In the Age of Trump, All Queer People Should Be Anarchists
Image by Meg.
Well, it’s official dearest motherfuckers, according to the President of the United States I don’t fucking exist and neither does anyone else who falls outside of that country club rapist’s definition of male and female. I had my suspicions; people do seem to struggle to look me in the eye at the Cracker Barrel but thank God we have an Executive Office with the power to finally set the record straight.
I speak of course of Donald Trump’s absurd executive order “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government” and as ludicrous as this document may be, quite literally defining something as biologically complicated as gender to be defined by what junk one doctor reports seeing on your birth certificate, it is still essentially a genocidal document designed to legally erase an entire population of people and it carries just enough authority to hurt the most vulnerable members of the already existentially vulnerable transgender community.
Aside from defining our very existence to be little more than a contrived conspiracy against the fabric of Western Civilization, President Trump’s sweepingly vague executive decree also directs all federal prisons, jails, shelters, and juvenile facilities to be segregated based on some asshole’s definition of sex.
One in six transgender people find themselves a hostage of the prison industrial complex at some point during our lifetime, usually for engaging in the victimless crime of survival sex, and we are already 13 times more likely than cisgender prisoners to be sexually assaulted by fellow inmates or staff. This order doesn’t so much change that harsh reality as it enshrines it into federal policy and emboldens the wardens of America’s gulag archipelago to act with explicit malice.
Trump’s executive order also promises to expand this institutional violence to the compulsory school system that so often serves as a pipeline to America’s prisons by directing the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take a break from kicking Muslims so they can bar transgender people from government funded single sex facilities that align with our gender identity.
This means that every school K-12 that excepts a dime of federal aid runs the risk of incurring the wrath of their landlord unless they carefully police the genitalia of the children in their charge and effectively deprive trans children of the basic human right of using the bathroom unless they are willing to run the risk of facing the same fate of Nex Bennedict or worse.
All of this comes at a time when transgender people like me are already finding ourselves under assault by quite literally every single branch of the American Government.
Half the states in the country have laws banning transgender children from access to treatment that every major medical body on the planet agrees is virtually harmless and potentially lifesaving and, based on recent hearings, the Supreme Court looks primed to allow such draconian attempts to police the private medical decisions of families and individuals, in spite of the fact that they clearly violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
As if that weren’t despotic enough, the House of Representatives has recently succeeded in passing a national law regulating gender in student sports that also conceals a far more heinous provision to amend federal law to define sex on similar grounds as Trump’s pompous executive order.
And I can just hear the queens at my local fag bar now, bitching me out over their cocktails, “This is why you should have voted bitch! This is why you should have voted!” I hate to break it to you girls but I’m still not taking a bite out of that poison apple.
Who the fuck was I supposed to vote for? Kamala? That police state TERF in rainbow clothing. The same one who chucked transwomen into men’s prisons as an attorney general and then deprived them of basic medical care.
Was she the one who was going to save me? Well, then what stopped her and the rest her crooked administration from doing so over the last four years? What did any of those fucking Democrats do to prevent this? Quite the contrary, that party has long contributed to making these kinds of executive pogroms possible.
Executive orders are largely toothless proclamations made by presidents trying to appear less feckless amidst the deep state. Just look at all the meaningless crap Biden passed on student debt. The only thing that can give these glorified decrees fangs is the one thing the president does have direct authority over and that is the various departments of this country’s police state, and nobody has done more to overfund and centralize that phalanx of bureaucratic fascisti than the Democratic Party.
It was Kamala’s rapidly disintegrating boss, Joe Biden, who helped then-President Bill Clinton pass his massive crime bill in 1994 that paved the way for the disproportionate mass incarceration of my people and turned the prison industry in this country into a multibillion-dollar corporate juggernaut. Within a decade of passing that atrocity, the incarcerated population of this country more than doubled and put China to shame as the largest human zoo on earth.
This ain’t just ancient history either. In 2018, then-Senator Kamala Harris was one of the numerous Democratic sponsors of SESTA-FOSTA, a monstrously bloated bill that affectively criminalized any attempt by sex workers or their allies to organize online in a blatant bipartisan assault on internet freedom and the First Amendment that it depends on.
And even more recently, it was the Biden-Harris Administration that fed the police state another $350 billion dollars as part of their massive covid slush fund which also pushed another $170 billion to the public school system without any strings attached, lining the pockets of some of the most blatantly transphobic school boards in the country.
I have seen the damage of this legislation firsthand in my own little corner of the rust belt. I volunteered at an AIDS resource center whose outreach programs providing contraceptives to at-risk sex workers were affectively crippled by SESTA-FOSTA and my local LGBTQ center was devastated by the covid lockdowns.
None of us saw a single red cent from Biden’s wallet, but the police force that shot a friend of mine dead for the crime of being neurodivergent while Black and the Catholic Church that literally tried to rape me straight in preschool both got their cut. Funny how that works out, don’t you think?
When are Queer people going to get it, the government is not our fucking ally. The state has never recognized our existence as anything but mascots or cannon fodder, so why do we continue to recognize the legitimacy of the state?
The people I love do it because they’re scared. I’m not sure that I’ve ever met another transgender person who hasn’t been horrifically traumatized, bullied, and humiliated, usually as children in the Democrats’ sacred compulsory school system. So, when we hear bible thumping lunatics calling for us to be prosecuted like sex criminals, we get triggered, and when Democrats like Kamala and Biden put down the whip just long enough to pet us, it’s hard not to be tempted by the devil we know.
This is a textbook abusive relationship, and we all know it. One arm of the state beats us while the other offers us shelter but they both serve the same industrial complexes.
If the shockingly unthinkable resurrection of Donald Trump proves anything it’s that the Democratic Party is about as worthless as the German Social Democrats who made the rise of Hitler inevitable by canoodling with the Freikorps while feigning tolerance for the weird people, and if that ugly chapter of democratic history should prove anything to Queer people it’s that all of us should be anarchists right now.
But exactly what is a Queer Anarchist, you ask? I’ll tell you but not before I tell you what the words ‘Queer’ and ‘Anarchist’ really mean.
Queer is a counterculture of people biologically driven to live in resistance to Anglo-Saxon Puritan values and all of the secular forms of cultural conformity they inspired. While most of us are gender outlaws and sexual minorities, simply being LGBT does not make one Queer. It is resistance to mainstream assimilation that achieves that title.
An Anarchist is an individual or collective opposed to the state or any other authority defined by a monopoly on the use of force. Therefore, a Queer Anarchist is any Queer anti-assimilationist who puts tribe before authority and recognizes that the state is the authority that poses the biggest threat to this tribe.
We as a tribe must resist Trump, and we must do it with every fiber of our collective being, but this resistance will prove just as pointless as our resistance to that man’s last term if we fail once again to recognize that it is only the existence of the state itself that makes such a stupid and petty clown this dangerous.
As long as the state exists no marginalized tribe of committed anti-conformists will ever be truly liberated. So, let’s finish the job Stonewall started before it’s too late.
