I’m a transgender woman and like most of our kind, I’m fucking horrified.
The Democrats are blaming us for 2024’s lossx
Trump signed an executive order criminalizing our existence
And I’ve had cis friends turn on me, telling me “People like you should have left children out of it, you’ve hurt your cause forever!!111!11”
I have no hope for the future, I feel truly and horrifically, cooked.
I just wanna know. Why did this happen? Why does everyone suddenly hate transpeople when Anti-Trans Policies were deeply unpopular as recently as 2023?
Why? Why? Why?
I just want to know, what did we do wrong? What changed? Why is this happening to us? When do the papers come saying they’ve “corrected my gender marker” or are they just going to drag me off to the camps instead?
I just… I’m trying to hold it together, and I fucking can’t.
I honestly thought I was safe, that the GOP’s threats were bluster, that they could act on them but they’d fail, because the American people had spoken and weren’t going to buy that the “threat was already in their locker room.”
I never imagined that people like us would become the villains of the week. I thought that the demonization of our kind was a badly aged cliche of the 80’s… I… I’m honestly wondering if…
My mind’s going to dark places, but if I let them go there I’ll find places darker still.
So many people keep thinking this. It’s every marginalized group. In every single one of them there are people who get complacent and assume they are safe. And then for reasons I don’t understand, they vote against their own best interest or don’t vote at all. Because some singular issues matters more to them than the issues that are actively hurting their fellow men and women.
I don’t mean to blame you when I say this. I mean to explain that it’s not you. I have felt this way. I felt like this when Trump got elected back in 2016. I didn’t understand how people could vote for him. I talked to several people who were marginalized like me who didn’t seem to think he was a threat. Who thought he might even be good for the country.
Trump is an inventive liar, and his charisma appeals to a certain subset of the population who are single issue voters. The message that “only I can help” appeals to some people because it’s what people who are overwhelmed want to hear. Because they don’t want to have to figure things out. They are already overstressed and they want to pass off responsibility to others.
When you add in the war on education for the last 80 or more years, you can start to recognize that a lot of people just don’t have critical thinking skills or they’re in such a state of overwhelmed worry that they can’t use them.
It’s not just one thing. And the vast majority probably didn’t intend to “betray” anyone. The system is designed to keep the population desperate so that they don’t organize against it.
And people like to assume they’re immune from propaganda. They aren’t. It’s insidious. It’s the type of thing you have to actively be on guard for.
As for “friends or family”, this may seem harsh, but if they would hurt you in this way they were never your people. Let them go. Build meaningful relationships with other people who you can count on for love and support.
Things are hard and they’re going to get harder. We gotta work to get things changed. That’s all we can do. The fight is never over.