The Republican Party wants to erase trans people. Over the last couple of years, they have made this sickeningly clear, not just with their colossal barrage of brazenly bigoted legislation overwhelmingly targeting children in one of the most tragically suicidal demographics in the country but with their increasingly unhinged and deliberately dehumanizing rhetoric. In fact, according to GOP rock stars like Ron DeSantis and Gregg Abbott, people like me don't even exist. We have been reduced to a conspiratorial ideology known as transgenderism, a perverted cult poisoning the brains of young children and convincing them to mutilate themselves with experimental pharmaceuticals and draconian surgical procedures.
Never mind the mountains of analytical evidence that has led a typically bigoted medical establishment to finally admit that being transgender is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Never mind the decades of exhaustive and conclusive evidence that transgender children denied the right to transition chose to destroy themselves in alarmingly high numbers. Never mind the fact that there are historical records even in the goddamn Bible of third genders existing for as long as anyone has bothered to keep them. Just never mind the fucking facts at all because these people aren't interested in them. They are only interested in securing the endorsement of the Zionist Christian Right and the Christian Right is only interested in using big government to erase my people like Palestinians by any means necessary.
These means include bills that do far worse things than banning trans kids from sports. They include bills that flagrantly violate the First Amendment by making discussion of their very existence in compulsory public schools a crime. They include bills stripping public libraries of all literature that so much as even acknowledges our history. They include bills that bar minors from access to harmless medications like puberty blockers that have been proven over decades to reduce suicide rates by the double digits. They include prosecuting doctors that even provide this care with felonies. And perhaps most disturbingly of all, they include investigating parents who simply allow their kids to be themselves for child abuse in hopes of ripping their children screaming from their arms before placing them into homes that will force them back into the closet and erase them from public existence. There is a word for this and I'm getting tired of avoiding saying it out loud for fear of getting gaslit by my straight friends. That word is genocide.
I have always contended that being Queer is about far more than just sexuality and gender. We are a nation unto ourselves. Queer people are a unique race defined by our biological and spiritual inability to conform to the rigid confines of Western colonialist puritanical values. We were violently banished from our once affirming Heathen tribes during their forced conversion to State Christianity and left with no other choice but to forge a tribe of our own from the ashes. What we built from those ashes was a diverse and vibrant culture defined by our shared values of radical individuality and resistance to conforming to the White Anglo Saxon gender binary. We stubbornly refused to allow ourselves to be defined by what some progressive eugenicist or child molesting priest contended that our genitalia were supposed to mean.
All Queer people began as gender outlaws of one kind or another. There is no divorcing "transgenderism" from the Queer experience because it is fundamental to our provocatively transgressive way of life. Boys fuck girls because girls wear dresses because human beings require rigid categorization to be properly governed. When the constructed biological basis of the current patriarchal power system becomes fluid, anything becomes possible, and everything is up for grabs. Maybe race and class become fluid too. The order, the caste system, divide and conquer, it all falls apart in glorious anarchy. This is why transgender people are so fucking dangerous, no matter how powerless we are. And this why we must be stopped, and the GOP aren't the only ones conspiring to stop us.
Transgender people, especially those of us who brazenly reject the binary altogether, are the last vanguard of the Queer Nation because we are the most resistant to assimilation and assimilation is the preferred answer to the Queer Question proposed by our supposed allies in the Democratic Party. On the surface this appears to be a far gentler and more equitable approach to diversity, but its conclusion remains identical to that of the openly genocidal Republicans, erasure, and this ain't the first Queer holocaust to prove the synergistic effectiveness of this bipartisan method either.
The AIDS Virus offered the Christian Right with their first viable opportunity to annihilate us with a conspiracy of silence. An entire generation of Queer revolutionaries were wiped out by that suspiciously convenient plague while Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush used the federal government to keep the medical establishment at bay and divorced from any viable attempt to contain it. But the fags refused to just die quietly. Even with a viral timebomb strapped to our chests, the Queer Nation used the tools that we had sharpened on the thick rock-like skulls of pigs at Stonewall to make our suffering too grotesquely visible to ignore. Groups like ACT-UP used an aggressive campaign of highly publicized direct action in order to provoke empathy from the better angels of the straight world. These martyrs came out of the closet to die so another generation could live to torch cop cars.
Sadly, the Democrats had other designs. It was only after it had become viscerally clear that Queer people had survived the plague and the Republican party's attempts to weaponize it for votes that the DNC finally opened its doors to us, and many Queer people were simply to shellshocked to say no to such a warm welcome, but what exactly was it that these fair-weather allies were really offering us?
They offered us the heterosexual ritual of marriage provided that we mind our manners and shut the fuck up about fixing a crooked insurance system that still leaves most Queer people dying in the cold. They offered us protection from hate crimes provided that we consent to growing the police state where the greatest hate criminals thrive for a government paycheck as well as that colossal heterosexist animal farm known as the Prison Industrial Complex. They offered us the honor of serving openly in the straight man's army so long as we forfeited our commitment to solidarity with other colonized cultures in the Third World. And of course, they offered us access to their totalitarian medical and education systems where our kids now find themselves soft targets for the Republicans latest jihad against our existence. The message is clear, conform to one half of the duopoly or the other will crush you.
The Democratic Party's solution to Republican terrorism is to use our terror to strengthen the state that the GOP uses to terrorize us and even this booby-trapped gift comes at the price of our autonomy. Ironically, these are also the same twisted mind games the Republican Party plays on Christian conservatives. What was once an insular and largely self-sufficient minority has been successfully assimilated into the state apparatus they once rightfully feared with the promise of protection from Queer scapegoats in exchange for conformity.
The Democrats torch a bunch of Jesus freaks at Waco and the Republicans offer them protection from fags like me if they agree to fund the same feds who cooked the Branch Davidians alive. The GOP governed CDC twiddles their thumbs while Christopher Street becomes an open-air morgue, and the Democrats offer to hold off the fag bashing hillbillies as long as we give Anthony Fauci a raise for waiting so patiently for us to die. It's all part of the same sick fucking shell game of divide and conquer that inspired the invention of the gender binary in the first place. Every American becomes some other American's demonized other in order to manufacture all of our consent to be ruled. But when that other becomes disposable the stakes grow higher.
Queers, Blacks and Chicanos face the constant threat of extinction because we were never supposed to last as long as we have. Our races, our nations, were designed for the express purpose of resisting our annihilation which made these very identities even more lethal than the bodies they protect because they encourage everyone to join our resistance. This is why both parties are committed to crushing us by any means necessary. The Republican means are far cruder but far less affective. It turns out that even your average straight white American yuppie has a hard time watching Black transgirls slit their wrists to avoid being forcibly displaced. The Democrat's solution is to leave our bodies be and quietly dismantle the identities that empower them. We have nowhere to turn. Or do we?
This Queer turns to Malcolm X. Malcolm saw through the hoax of liberal integration being trafficked by Democrats to quell furious ghettos like Watts into compliance with white power. Malcolm new that the only people who could save Black people from the Faustian holocaust of extermination or assimilation were Black people themselves. Before the government could have him killed, Malcolm called on his people to create their own institutions that could operate with total autonomy from the state. Many fools continue to misunderstand this message to be one of racial separatism as if that were the only alternative to government subjugation, but Malcolm had tossed that bullshit in the rearview mirror with the Nation of Islam. What Malcolm was actually advocating was an old African tradition that honkies have come to call anarchism, a system of a million minorities coexisting without a massive, centralized caste system to divide us against each other.
This is the only way that the Queer nation will survive. The state is a system designed to destroy individuality and the diversity it inspires in the name of order. This only ever leaves any tribe with three options, assimilation, genocide or revolution and the third option doesn't come in a ballot box.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Under Pressure by David Bowie & Queen
* Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras
* Candy Says by the Velvet Underground
* Been a Son by Nirvana
* The Walker by Christine & the Queens
* Shoplifters of the World Unite by the Smiths
* Cop Car by Mitski
* Easy on Your Own by Alvvays
* I Think That I Would Die by Hole
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