By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

There are some very powerful people who want you to hate me, and they will tell you some very terrible things to convince you that I am your enemy and most of these things have to do with my admittedly unconventional gender identity. The anti-trans movement will tell you that my gender identity is a mental illness that poses an existential threat to the very fabric of a functioning society. They will tell you that my gender identity is a totalitarian ideology cooked up by crypto-Marxist Ivy League wonks to enslave Christians under some genderless new world order. They will even tell you that my gender identity is a perverted conspiracy to sexualize your children and groom them into compliant victims.

They will tell you pretty much anything except the fact that my gender identity is a heartfelt expression of my own individuality and when their smear campaign against me fails the multibillion-dollar machine behind the anti-trans movement will begin telling you terrible things about other people who are even more marginalized than I am to keep you scared of them becoming empowered too. In fact, they’ve already gotten started.

Every other talking point these people regurgitate seems to be a hymn to protecting children from my kind but what does the anti-trans movement really have to say about their favorite age demographic? Their propaganda paints young people as innocent, feeble-minded, dupes who lack anything in the way of agency. They would have you believe that your own children are too stupid to tell you who they are and that they should have zero expectation of privacy or free expression.

These people don’t just want any notion of the very existence of people like me to be removed from schools and public spaces, they want to transform these commons into a hyper-vigilante police state that carefully governs the conversations and behavior of young people and urges public officials to report on their movements to legal guardians like the Stasi. Basically, according to the supposed libertarians of the anti-trans movement, your civil rights do not exist until your 18th birthday and maybe not even then.

The latest target of the war on trans is the mentally disabled, in particular those who happen to find themselves on the autism spectrum. It’s actually quite the turn if you think about it. Suddenly, these braying hate-mongers care very deeply about degenerate groomers like me, they just believe that we’re all retarded whack-jobs getting played by big pharma. Their proof, if you can call it that, is the fact that a lot of trans people seem to be nuts. Fair enough, they’re not totally wrong about this. Rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation do run pretty high among trans people but they’re high for a reason. Trans people struggle to cope because we live in a society that demonizes anyone who doesn’t fit into a very confining script and refuses to perform the roles assigned to us before we’re even old enough to say, ‘shut the fuck up.’

As for autism, the prevalence of this “condition” in the overall trans community is not particularly well known but it is elevated among people actually seeking care for gender dysphoria for the simple reason that these people are more likely to receive a diagnosis. With that being said, having personally known plenty of people on the spectrum, both inside and out of the trans community, a correlation between the two would not be particularly shocking to me. Your average autistic person isn’t even nuts, they’re just someone wired to be incapable of falling for the bullshit of pointless social norms like the gender binary. This is an admirable trait that autistic people happen to share with children which I believe is the real reason why the very powerful people behind the anti-trans movement want them both to be singled out to be sufficiently governed.

Much like the transgender phenomena itself, there is nothing particularly new about the anti-trans movement. These charlatans may paint themselves as a grassroots coalition of concerned parents fighting big government intrusion into Christian family life, but this is all just smoke. The anti-trans movement is actually just the latest crusade of the Christian Right. All of the big names pushing the most draconian legislation along with the barely literate talking points that drive it home are agents of the same millionaire moneychangers behind such social engineering projects as the PMRC and Satanic Panic. In fact, the two biggest anti-trans lobbies, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, are both little more than front groups for Focus on the Family, an organization run by Jerry Fallwell’s heir apparent, James Dobson.

READ MORE