Well, here we go again. The USA has, in its infinite wisdom, elected a fascist (and no, I will not argue on this: there's a good resource here should you wish to know why I said this) to rule them. This is going to have horrifically negative consequences for more groups of people than I can count, both in the USA and abroad.
In this article, I'm going to delve a bit further into the effects that this is liable to have on trans people everywhere and especially in New Zealand. I'm finding that a disturbing number of people day-to-day simply don't grasp the sheer devastation that this has caused the trans community, wherever we are. So, this is what it's done.
Our friends are in extreme danger
It's sadly pretty usual for trans people to be isolated wherever they live: many in-person social spaces are pretty hostile to us, and even when they aren't, we often don't fit in, don't have interests in common with other people in these spaces and generally exist on the outskirts of social spaces. Even when we have spaces that belong to us, relationships built solely on all of us being trans are pretty thin gruel: despite what transphobes seem to think, we're a pretty diverse crowd and there's no guarantee that we'll have anything in common beyond our identity. This means that, in general, a lot of our social circles are online.
The result of this is that almost all of us, in whatever country, have a lot of international friends, and this includes friends in the USA. These aren't trivial relationships: they're people whom we love, who love us, who are often our partners and whom, even when they aren't, we're deeply close to. So as a result of the US elections, some of the people whom we love most dearly are now at the mercy of a government that seems intent on eradicating us.
It's hard to explain the kind of strain that this has placed on your average trans person. We're waking up most mornings fretting about our friends trapped in an increasingly bleak situation. We're thinking and asking about visas, travel documents and helping people plan options for leaving the country. Those of us who've recently escaped the USA ourselves are trapped between relief at getting out in time and crippling survivor's guilt for the people left behind. The experience is both heartbreaking and exhausting, and most of us seem to be experiencing the world through a thin haze of dread at the moment. Getting work done or being a functional adult at all feels almost impossible in this state.
This election empowers local people who want us gone
If having to worry about our friends, relatives and loved ones being denied healthcare, criminalised for existing in public and in the extreme, thrown into concentration camps was the worst we had to deal with, that would be more than enough. Unfortunately, this isn't the end of it. The victory of an explicitly fascist movement in the US elections will have the effect of empowering and encouraging every blasted reactionary in the world to show their true colours and abandon any semblance of decency or self-control they had left.
Brian Tamaki, for one, is going to absolutely love this. He already hates us, he already wishes we didn't exist, and he's already marched black-shirted thugs down our country's main street on multiple occasions attempting to threaten us out of the public sphere (a little on the nose there, Brian?). And this was all with the USA looking as though it was slowly trending back towards democratic norms. Imagine what he's going to be like with Trump in charge.
It's in our government as well. The deeply weird saga of Stephen Rainbow and the other transphobic appointees to the Human Rights Commission in New Zealand spells out about everything you need to know about the Luxon/Seymour/Peters chimaera and its views on us, and of course, now that our biggest security partner and a major export market is ruled by... well, that, they certainly aren't going to feel the need to change how they approach trans issues here now. Much less are they going to feel the need to pull back on their plans to segregate community sports on the basis of phenotype, or avoid cutting funding for trans healthcare should the mood take them. And, of course, if the USA puts diplomatic pressure on them to make life harder for us, well, we can't exactly not, can we? We do have the greater good of the country to think of, after all.
And then of course there's every other two-bit reactionary in the country. From the piles of people advertising themselves as being anti-woke on LinkedIn of all places, to the yahoos that harass random people on the street, to your transphobic uncle that hates the very thought of having a filter on what they say, every one of these people is going to be empowered to behave just as crassly, hurtfully and thoughtlessly as the most powerful man in the world now does. While we might be distant from the worst of what the new regime brews up, trans people in New Zealand are not going to have a fun time. It's going to be harder for us to find work, harder for us to seek the medical care we need, harder for us to engage with society and harder for us to avoid abuse and the people who will do us harm. This is going to be a bitch.
We're feeling very lonely and exposed at the moment
Thus far, I've written mostly about the active hostility that we face. For me personally, however, the worst of this situation is what it exposes about the people that don't exactly oppose our existence, but that are... disengaged: most of the population, in fact. The people who "don't pay much attention to politics", the people who "try and see both sides of the situation"... the usual species of disengagement and looking the other way. The sad truth is that vague tolerance doesn't protect us. Being tolerant does nothing to stop hostile legislation. It does nothing to stop bigotry, nothing to keep us fed or keep the lights on, and nothing to keep us safe.
Fun fact: for a surprisingly long time, the Nazi and Fascist regimes didn't have to use state force against the people they persecuted. They simply failed to enforce the law when violence was directed against Jews, socialists or anyone else whom they didn't like. Blackshirts, stormtroopers or random thugs were able to murder people, beat them up or intimidate them with little or no legal consequence, and nature just... took its course. And it's very easy to ignore or deny that kind of persecution while still feeling progressive and tolerant: you can just have faith in systems, institutions, the basic goodness of people.
Living in this space feels hauntingly lonely and exposed, as though we're crossing the Plateau of Gorgoroth, Lidless Eye relentlessly glaring down on us... except that we're surrounded by people behaving as though they're in a bustling city, all milling around us, nobody paying the Lidless Eye any mind and looking at us kind of funny when we point out the Eye and the massive spiked tower to them. We might, at the most, get some vague acknowledgement that it might theoretically be a problem, but that's almost always followed by a "but don't worry, I'm sure we're safe here, far away from everything". More often, it's something like "I can't see the tower. Are you sure you aren't imagining it?", or even "but maybe the Eye has some good points? After all, we have to listen to both sides of the debate." And all this while the Nazgûl are swooping ever-closer overhead...
Living like this is terrifying, knowing that even if the people surrounding you are vaguely supportive, they certainly won't show up for you when the reactionary right beat you to death, destroy your businesses and have you arrested on false charges. They might even ignore it when you start getting thrown into concentration camps and slowly starved. And heaven knows, they'll probably realise and feel awful when the smoke starts rising from the chimneys, but by that point it'll be far too late to do anything.
So heed my words: if you want to support us, if you believe that we deserve to live, you have to act, and you have to act now. You have to invite us in to your businesses, to your communities, to your dinner table. You have to let us know that you, directly, will be there for us, to support and protect us when the shit hits the fan. And most of all, you'll have to drop the idea of "us" and "you", and accept the fact that we partake of the same spaces and communities that you do.
The post ends here, but in the interests of full disclosure, I thought I'd best add a note. I've set up a Patreon and a Liberapay for this blog: while my consultancy is seeing some early successes, I have learned to my cost that I need to diversify my income streams, and sometimes writing is the only thing I can do effectively. There is, of course, no pressure to support me, and you will continue getting my writing for free indefinitely, but every little bit helps. So if you appreciate what I'm doing here and would like to support it, donations are gratefully accepted.