You might ask: what do queers have to do with the cops? Today I want to ask the other way round: what do the cops want from us queers all the time?
The answer is simple: queers are a thorn in the side of the ruling order.
Being queer means breaking with so-called normality in many ways. At this point we might ask: normality for whom? Normality usually euphemistically refers to social mechanisms of power. Gender is one such mechanism of domination: gender divides our society into two parts: man and woman. Gender in patriarchal capitalism then gives domination to the man, makes the woman worse and thus legitimises the exploitation of everything that has ‘female’ connotations. Being queer means attacking this understanding of gender. And thereby questioning this “normality”. We are fags, queens, kings and quings in straps and binders. We transition, we re-transition as we please. We don’t choose our gender any more than cis people do, we just find it elsewhere. Then we are still so naughty and have fun with breaks. We no longer apologise for our lesbian two-handed axes and high heels, for our gummy dicks in cashew and purple, our nice hairstyles and funky neopronoms. We are PROUD, we celebrate the QUEER PRIDE.
To understand and promote monogamous heterosexuality as “The Normal” is another biopolitical instrument of power. Groups previously formed by gender are supposed to relate to each other romantically. We are supposed to have babies. The number of children per cis woman is still a parameter to describe nation states. This number of children is then used to realise political strategies, e.g. support or relief for heterosexual nuclear families. Queers relate to each other romantically in all possible combinations, fuck wildly, totally messy. And when we have children, it’s with our communities, then there’s an exchange about who actually still has a womb and how to get involved in the baby?
The state looks at this hustle – and then it hates the queers. Because they question both gender and desire as instruments of power. That’s why states develop countless forms of legal repression. Laws that tell us how to look, what to wear, who to be, how to behave. Laws that tell us how and with whom we should have sex. Laws that describe how we should be hurt if we deviate. Laws like the so-called ‘transsexual law’ that deliberately make it hard for us, that degrade us, slow us down, that are meant to break us and break how we would live our lives.
The state sends us into precarious jobs and poverty. It imposes homelessness on us. First it makes us legally ill and then it makes us mentally ill. It makes us kill ourselves, like Ella in Berlin recently.
And for that, the patriarchal state needs its lackeys.
Who does it send out to check that we wear at least three outfits of our assigned gender? That used to be a law! These controls triggered the resistance around Christopher Street day.Who does he send to beat the homosexuals to death in Chechnya? Who has he been sending for decades to harass and degrade sex workers? And who then drags us into custody? Who denies us our medicines in detention? Who checks our passports? Who deports us to so-called countries of origin? Who then kills us in these countries of origin?
It is the police! It is the police who execute laws on us – regardless of whether something is right or just. The police is an institution invented by the more powerful in society to enslave the less powerful. Us poor, us wage earners, us homeless, addicts, stigmatised, us work-shy, us queers. So that we don’t defend ourselves against the misery. The police are used to maintain the status quo. To enforce domination. And as long as gender and desire is used as an instrument in a nation state, the police will get on our balls with it.
In Saxony, the AFD has 30% in the state parliament. If these fascists write laws – and they want to write laws because they hate us queers! – yes, then it’s the police who come to count us, to punish us or to beat us. Then it’s the police who come to put us in jail. Then it’s the police who say they are only following law and order.But it’s not about order, it’s about submission. It is not about law, it is about oppression and exploitation. It’s about upholding a system of domination.
Fuck law and this order!
The history of queers is a glorious one without order. The queer community is an outstandingly resistant one! Whether at Compton’s Cafeteria or the Stonewall Inn, some of our biggest celebrations relate to bar fights with the cops. Because we know how to party!
It’s a sad fact that those with the least to lose are considered the spearhead of social movements. You have little to lose when you have already been deprived of much. The more intersectional domination mechanisms come together, the more is taken from you. Rights, self-determination, medical care, wealth or insecurity, for example. So it is no wonder that it was often transgender black women, many working in sex work, who formed this spearhead. They had nothing left to lose and hunger for everything. They were the engine of the struggles against repression, police harassment and violence. They were the driving force of the emerging gay liberation – until they were rejected by it.
If you stab them in the back, you stab us all in the back. Express solidarity with sex workers! We want to be there for each other! The queer community and its allies stick together! We design ways of dealing outside of legal punitive concepts. Community accountability and restorative / transformative justice is one example.
And we continue to fight for our rights!
When Ella publicly burned herself to death in Berlin on 14 September 2021, it was the murderous normality of racist German laws that drove her to do so. The police rushed to rule out a political motivation on the same day.
Journalist jeja Klein vehemently inquired until it came out that this claim was also pure randomness. The repeated desecration of her grave was never prosecuted, nor did the cops find out who leaked the pictures of her burnt body.
We will not find peace in a system that never intends to put us on an equal footing.
We will not be bribed by liberal reforms for some of us while others fall by the wayside!
We will continue to live and love how and who we want.
Fight the police, dont fuck them!
See you on the street on 25.06.22 at Queer Pride Dresden!
Lets fuck against the system!