I’m so tired of cis people asking stuff like, “Why would Texas want a list of trans people who legally changed their names?” or “Why would Florida want a list of college students who have seeking gender affirming care? We can’t figure it out.”
It’s eliminationist.
Ken Paxton wants a list of trans people who have changed their name in Texas so he can reverse all of those decisions (and that’s the most charitable interpretation). Ron DeSantis wants a list of college students who have seeked affirming care so he can force them to detransition.
Oklahoma introduced a bill to forcibly detransition people under the age of 21 (ironically doing what they accuse us of doing, forcing someone to live as the wrong gender). Texas has a new bill that will ban gender affirming care for every Texan of any age and makes it a felony for doctors to provide it. Multiple states either have passed or will pass bills that will ban legal name changes. Some states have slipped in language to anti-drag bills (which are horrific enough on their own) that ban anyone from displaying, presenting, or dressing outside their “biological” gender (one state has language about “DNA gender”) in public.
It’s about legally and morally mandating trans people out of existence.
Plain and simple. It’s about making sure that trans people can not exist. Period. It’s not about restrictions, or “think of the children!” It’s about eliminating us from public life and then eliminating us from private life so that we have a choice of either die or conform.
When will y'all realize this isn’t some wedge issue or a political football that they’ll just give up on if they lose an election or two. These are ideologues who are singularly focused. They don’t care about the marketplace of ideas. They don’t give a shit if they get mocked on lefty Twitter and the late night shows. They only care about one thing: gaining and then wielding power to achieve their goal of eliminating trans people (and then gay people, and then women who don’t conform to their gender standards, ect).
Because my wife had the skill and guts (and the license, which I also lack) to drive all the way, we had the pleasure of several days in rural New Hampshire and Boston with my great friends M&Z and their family. We’ve been back less than 24 hours and already the anxieties of day-to-day life have started to dull the shine on my memories. But even worn they’re pretty good.
We breathed the mountain air and marveled at how much wood and meadow New Hampshire and Vermont natives have between themselves and their neighbors, and how little modern crap spoils their vistas.
We went sailing, which was not as terrifying as I’d feared — in fact it was bracing and fun, and now I can see why people love being out on the water where the world may be in sight but is definitely out of mind.
We went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum which reflects a genuinely eccentric vision, with Charles Foster Kane pack-rattish piles of treasure and some of the most overtly feminist signage I’ve ever seen in a big museum, like this bit from the (extraordinary) Titian show:
And we got to sit with some good people we hadn’t seen in years and had no hope of seeing till recently. So, good.
July 15 (One in a series of front pagers from edroso.com that I’m preserving here.)
I let this front page go nearly a month before updating. And I’m way too tired now to do a good job of it. But about 10, 15 years ago I entered a phase of honoring pledges after a lifetime of blowing them off. It hasn’t always been satisfying and in point of fact* it’s often extremely unsatisfying – commitments are a pain in the ass.
* just want to say “in point of fact” is one of my favorite superfluous expressions – that is, the sort of phrases that you barely need, and for which shorter statements like “actually” would do the job just as well (even better, when you take into account that many of your auditors won’t know what you’re talking about), but sometimes you use them just because the rhythm of the extra syllables is more poetic, or because they help you stall for time to think. For an acting class years ago I played Joey in a scene from Simon Gray’s Butley, and Joey’s habit of saying “in point of fact,” especially when on the defensive, was very much a key to the character.AlsoI once had a girlfriend who used the spoonerized phrase “the truth of the fact” in its place, which I still like.
But this is one of those moral decisions that you make without hope of reward. And I when I say that, I mean “without hope of the cheap rewards of money and prestige that this poor world has to offer, but with hope of something better than that to come.” And when I say “something better than that to come” I mean I hope I get some inkling of it in this world rather than having to wait for it in the next, or to hell with this morality shit.
That’s always the rub, eh? The moral choice is always something that pulls through very much late for the winner’s circle. The bet is that all the stuff you believed about what really mattered in life… really mattered. And if you lose, well, Pascal knew: No big loss.
Anyway my devotion gets you lucky people a cellphone shot of the Washington Mall, Fourth of July as folks gathered for the fireworks. More photos and words on that here.
JUNE 19th (One in a series of front pagers from edroso.com that I’m preserving here.)
Happy Juneteenth! Today I got a very eloquent cancellation notice from a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down subscriber. He said, basically (I am flattening his meaning a great deal but guys like him write at length because their full meaning takes a long time to convey, and you and I don’t have all day) he’d gotten older and now saw that the sort of pushback he and I were giving to the madness of our leaders was not doing a whole hell of a lot of good and he was turning his attention in other directions.
A defensible position! I responded at length and, like all lazy writers, figured I’d repurpose the less personal parts of what I’d written for another audience, namely you. So:
…I can relate. I’m no spring chicken myself. I’ve seen some dispiriting changes in the polity too. I remember especially clearly when Reagan swept all before him, bringing a reordering not only of government policy but also of American culture (that thing that, conservatives are always complaining, has been “captured” by the “left” — which may be their least noticed and most effective lie). I remember the “poverty sucks” posters and “poverty pimp” editorials and movies and TV shows that ascribed the basest motives to do-gooders and the highest authority to capitalism. And I remember how everyone seemed to roll with it — as if the moral crusades of the preceding decades (and, for that matter, centuries of basic morality as well) had been a waste of time that distracted from money-making opportunities (which, for most of us, came to nothing anyway).
I ducked out of politics for the most part then, and frankly there followed for me some happy and productive days. Politics is a drag and, as you perceive, whatever flea-bites we may inflict seem not to even get the dog to scratch, so why be troubled by it when you can choose not to be?
I only really got back at politics in this horrible new century because an outlet presented itself (that “blog” thing that was sweeping the country back in those crazy Oughts) and, I began to notice, the subject had never really stopped bugging me, no matter what I was doing, and it felt good to talk about, especially when I found people who’d listen. I’ve been at that for close to twenty years. Yeah, it’s dispiriting to see how absolutely crazy the terms of debate have become — I mean, try to imagine even the 1980s Republican Party justifying an attempted coup by its members! But it’s also good to know that some people, maybe a lot of people, also see how crazy it is. Hell, I even see people saying stuff like, “you know when the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as President and we acted like it was the will of the Founders? What was that about?” Back in 2000 who knew anyone besides commie soreheads thought such things?…
Etc. Anyway here’s another shot of a pretty DC alley.
Not much to tell since last week: Another week of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, of the God Damn Job, and of a slowly reopening Washington. I got my teeth cleaned. The dentist, filling in for the hygienist, put a flat plastic device in my mouth that he referred to as “the fish.” This appears to be the VacuLUX mouthpiece, which reduces the spread of aerosolized particles from the patient’s mouth by 90%, the company claims. As the dentist worked I still saw aerosol clouds and fragments rising from my mouth, though; it’s not impossible that a particle or two got at least close to my dentist’s mask.
It’s amazing how much of everyday life has been a high-wire act because of this thing. When we talk about the long-term effects our pandemic behaviors might have on our psyches and society, we don’t much take into account the fact that we were all made aware of the danger of small, ordinary acts that we could not easily avoid doing, and then did them anyway. Even if the skeptics were right and the real danger was thin, that’s an interesting sort of training, and not necessarily a negative one, either, in facing and overcoming fears. I get trauma, but not all exercise is injurious.
I walked the missus through Union Market yesterday for the first time in over a year. We’re so used to masks that it didn’t reduce the experience or make it strange. It was strangely exciting to point out the changes to one another, shop the fancy dishes, and take a couple home for lunch. I know, it’s high capitalism, a mere simulacrum of an agora, etc. Nonetheless.
Last weekend I went to Black Lives Matter Plaza and they had an actual event: A “No Slide Zone” protest against gun violence, with a band and high-minded exhortations to love and consciousness from the temporary stage. It wasn’t huge, just a few hundred people, and most of the Plaza had the same eerie, depopulated feel it’s had since last summer. But here was some joy, some call and response, some life. And that’s a damn sight better than those fucking high-volume Jesus preachers who’d colonized the entrance to Lafayette Park, and were this day nowhere in sight.
Oh, speaking of Lafayette Park, it’s fully open now — except for the charred bathroom, which remains enclosed. It was the one serious piece of vandalism from the local George Floyd protests (which were characterized as CITIES AFLAME by the usual bad-faith wingnuts) and seems to have been preserved in this state for unknown reasons. (If it’s meant to show how destructive the protests were, I hope its preservationists are prepared to be laughed at.)
