my throat is still burning
my skin still seething
my bones still outraged

that white cop still won’t get more than 2-4 years and
involuntary manslaughter is still
considered
“progress”

our bodies our blood our babies
still means nothing
to nobody and

oscar grant in oakland
sean bell in new york
kenmara ‘k-roc’ davis in fayetteville, nc
they’re all
still dead.

i’ll scream it again & again—

no matter how eager, how radical, how cute you are

i do not exist for your fancy of freakery.

i could care less about feeding your taste for exotic flavors. i was not born to stroke your fascination of marginalized people.

no matter how much you are learning, no matter how much power/money/influence you carry, no matter how much you always know the right things to say,

my body is not for you to examine, conquer, or casually observe
as if the strands of my hair were nothing more than pages of a magazine

the creator did not craft these hands, lungs, feet of mine so you can feel good about yourself. my issues are not for you to solve.

who said you could analyze me? i am not a hobby, a project, a case study

nor will i ever be a pet to collect
in that menagerie of yours

instead i am harriet tubman using her disability to trick slavemasters, survey lands, and carve out paths to freedom
i am the spear waiting in datu lapu lapu’s right hand, standing with thousands ready to slice the colonizer’s head off of magellan’s body
i am the body casts frida kahlo painted on
i am the freedom song my joseon ancestors sung, the taegukis wrapped around their foreheads as they demanded an end to tyranny

no matter how quick i was to hand you this hard-earned self-determination in the past, know that from now on, you are being watched. vigilantly.

flip it, spit it out in a poem, brand it on the tip
of your tongue
do whatever you have to do
to remember

a friend and i have been having conversations about how hard we have been finding organizing to be lately. like, make-you-hate-yourself hard. energy-sucking hard. questioning-your-every-ability hard. i am happy to learn that september was the month mercury was in retrograde, that maybe it was the universe or something that we could not control that made us all treat each other like that.

that friend and i have been talking about what working in a community where everyone is coming from an extreme place of vulnerability looks like. like if vulnerability is a spectrum, it’s no joke, so many of us in core leadership roles are way down on one end of it. with parents, family members or best friends that we can’t tell we’re queer to. caught and trapped in systems. homeless. brushed aside. left behind. dealing with abuse/ being in abusive situations. creepin’. stuck. disability, the silence around it, the lack of people who actually get us, can be so isolating.  we come to this space where we have access and get to be ourselves — at least for a weekend here, a weekend there—and damn if we aren’t scared as hell to lose it. damn if we don’t whip out all the survival weapons we have hiding under our clothes. damn if we don’t secretly keep our finger on the trigger ready to shoot, not even knowing that’s what we are doing, not even knowing that we are working from a place of insecurity. vulnerability.

or at least it’s like that for me. i am left thinking of all the ways our actions are motivated by insecurity. fear of loneliness. loss of community.  maybe i keep waking up and finding myself in these relationships and friendships that aren’t working because i am scared of being so so so alone. that i can’t take any more isolation or longing. maybe the reason you are so angry with me is because you don’t trust me not to leave you, not to spit on everything you have poured into this friendship.  when i do something small, it ruffles up all these feelings, hits our histories— that gut feeling in you—and soon we all look like the enemy you have been taught to shoot at.

know that we have to be more gentle. more intentional. more aware. just am not sure yet how to put that into practice.

any ideas?

moya, caitlin, and mia bring a disability justice analysis, a queer critique, and an understanding of the way that the bodies of people of color are criminalized by the media to talk about all the ways that wrong is not caster semenya’s name. please click the link and read the whole thing.

We write to right wrongs done to someone whose only crime was daring to be all that she is…

for caster semenya:

What happens to Caster Semenya is connected to and impacts all women of color. After all, women of color’s genders (and bodies) are always under surveillance. Caster Semenya is not the first and she will not be the last. Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian athlete, also lost her 2006 Asian Games silver medal for failing a gender test and also found out the results of her gender test from newspaper and television reports. The twisting and wringing of individual women of color’s gender (in the U.S. and globally) reinforces the violent racist gender stereotypes about all women of color and leaves us all hung out to dry.

As disability justice activists, we must connect how ableism gets leveraged in service of heteronormativity, in service of white supremacy, in service of misogyny. Ableism gets used all the time to divide us and we must fight it at every turn. How do we begin to understand that it was Caster’s extraordinary able-bodied and gender-non-conforming abilities that threatened ableist notions of gendered bodies and propelled the exposure of her gender through the use of a medical “gender test” to expose her sex. This is not just about defining what a “woman” is, it is also about defining what a “normal body” is and what “able-bodied” is and what it is not; it is about defining what “intersex” is and what it’s not.

We must understand how the medical industrial complex and science are being used to profit off of our bodies and medicalize our genders, our abilities, and render, in this case, an 18 year old intersex South African black woman a spectacle for the world to stare at, gawk at, and examine—at her expense. We must see how this spectacle is connected to the spectacle made of disabled bodies everyday behind closed doors, in sterile white rooms, under florescent lights, in homes, at family dinners, birthday parties, a trip to the mall, to the park, down the street.

As reproductive justice activists, we must challenge the notion that women are only as valuable as our wombs and the children we are expected to produce. We must challenge definitions of “woman” and “reproduction” that exclude intersex people and work to create a movement and framework that integrates an intersex analysis in to our work.

Where are the radical women of color feminists, building homes with fierce intersex poets, forging alliances with trans and gender queer immigrant gardeners, eating dinner with queer disabled dancers, making music with southern artists? Where are our voices, bringing an intersectional, multi-issue, multi-lived politic and analysis to all of this—amidst the white media frenzy, gender binary enforcers, medical experts, athletic officials and government heads? We need more than just a gender analysis, or a nationalist racial analysis. These are opportunities to speak across the lines and tiny definitions of ourselves that keep us self-righteous, isolated and apart.

Our voices are crucial because people who reflect Caster Semenya and reflect us are listening and learning what it means to have extraordinary bodies….

-for caster semenya