By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

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.

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