Sunday, June 8, 2025

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

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