By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“Why don’t you guys do something?” Those were the eternal words of Storme DeLarverie as the pigs hauled her away in shackles, bloodied but unbowed, after she threw the first punch of the Stonewall Uprising. I feel like I’m screaming this to my people all the time lately and I still can’t seem to inspire the riot necessary for our collective survival.

We live in dangerous times. We have lived in them before but genderqueer people like me have never faced a creature quite like this. As we reach an era when we have never stood farther outside of the closet, we face an open and brazen campaign to extinguish us from public existence. While popular right-wing ideologues proudly call for our annihilation, state governments across the nation are dutifully carrying out their dictates.

Genocide is an ugly word, but I can’t think of a more appropriate description for the GOP’s war on “transgenderism.” At a time when violence and suicide have never been higher in the transgender community, we are drowning in a deluge of openly bigoted legislation.

2023 is already the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans bills in this country, with 498 hate laws in counting proposed in 49 states. 43 have already passed. This includes 12 states pushing laws that violate the rights of minors to seek what has been clinically proven to be lifesaving care, as well as three who have also expanded those bans to reach well into adulthood, banning the use of puberty blockers up to the age of 26.

This hideous campaign also includes a growing rash of so-called anti-drag bills the likes of which have already passed in Tennessee and Florida and are affectively written to police public gender non-conformity in a blatant violation of free speech and expression. In Nashville, a second attempt at “male or female impersonation” is a felony that could lead to over half a decade in prison. That is six years upstate for the crime of having a dick beneath your dress.

And these lawmakers aren’t shy about their intentions either. They have made it painfully clear that they consider the entire transgender tribe to be little more than an ideology that they fully intend to censor out of existence by any means necessary and they are targeting our children first, using the public school system for its original intended purpose to kill the Queer and save the child so as to protect the sanctity of their idealized concept of purified cisgender youth. My people aren’t clueless to these facts. The word genocide is popping up like daisies in every support group and Queer bar across my little slice of rustbelt Americana, but I still can’t seem to inspire a single goddamn faggot to throw a fucking punch.

The stormtroopers are returning to Stonewall and every time I say revolution, my own fucking people stare at me like some kind of crazed heretic, telling me to simmer down and that this isn’t the appropriate time for such radicalism. Really? Then when? There is an open plot to erase us here. If this isn’t an appropriate time to arm ourselves to the teeth and batten down the hatches, then when is? I seriously want to know so I don’t miss the signal. Do we wait for the train cars to arrive at the gayborhoods? Or maybe we should just sing “We Shall Overcome” as they march us all into the fucking showers?

“Vote, march, be peaceful, repeat, vote, march, be peaceful, repeat…” this what they tell me over and over again. Hell, even the so-called radical Queers are simply peacefully marching to their local state capitols to demand that other powerful cis-gender people in Washington come to our rescue with the miracle of more useless legislation that no country sheriff or small-town principal is ever actually going to follow through on.

And they keep quoting Martin Luther King at me like braying birds, promising me with almost embarrassing sincerity that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice.” How do I politely break it to them that this is total fucking bullshit? First of all, King was quoting a 19th century clergyman named Theodore Parker who was actually trying to console his fellow white abolitionists with the hollow promise that at least there would be justice in the sweet hereafter. Second, there exists no single clearer case that peaceful liberal democracy achieves exactly nothing than the endless struggle for anything that even remotely resembles civil rights in this country.

Let me break it down for you.

READ MORE