I know a handful of trans people IRL that stan Ukraine very hard. I mentioned that trans people were being held at the border and are being forced on to the front lines instead of being allowed asylum. This just caused these people to double down and say, no no, its Russia’s fault! I can’t even do a simple ‘oh both sides are bad for trans people so you shouldn’t get invested’ because they think Ukraine is like Sweden and both are European and therefore enlightened on LGBT stuff and anything else is me belittling the situation. And even more obviously, they don’t speak any Slavic language and therefore are incapable of talking to first parties about anything happening in Eastern Europe.

Of course, these people only cared about Ukraine recently. I’ve been in contact with LGBT groups in Eastern Europe helping ferry marginalized people to safer locations through funding, scanning police radios, and miscellaneous illegal activities in association to those governments (did you know it can cost an American 50 bucks to save a lgbt person mentioned on a radio in Chechnya from Kadyrov’s goons? true story). Ukraine was no exception. It sucks to be there. Women desperately apply to be ‘mail order brides’ in order to escape the post soviet dystopia that is Ukraine. Trans people are no exception here, the outlook is grim and people do a lot of very sad things in order to get out of these post-soviet states and for every one person the org I was in helped 100 slipped through the cracks. The population of Ukraine has been posting negative growth numbers since the collapse of the USSR and has lost nearly 10 million inhabitants from either death or immigration, 1/5th of the population. And that is part of the reason why they’re in the predicament they’re in now- all the people who weren’t nationalist left. Only people that are ‘Ukraine or die!’, or are too poor to leave, are left in the country. But everyone seems to be acting like Ukraine is a veritable utopia in comparison to Putin’s Russia.

I had one lady compare it to the holocaust. She said Putin was stealing people’s kids or something, which I don’t know if that is true or not. But it really stung for me. My family had members in it that were kidnapped by the Nazis and we only learned about survivors of that a couple years ago. Our town was annexed by Nazis. Our family was never listed as victims because there was no paper trail, perhaps on purpose by the Nazis. For a while, we just figured that side of our family died/went missing during the war. But the real situation is that the parents were likely killed by the Nazis and the babies were kidnapped to be Germanized in the Rheinland (which is where we found them after a DNA test, they were put into adoption agencies and raised German instead of Czech [other theory is some decentralized Nazis killed the parents and took the kids to adoption]). And the thing that irks me here is that people are saying these things with supreme authority, that there is no possibility that they are being misled and that what they are saying is 1000% factual. I think this way of thinking is terrifying. Its precisely the sort of thinking that the Nazis themselves preyed on. And the idea to be so gungho and know absolutely what is going on one month from the outset of a war when even my own family didn’t understand the full extent to which we were affected by Nazis for nearly 80 years is mindblowing to me.

And i just find it disgusting to compare things to the holocaust. If we have documented evidence of people being used as slaves, their bodies being thrown in mass graves and starved to death, and being murdered for not working hard enough - I am more than glad to compare it to the holocaust. The industrialized nature of the genocide perpetrated in the holocaust was the defining feature of it. Its possible to be terrible and evil and not be comparable to the holocaust.

I’m just tired. Like, I’ve dedicated quite a lot of my free time to helping people across the globe that I’ll never meet in person and I’m just so disheartened when people throw all of my experience with people over there out the window as soon as a headline from Azov Battalion twitter hits their brainwaves.

I don’t know. Fuck everyone for listening to the news instead of doing something productive with their day myself included