Darkmatter Poetry: Alok Vaid Menon & Janani Balasubramanian - Non-binary trans performance "artists"

[get_ur_gamon]

> Comedy

>internationally acclaimed
Maybe if you get your buddies to say it enough it will be true.

It's wild to see daytime talk show hosts sitting next to an even bigger attention whore.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

>internationally acclaimed
Maybe if you get your buddies to say it enough it will be true.

It's wild to see daytime talk show hosts sitting next to an even bigger attention whore.

Alok is funny for all the wrong reasons. then you dive deeper and it just becomes enraging.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

Crossposted from the Tranny Sideshows on Social Media thread.

 

[NoReturn]

Does he have a thread?

I don't know, but it should.

In doing so he also deletes his culpable deniability over Alok Vaid-Menon, silly boy. Now we know he knows.

I mentioned it in passing a while back, but I'm amused to no end how fat hairy pedo-desi Alok has suddenly reappeared from the woodwork just in time to take advantage of Dylan's reflected glory, apparently having completely discarded his former "queer influencer" friend Jacob Tobia now that the latter is old news. It actually inspired me to make a little meme image:

Hello friends and welcome to the Alok thread that we have. It's not just his, but it's what we've got so we're gonna use it.

Yes, Alok is on TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@alokvmenon/video/7267314250958523694

https://www.tiktok.com/@alokvmenon/video/7256474792210058538

https://www.tiktok.com/@alokvmenon/video/7227563505514335531

And he shows up as his own hashtag

https://www.tiktok.com/@mckillinmyself/video/7209028025441062190

https://www.tiktok.com/@tedydneiyo/video/7206086442769239342

https://www.tiktok.com/@twoobs/video/7094074556305935617

 

[AssignedEva]

I mentioned it in passing a while back, but I'm amused to no end how fat hairy pedo-desi Alok has suddenly reappeared from the woodwork just in time to take advantage of Dylan's reflected glory, apparently having completely discarded his former "queer influencer" friend Jacob Tobia now that the latter is old news. It actually inspired me to make a little meme image:

Alok's actually had a bit more staying power than Jacob Tobia - Alok's red, Jacob's blue:

The massive spike in 2019 was from Jacob's appearance on The Daily Show to plug his memoir "Sissy"

while Alok's spike in 2022 was from getting interviewed by The Washington Post about his show and his thoughts on Roe vs Wade:

Alok's continuing to shit-stir by appearing on the cover of Indian wedding magazine "Brides Today":

I think Jacob's fizzled a bit because he got some professional gigs that might have muzzled him slightly (like voice acting on She-Ra and the Biden Foundation's LGBTQ+ Advisory Council) but also because with the likes of Sam Brinton running around he's just not that novel any more. Alok has got the additional niche of constantly talking about race (and more impressively weird/ugly dress sense).
I'd really enjoy an Alok and Dylan collab because it'd be funny, but I can't see it happening because they're such different people - Dylan's a vacuous airhead who basically just wants good vibes only, while Alok takes himself immensely seriously and wants to constantly have "difficult conversations".
That being said he's a massive schmoozer - he was hanging out with Sam Smith recently despite his usual fanbase hating "the white enby who took photos with cops at pride"

and apparently Valentino sent him an outfit for the Variety red carpet he was hanging out with Dylan at:

and he's inexplicably managed to do a collab with Papa Don't Preach on his own line of jewellery:

so perhaps he could suck it up to do a couple of TikToks with Dylan.

 

[Nanashi no kiwi]

Alok's continuing to shit-stir by appearing on the cover of Indian wedding magazine "Brides Today":

You know, I've never considered myself a feminist, but there's something particularly rage-inducing about the sight of this fruity little ABCD prancing about in his prettiest saris in a country where in recent memory a young woman was gang-raped so brutally that the majority of her intestines had to be removed as a result of traumatic injury, and one of the attackers tried to claim she had it coming because she shouldn't have been out at that hour (around 9:30, heading home with a male friend after seeing a movie), and that she shouldn't have tried to fight back and just taken it silently.

I don't know if gay-bashing is a thing in India, and (minor PL) as a card-carrying homosexual I obviously am not going to condone the practice, but even I wouldn't shed too many tears if Alok were to get roughed up just a bit by some of his fellow pajeets - not to the point of death, but just to give him a taste of what that poor girl had to suffer. Just as something for him to think about when he starts crying about white colonizers destroying India's vibrant history of third sexes and gender non-conformity.

 

[Trombonista]

Come to think of it, are these two still in touch?

 

[AssignedEva]

Come to think of it, are these two still in touch?

I suspect Janani and Alok were not amicably parted as they're both contentious people. The last Darkmatter performance seems to have been at Stanford in February 2017, shortly before Alok's solo poetry anthology "Femme In Public" was released. He started his solo tour in March, performing at Grow Hackney in London with Travis Alabanza. In a July 2017 interview with Spiktinok there's an acknowledgement that Alok is "taking a break from Darkmatter"

You’ve recently announced that you’ve taken a break from DarkMatter Poetry. Can you tell us a little about what that project with Janani meant for you?​

I met Janani at a really foundational stage of my life. I was just beginning to really question gender, both my own and as a concept. Meeting Janani at that point- we were friends for like, nine years? We were both at that place where we were questioning a lot of things, about ourselves and the world. It began as a series of questions and having someone else to work through them with was invaluable. It gave me the confidence to say and do things that I’m able to do now.

I wouldn’t have been able to do what I do if it wasn’t for that friendship and if it wasn’t for many of those friendships. In the same way that celebrity is toxic for tokenism, it’s toxic in the way that we pretend that it’s individual people’s hard work and not the contributions of the community that leads to recognition. All of my writing is the reception of all the lives I’ve encountered of other people. I think about what it takes for someone to even actually approach a stage. I meet so many people who have been writing at home, but who would never share, thinking, oh, I’m not good enough, I’m not confident enough.

I was the exact same way, and then I met Janani who would just say, shut up and do it! *laughs* And then when it went badly, Janani would look at me and say, okay, actually, you need to work on that. And that’s how we grow.

That’s why I hate this very Western. masculine model of the artist who sort of goes into-

The woods?​

The woods, yes! And this ivory tower from the world and is separate. This is not how women and trans writers work, we need the support.

When I started, I didn’t really have a role model. I didn’t even see what I was doing as poetry. I thought of it more as diary writing- it was me sitting in a corner, writing down my feelings. I was reading poetry beyond what was assigned to us at school which meant a lot of traditional, white, British poets, which I did not identify with at all. I’m really mad about that because I feel like a lot of young people don’t really see their work as poetry, or as art, because we’re constantly comparing ourselves to the canon. That’s so fucked,. We are our own canon, and we don’t have to write like Shakespeare or Keats to be validated.

That’s why I gravitated towards art forms such as spoken word, where I saw myself represented. There are way more women, way more queer people, way more people of colour. And I think that what happens is when we make art accessible, it’s not perceived as art. And that’s what we need to change.

Then by August/September they seem to have formally announced that DarkMatter was over. It's hard to reconstruct because their website and all social media (including YouTube) have been completely deleted.
The kinky little girls thing was seemingly posted by Alok on their DarkMatter page at some point in early 2017. The "Why Can't My Famous Gender Non-conforming Friends Get Laid" article was June 2017. You can also see around that time Alok starts doing fashion photoshoots (well, "fashion" photoshoots) and schmoozing with lowl level celebrities and giving interviews about his new projects, whereas to this day Janani is still doing relatively high brow art/poetry projects and remains in academia.
My impression is that Alok started getting high on his own supply and making everything about himself, and Janani wrankled at getting talked over, and then some of his more out there things were things she didn't agree with. They don't seem to interact any more and Janani makes no mention of being part of DarkMatter on her personal website (plus all of DarkMatter's content has been memoryholed).

 

[NoReturn]

You guys think we should ask the mods to split things or change the title?

https://www.tiktok.com/@alokvmenon/video/7269883972115549483

 

[Nanashi no kiwi]

You guys think we should ask the mods to split things or change the title?

I vote for name change, since most of the content in the thread is already about Alok anyway. Maybe edit the OP slightly to shift the emphasis from DarkMatter to Alok himself.

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

and he's inexplicably managed to do a collab with Papa Don't Preach on his own line of jewellery:

How do you make even jewellery repulsive and strangely mannish?

 

[AssignedEva]

How do you make even jewellery repulsive and strangely mannish?

It's at least mildly better than the clothing line he designed


I don't think the clothing line was ever for sale, he just got his fashion designer friend to help make it and then got photographed in it.
Not that he needs to design clothing, he's got an uncanny knack for discovering horrendous designers. I can appreciate avant garde fashion if done well, but he's apparently sniffed out Les Jesus, a Mexican brand that launched at Opening Ceremony, and uh...




They're not exact matches but it gives you an idea. It's not very anti-capitalist to drop about $2500 on clown clothes, but then again Alok never exactly explicitly described himself as anti-capitalist (that was always Janani). He comes from money.

 

[NoReturn]

I googled Alok to find out more about about him and found this.

Cross-posting @𝕊𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕟𝟚's excellent post from the Dylan Mulvaney post because it's too big to actually quote with the normal-quote"

I googled Alok to find out more about about him and found this. It has the original Facebook post where his famous quote about little girls in bathrooms is pulled from but this is particularly interesting. For years I have tried to reconcile how I feel about Transgender people and have relegated them to confused freaks that are victims of the American psychological/pharmaceutical machine at best and at worst they are pedophiles abusing liberal policy to victimize children. Both of these are making less sense as we move forward in this cultural degradation but this post has sent me over the edge. These people are demons. Their primary interests are to mock birth, creation and women. At every level they enjoy sexualizing the corruption of the innocent and fetishizing submission. They will not be happy until a uterus is ripped out of economically victimized Christian woman and implanted into their disgusting SSRI and hormone ridden male body so they can be living baby rape factories squeezing out infected children to molest and corrupt from inception. We are going to see In Vitro molestation. I genuinely believe when enough people are demoralized they will just flat out announce their Moloch and Demon worship on social media.​

Even viewing The Exorcist from completely Secular eyes and ignoring the themes, ignoring the male main character of the film and the contextual information about Burke Dennings molesting Reagan. You can not rationalize Reagan's story as anything but losing her autonomy. She loses it to the doctors, psychiatrists, her parents, the demon(s), and is even relegated to the point where she is strapped immobile to a bed. This is the ultimate fantasy of these freaks and that's why he is so easy to accept this as a "coming of age story". They hate autonomy and freedom. They want all political dissidents silenced and want all little girls drugged up, molested and strapped to a bed. I'm mad at the Internet.​

 

[AssignedEva]

Cross-posting @𝕊𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕟𝟚's excellent post from the Dylan Mulvaney post because it's too big to actually quote with the normal-quote"

The whole thing is actually on the first page! It looks like my timeline was slightly off because the "Darkmatter should not be welcome in Wellington" post complaining about the "kinky little girls" claim is from October 2016, so it must have been posted on that page some time in 2016.

The deleted link is https://www.facebook.com/darkmatterpoetry/posts/1015443305203253. Magdalen Berns makes reference to it in a video where she reacts to this (haram) video posted by Refinery29 on March 23rd 2016:

The comments (which are all either shitting on Alok for being a weirdo or shitting on Alok for meaning well but knowing nothing about philosophy or history) noticeably don't mention the kinky little girls post, but Magdalen Berns references it in her video on April 26th 2016, saying the fans started kicking off but instead of apologising they reposted it.

I think I was also off with my timing of their last events - relying on when Google says something was published isn't the most accurate (page header reveals published 2015 but modifed 2017).

Their tour was "It Gets Bitter":

The DarkMatter website actually seems scrubbed from the Internet Archive so it's hard to reconstruct. The last few events I've been able to verify appear to have been:

Spoiler: This is long

March 8th 2016 - DarkMatter appear on The Laura Flanders Show


March 10th 2016 (or slightly before) - DarkMatter are interviewed by StreetRoots, a newspaper in Portland, Oregon

March 12th 2016 - Cornell University, New York, USA


March 15th 2016 (or slightly before) - Moore Vintage Archive photoshoot for Refinery 29 (which also resulted in the above awful video) in Philadelphia, USA


March 19th 2016 - Moksha (now Biome), Seattle, USA


April 8th 2016 - The University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA


April 16th, 2016, Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA

7th-8th May 2016 - UC Irvine, California, USA

12th May 2016 - Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada


21st May 2016 - London School of Economics, London, UK


You can see this tweet from June 6th 2016 -


June 23rd 2016 - VH1's Trailblazer Honours, NYC, US

Alok noticeably does not bring Janani along as a +1, instead that "why can't my non binary friends get laid" author

September 16th - Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity at Duke University in North Carolina, USA:


On what appears to be the 3rd of October 2016 there is the following article and open letter published - "DarkMatter Should Not Be Welcome in Wellington".

The weekend of the 7th-9th October at the Basement Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand.

Noticeably this is only Alok, although it seems to originally have been badged as DarkMatter on tour. Here's a review.

With huge excitement in the Auckland queer community, one half of the now famous DarkMatter poetry duo, Alok Vaid-Menon performed three shows this weekend at the Basement theatre, and held a Saturday afternoon writing workshop, primarily for people of colour here in New Zealand. An American poet, of South Asian and Brahmin Hindu descent, Alok has become quite a sensation on Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms, as well as in live performance across the USA.

Along with Janani Balasubramanian, a fellow queer non-binary trans poet, also of South Asian family, the duo DarkMatter has put bold words and faces to a voice not often heard in mainstream media. Not surprisingly, in an era of Caitlyn Jenner, Orlando and the Hilary/Trump popularity contests, their swift rise to fame as visible non-binary trans, queer, people of colour over the last four years has been hugely controversial. An outspoken critic, some would say that Alok rides the back of the underdog, while in fact being a privileged Stanford University scholar, who affords the time and money to indulge in fashion shoots with friends with fancy cameras. Their articulate sneers at mighty White America, while living so high up the pecking order of migrant hierarchies, couldn’t possibly hope to understand the real concerns of most queer people of colour, who don’t get to attend university, who don’t get to live in Brooklyn, New York, who don’t get to escape neighbourhoods of poverty, injustice, and police violence.

Others question Alok’s non-binary trans feminine identity, arguing that we should do away with gender all together and just be ourselves, ending conversations of colonial and patriarchal ideas on masculinity or femininity. How can someone transgress binary gender paradigms while so flagrantly presenting themselves in the mode of western femme culture? Seeing Alok perform, it's not so easy to shoot someone down when they fully own their own paradox. From the start they assert, they don’t have to be a woman or a man to be a coherent human being. A quick flick through online profiles should make anyone aware that there is more to this than meets the eye.

The backroom at Basement Theatre was jammed with tables and chairs, and tiered bleachers lining the back wall, packing in as many people as legally possible in this tiny dungeon of an underground theatre. People nervously shuffled in anticipation, some cramming the floor at the foot of the stage. There was a quieter hum among the crowds too, anticipation of stark honesty, and jittery drinks to dull the pain with friends, of what is already a known daily reality for plenty of us here in New Zealand. Alok wanders in, peeking round the door and then springing onto stage, in a saturn rosebud dressing gown, with the chesty hint of a neon pink and striped leotard. The solo poet scrunches onto the small stage, polished hand reaching out to flick switches on the effects machine; Alok layers repetitions of sound and breath, short phrases, and we are deep into melancholy before we have blinked, as two poems roll out to us and fill the small room with a gentle but powerful voice.

Ten seconds later, the poem ends and Alok is all chirpy and full of banter, accidentally knocking over a plugbox full of cords, and a humble joking scuffle amongst the knees and cross legged faces staring adoringly up at the platform stage. Now we are challenged to move past our white conditioning, to give a little love in generosity to the poems we are about to receive, to let out our loudest moan in public on the count of three. All sarcasm and bravado, while pouty and flippant, Alok oscillates between serious and poetic, from fact-filled storms shooting bullets about the reality of the violence of colonial nationalism, to empathetic dedications, to loving fathers who moved countries through the inherited trauma of fitting into other peoples meanings of what it is to be a brown male or female in a white world, no matter how much they took it out on their children. People giggle at first, plenty of finger snapping agreements, and as 11.30pm wears on past midnight, the heaviness of confrontation and white discomfort spreads across the room. There is no way out, as personal revelations sit with tender memories, snippets from day to day family life, made even more painful alongside bulleted facts spat, half of all black transwomen have been in prison, and if that isn’t systemic injustice, what is?!

In Bring in Brown to keep Black Down, Alok acknowledges the diaspora of being an Indian in America, the ‘I love America’ tshirts, and the oppressions their own people have engaged in, inside and outside of white colonisation. Alok’s very embodiment, being a dark, hairy person of South Asian descent, means they are often first read as an Islamic terrorist, and then as a confusing other, or sometimes just a faggot. First recognising themselves through the white construct of “gay”, their giving birth to themselves, has been a process of both de-colonising themselves, at the same time as finding the realness in reframing their sexuality and gender on their own terms, and the strength in that. So many of us in the LGBTIQ community could empathise with the feeling that, no matter how much we move from childhood discomforts to adult self acceptance, the minute we go outside we are under attack. To many, Alok is a heroine, whose brave presence rings “I exist, I belong, I have a right to be myself, and I am not alone”. A final ballad rolls out, and repetitions whisper and fade getting quieter and quieter until you can almost hear the people breathing next to you.

Alok disappears out the door, and the audience is left shellshocked. Its not so much that the atmosphere is thick with emotion, as folks are quietly grieving together. Some people scuffle off, others are glued to their seats and drift out slowly, taking time for rich conversations afterwards, while others of us leave to dance at Family and shake it all out of our bodies, or shake our bodies out into the world a little more proudly. Aloks poetry is not just for victims and the oppressed. It’s hard to digest, unpalatable made palatably sweeter by humour, self depreciation, sarcasm, exageration. They are sometimes accused of superficial parody. One can see why, but I think it goes deeper. A good performer will always play with what is familiar, and distort it slightly, to open a gap in the actuality of our perceived world. Vulnerability, a gem, somehow sitting amongst the detracting bravado, cant negate there is a real human here, who is proudly stating and revelling in their human messiness. While they refute the trend in projecting “authenticity”, they are a living breathing conundrum made of the very complexities and paradoxes which self exposure requires, which being queer requires of us.

One thing is for certain though, Alok is a fighter, whether it’s with articulate streams of consciousness, dissecting the state of Global Colonisation or American politics, or the sarcastic humour of a generation, that is sometimes the only antidote to the pain of the unfunny state of life, the admission that we are all lonely, or the sugar sweet glee at childhood memories and reclaiming the innocence of a self before ‘shoulds' got in the way. Its so easy to de-personalise trans people. To critique them, analyse them, and characterise them. Alok’s determined giving birth to themselves, opens the space for us all to claim our fullest potential.

The 9th, at Meow Wellington:

Then on the 10th of October 2016, in The New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand


October 20th-21st - University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

Janani is here for this one, based on this review. However -

October 25th: "The Case for Nonsense - Janani Balasubramanian", CreativeTime Summit, DC, USA

There is no mention of DarkMatter or Alok in this or indeed in the lecutre (I suffered through the whole thing, which was frog voiced and the jokes didn't land and it featured a heavy misunderstanding of multiverse theory). However the ramblings about Schrodinger's Cat and the multiverse and everything appear to have been directly lifted from that last Darkmatter performance (which were completely disjointed from what Alok was doing), so it seems she was treating that performance as a rehearsal.

November 16th - VCLS (Voices of Colour Lecture Series) at Hamilton College in New York, USA

Again - this is just Alok, no Janani.

November 18th - Carnegie Lecture Hall in Pittsburgh, USA.

This review indicates Janani was there.
I can't find another appearance of them together after this date. I've also skipped out a whole bunch of interviews because they didn't seem relevant.

Anyway other than an amusing timewarp into 2016, the point of all that was to try and maybe work out a rough timeframe of what went down. It appears Darkmatter shared that kinky little girls thing in late March/early April and when facing backlash from fans reposted it instead of apologising. Darkmatter who had been doing loads of events suddenly slowed down, then an apology is posted and there's no more events for months. Janani only appeared a couple of times subsequently while actively distancing herself from Darkmatter. Then Alok announces he's "taking a break", goes off on solo tour and then Darkmatter officially ends.

I might be schizo pattern reading but I think that indicates the strain of "kinky little girls" does appear to have split them up... although they might have just gotten sick of each other.

The one thing I can't verify is who actually posted about "kinky little girls". They never signed their posts on DarkMatter and the post mentions having been a cute little girl - it feasibly could have been Janani who posted it. I can't see any evidence it specifically was Alok. On the other hand it seems like received wisdom at the time (and I do remember it at the time) that the post was from Alok and that Alok apologised for it, and also it seems more like the sort of shit Alok would come out with (Janani came out with some off the wall shit too, but the focus on femininity feels more like an Alok post). If anyone else can do some digging on that it'd be great, I just can't find any more receipts and they've DFE'd all the relevant stuff.

Oh, and if you were wondering what their performances were like, here's a little taster

This is from "Decoding DarkMatter". Someone called Crystal Waterton who's a black woman (possibly trans) followed them around filming them. Started filming in November 2015 and production wrapped December 2016. This was used as Crystal's project for her MA in Integrated Media Arts at the City University of New York. According to her Master's Thesis "I wrapped up my film with their Public Theater poetry performance and the information that the group would be disbanding".

It appears they formally ended their collaboration at the end of 2016 but kept schtum to let Crystal have the scoop on them. Certainly the film itself wasn't screened until July 29th 2017 at the Asian American International Film Festival (and DarkMatter didn't formally announce their breakup until after then, but yet the film that had finished post production in April ended with the news they'd disbanded). I guess that was nice of them, or maybe they were worried about getting cancelled (Crystal won several awards and now has a corporate job with Condé-Nast and Netflix). I wish I could find a copy out there as she mentions filming cinéma vérité and you know there'd be some juicy candid stuff included. Doesn't seem like either Alok or Janani went to the screening.

 

[Joe Lieberman]

https://jananibalasubramanian.com/bio

In case you were wondering what the other faggot from DarkMatter was up to

Janani appears to have completely walked away from the type of performances that Darkmatter did and subject matter that Darkmatter covered, and dresses relatively gender-conforming now: https://diversityarts.stanford.edu/2020/08/janani-balasubramanian/

 

[afternoon_tea]

The one thing I can't verify is who actually posted about "kinky little girls". They never signed their posts on DarkMatter and the post mentions having been a cute little girl - it feasibly could have been Janani who posted it

Yeah, I've always kind of wondered about this myself. Describing himself as being raised as a little girl doesn't really fit the way Alok talks about himself so I've always thought there was a chance Janani wrote it.

He's never corrected the record on it but that might be because of bad blood between them and not wanting to talk about her.

Not that I am trying to cape for the greasy pajeet, I just remember seeing that kind of gross rhetoric on queer feminist tumblr back on the day so it doesn't seem unfathomable to me that a woman wrote it.

 

[AssignedEva]

Yeah, I've always kind of wondered about this myself. Describing himself as being raised as a little girl doesn't really fit the way Alok talks about himself so I've always thought there was a chance Janani wrote it.

He's never corrected the record on it but that might be because of bad blood between them and not wanting to talk about her.

Not that I am trying to cape for the greasy pajeet, I just remember seeing that kind of gross rhetoric on queer feminist tumblr back on the day so it doesn't seem unfathomable to me that a woman wrote it.

@Tard Whisperer in the Dylan thread found that Alok actually has addressed it on his personal website back in 2021 -

I need your help. Right wing and trans exclusionary media spread lies about trans and non-binary people to delegitimize our existence and justify harassment against us. This slander continues uninterrupted because it’s profitable. Since the majority of news shared on social media is anti-trans and factually incorrect I want to get something straight.

These forces have misattributed a 2016 Facebook status about girlhood to me that I did not write. These words, ideas, and life experience are not mine. This status – an analysis of a film I haven’t seen -- was written by a former colleague who was born female. The author states this in the text (“I have been a cute little girl”). This has been glossed over and erased in order to demonize and discredit me.

I have never been a girl. Anyone familiar with my life knows I am a non-binary transfeminine person who grew up a boy. For over fifteen years, I have written, spoken, and published a book about this experience.

This is how confirmation bias works: because people believe that transfeminine BIPOC are monsters, they ignore overwhelming evidence otherwise to re-enforce their views. The trope of transfeminine BIPOC as dangerous and predatory (especially to women and children) is part of a longstanding project to dehumanize us. This myth is used to deny our rights. The actual data shows that transfeminine BIPOC are the most likely to face discrimination and violence. We are not the threat, racism and transmisogyny are.

Society prioritizes other people’s words and projections over my life. This persistent malignment takes a dire toll on my body and spirit. Please correct the record and combat disinformation. Condemn scapegoating and exclusion. Resist the rising wave of anti-trans legislation. Protect transfeminine BIPOC lives. Affirm our dignity in a world that uses us as cheap shots for views, clicks, and political and financial gain.

Love and need you,
ALOK

Very interesting that Janani is a "former colleague" and there's no acknowledgement of DarkMatter by name. I wonder if they've both realised how cringe their performances were.

 

[afternoon_tea]

in the Dylan thread found that Alok actually has addressed it on his personal website back in 2021 -

Interesting! I believe him honestly, I've always thought Janani wrote that. That kind of anti-purity culture sentiment was pretty big in intersectional feminist circles on Tumblr for awhile, some of it was extremely creepy, and it was mostly coming from 20-something female gender studies majors from what I could tell.

It often intersected with discussion of race, with people saying only white female children are considered innocent while brown girls aren't. I have no idea whether
this is true/I agree with it, but it's something I remember seeing brought up a lot.

It's pretty obvious something went down between Janani and Alok, I'd love to know the hot goss. All these types of queers are major shit talkers and gossips, I'm hoping someone who knows someone might stop by the thread with some information.

 

[Joe Lieberman]

Interesting find, is this Alok outing Janani as FTM?

 

[Trombonista]

Interesting find, is this Alok outing Janani as FTM?

I doubt Janani was stealth while they were together or even after they parted.