This post began as a calm, rational take on America’s march toward transgender genocide, but fuck being rational; this is how I really feel.
The latest tsunami of anti-trans hysteria is in full effect. It’s worse this time around because we have so many proudly imbecilic knuckle-draggers occupying state and federal governments.
They are successfully legislating trans people out of existence based on their remarkable lack of knowledge about us, any of us. An ignorance that’s celebrated and gleefully cross-bred with the unnatural sexual fixations of a bunch of self-hating extreme right-wing puppet bootlickers.
The disturbing Thriller video flash mob of drooling flag-wavers took over while we were doing the dishes, and they won’t stop passing their laws until it’s illegal to be anything but a white “Christian” in America. And perhaps only a male white “Christian.”
Yes, I live in California, a state with actual legal protections for trans folks (gasp!). But the backwardness of other states affects me deeply. I feel for the trans people who are marooned in those repressive wastelands. I fear for them and worry about them. I don’t want to see any more of my trans sisters, brothers, or others murdered. None of us need to see that. As a country, we wear those murders as a stain that can never be removed. Right next to the countless other stains that we already wear.
Yes, I live in California, but it affects me too because it makes my world smaller. Look at this map. I can’t even get into my car and drive across the country without putting myself in danger.
That’s trans activist Erin Reed’s “First Period Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Assessment Map.” You should read about how she compiles it; it’s legit.
(Map updated June 1, 2023.)
And that’s just America. It’s worse out in the world. Recently the company I work for scheduled a departmental meet-up in Cancun, Mexico. I had to decline to attend. Why? Do I have an unnatural fear of Cancun’s festive drink umbrellas and reasonably priced souvenirs? An aversion to streets full of white people in sombreros?
No, I had to pass because there’s only one country in the world that murders more trans people than Mexico (that country is Brazil, and I ain’t going there either). I’m not necessarily afraid of being murdered in Cancun or anywhere else, but where murders of trans people are common, violence against us is even more common. That’s a cause for legitimate fear and a threat I have to take seriously.
But back to America. Seriously, my friends, what the fuck?
I’m 63 years old, so I remember the freewheeling, progressive 60s and 70s, and I remember the backlash to that joyfulness that was spearheaded by Reagan, the pumpkin-headed, bitch-slapping advocate for the return of McCarthyism. Around the turn of the century, things started to get better again for gender outlaws, but now we’re being marched to the stake for burning again by gaggles of lemon-sucking puritans trapped in regressive, “Christian” religions who can’t bear to see progress or happiness because they’ve never experienced such things themselves.
Oh, America. Where are you?
Clearly, you – the hillbilly “you,” not the people reading this – are on a mission to burn the country to the ground. And hey, why not the whole world, too, since you’re already up and have your pants on! Giddyup crusaders! Carry on dooming us all to some kind of Wonder Bread-induced coma future where banjos are the only legal musical instrument, and the universities have all been turned into Hometown Buffets.
I may not live long enough to see the pendulum swing back to sanity, which is sad in the way that things you can’t do anything about can be sad. I’m kind of resigned to watching this zoo monkey shit-tossing festival play out. I may be sent to prison for existing in the meantime, but what can you do?
I believe all people are capable of redemption. Regardless of all the justifiably mean things I’ve just typed. I believe that any person brainwashed by the right-wing fascist voodoo cult can be made to see the light. I know they can. It just takes a really long time and a lot of personal attention. But there aren’t enough trans people and allies in the world to cover that spread.
So we’re left with a whole lot of people who are willingly selling their souls to vultures in Berkshire Hathaway cufflinks while being reeducated by the disingenuous cauldron of boiling weasel entrails that is Fox News, along with the equally disingenuous extreme right-wing vitamin supplement shills and pandering shit-stirrers on the radio (you remember the radio, they listen to it in all of those red states in the map above).
I have no solution. I never do. All I know is I’m feeling uncomfortable, pissed off, and cornered, so I’m becoming defensive, and apparently, that makes me type run-on sentences full of picturesque homespun insults.
Maybe that’s my solution.
It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve ever had to work with.