So the Belarussian journalist who edited Tut.by and just got sent to jail for a decade+ for the crime of telling the truth when the people in Belarussian power didn’t want her to? Sure as hell looks like a dyke to me.

Okay, yeah, I’m stereotyping, but if she is a dyke, I’m not at all surprised. Why? Well, here’s what I want to say about that:

This is why they’re afraid of us. The dykes, the trannies, the Black preachers from Georgia. We’ve seen shit at it’s pretty damn bad (even if many of us haven’t seen it at its absolute worst), and we responded by speaking up about what was important to us anyway.

When a Black preacher looks a white supremacist in the eye and says, “You don’t know Jesus,” or when a dyke looks a man in the eye and says, “Fuck off, no one here cares about your penis,” or when a trans person says, “No, you don’t get to know what’s in my pants before we start dating. Prove to me you’re kind, trustworthy and attractive and maybe you’ll find out,” we turn entire worlds upside down. White people don’t own Black folk OR Christianity, straight men don’t own women, and trans people aren’t desperately lying to get our ‘nads off, you cis folk are just begging to get in our shorts.

And when we’re willing to tell the truth even when it counters such cherished myths, what else might we contradict? What other lies might we disprove? And how will our masters keep us under control when we’re so obviously persisting in the face of existing mountains of pressure, of intimidation, of outright threat?

What more can they threaten us with? Jail? You think that’s going to stop Marina Zolotova? You think that’s going to stop me?

No, they are desperate and afraid, the right wing, desperate and afraid of change, but even more desperate and more afraid of the people like us. The people who simply won’t shut up when ordered, who won’t even shut up when attacked, when jailed, when brutalized.

They are terrified. And they say that they’re terrified of injustice. Of unjust prison sentences. Of the government being weaponized. But they’re not. They revel in these things. They depend upon these things.

No, in the end, for all their screaming about cancel culture, their most paralyzing fear is that we simply will not shut up.

Sure, they sentenced Zolotova today, but there are a ton more outsiders who don’t depend on the system’s approval for our worth.

And we simply will not shut up.