…Here’s how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
…[The] runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding what made them different by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that had ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.
…And here is the most devastating fact of Frank’s posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: We know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don’t want to hear it.
The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift, it is worth noting, at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” three weeks before she met people who weren’t.
Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: They murdered six million of them. Anne Frank’s writings do not describe this process. Readers know that the author was a victim of genocide, but that does not mean they are reading a work about genocide. If that were her subject, it is unlikely that those writings would have been universally embraced.
We know this because there is no shortage of texts from victims and survivors who chronicled the fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents has achieved anything like the fame of Frank’s diary. Those that have come close have only done so by observing the same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don’t insult their persecutors. The work that came closest to achieving Frank’s international fame might be Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank’s experience, recounting the tortures of a 15-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Kept Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story, but it exploded with rage against his family’s murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version of the book under the title Night—a work that repositioned the young survivor’s rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how his society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame God. This approach did earn Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as a spot in Oprah’s Book Club, the American epitome of grace…
A white man was throwing racial slurs at a Black FedEx Driver. He started Punching the driver, the FedEx driver punched him back one time, killing the man with One Punch.
He wont be indicted for the racist scumbags death either! Win!
Magnuson’s death from the fall was precipitated by “extremely poor health,” a medical examiner concluded, and the punch itself was not fatal, Senior Deputy District Attorney Adam Gibbs wrote.
Warren was within his legal right to challenge Magnuson’s “racist vitriol,” Gibbs noted, and said that Warren’s decision to confront Magnuson — rather than ignore him — was not legally significant.
Please keep up this energy of racists dropping dead on my dash.
And it didn’t happen the way I expected. I wasn’t strapped to a bed or dragged screaming into an operating room. If that had been the case, at least I would have had an easier time understanding what happened to me.
Instead it was the slow mounting of circumstances. I was told that without proof of sterilization, I couldn’t change the gender marker on my passport. I learned that without that change I couldn’t find a job. I couldn’t go to a bank, hospital or dentist without being publically humiliated as I was forced to explain the discrepancy on my passport. I couldn’t get through passport control to leave my country. I couldn’t safely go to a bar at night. And since I didn’t get sterilized, doctors doubted my ‘commitment’ to being transgender and refused access to further transition related care.
Eventually I gave in. I needed to get on with my life. I was done screaming, crying, fighting. I made my appointment, packed up my own bag for a 3 day stay at the hospital and checked myself in for my own sterilization. The one I really did not want.
When I made my appointment, when I checked myself in, when I went through preparation for surgery, I must have signed over half a dozen consent forms. It seemed that at every turn there was a new form for me to sign saying that I did in fact want this. That I was giving my full informed consent to the procedure. I’ve had other surgeries that did not involve this pile of paper work and looking back, I’m sure all that extra attention to consent was there precisely because I was being forced into this position. I was being sterilized against my will, but I had to put on a performance of consent so the agents within the system could never be held accountable. I do not know if the nurse who handed me my 5th consent form and prepped my for my surgery knew that I really wanted to run out of that hospital. I don’t know if she knew that I felt broken, defeated, hopeless. Sometimes I feel guilty about allowing her to be an unknowing participant in my violation.
I hated the consent forms more than anything.
I had the surgery and I went on, as I did before, to campaign against sterilization as a requirement for legal gender recognition. And in 2014 sterilization ceased to be a requirement for legal gender recognition in the Netherlands, where I live. I celebrated that day. I am really happy that the next generation of transgender people will not have to go through the same thing.
But I never forgot what had happened to me or considered it a finished chapter. I never forgot that consent can be a performance, enforced to cover up a great coercion. I never forgot that the participants in a consent violation, doctors and nurses in my case, may not even be aware of their role because they did not witness the coercion taking place. They did not see how my options were limited until I got to this point. Consent can be a choice made because all the other roads you would choose are blocked. Consent can be the mask violation wears. And I am very skeptical when I see consent hailed as the highest standard for ethical conduct. So there is a ‘yes’, maybe even an eager, informed ‘yes’. But what’s the rest of the story? Where there are those with power and those without it, consent is not a good measure for whether abuse occurs.
I am sure others are at this very moment signing consent forms or saying ‘yes’ to things they really do not want.
why do they make people do this?
Because they believe we can’t be good parents.
Because they want us to suffer to prove the validity of our identity.
Because they believe who we are is wrong and they hope to eradicate us.
Thanks for replying. What fake reasons do they give for it? Or do they just straight up and blatantly argue that trans people shouldn’t have children?
Fake reasons doctors give:
These hormones will give you cancer if you keep your testes / ovaries (even though there is zero proof that the risk of cancer is higher than in cis people who produce their own hormones)
If you were really trans, you’d want to get rid of this part of your body.
This is necessary for the other surgery you want. (often blatantly untrue!)
Truthful reasons doctors give:
Hormone therapy for trans women is much more intense and unhealthy if their body is still making testosterone too. (but they often tell that without going into the option of freezing sperm)
Hormone therapy for trans men is slightly healthier and slightly more effective after sterilisation.
You won’t get your passport changed if you don’t go through with this surgery. (really, doctors don’t even have to lie, this right here is cruel and dangerous enough to make many trans people go through with the surgery.)
Truthful things doctors don’t tell you:
Once you get sterilized, you’ll be dependent on medical hormones to survive. Natural retransition won’t be an option and if at any time the hormone supplies run low (which actually happens, because pharmaceutical companies don’t prioritize that stuff) you’ll run immediate health risks.
The (minor) long term health risks that I’ve told you about don’t mean you have to get sterilized now. You could have children within the next decade and then get that sterilization to have a healthier old age.
Fake reasons politicians use to uphold the law:
Pregnant fathers and sperm-providing mothers will upset our entire legal system and will be super confusing for children! Trans existence is too scary for our vulnerable youth and lawyers.
I never forgot that consent can be a performance, enforced to cover up a great coercion…. Consent can be a choice made because all the other roads you would choose are blocked. Consent can be the mask violation wears.
We used to have a similar law here in Sweden until 2013. Now you don’t have to be sterilised and anyone that where sterilised is offers a compensation. I hope the Netherlands will do the same for you
middle aged white man with trump maga van sends pipe bombs and anthrax to 13 prominent democratic politicians, donors, and media outlets.
middle aged white man who claims he ‘doesn’t shoot whites’ attempts to enter a black church for a massacre, fails, and murders two random black strangers in a grocery store.
white man yells ‘all jews must die!’ before entering a synagogue during shabbat and opening fire. the news is still breaking, but at least eight people are confirmed dead.
this comic by Matt Lubchansky pretty much summarizes my feelings about companies that try to sell products using oppressed groups’ mass deaths as a marketing technique
alder-knight 