hear the truth because the truth is nasty and violent and shameful. It’s a truth you helped build and maintain. Don’t be so surprised that you’re finally being made to face it.

I could have written this non-confrontationally, and it would have made no difference, because when people say, “you need to be nicer,” what they actually mean is, “you need to stop talking about these things I don’t want to hear.” And that’s not going to happen. This is the truth of the world that we live in and I am not going to stop shouting and marching and protesting just because you don’t want to face the facts. This anger is the result of every catcall, every man who thought my sexuality existed for him and turned nasty when he was proven wrong, every friend I know who was raped and never saw their rapist brought to justice, every trans woman who has contemplated or carried out self-harm or suicide, every sex worker who has been dehumanised and degraded and treated like trash, every woman of colour who has seen her sexuality turned into a sick parody of itself for the entertainment of white people. This anger is because of you.

You can’t stop it. You can’t silence it. I’m damn well not going to let you police it. So you might as well listen, because I’m not going to stop being angry until you do.

Good girls and whores

Rule one of remaining sane on the internet: don’t read the comments.

Corollary: you’ll let your curiosity overpower your good judgement at least once.

This is how I’ve ended up reading several comments from people across the internet who, despite undoubtedly believing themselves feminist, are happy to judge women for looking, acting or dressing like “whores”. Be it a woman with multiple sexual partners, a woman who wears revealing clothing or one who’s marrying for financial security, these women are dragged through the mud, their reputations tarnished by association with the proverbial world’s oldest profession.

Their skirts are too short – don’t they know how unbecoming that is? Their sexuality is too aggressive – don’t they realise they’re making spectacles of themselves? They’re willing to “settle” for someone with more money than sex appeal – how do they live with themselves?

Apologists will generally respond that it’s not like that. They’re not like those women – you know, the ones who make a living selling (gasp!) sex. They’re not real “whores”. They just like dressing sexy or expressing themselves or being financially secure. Nothing wrong with that, right?

And thus, the core of the problematic argument being made is left untouched:

There’s nothing wrong with being a whore.

I know a lot of sex workers. I know girls who work in brothels, girls who work on the streets, camgirls, well-paid escorts, glamour models and adult film actresses. Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that they sell a sex-related service for money and do so voluntarily. True, some of them have turned to sex work out of financial need, but these still aren’t women who’ve been trafficked – they’re women choosing to sell these services of their own free will, women making autonomous decisions regarding their bodies and their boundaries. Hell, one or two of them aren’t even women. And none of them look like what you’d think.

Some of them are university students. Some of them are raising kids. Some of them just need to make rent. Some of them do the work they do because they enjoy it and find it liberating. None of them are being degraded by anyone other than people who pass judgement on their chosen profession. These women aren’t “selling their bodies”; they’re selling a service that just happens to be sex or sex-related. I assure you that they retain full ownership of their bodies afterwards. (At least, none of the ones I know have woken up to find themselves disembodied spirits, cursing themselves for selling their bodies to the highest bidder the night before. Maybe I’m missing something?) So what, exactly, is the problem? And why is “whore” the go-to comparison for any woman who dares express herself sexually, dress revealingly or exchange a service for money?

An elderly woman I know has worked for several decades with a sex worker advocacy group in my city. She tells a story of a conference she went to once, where she challenged an anti-sex work campaigner to describe what a sex worker looked like. You can probably guess what the woman said – the fishnets, the high-heeled boots, the lingerie-as-outerwear, the hanging out on street corners (despite the fact that registered brothels are legal in Australia), the cigarette dangling from nicotine-stained fingertips. So my friend asked a follow-up question: what does a male sex worker look like? Flummoxed, her opponent was forced to concede that they probably looked “just like everyone else”. Moral of the story: funnily enough, sex workers neither look nor act like you think, and you know far less about them than you realise.

I’ve been called a whore several times, generally (and very paradoxically) by men who are upset with me for not giving them what they want. I’ve been called a whore for dressing revealingly. I’ve been called a whore for talking openly about sex and sexuality. I’ve been called a whore for not hiding my sexual desires like the shameful thing society apparently thinks they are. And you know what? I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the idea that being called a whore is a negative thing, that by the association with sex work, these people are trying to degrade me – and women who actually are sex workers in the process. I have a problem with the idea that “whore” is a way of branding a woman as shameful, sinful and depraved. I have a problem with the idea that women who make autonomous decisions regarding their bodies are seen as subhuman and lesser, while the people who attempt to shame them into silence are held up as moral paragons.

Yeah, I have a whole lot of problems with “whore” being used as a pejorative descriptor, but none of said problems are related to sex workers. They’re related to the scumbags who judge them.

The sex workers I know are, generally speaking, a diverse group of women who do what they do for a number of reasons. They’re not mindless. They’re not subhuman. They’re definitely not immoral, whatever that means. They’re exchanging a service for money. Some of them service elderly clients who don’t get to have sex any other way. Some of them shoot porn because they have fun doing so. Some of them are paying their way through university degrees and would rather sell sex and remain more or less their own bosses than be subject to workplace sexual harassment in low-paying jobs where they’d be viewed as nothing more than dispensable cannon fodder. (But sex work is dehumanising by comparison…how, again?) Mostly, they’re just girls doing a job. They aren’t “selling their bodies” – they’re selling sex, or simulations of sex, and getting money in exchange. That’s pretty much how most service jobs work. The only difference is that this kind of service is viewed as immoral by the kinds of people who think women making decisions about how, when and for what reasons they have sex sets a dangerous precedent.

I have no problem with being compared to sex workers because in my mind, there’s nothing wrong with sex work. And maybe if more people thought that way, sex workers wouldn’t be disproportionate targets of violent crime, including sexual violence. Maybe if more people thought that way, sex workers wouldn’t be driven underground and into unsafe working conditions by moralising governments who think they’re “saving” women by depriving them of a source of income and legal protections. Maybe if more people thought that way, a sex worker and advocate named Jasmine wouldn’t have been murdered by her abusive ex-husband earlier this year after police repeatedly ignored her reports of stalking, harassment and abuse. Maybe if more people thought that way, we’d finally stop treating sex workers like women without minds of their own and recognising that autonomous decisions deserve to be respected, even if they’re not decisions we’d make ourselves.

The next time someone compares you or someone you know to a sex worker, your knee-jerk reaction shouldn’t be moral outrage. It should be outrage over the fact that in the year 2013, “whore” is still an insult people use to degrade and dehumanise women who dare to be sexual beings outside the limitations society has set for them. You should be outraged that an entire profession has been deemed immoral simply because it involves the selling of sex by women (and some men) who’ve decided for themselves what their own boundaries and limits are. You should be outraged not at being compared to these women, but at the way society treats them. You should be outraged by the disproportionately high levels of rape, physical abuse and homicide perpetrated against women selling a service for money. You should be outraged that these women are seen as subhuman solely due to their profession of choice.

Maybe, if you can spare a little outrage, you should be upset that we live in a society where women are so marginalised, even in the supposedly developed world, that sometimes sex work is the only viable profession for them. You should be upset that sex workers are being driven into unsafe work conditions and being stripped of all legal protection by moralisers who end up killing more women than they save. You should be upset about women’s shelters and rape crisis centres who refuse to accept sex workers. You should be upset by a society that looks at the murder of a sex worker and decides that she brought it upon herself for daring to work.

You should be upset by a lot of things. But you shouldn’t be upset that you’re being compared to a class of women who fight fiercely to defend their autonomy and their right to choose. You shouldn’t be upset that you’re being compared to a group of women who are, on the whole, some of the most strident and outspoken feminists I’ve ever met. You should be upset that people consider association with this group of women an insult. You should be upset that “whore” is still a dirty word used by people trying to shame women for daring to have sexualities.

Dress how you like. Have sex with who you want. Decide for yourself what the value of sex is to you, and what you’re prepared to exchange for it. And stop shaming women who’ve done the same, or shaming other women by association. You’re not just degrading them – you’re degrading yourself by sending the message that society has the right to shame and shun women who take charge of their bodies and their sex lives.

If you’re a feminist, that should be the opposite of what you want.

[TW: death, violence] Blood on our hands

You are a murderer.

Earlier this year, a woman named Jasmine was killed. She was a sex worker in Sweden. She lost her children to her abusive ex-partner because the courts deemed her an unfit mother due to her occupation. She reported her ex-partner’s abuse and the authorities took no notice again and again and again and again because her life and safety and well-being as a sex worker meant nothing to them.

Her ex-partner murdered her, but her blood is on your hands for every time you didn’t stand up for the rights of women like Jasmine. She is dead because you did nothing.

In Melbourne earlier this year, a woman named Jill Meagher was raped and murdered by a serial killer. I say “serial killer” because the man had done it before. Nobody cared because all of his previous victims were sex workers. It took the murder of a woman society deemed worthy of their regard in order for the killer to finally be brought to justice.

Her blood is on your hands as well. So is the blood of the sex workers who were raped and killed by a man who got away with it because nobody cared as long as they deemed the lives of his victims not worth saving. You heard them scream and did nothing. You let them die and looked away, unseeing, unknowing, uncaring.

Society has devised a particularly cruel method of punishment for those it deems inferior. We don’t kill them ourselves – we allow the dregs of society, the rapists and torturers and murderers, to do our dirty work for us. We stand back and shake our heads and cluck disapprovingly at the side of the victims’ graves. Didn’t they know what they were getting themselves into? Didn’t they know they would eventually be punished?

We let the blood drip from our hands and pretend ourselves innocent as more and more and more people die, condemned by our judgement to be slain by society-sanctioned executioners. We swear we had no part in their murders, but we turn a blind eye to those who commit them in our name.

Once every three days in the United States, the murder of a transgender person is reported. Often, the corpses are found with their genitals mutilated, with slurs carved into their flesh. This, we have decided, is the fate reserved for the abnormal – to be tortured, maimed and brutally killed while we look on, unmoving and unmoved. We stay silent as gays and lesbians are beaten and left for dead on the curbside outside pubs on a Saturday night. We pretend we do not see every young black man in a hoodie who is gunned down in cold blood by a white man with a grudge. They are guilty of the crime of existence. We allow them to be punished for it and then wash our hands of the deed.

Two years ago in Scotland, a young gay man was tied to a lamppost, beaten and then set on fire for the crime of existing and being gay. He was twenty-eight years old when they killed him. In Queensland, there is a gay panic defence on the books – if someone murders a gay person, they can claim it was self-defence because the person they murdered might have been making advances towards them.

So much blood and so many dead and we continue to delude ourselves into believing we are innocent of their murders.

A friend told me recently that a quarter of trans* people end up taking their own lives. Twenty-five percent. Imagine if twenty-five percent of young, attractive, white women felt driven to kill themselves in order to escape a world they knew didn’t want them. Imagine if twenty-five percent of the people you love the most felt so hated, so reviled, that they did the murderers’ work for them so that they could at least choose to make it swift and painless. Imagine one in four people you care about killing themselves, and ask yourself why you are content to let one in four trans* people do so.

You may not have set fire to that young gay man, nor raped and murdered Jill Meagher, nor beaten Jasmine and been ignored and ignored and ignored until you finally killed her. You may not personally have bullied a trans* person into taking their own life. But it may as well have been your finger on the trigger, your hand grasping the dagger hilt, your fingers that struck the match. You killed them when you stood by and said nothing as they were bullied and mocked and shunned. You killed them when you decided they weren’t worth saving.

Their blood is on your hands. Their blood is on all of our hands.

How many more must die before we decide to take responsibility for the monsters we have created? We allow the small oppressions – the slurs, the cyber-bullying, the whispered comments on the street – knowing full well that they enable larger ones. We know that we are giving our implicit consent to rapists and tormentors and murderers to do with those we’ve shunned as they will. We know that our silence is assent. We know, each of us, deep in our hearts, that we are every bit as guilty of every beating and every rape and every murder as the people we allowed to commit the acts.

We did not do enough to save Jasmine or Jill or Trayvon or the thousands upon thousands of people who are murdered or who take their own lives to escape the cruelty of a society that has deemed them lesser. These were not isolated incidents – this happens every second of every minute of every hour of every day and we stand by and let it continue. There are so many Jasmines and Jills and Trayvons, so many people killing themselves or being killed by people we have allowed to appoint themselves judge, jury and executioner. All that evil needs is for good people to do nothing. We tell ourselves we’re the good ones, but how good are we if we allow ourselves to discount the value of human lives?

If we are ever to wash the spot from our hands, we must act. We must stop the small things – the taunts, the insults, the “jokes”. We must let our fellow human beings know that we consider their lives sacrosanct, no matter who they are or what they do for a living. We must refuse to sanction thugs who carry out our dirty work for us. There must be no dirty work at all. The victims of our inaction lived, loved and were loved, had so much potential, so much to give. If only we had opened our eyes. If only we had stayed the hands of their murderers. We are allowing ourselves to be robbed of the most precious resource on the planet – human life – because we have become complacent, careless, callous, cold.

I do not want any more blood on my hands. I am tired of death counts and statistics. I refuse to give my consent for the destruction of innocent human lives by killers who get away with it because we do nothing to stop them. Jasmine’s children lost their mother. Jill’s husband lost his wife, and the sex workers killed before her left behind family and friends who had loved ones snatched from them for no reason at all. Trayvon Martin’s family was forced to watch as their son’s character was assassinated on national television after his person was assassinated by a man with a thirst for blood. Can we really claim to have humanity if we allow this to continue? Can we claim that we are compassionate, loving, fair, just, when innocent people die and we do nothing?

If you want to stop being a murderer, disarm your weapons. Disenfranchise the bigots. Defang their hate. Only then will our Jasmines and Jills and Trayvons be safe. You cannot afford inaction, not any more. Too many lives depend on you.

There is so much blood on your hands.