Youth Rights Are Queer Rights

 2025 has been a hard year to be Queer in this necrotic empire but it has been a downright horrific year to be a Queer kid and tragically, in many ways, it has never been harder to be transgender under 18. While past generations like mine spent decades languishing in the shadows of cramped closets with no place else to hide, the latest generation of gender outlaws has quite heroically liberated themselves through the power of chat rooms and message boards only to find themselves playing the unwitting role of the latest scapegoats for the professional hatemongers of the Christian Right. These same merchants of misery invested in MAGA back when it was still a sideshow stunt. Now that stunt has both the momentum of a populist uprising and the corporate sponsorship of the zillionaire tech bro class and smashing "transgenderism" in the cradle seems to be their favorite side hustle.

The laws just keep coming and they just keep getting worse. Since 2020, every new year has broken records with the sheer volume of anti-trans legislation, with the number of bills restricting transgender rights more than tripling between 2022 and 2023 alone. 2025 is no exception. The year isn't even halfway through and a record breaking 923 bills have already been pushed forward with 88 at the federal level. Most of these bills are likely to die on the vine but 54 have already passed, adding to the rapidly growing matrix of police state provisions harassing Queer youth wherever they dare to exist.

As much as 40% of trans youth between the ages of 13-17, or roughly 100,000 patients, now live in states restricting gender affirming care, including 6 states where providers face felony charges just for treating trans kids with the same puberty blockers still handed out to cis girls suffering from their own version of precocious puberty. This is being done in spite or perhaps even because of the fact that this treatment has been proven repeatedly to reduce suicidality among trans youth exponentially.

Trump has joined in on this anti-scientific campaign of medical apartheid with an executive order broadly declaring any form of medical care for minors suffering from gender dysphoria to be abuse and prohibiting federal funding to any institution providing this care, leading at least seven clinics to shutter their youth services in states where they are still fully legal. Trans kids across the country have been confronted with the horror of being abruptly taken off a drug that gave them their life back. 

Many families with suicidal children have been forced to travel hours or even days out of state and pay tens of thousands of dollars a month out of pocket if they're lucky enough not to live in one of the 8 states that have passed purposely vague "aiding and abetting" provisions to their anti-trans legislation, restricting even out of state care. There is simply no point to such petty fascism beyond garden variety cruelty and six-ninths of the Supreme Court seems to be cool with it, couching state interference in family healthcare decisions as conservatism in this brave new world.

But the doctor's office isn't the only space being turned into a warzone targeting young Queer bodies. In many ways ground zero has been the public school system which is increasingly beginning to resemble an East German police state in which a faceless network of adult bureaucrats is given the right to carefully inspect every cavity of the student body to insure proper gender conformity. 28 states prohibit transgender youth from participating in school sports. 19 restrict bathroom access in K through 12 schools. Another 19 censor open discussions on Queer topics and 8 mandate that school officials out their students to their parents.

Various LGBTQ rights and civil rights organizations are mounting legal battles against what should be clear to anyone with eyes are grotesque violations against fundamental human rights like privacy, free speech and bodily autonomy. A growing number of states, cities, counties and other localities are similarly trying to combat this wave of legislative harassment by declaring their schools and doctors' offices to be sanctuaries for Queer youth. I welcome all of this, but I still can't help but to recognize that these liberal reformers are missing the point. The only reason that any of these laws are affective is because individuals cease to have rights in this country beneath the age of 18.

In no place is this sad fact more horrifically obvious than it is in the American compulsory school system which was designed for the express purpose of policing young people and assimilating them into obedient citizens. The bans on trans girls engaging in girls' sports or using girls' bathrooms in particular highlights this fact. These laws are totally unenforceable unless adult administrators carefully police the bodies of young girls by surveilling even their most personal activities and carefully inspecting their bodies with invasive screening exercises that would amount to abuse even if they aren't inevitably exploited by opportunistic sexual predators. These obscene violations are only possible because adults are already afforded full access to their students every move and bodily function with children carefully groomed from a young age not to object.

A similarly oppressive atmosphere has been cultivated in the American doctor's office. While many states rightfully observe the age when young people are capable of making choices regarding their mental health to fall somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14, nearly every state refuses to extend this same right to privacy and personal agency in regard to medical procedures for anyone beneath the age of 18. This essentially creates an environment where the human body of certain citizens is left almost entirely up to the mercy of other citizens based largely on a totally arbitrary number on a government document. 

I shouldn't have to tell you that the number one source of child abuse in this country and worldwide are the legal guardians of said children. So, why then do I have to tell anyone that allowing such people or any people unrestricted access to the medical decisions of young citizens essentially amounts to affording science the opportunity to facilitate this abuse?  

Children are individuals with a constantly evolving capacity to assert their own bodily autonomy. Any system that fails to recognize their agency as individuals, including the Supreme Court, is abusive under any circumstances and should be leveled, not replaced by an equally abusive system with more woke intentions. This is especially true in the case of marginalized communities such as mine who already exist at the mercy of a state apparatus designed to oppress us. Queer children will never be safe in cis hetero institutions unless all children are granted the same rights as any other sovereign individual.

This means ending the glorified indentured servitude of the compulsory school system. This means replacing that heavily centralized twelve-year police state with some form of radical school choice that includes public schools based on mutual aid and the Sudbury method of curriculum free and directly democratic education. This means granting all children the basic human right of being able to choose their own education, their own informed medical decisions, and even their own parental guardians. This means all adults, even the "woke" ones, releasing the grip on their egos and assuming their proper roles as guides and caretakers, not gods and masters. And this means that any civil rights movement should be considered a farce unless they commit themselves to universal youth rights because human rights begin at birth.

Youth rights must become Black rights. Youth rights must become women's rights. And today more than ever, youth rights must become Queer rights, for without youth rights Queer people may cease to exist outside of the prison of those cramped closets of yesteryear. We've fought too goddamn hard to go back now and I say it's high time we taught our kids how to throw a brick like a Queer.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Song that Inspired this Post

* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

* School's Out by Alice Cooper

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Changes by David Bowie

* Sheila Take a Bow by the Smiths

* Hang On to Your Ego by Frank Black

* Awful by Hole

* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

* Teen Age Riot by Sonic Youth

Why I Can't Celebrate Pride This Year

 If you've read more than a few of my rants, then you are probably already painfully aware that I am a Queer person and that I take this identity pretty seriously, some of you may even be forgiven for saying annoyingly so. However, you have to understand that I really didn't choose this shit, at least not all of it. I didn't choose to be born into a body that makes me physically Ill. I didn't choose to have a gender identity so complicated that I need a goddamn Venn diagram just to explain it. And I sure as fuck didn't choose to have to deal with all of this shit in a conservative Catholic diocese loaded to the gills with pedophile priests and fire-breathing conformist imbeciles.

What I did choose was to fight back, to maintain my mutant otherness and take pride in it. I chose to be an anti-puritanical individualist in league with other biologically bizarre people who would rather fight than fit in and this is what makes me Queer. I am a neurodiverse genderqueer lesbian, and Queer anarchism is the martial art that I practice to defend this existence. Queer is my culture, Queer is my tribe, Queer saved my life and it will probably save it a few more times before sundown. With all that being said, just because I am very proud of my people doesn't mean that they don't occasionally piss me off and it is this dichotomy that has long led me to have a very uneasy relationship with Pride Month.

What began as the revolutionary celebration of a riot waged by an irate mob of largely Black and brown gender outlaws against the police state has slowly transformed into a Disneyfied and heavily policed parade replete with soulless corporate sponsors and opportunistic Democrats. In fact, the entire month has become one big vanilla cash grab for monster machines like Blackrock and Raytheon who drape themselves in rainbows and get their pictures taken with weird people to throw us all off the scent of the latest war crime they manufactured in some dead-end corner of the third world. Crucify me twice for being presumptuous but something tells me that this was not what Marsha P. Johnson had in mind when she picked up that first brick.

On the other hand, I have found-family that includes actual Queer children, and I have long sucked up my bitter discontent just to see their faces light up like Molotov cocktails when it becomes theatrically undeniable that they are not the only ones. If I had even the slightest idea of that fact when I was their age it might have saved me from decades of therapy and a lifetime of suicidal ideation. So, every June I pick up the youngins and make the hour-long trek to the nearest college town to plug my nose while I uncomfortably coexist with pink capitalism, that is until this year.

In 2025 I can't do this anymore and it's not because I'm afraid of the bullseye that Donald Trump has put on every rainbow within shooting distance of the nearest federal building. It is because of the lengths that I have seen Pride organizations go to keep the straight corporate sponsors that MAGA is scaring away. I had a front row seat to this grotesque display of Queer servitude this year and I have seen firsthand how the Pride parade is now running over the Queer kids that they're supposed to be saving.

The return of Trump to the White House has been pretty harsh for most Queer people but it has been downright traumatizing for anyone growing up trans as well as those of us who still carry the scars from growing up trans. During Trumps first couple of campaigns, he largely left culture war bullshit on the back burner, preferring a xenophobic populist schtick instead. But by 2024 this was running a little thin, largely because Trump had already exposed himself to the rural isolationist set as just another fellatious cuck for the Israel Lobby.

So, Donny did what Republicans have always done to win back the trailer park; he doubled down on bashing the Queers next door. In 2024, Trump essentially ran on a promise to eradicate the toxic ideology of "transgenderism" from the face of the planet by handing over the sledgehammer of the federal government to the Zionist gangsters in the Christian Right and it didn't take him long to make good on that promise once he was back in the Oval Office, with a slew of executive orders directing the compulsory school system to police the biology of their captive student body.

Throughout this horrific election circus, I had been volunteering for one of the largest LGBTQ non-profits in the state, one largely responsible for throwing the annual Pride events in my region. I won't use their name because I still know a few good people over there who still provide a few good services, which is actually what led an anti-assimilationist Queer anarchist like me to work for such an organization in the first place. 

By mid 2024, I had already spent months pushing these people to provide more rural communities like mine with the kind of youth groups they run in the college towns. We had gotten a grant, hired a facilitator, and I had personally found an off-campus location willing to host the program, but months went by without further action. I was told repeatedly to be patient while this organization ran galas and fundraisers for their next parade, and I tried hoping that maybe just a sliver of that money would go to my kids. Then Trump got elected in a landslide, and I lost my patience.

I also lost all contact with my boss, who seemed to have locked herself in her office on November 6 and never got off the phone. I harassed her and her board members with a storm of emails first asking and then begging for a simple face-to-face meeting with anyone who could tell me why we couldn't pull the trigger on a rural youth group even with a loaded gun in our hands. We had the cash, we had the location, we had a licensed facilitator, I even offered to drive the kids of my little backwoods tribe to the spot myself, but nobody seemed to have fifteen minutes to put it all together. It didn't make any goddamn sense until I discovered that my boss had been spending every waking minute since Trump's reelection on the phone with corporate sponsors, trying to convince them to keep their floats in the parade.

I was livid but I was still determined to get some kind of support system in place for my kids who were receiving death threats and had friends in and out of the psych ward after failed suicide pacts. I tried to track down the actual facilitator who I was told was attempting to hold this youth group at the local non-profit bookstore I had gotten them in touch with. It turned out that they weren't there, they weren't even showing up, they were just cashing the checks and going home, and no one had even noticed. When I brought this to the attention of my boss's boss, the chairman of the board for this organization, they fired the scam artist, replaced them with an old white straight woman, and informed me that they didn't even want me alone with the kids because of my diagnosed neurodivergence.

They managed to get enough money to throw their fucking parade this year, but the rural youth group remains a shell, a single poorly paid breeder with no youth to bore. I left the big non-profit to volunteer at the bookstore so I could at least still make the group happen even if I wasn't allowed to be an official part of it, but they moved the group to another closed location after getting too many questions from me and the bookstore that they refused to answer. 

I am now attempting to run my own youth group out of the same location with zero budget, but my adult transgender support group, one run by my former employers at the big non-profit, very recently and very suddenly decided that after seven years with me as a member they no longer want me to bring up my multiple personalities out of fear that my neurodivergence might somehow be spooking away new members. So, now I'm left trying to build yet another support group from scratch at a time when I have never felt more abandoned by my own community.

This is what Pride has become. LGBTQ groups across the country who used to throw a little parade once a year and then actually fucking help people have converted themselves into veritable parade industrial complexes, spending the entire year raising money for a parade so they can raise more money for the next parade. In the process, they end up spending more time trying to shmooze with big corporations run by cishet billionaires then they do with the young people who have always defined our movement, leading them to become completely out of touch with their own community, one which is becoming increasingly brown, radical and neurodivergent while those corporations begin to bail because they see bigger dollar signs with MAGA than they do with LGBTQ.

I can't be a part of this. I won't be a part of this. I refuse to hold the IV while a handful of old neurotypical white cis lesbians facilitate the suicide of a movement that saved my life while they chase parade floats. I really do hate to rain on the parade, but I will not be taking part in any corporate Pride events this year or any other year but that doesn't mean that there isn't a silver lining to this storm cloud. 

Across the country, while corporations are pulling out of Pride parades left and right, activists are stepping up to take their place, using grassroots funding while shifting focus from celebration to confrontation. In other words, the weird people will inherit Pride after all.

I am proud to say that the non-profit I currently organize with is a part of this trend and I fully intend to take part in any march against the police state that doesn't conflict with my youth group just so long as the only corporate float is a flaming Venmo.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Kind of Girl by Muna

* You're One by Imperial Teen

* Dicks Hate the Police by the Dicks

* Slip Away by Perfume Genius

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Satanist by Boygenius

* America's So Straight by MDC

* The Walker by Christine & the Queens

* You Know You're Right by Nirvana

* True Blue by Boygenius

Why Gaza Matters to Trans Liberation

 The Genocide Convention defines genocide as an intentional effort to completely or partially destroy a group based on its nationality, ethnicity or religion. Merriam-Webster defines genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

Regardless of which definition you use it has become pretty much impossible for any mildly rational human being to deny that what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip right now with America's full approval and careful guidance is a genocide. Even many of the leaders engaged in the new Nakba seem to have a hard time denying their blatantly genocidal ambitions and the numbers don't lie.

After 19 months of relentless slaughter, the ongoing holocaust in Gaza stands perilously tall as the most well-publicized and unapologetic genocide in modern history. Over 53,000 corpses have been counted at hospitals and morgues with estimates for the real number of the dead reaching well into the hundreds-of-thousands. This includes over 200 journalists and over 400 international aid workers. Another 120,000 have been wounded and over one million people out of a population of 2.1 million have been displaced at least once with many wearily traveling from refugee camp to refugee camp only to be bombed out over and over again.

The entire region has been reduced to rubble with over 60% of all buildings that once stood in Gaza now demolished. Mosques, schools, hospitals, bakeries; no target is off limits with every cradle apparently concealing another secret Hamas installation beneath its shadow. As if bunker busters and scatter bombs weren't already enough, since March 2 of this year, this already desperate hellscape has also been under a total blockade. No food. No water. No children. Around 60 of which have starved to death and another 70,000 are currently at risk of acute malnutrition.

The statistics alone leave little room for interpretation. These numbers and the harrowing smartphone footage from the ground that came with them exposed the lies beneath the veneer of the Biden-Harris administration's cheesy humanitarian rhetoric and in all likelihood cost the Democrats what should have been another easy election win against a blatant lunatic. However, their replacement in the Oval Office has taken this evil one step further by making absolutely zero attempt to mask his own genocidal intentions and his Israeli masters never really did to begin with.

Former Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant once famously boasted "We are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly." President Isaac Herzog stated "It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it's absolutely not true." And Israel's Heritage Minister, a charming individual named Amical Eliyahu who has repeatedly called for dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza, summed up his position succinctly with "They need to starve."

These comments were all made during a time when then-President Joe Biden was wagging his finger at his own Zionist proxy gestapo with one hand while handing them one fat juicy check after another with the other, but now his successor seems to have adopted the same rhetoric as the killers, totally erasing any manufactured line that once separated the two.

"I think I'd be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone... Gaza is a nasty place. It's been that way for years. I think it should become a free zone, you know, freedom, I call it a freedom zone." There you have it, Donald Trump, an American president, openly calling for a final solution and where the hell is the glorious "free world" to stop it? Where are the humanitarian interventionists of the EU and the UN? Shouldn't they be bombing Washington D.C. right now the way they did Belgrade over far less evidence? 

And where are all those fearsome strongmen of the Middle East, your Erdogans and al-Sisis and shieks and crown princes? Men more than willing to slaughter their own people over a social media slight are suddenly as timid as newborn fawns while their sugar daddy back in Mar-a-Lago throws Arab infants into a woodchipper on live television. Sadly, only the dispossessed cry for the dispossessed and I can't stop crying.

But there is more than one way to perform a genocide, there is more than one way to erase an entire class of human beings, and Donald Trump's zest for open annihilation isn't limited to the Gaza Strip. He and his Republican minions have been carrying out another very different kind of final solution right here in the United States, one directed explicitly against my own people in the transgender community. While we aren't being starved and shot in the streets, we are being forcibly removed from them while laws are being written to deny our existence and prevent us from having any presence in public life.

Since 2020, every new year has brought a new record for state bills attempting to roll back transgender rights with the ACLU tracking 575 in 2025 already so far, and while most of these bills fail to pass the courts, more and more do, and they are becoming increasingly extreme. 19 states now ban transgender people from using bathrooms that match their gender identity in a variety of government owned buildings including ones existing in public places like schools, parks and libraries. Utah and Florida have taken policing the bodily functions of its citizenry one step further by making bathroom transgressions a misdemeanor punishable by jail time.

40% of trans youth in this country now live in states that restrict access to pretty basic gender affirming care with six states now threatening medical providers with felonies for simply using totally reversible methods that every major medical body on earth recommends. Methods statistically proven through decades of research to reduce the rampantly high suicide rate among trans youth.

What's even more disturbing is the Tennessee ban on "drag performances" which affectively makes it illegal for anyone deemed to be a "male or female impersonator" to be present on public property or anywhere where people under the age of 18 could be present. Florida, Montana and Texas have all passed similar laws that are currently tied up in the courts. The effect of such laws would be to essentially penalize the public existence of a clearly visible and historically continuous cultural group, and the aim of these laws has been made explicit by our current president with both his rhetoric and his executive orders.

Donald Trump has so far launched six executive orders targeting trans existence but his first still remains his most telling. In his order "defending women from gender ideology extremism and fostering biological truth to the federal government" our shameless leader federally mandates that the government only recognize two genders determined exclusively by sex assigned at birth. He also explicitly denies the existence of transgender, intersex, and gender diverse people, reducing us on paper to an extremist ideology to be confronted and eliminated. The states are following suit, with 15 now defining sex based on severely rudimentary interpretations of reproductive anatomy. I don't know where we go from here, but I have a feeling it involves federal databases and registries.

People on both the left and the right seem to find the notion of trans solidarity with Palestine to be silly simply because certain Muslims despise us. Not only does this fail to capture the cultural diversity that exists both in Palestine and Islam, but it also relegates human rights to the realm of only protecting people you agree with, and this mindset is precisely what allows genocide to continue to be a thriving industry in an era supposedly defined by humanitarian universalism.

Should a pagan shiksa like me have said nothing while the Nazis loaded up trains to Auschwitz simply because certain Orthodox Jews find me to be a despicable pervert? I suspect some transgender Germans did exactly that only to find themselves dying in the same camps and for the same damn reasons. Both Jews and trannies didn't fit into the Third Reich and both Gazans and trannies don't fit into the Fourth.

Those seeking trans liberation and those seeking Palestinian liberation don't just share an enemy. We share a cause and that cause isn't tolerance or Sharia Law, it's an opposition to conquest and empire in any form. Genocide is by definition a tool of colonialism and so is the gender binary that compulsory heterosexuality was built around. Before western colonization, every pre-Christian tribe from Dublin to Damascus had its own regional variants of third genders and a few of these colonized cultures still do, including devout Muslim cultures like those in Oman who have the Khanith and those in South Asia who have the Hijra.

This is why the Queer liberation movement that formed around the fires of Stonewall was explicitly anti-colonialist in nature and this is why it is quite literally existential that we become so once more. Because only the dispossessed cry for the dispossessed and only united in struggle can that collective wail become a war cry. Never again means never again and never again means unconditional solidarity.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* No Children by the Mountain Goats

* Afterlife by Alex G

* Violent Times by St. Vincent

* Doesn't Remind Me of Anything by Audioslave

* It's a Mirror by Perfume Genius

* And the Same by Fugazi

* Hey Jupiter by Tori Amos

* Violence by Grimes

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* We're In This Together by Nine Inch Nails

What "Mental Illness" Has Taught Me About Anarchism

 Everywhere you turn lately somebody seems to be talking about the importance of mental health; online adds, television commercials, celebrities, politicians and a lot of other shit that generally makes me want to shake cocktails with the stuff beneath the kitchen sink are all gently reaching out and telling me that it's ok to be fucking crazy. In fact, last month was widely celebrated as Mental Health Awareness Month, and this all sounds just charming but the voices in my head still feel compelled to ask just what exactly we are being made aware of. 

As kind and understanding as all these corporate sponsored allies' sound, they all seem to be part of a chorus singing the same narrative and that narrative generally goes that if you're sad you're sick and if you're sick there is no shame in seeking help from any federally vetted agent of America's Byzantinesque healthcare establishment. There are a number of problems with this narrative, the chief one amongst them being that it relies almost entirely on the biological illness model of mental health; the contrived but commonly accepted notion that any form of mental distress or neurodivergence is the result of some kind of chemical imbalance.

The reality is that this generally assumed notion is largely unsupported by any real substantial and verifiable evidence. This isn't to say that mental illness is necessarily a myth, it's just not a fucking illness, it's more of a response to trauma and some of us seem to be more traumatized than others. The biggest commonalities among the chronically distressed appear to be poverty and various forms of institutional disenfranchisement. Poverty alone has been shown by numerous statistics to be a direct pipeline to the asylum with individuals beneath the poverty line being eight times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than more affluent patients.

And we see these same trends accelerate even further among nearly every other variety of marginalized community as well. People of color are pretty consistently shown to have alarmingly high rates of depression, women are often diagnosed and drugged twice as often as men, and Queer people have substantially higher rates of suicidality than straight folks, with almost half of all consulted trans people such as myself reporting to have attempted to commit suicide in their lifetime. Just add the institutional abuse sustained for simply being autistic or otherwise neurodivergent and we've pretty much covered the entire mental ward.

The reasons behind this demographic epidemic really shouldn't be that hard to conjure and they have nothing to do with illness. To put it succinctly, it is fucking traumatizing to be anything but a wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dude in a world run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes and when said wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes make all the rules, anyone else who pushes back or even just gets bummed out is deemed sick and usually by the same institutions that we are being encouraged by MTV and YouTube to seek help from which (Surprise! Surprise!) are pretty much all run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes.

Somehow, none of the supposedly woke mass media campaigns for "Mental Health Awareness" talk about any of this shit. There is also zero effort to address the fact that the biggest comorbidity across all of these demographics of diagnosed Americans is being a survivor of sexual violence which every demographic listed above experiences at far higher rates because rape culture is a direct byproduct of marginalized existence under a post-colonial hierarchy. 

And of course, there is no effort whatsoever to address patients' rights or the fact that many of the institutions we are being welcomed to seek help from are actually a major source of the trauma they deem to be an illness, with admission to impatient mental health facilities being directly associated not only with increased rates of trauma and suicide but with rampant rates of sexual abuse as well. (I have personally known two close friends who have been raped inpatient.)

Then there is the biggest taboo in the mental health conversation; the very uncomfortable question of 'what if we're not the sick ones here?' What if civilization itself, with all of its trauma inducing institutions, vapid celebrity culture, and increasingly invasive modes of technology, is the illness and the people they all insist are sick are actually the cure? 

Speaking personally, as a lifelong anarchist, I can honestly say that my latest diagnosis, known as otherwise specified dissociative identity disorder, has taught me more about anarchism than any two Russian or German philosophers combined.

I spent most of my life in a fog, drifting aimlessly from one diagnosis to the next and from one medication to the next with shrink after shrink coming up with one excuse after another as to why I was so damn dysfunctional. It wasn't until I arrived at my own conclusion that my assigned gender identity felt like a prison sentence that shit finally started to come together. After coming out I increasingly began to exhibit all the symptoms typically associated with complex PTSD. This seemed to accelerate rapidly with my gender transition, during which a storm of vivid flashbacks revealed that sexual abuse at the hands of the church I grew up in forced me to suppress my gender identity at a very young age as a means of survival.

The result of repressing such a huge part of who I was at such a young age was the compartmentalization of the self into multiple identities and realizing this long-buried truth resulted in these identities abruptly coming to the surface. So, when Nicholas became Nicolette, Nicolette also became Agnes, Max, Ophelia, and Mona. Naturally, this has been an overwhelming experience with many, many, many, many complications. My identity became something too complex for any single personality to govern, so we became a collective. Then something really strange happened. My life began to make sense.

Every single day is a team effort, and every single alter has a role to perform in this effort. Agnes, the five-year-old who kept the abuse a secret and never forgot is our emotional base as well as the source of our sometimes-overwhelming empathy. It's very easy to dismiss her outbursts as tantrums but she has an unfiltered capability for comprehending our emotions without intellectual pretention. Max is the manager, the whip smart teenage prick who seems to be strangely immune to most of our more irrational impulses and paranoia. Ophelia is the nonverbal personification of our long tryst with disassociation who has the almost uncanny ability to calm us without ever uttering a word. And Mona is our merciless protector, tempered by decades of suppressed rage.

No one is in charge and any attempt by any single alter to take charge ultimately only results in more chaos. Order can only be achieved through decentralized consensus, and this takes a level of meditation that gets downright psychedelic. To an outside observer it probably looks like stereotypical insanity; one weird bitch engaged in lengthy conversation with herself, but this has afforded me the ability to be far more aware of the surrounding universe than I was when I passed for sane. Instead of just walking into seemingly random bouts of depression or anxiety, Agnes sees the triggers, Max coaches us through disarming them, Ophelia keeps us calm, and Mona kicks in if we encounter danger while we manage the situation.

There is nothing crazed or insane about this. Much like real anarchism, it is actually an extremely organized means of self-governance and it's one that would be totally impossible without every single member of the collective being motivated primarily by their own unique needs. The closest that any sane philosopher has come to explaining this kind of distinctly individualist collectivism is Max Stirner with his 'Union of Egoists' in which the system fails to become a truly functioning collective the moment that any member decides to put the others' needs before their own. Though, even this falls short of truly comprehending the fact that at its core true individualism is an act of collective love.

In my inner collective we are all in this because we love each other as much as we love ourselves, but we recognize that the only way to truly love and support each other is to give each member of the collective the room to define themselves through their own will to be unique. Call it emo-egoism or perhaps an inverted union of egoists but one thing that it certainly is not is mayhem and chaos and neither is anarchism, another system deemed mad by the institutions it renders irrelevant.

You see dearest motherfuckers, my dissociative identities are not a disorder, they are a pathological defense mechanism developed to defend my individual agency from institutional trauma, and I believe this to be essentially true of most so-called mental illness' which can be better described as forms of pathological post-traumatic survivalism or perhaps even a means of individualist evolution. I also don't believe that it is a mere coincidence that the population of these evolved egoists has exploded at a time when our trauma inducing civilization is on the brink of self-destruction.

With all these things considered, this system's sudden concern with 'mental health awareness' strikes me as a last-ditch effort by an abusive shepherd to convince his wayward flock to voluntarily subjugate themselves back at the barn but it isn't working. The barn is on fire, and we can all see the flames.

Call me ill all you want but I'm not the one who needs help. I don't fear the collapse of your precious "civil" society and its various forms of abusive governance. I have already developed the means to govern myself and you can too. All you have to do is stop listening to the gods and masters they've prescribed for you and start listening to the voices in your head.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* In My Head by Black Flag

* Madness by Muse

* Happy by Mitski

* Lithium by Nirvana

* The Crazy Girl by Black Flag

* North Poles by Samia

* The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails

* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey

* Paranoid by Black Sabbath

* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski