By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

My people are freaking the fuck out right now. I deal with it every day. Just being transgender in a conservative rural community alone can feel like a fulltime job. Being actively trans, organizing Queer resistance in a place with two fag-bashing churches for every honkytonk bar, can feel like a tour of duty without an exit strategy, especially in an age of epic collapse when every normie seems to be jonesing for a convenient scapegoat and every gangster in Washington needs a distraction from the latest bed he shit.

I cope with this along with my own palette load of trauma by organizing. I volunteer at non-profits, I facilitate youth groups, I help out at my found family’s homestead, I weather death threats and carry three knives in my purse… I do whatever I can to keep busy between therapy sessions and blog posts, in part because the trans people I work with who don’t get busy tend to get terrified and they’re not being irrational.

The GOP has declared war against trans people in this country in nearly every manner conceivable. For five straight years these police state bulls have broken the last year’s record for the sheer volume of bloated, big government, anti-trans legislation they’ve pushed forward. Sadly, 2025 is looking likely to break the record again with 998 bills proposed and 129 passed across 49 states in the first half of the year alone. These laws police every aspect of trans existence from school bathroom access to private healthcare decisions and the latest Trump administration is cranking up the heat with one executive order after another.

The first, passed just days after that orange child molester crept back into the Oval Office, set the tone by proclaiming that transgender people simply do not exist and that the federal government officially rejects our existence by declaring there to be only two immutable gender identities defined exclusively by government documents taken at birth, a position flatly rejected by every major medical and scientific body on the planet.

This is what radical trans activists like me are talking about when we talk about transgender genocide; a concerted effort by various wings of the power elite to erase us from public life and force the youngest generation of gender outlaws back into the closet they escaped from no matter how many suicides that results in, all while empowering the strong arm of the state to dictate everyone’s biological integrity in the process.

And this is why radical trans activism is absolutely existential to individual liberty, especially in rural areas where the GOP’s influence over popular opinion is tragically damn near universal. However, with Trump’s numbers slipping in nearly every poll available and that lecherous cretin’s standing with his own base on extremely shaky ground over his desperate attempts to cover up his toxic bromance with Jeffrey Epstein, the President is attempting to shift focus by leveling every last federal rifle scope at his disposal on radical trans activists like me.

Trump is doing this with a national security directive known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 or NSPM-7 which identifies a disturbingly broad laundry list of rudimentary viewpoints as investigable indicators of “radical left violence.” Such symptoms of terroristic ideation include “anti-Christianity”, “extremism on gender” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion or morality.” The directive’s solution to these threats is best explained in no uncertain terms by the document itself.

“The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

The key jargon here is the call to “disrupt” individuals or groups “that foment(s) political violence… before they result in violent political acts.” What this newspeak essentially amounts to is the Executive Branch commanding the Federal Government to surveil and sabotage speech and ideas that they believe to be capable of influencing crimes before they even occur and using a strategy of disruption to do so and what this essentially amounts to is East Berlin-style Stalinism in a bright red ballcap.

All this sickeningly Orwellian horseshit is only compounded further by the fact that all of it comes on the heels of the Department of Justice’s open calls to consider stripping anyone diagnosed with gender dysphoria of their Second Amendment rights by including us in their ‘Red Flag Laws’ along with the all-powerful Heritage Foundation’s memo to the FBI calling on the feds to essentially label all transgender activism as “Trans Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism.”

As I said above, this is all shit well-worth freaking the fuck out about, but I also have a feeling that might be precisely the point. The Trump Administration tried like hell to turn the assassination of Charlie Kirk into some kind of 9/11 moment that would rally wayward deplorables around a MAGA brand increasingly tainted by the Donald’s own historical sexual predations and his utterly shameless support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to declare war on pretty much the entire Middle East.

The result was actually pretty fucking funny if you have a deranged enough sense of humor. So many Trumpers blamed Bibi himself for the assassination of one of his own lobbyists that the Israeli Prime Minister felt compelled to release a video in which he basically begged a bunch of social media trolls to believe him when he promised for two minutes straight that he wasn’t on the Grassy Knoll.

As crazy as all this sounds and is, it was only made possible by the fact that MAGA’s attempts to connect the Charlie Kirk assassination to some bizarre cabal of transgender furies proved to be even more batshit than anything the Groypers could conjure up.

So, now Donald Trump is openly publishing what would typically be a classified national security directive announcing his intention to infiltrate and destroy a movement he can’t seem to convince his already virulently transphobic base to crucify in the name of American greatness. This feels like a trap (pun welcomed but not intended) and it wouldn’t be the first time in history that the feds tried to neutralize a radical political movement through provocation and trickery.

This was the entire basis for Cointelpro; J. Edgar Hoover’s Cold War conspiracy to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the “subversives” of the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements. The variety of tactics used to do so were vast but frequently violent and often involved sending snitches into these organizations to encourage and sometimes just outright commit acts of violence against political rivals or even their handlers’ own foot soldiers.

A classic example of this septic skullduggery is the case of the Panther 21; a joint FBI/NYPD sting operation against the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, charging 21 radicals of conspiring to launch a massive spree of terrorist attacks against local police infrastructure. The only problem was that the entire conspiracy was largely the invention of a network of police infiltrators and once this boondoggle was exposed, the case collapsed into a humiliating money pit that proved to be the most expensive criminal prosecution in Gotham history while only seeing a single solitary Panther do any real time.

This didn’t end with Cointelpro either. During the War on Terror, guerrilla catfishing basically became a cottage industry that kept the lights on at Quantico and those fuckers honed the con job down to a science. First you find several heavy breathers talking shit on some dark web chatroom, then you egg them on to take things to the next level, provide them with the kind of logistics and firepower they could never possibly assemble on their own and nail them in some highly publicized law enforcement production before J. Edna’s Heroes very publicly pat themselves on the back for being real-life action heroes and ask for another deficit tripling raise so they can spend even more of your tax dollars entrapping glorified jihad larpers on 4chan.

The feds do this all the time to pissed-off Muslim kids but they’ve also done it with militia types like those Boogaloo wannabes who needed a dozen informants just to put together a hairbrained scheme to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and now Trump wants to play this game with “Transtifa” because it’s the only way to make us desperate enough to fire first and scare people off his trail of raped teenage girls and dead Arab babies.

Call it Queerintelpro, put it on a bumper sticker and fix me another White Russian because I was born too old for this shit in the wrong goddamn gender.

My advice as a genderfuck anarchist with a serious hyperfocus on the nastier shards of American history is that Queer people need to stay vigilant, we need to prepare ourselves to defend our people by any means necessary, but we must not react. The strongest defense that we as a community against this kind of insidious government infiltration is actually our communities themselves; intimate, tightknit tribes designed to replace the families many of us have been thrown out of. We need to strengthen these bonds now more than ever because no fed can fake that kind of love.

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