Published November 21, 2024

Transgender Day of Remembrance 2024 will be hard to forget, even if we wanted to. For one thing, this might be the last one in my lifetime the U.S. government acknowledges. It certainly won’t do so for the next four years. It might soon be declared illegal.

And we definitely won’t see a night like this one again until at least 2029.

I don’t know what else to say. We’ve been warning people about how bad it would get, and we are just beginning to experience the horrors. I won’t bother telling you the news from yesterday. None of it was good for trans people or the people who love them. Not that I saw.

It will get so much worse.

I had to circle back to a Rebecca Solnit column from 2020 for comfort.

Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You. Back then we thought gender really was kind of binary and defined by genitals; science has gotten smarter in the decades since and we now know it’s a complex interplay of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and other stuff, some of which is in the brain, not the pants, and also that quite a significant number of people are born intersex, and some are misgendered at birth, and male and female never were airtight categories anyway. Cultures from Native America to India have long recognized that there are other ways to be gendered.”

She still supports us, unlike some who have decided to run us over to mask their failure.

This is still in the early stages

People who want to wipe us out want us to be the top issue at least through the midterm elections of 2026, so this is just the beginning. It’s a circular dynamic: They want to wipe us out, sure, but more than anything else, they want to win and be in power. If threatening to wipe us out helps them achieve that, they’ve gotten their wish. If actually wiping us out comes with that, it’s icing on their cake.

But they can always recycle the threat, just like their promise of better and more affordable health care, a promise that never goes anywhere. Thing is, some people are just now finding out that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing, and they are wondering why nobody told them.

In a land where that is true, using us to scare people is always going to pay off.

Nancy Mace’s former comms director Natalie Johnson gets it.

Mace wasn’t always like this. This 2021 tweet came before she realized how much being anti-trans could help her become a political star.

I strongly support LGBTQ rights. No one should be discriminated against.

Religious liberty, gay rights, and transgender equality can all coexist. I’m also a constitutionalist. We have to ensure anti-discrimination laws don’t violate religious freedom. https://t.co/HrTgPQPfXH

— Rep. Nancy Mace (@RepNancyMace) March 2, 2021

Courtney Milan gets it. So does Rebecca Solnit. From that same column:

And yes, men who want to harm women could dress up as women, but they could also pretend to be repairmen or emergency workers to get into our homes, and actually have, and we haven’t banned repairmen and emergency workers yet.

Linda Holmes gets it. All of these are cisgender women, I might add.

But we feel like potentially we have to fear everybody now, even our “allies.” Many are abandoning us because it’s politically expedient to do so.

People who paid attention closely enough to see reality understand. “Working class pain” is always invoked by people who forget that the working class isn’t just white people. Somehow, Black people, for example, can be statistically more working class and resist fascism and authoritarianism.

Yeah, but, but, traditional social norms! Family values!

The advantage to the bad guys in devaluing education and knowledge of history is obvious.

I’m bringing in other voices because I am mostly out of words. I’ve been screaming for years, and I don’t think it made a lick of difference.

Jim Benton gets it.

What kind of girl am I? What kind of woman?

And what kind of person are you? I don’t care what you’re doing in your stall or how you pee. Just mind your own business and wash your fucking hands.

And then there’s this:

True whether the person has a penis or not.

Anyway …

I’m like this, too.

But hey, let’s talk about traditional social norms, about manly men, hypermasculine dudes, toxic masculinity and gay panic, among other things. Listen to Marilyn Frye.

Nailed it down pretty well there.

Meanwhile, I am tired of being lectured about morality.

I can’t seem to remember the name of the writer who, when asked what he thought of Christians, replied, “I don’t know. I’ve never met one.” How about that, huh? The gap between the talk and the walk is often immense.

We won’t ever get around to that. We’re too worried about where some people pee.

We are an easy punching bag now. Few seem to want to step up and defend us.

Nightmare

Meanwhile, the people assuming control of the country knew what they were doing when they took their stand on bathroom policy on Transgender Day of Remembrance.

People love to say “Never forget” about things absolutely no one will ever forget.

How about we never forget Rita Hester. How about we never forget all the other trans women we’ve lost and all the trans people we are about to as this gets worse and worse.

Never forget, motherfuckers.

The people assuming control of the country ran on a yearslong push that “trans people are perverts” and are now nominating actual perverts for powerful positions. Being a pervert seems to be a social contagion in that world. (Remember how much they love that term?)

I dictated this in bed, pasted it into a story template, added a few links I had found (with help) between sessions of sleep throughout the day and scheduled it before going to bed late last night. (I mostly sleep now, or try. Sixteen hours a day, on average. It isn’t enough.)

I woke up screaming from a nightmare. A cisgender woman had found me by using a tracking device installed in a gift, a mobile something or other someone had given me, and kidnapped me. She was subjecting me to medical cruelty, and smiling and laughing, when I began screaming. For a few minutes, I worried that my neighbors had heard me.

I’ve been screaming for a long time, though, and wondering if anyone ever hears me. I can’t seem to scream loud enough.

This is only the beginning.

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Photo of White House from June 26, 2015, by Rena Schild via Shutterstock.

Image of trans people and trans pride flag by BNP Design Studio via Shutterstock.

Rage by Carly J. Dubois.