“Her” is right here. & I criticized Díaz for being patriarchal in how he dealt with women, which he also admits and discusses in this piece, he just continued to erase them and talk about his treatment of them as it pertained to him. I am not doing that in return. I’m touching upon a subject apparent in the narrative and discussing it. I’m not erasing or downplaying his narrative, just naming that there are racialized gendered layers to what’s happening there.

Secondly, I was referring to anecdotes from my past to give context to what I was saying, which I should be able to do without being dismissed as “not being over it” which seems like an unnecessarily mean way to talk about a woman recounting her past (though you are fine if a man does it, which shows me that you’re holding us at different standards. Men’s trauma is more valid than Black women’s.)

You can listen, respect and handle it even if it seems hard at first. Even if you can’t, you gotta.