By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

They say that the arch of history bends towards progress but as a trans person in the midst of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I find myself torn at the crossroads of an increasingly bewildering age. On the one hand, transgender and gender diverse people in the West have never experienced a greater level of exposure and popular acceptance. On the other hand, these same trans people, my people, have also never faced a greater threat of state sanctioned violence and outright erasure.

The Human Rights Campaign has found in recent polls that 41% of American adults report to personally know at least one person who openly identifies as transgender and another 85% of Americans claim that they accept that trans people should be afforded the same rights and protections as anyone else. This includes a full 76% of Republicans and the pop-cultural zeitgeist seems to concur.

Flipping through any random barrage of TV channels and/or streaming services, you will certainly find more than your fair share of programming presenting transgender people in a positive if exceedingly narrow light.

With all that being said, it can be a little hard to feel the love of statistical bromides and cultural tokenism beneath the flame of a state fueled blowtorch.

The Republican Party has been on the warpath for some time now, openly seeking to annihilate all things trans for at least a decade, and the Trump Administration seems to represent the zenith of this campaign. A litany of executive orders signed by Trump since 2025 have directed the Federal Government to define gender as an immutable binary determined exclusively by a single document inked at birth while also commanding the most powerful government on earth to use every piece of regulatory and penal machinery at its disposal to erase anything and anyone who defies this edict.

Compulsory schools have been ordered to deprive trans children of even the most basic human dignity. Prisons and juvenile detention centers have been ordered to forcibly detransition inmates in what can only be legally described as medical experimentation. And foster homes and other related youth services have been given the greenlight to use all manner of religious quackery to torment the trans youth grossly overrepresented under their so-called care.

It shouldn’t take a goddamn human rights organization to tell you that this concerted campaign of forced erasure from public life qualifies as nothing less than genocide, but the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has done just that, warning that such policies and rhetoric as mentioned above match the early stages of a genocidal process based on what has been historically documented across the globe over the last century.

How in the hell is this kind of disconnect between governance and popular sentiment even possible and how did we get to such an absurdly dichotomous place as a nation, actively seeking to eradicate a people the majority of the country shows very little outward animosity towards?

The reason for the violence is fairly simple, at least to any committed student of historical collapse. The American Empire is in the early stages of the kind of long, slow disintegration that ultimately befalls all imperial hegemons. Our nation is not only rapidly losing the faith of its own citizenry, it is losing the faith of many of its own proxies who are showing increasingly bold signs of going rogue with the barbarians at the gates.

Traditionally, under such dyer circumstance, collapsing empires frequently appeal to small but fanatical death cults within the upper echelons of their polluted societies. For Pax-Americana under the reign of Imperator Trump this means riling up the Christo-Zionist Millenarians of the Evangelical Movement.

In order to keep this powerful minority engaged and committed to a series of increasingly pointless and unwinnable wars, the Empire needs to feed them a juicy scapegoat now and then and thus they rally the doom seekers around the spook of the evil, mincing, transgender groomer lurking in a women’s room near you.

On multiple occasions, I have seen Donald Trump cornered in the Oval Office with offensively polite questions about his abject failure to reign in a thrice decapitated third world nation in the Persian Gulf only to witness that soiled Ceasar bark incoherently about ‘men in women’s sports’ and some conspiracy to ‘trans all the children.’ This rhetoric isn’t for the general public; it’s for a very specific moneyed faithful amongst the petite bourgeoisie. The kind of people willing to drop nukes on Gaza just to see Jesus ride back to earth on a dinosaur.

But what of the silent tolerant majority? What happened to all that glorious acceptance we soaked up under Imperator Biden?

Sadly, regardless of popular sentiment, it was all little more than worthless rhetorical platitudes; the desperate byproduct of a rival attempt to save the bad name of the same empire now busy erasing us.

Every empire consists of a constant contest between competing elites. These elites tend to share virtually identical goals. They tend to struggle to protect the same institutions that empower all of them. They just don’t always agree on the best strategy to do this. Some of them will even go so far as to vigorously compete for the highest position on their mountain of skulls and that is what we are witnessing here with this facetious war over trans rights.

In spite of their hollow rhetoric, the Democrats do not support Queer people. They fund the exact same prisons and compulsory school system that serve to enslave and marginalize us as their Republican rivals do. The Democrats simply seek to use the spook of ‘LGBTQ tolerance’ to prove that the Empire which thrashes us is capable of humanitarian inclusion. After all, how can the Devil be a monster while he’s petting a kitten?

This kind of imperial inclusion has done nothing to serve my people. Quite the contrary, it has only made us appear complicit in the corruption of our tormentors. Transgender people have become associated with a morally bankrupt society by conservatives in the same fashion that many Christians have by those on the left.

We have all become human shields in a culture war between different factions of elite imperial casualties and that is a revolting shame. Your average redneck Jesus freak cares far more about Palestine, Ohio than Jerusalem and your average tranny lunatic cares far more about the gulags of their own local wing of the Prison Industrial Complex than Putin’s Russia. But we are all compelled to warfare, both with each other and the world, in the name of strikingly similar concepts of Western cultural universalism.

I myself inhabit a decidedly vexing space in this manufactured cataclysm as I happen to be something of a Christian as well as something of a transwoman. In fact, both of these disciplines are inspired by the same commitment I owe to Gnostic Sophiology and both of those seemingly divergent phenomena predate what we now know as Western Civilization.

Christianity was just one of many schools of ancient Gnostic mysticism to spring from the battlefields of the Levant onto the streets of Rome before that Empire, the very same empire that crucified Christianity’s namesake, decided to use that particular school popular among the urban Roman working class to justify their struggling empire’s continued existence and endless expansion.

In the process of assimilation, entire Gospels were purged from the Bible while others were censored and manipulated beyond recognition and from this manipulation modern Western Civilization was born.

In spite of the fact that Christ made zero reference to the third genders which existed both in Europe and the Levant during his lifetime, the newly Roman Catholic Church and its colonial Protestant progeny in England blasphemously used the name of Christ to erase all trace of any form of gender expression that existed outside the binary.

As Christian law gelled into a single dictum across Medieval Europe, rigid gender norms were enforced that essentially rendered women into breeding stock and viewed all forms of fluidity between male and female as a threat to an order designed to reduce the womb into a glorified soldier factory to populate the battlefields of an endless crusade for more church property.

The Enlightenment only served to reinforce this rigid gender binary by declaring that construct be a science and rendering it to a distinction that could only be determined by the state. Thus, the tyranny of the birth certificate became sanctified by liberal secularism.

The Enlightenment also fostered the rise of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide with its similar breakthroughs in scientific racism, opening the door for missionaries to erase even more ancient third genders from the face of multiple continents. Be they two spirit or hijra, they were all sentenced to the same fate as the so-called eunuchs of the Gospels; marginalization to the point of erasure.

But both wings of the West failed and we are still here, fighting yet another wave of imperial subjugation on our own, while the elites compete over their kingdom of skulls in another pointless midterm election circus.

And here I stand with you today, during what has been declared Transgender History Month by some corporate monolith or another, as a devout Marian witch, a post-civ genderqueer anarchist, and perhaps above all else, living, spitting, hissing proof of the failures of Western Civilization in all its secular cabals and devout renditions.

They all failed. They failed to contain the Holy Spirit beneath the jar of a single tyrannical church, and they failed to contain the human spirit beneath the jar of a manufactured gender binary, just as they have failed to contain the Axis of Resistance beneath their bombs.

My message to you, my dearest motherfuckers, and to any agent of imperial bureaucracy surveilling this screed, is that the Christo-Zionist horde is right about one thing and that is that gender outlaws like me are the bane of Western Civilization.

To this slur I proudly shout, ‘your goddamn right we are and we’re here to finish the job that the third world started!’ You can pass all the laws and royal edicts you want. The writing is already scrawled in Venus Extravaganza’s blood all over the temple walls; your stadium church is a massive tomb of material emptiness and your empire’s days of rape and honey are numbered.

Death to the old gods! Long live the ancient gods! And long live those of us compelled to transgress in their honor, for we shall inherit the ruins of a blasphemous era and bring forth a new age of tribal diversity in stiletto heels and smeared lipstick.

READ MORE