My Queer Rage

Trigger warning: Mention of childhood maltreatment, childhood sexual abuse, bullying, and a lot of swearing.

MY QUEER RAGE

Have you been angry long enough? (1)
No, I haven't even started to be angry yet!
I'm angry at my mother
Who never saw the girl I was (2),
Who never responded to my needs, but used me as her doll to satisfy hers
Who never respected my body as mine
Who invaded my body by touching, "caressing" me against my expressed resistance
I'm angry at my mother
Who made me repress my anger, all my feelings,
Who responded to my anger only with the threat of total abandonment.

Have you been angry long enough?
No, I haven't even started to be angry yet!
I'm angry at my father,
Who tried to push masculinity onto me
And, when that failed,
Who abused me, the girl I was
"If you want to be a girl, suck my cock!"
I'm angry at my father
His fucking masculinity
I want to hit you in your face
Your fucking smile

Have you been angry long enough?
No, I haven't even started to be angry yet!
I'm angry at my family
At all of you, your fucking normality
Your dictatorship of the normal, your "what shall the neighbours think?"
I'm angry at my family
For surpressing the girl I was
For instilling in me the fear to be me
Your fucking cis-heteronormativity

Have you been angry long enough?
No, I haven't even started to be angry yet!
I'm angry at my teachers
Who made my anger the problem when I was bullied, but not the bullies
Who made my anger the problem when it was a desperate cry for help in the face of sexual abuse
I'm angry at my teachers
Who turned me into a machine, disconnected from my emotions, my body
Who preferred me quiet rather than angry, dissociated from myself but "functioning", obedient

Have you been angry long enough?
No, I haven't even started to be angry yet!
I'm angry at the system
At cisheteronormativity
Which kept my girl in the closet for far too long
At amatonormativity
Which made me think there was something wrong with me for not (or almost never) feeling sexual or romantic attraction

Have you been angry long enough?
No, I haven't even started to be angry yet!
I'm angry at society
For questioning or denying me my identity, after finally coming out as genderqueer
I'm angry at society
For not recognising me for who I am,
Queer, non-binary, asexual
I'm angry at society
For not providing space and support for healing from trauma
For ignoring the needs of survivors

I'm fed up with eating my anger, turning it inwards, against myself
I want to start to be angry
I want to smash the system
Smash patriarchy
Destroy family
Smash cisheteronormativity
Destroy capitalism
Smash "normal"
Destroy what is destroying me (3)
It's time to be angry
It's time for my queer rage!

--
Notes:
(1) The Dalai Lama asked this question to sujatha baliga, herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Her answer does not matter here. As told by sujatha at the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute 2023
(2) I decided to refer to myself as a child as "girl", as non-binary didn't exist back then and boy sounds plain wrong
(3) Reference to the song Macht kaputt was Euch kaputt macht (Destroy What Destroys You) by German anarchist rock band Ton Steine Scherben, 1970