I sincerely believe people can change.
I believe brainwashed people can be un-brainwashed.
I firmly believe we shouldn’t go around killing each other. For any reason.
I believe hatred, murder, and war are never the answer to anything.
I believe love is the binding and guiding force of everything that exists.
I believe forgiveness is—for me, anyway—the most direct path to freedom.

I also believe the world is much better off without the person who was murdered on Wednesday. Murdered, not “assassinated.” We can’t call it an assassination until we know the murderer’s motive. For all we know, the killer had a deep-seated hatred of adults with baby teeth.

It’s things like that murder that cause me to struggle with my beliefs. Because the person who was murdered was an objectively reprehensible human being. A racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who spent his life spoon-feeding poison to gullible people.

Wait, though, was it transphobia? Phobia means fear. As your friendly neighborhood trans person, let me just say that dehumanizing, violent hate speech meant to put a target on my back, and the backs of all trans people, is not a phobia. It’s just good old-fashioned white “Christian” fascist hate, gleefully spread with a broad, ugly brush.

I won’t quote any of it. You can find the rank, bottomless, contaminated well of his hatred if you really want to. It’s out there in plain sight forever and ever, in the eternal, heavenly embrace of the web. I’m also not going to type his name. Ask your grandpa. The one with the red hat.

Despite all that, I should forgive him.

That’s what I tell myself. That, and it would have been better to change his mind than to murder him. And it would have been better. It would have been glorious.

I have a question, though: how long should we have waited for that redemption? How long should we allow a tsunami of hatred to rub up against our shore? How long should we turn the other cheek, to borrow a folksy witticism from their funtime book of fables?

Martin Luther King would have told me, “Hannah, baby, keep the faith!” You know, in so many words.

I was in third grade when someone killed Martin. I remember that day. I remember the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two months later. I have vague black and white memories of President John Kennedy’s assassination; a year later, someone killed Malcolm X. When I was 10 years old, the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four students protesting the Vietnam War.

I could go on, but I won’t.

I know things feel really unhinged right now, but blood in the streets of America is nothing new. When I see the endless shows of military force these days, the masked brownshirts snatching people off the street and stuffing them into unmarked cars and vans, it doesn’t shock me so much as it brings back unpleasant memories.

It saddens me that we’re still here. That we haven’t progressed an inch. If you believe we have made progress, okay, fair enough. I’d just say ask the next black person you see how happy they are with the way America treats them today. Ask any woman how the whole equality thing is going. Ask me what it’s like trying to walk through life as a trans person in America.

Being trans in America is like this: There’s a school shooting every week, but no modern gun control legislation has even been considered, let alone passed. Yet, somehow, in the past five years, thousands of bits of legislation intended to eliminate trans people from society have been proposed and enacted in the United States. Thousands. That’s what it’s like.

I see the masked brownshirts snatching people off the street and stuffing them into unmarked cars and vans, and I can see myself in that situation. It’s a clear vision that I don’t have to imagine—it already feels real. At times, it feels inevitable. It feels like next month, next week, tomorrow. That’s what it’s like.

So, go ahead, ask me if I mourn the death of any pale, stale crumb bum who took glee in dreaming up new ways to make me suffer, who worked ceaselessly to eliminate me, to invalidate, denigrate, and end my existence.

I do not.

I should forgive him, I tell myself again. It would have been better to change his mind than to murder him.

I should forgive all of them.

But I cannot.

None of this is a failing of forgiveness. It’s the realization that not everyone deserves forgiveness. I don’t like that fact—and it is a fact—but then I don’t like a lot of things that are floating in the water that’s rising up around me.

The next day everybody got up
Seein’ if the clothes were dry
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed
Mama, of course, she said, “Hi!”
“Have you heard the news?” he said, with a grin
“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”
“Where?” “Downtown.” “When?” “Last night”
“Hmm, say, that’s too bad!”
“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it,” said the neighbor
“It’s just somethin’ we’re gonna have to forget”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma
Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet

– “Clothes Line Saga,” Bob Dylan

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN