@MLClark Your friendship is always a gift to me. I get so much from your kindness, and I'm grateful you take the time each day to greet and encourage me.

@NiveusLepus

SCOTUS avoiding the bathroom issue & Vivek tanking when he tried to lean hard into transphobia to offset the racism of Republican voters are teeny tiny reminders that all the recent cruel acts against fellow human beings *can* be made to lose their power again. We have a long way to go, but the chinks in the armour *are* there.

🤗 Welcome to 2024! It's off to a weird start and some have taken bites from the wormy part already, but there are still a few healthful nibbles in it yet!

@MLClark @NiveusLepus Time and time again, we see transphobia is a losing campaign strategy. Even if that's because GOP voters are just sick of hearing about trans people, I'll take it if it gets bigots or if office or keeps them from reaching out in the first place.

@lenaoflune @NiveusLepus

It's still sickening that our cultures pursue political power by testing out different scapegoats, causing so much suffering just to see what will happen to their polling numbers if they do.

We don't talk about the ultimate failure of this strategy as if it lessens the horror of the struggle; we talk about it because we *have* to hold firm to the fact that this violence is a choice. We'd simply go even madder if we let their false narrative of inevitability win.

💜🫂

@MLClark @lenaoflune I am a student of history, it was my minor in college, and seeing these bills is terrifying.

The sheer volume of them is staggering. In 2023, over 500 anti LGBT+ laws were introduced. A statistic I heard this morning said in the first 3 weeks of 2024, 500 have been proposed.

Not all passed, but enough did, and the legislation is evolving from protecting children, to excluding adult TG folk from care, and from public spaces.

1/?

@MLClark @lenaoflune

In West Virigina, they are considering a law that would not only mandate reparitive therapy for Trans individuals, but declare us obscene, and subject us to felony arrest if we got within 2500 feet of a school... Registered Sex offenders, for refrence, only have to stay a 1000 feet away.

Whats more, the conservative "Project 2025" as highlighted the targeting of Trans rights specifically as a core issue

@MLClark @lenaoflune Historically the pattern is clear. It starts with laws like this, and it ends in a far darker space and the conservatives are showing no signs of slowing down. Rather they are escalating in both rhetoric and legislative violence.

@NiveusLepus @MLClark So... I'm also pretty afraid of what those in power can and are doing, and I certainly don't mean to minimize that or put on rose-colored glasses about the courts being our last line of defense. They have power and genocide is on their mind.

But what we're seeing is that when people run on transphobia as their platform, by and large, they lose. This is the part that gives me hope that we can get them out of and keep them out of power.

I may be naively hopeful, however :/

@lenaoflune @MLClark I hope you are right...

The Jewish people intially challenged the limitations of their rights within the 3rd reich in the courts, but a year after the first salvo, the Nazi's politicized the courts and made membership in the Nazi party mandatory for judges.

And they lost the courts as quickly as they lost their initial rights... And that terrifies me.

After that the attacks expanded, they were labeled, pushed into ghettos, and in 41, the "Final Solution" was enacted.

@lenaoflune @MLClark I am not trying to be a downer. I am just alarmed, and bewildered. I'm glad these people are losing, in some places, but I fear the tide, let us say.

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

Shoah is its own historical nightmare.

Before it happened in full, Nazis destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, robbing all of humanity of a wealth of sexual health and trans and queer research in 1933. We don't need to reach for and compare ourselves with the murder of 6 million Jewish peoples; the Nazis came after queer folk on their own, too - and we do not *ever* want that to happen again.

@MLClark @lenaoflune They absolutely did. That's where the pink triangle came from. What we have in common is that we are both minority groups and therefore easily marginalized and targeted.

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

💜

Your fear matters. Your despair matters. The anxiety built up from watching day in & day out as the news tells you people want you not to exist matters SO MUCH too.

Lena and I are talking about a form of resistance to hate that involves refusing the despair these wannabe fascists *want* queer folk, women, and other minorities to live with every day.

But that resistance isn't intended to dismiss your despair. It's a way of rising to meet it.

You are not alone.

🫂

@MLClark @lenaoflune I do not feel dismissed, I feel heard, in all honesty. I'm talking here openly because it's a safe place with fellow queer folk and allies that accept me for the renegade eccentric I am.

The conservatives may want me to die, and they may one day be successful in making that happen, but I plan to "Go down believing" if that happens

I'm seeing the parallels. That's not to coopt or claim a similar experience, its just that the extremes of human evil follow familiar patterns

@MLClark @lenaoflune There is a certain irony in the fact that being a Transgendered person is on the more "normal" end of my strange.

There's a reason I have "enjoy me I may never pass this way again" on my purse. It's not every day you meet a cryptid :P

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

Also, re:

"There is a certain irony in the fact that being [trans] is on the more 'normal' end of my strange."

😂 Oh heck yes.

This is exactly what queer persecution takes from our personhood. "Oh, you think who I'm attracted to or what I have in my scanties is the weirdest thing about me? HONEY, you haven't seen anything yet."

Prejudice is so boring.

It reduces people to mere labels, when we all have SO much more weird to share.

@MLClark @lenaoflune Exactly. I'm top shelf strange and they are missing it...

"Sweetheart, if I had it my way, gender transition would be the least of what you had to deal with from me. "

And why do they have to put up with it? Because I'm a person, as freakish and strange as I am and I have a right to exist so long as I'm not hurting anyone.

It's exactly that easy. Those of us on the vanguard, on the frontiers of being, we're how the understanding of being evolves.

@NiveusLepus @MLClark I quip that being trans is easily the least interesting thing about me.

And I think that's true of all (or almost all) trans people.

I talk about it a lot because it's on my mind lately and because I'm passionate about activism for equity and rights! But I also bake, design software, write poetry, create roleplaying games...

We're the pioneers on the razor's edge of the beautiful spectrum of human experience!

@lenaoflune @MLClark You are a beautiful soul in so many ways. I hope you will always find the strength to shine.

@NiveusLepus @MLClark @lenaoflune The GOP won't be anymore effective in this campaign than their war on mixed marriage. Just throwing steak chunks to their hate filled poser Christians. Keep the faith, maybe someday we will be judged by character.

@NiveusLepus @MLClark If it's helpful to hear, I see the parallels as well, which is why I've got contingency plans (and also why I have a lot of "potential survivor guilt" over who I may not be able to save if I have to invoke one, but that's a different story).

I'm just hoping that the other trends I see mean the pendulum is going to swing away from this madness before it's too late.

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

100%. I always nudge the WWII comparison when it comes up, though, because far too many people still don't know that Nazis destroyed a wealth of sexual health research that could've helped *everyone* sooner, and then gassed "deviants" for years. Part of protecting against queer persecution today is reclaiming the *full* history of struggle.

(Queer folk also deserve to be protected for their own sake, not simply to stop fascism because it then expands to other groups.)

@MLClark @lenaoflune My understanding is one of the worlds first gender affirming clinics opened in Germany in 1919. The Nazis targeted the Jewish, Slavic, Romani, and LGBT+ as well as the disabled, and even committed Christians like Bonhoeffer.

In that I do not think it is an accident that we are seeing a rise in things like Antisemitism. Hatred is a spreading cancer. The more people are othered, the wider the barrier of exclusion grows.

@NiveusLepus @MLClark 💯 The fascists will not stop with one group. They never do.

This is why we always have to defend everyone's freedom -- and why the struggles of all marginalized groups are interconnected!

@lenaoflune @NiveusLepus @MLClark No they won't. What they do is find the weakest group - the one they can get most people on board against - and then stomp on them. Then they take that bunch of people and move onto the next, throwing people under the bus on the way.

Leopards. Faces.

@Graci @lenaoflune @MLClark This is why its important to be visible, not to give them targets, but to rally our allies. It's going to take all of us to fight back.

@NiveusLepus @Graci @MLClark That's one of the big reasons I'm so publicly and loudly trans (and bi, and to a lesser extent, poly). Representation matters! It rallies allies, it rallies our community, and it gives a human face to those some want to dehumanize.

I also do it, though, to give hope and a feeling safety to others, particularly trans and queer youth. "I wear Pride so they don't have to hide."

And I do it because I am absolutely proud of this gift I've been given.

@Graci @lenaoflune @NiveusLepus

🤗 Diving into my next work stint now. Thank you all for this beautiful, hard, and *necessary* conversation.

Be good to your brilliant, fiercely striving selves today.

You are so loved, and I am so glad you're all here.

@MLClark @Graci @lenaoflune You are a wonderful friend and I am grateful to the Gods for you. Good luck and good writing!

@MLClark @Graci @NiveusLepus Thank you for listening and participating :) I hope your writing goes well!

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

I'm glad this is a safe space for grieving, and articulating fears.

We have many hard battles ahead to build a kinder world. We're going to have to take turns despairing and carrying the light forward, if we're going to live to see better days. 🤗 🕊️

@MLClark @lenaoflune

@MLClark @lenaoflune It never occured to me that I might have to avoid states for my own safety. That my existence may subject me to arrest.

My novels feature LGBT Characters, even though there are literally no sex scenes of any sort in any of the work Ive ever done, they would still have to be labeled as adults only, and containing obscene materials in places like Florida.

It's nuts... There's this continuing push to go back to the bad old days of categorizing us as inherently deviant.

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

They are indeed. In 2022 & 2023 they had a 15% success rate with legislation, and the fights to block implementation have been a nightmare in court circuits. I follow the bills, and I've been warning people about all of Project 2025.

The added problem, though, is that they *want* queer folk terrified like this in the interim. They want to drive up suicidal ideation & trans flight. So we have to refuse that inevitability narrative, while fighting the bills themselves.

@NiveusLepus @MLClark @lenaoflune

This is the strategy--to flood several states with similar bills, in the hopes that a few become law... and that even one of them stands up to legal challenges. (It also spreads us thin and wears us down.)

In fact, it's better for them if the laws *are* challenged, because then they can clearly establish new policy at a national level, if one of them is held up, even partially.