This article has been written as part of Julia Serano's LGBTQ+ People are not going back campaign. Regular programming will resume shortly, I swear.
In the wake of the US election, we're already seeing a concerted push by the incoming US regime to erase the existence of queer people. The first sitting trans house representative has been subject to the vilest harassment by the instruments of the US legislature (to which she has shamefully caved). State and federal politicians are casually discussing trans people as a "problem" that needs a "solution" (part of me wonders how long it'll take until someone slips in a "final" into that statement). People seem hell-bent on making trans healthcare illegal. There is much to be said about the morality of this conflict, the emotional elements and the social aspects of being trans in the world. This is all rhetorically important and I'm glad people are doing the world, but honestly, I'm not hugely interested. I am fundamentally done with defending my right to exist and thrive to people who speak and argue in bad faith.
No, what I want to ask is the following:
Dear fascists, how exactly do you think you're going to win this fight?
Let's assume (and I think it's a reasonable assumption, all things considered: you may not realise that this is what you want, but the logic of what you say leads pretty inexorably to that conclusion), that you wish to exterminate all queer people in a mass-graves-and-death-camps style genocide. In the most basic, worst-case scenario, queer people keep being born. Trans people keep being born. If, in the most extreme case, you somehow manage to kill all of us, even that won't solve your problem: we'll keep being born, we'll keep loving each other and we'll keep living as authentically as we can. The most repressive regimes on the planet have failed to stop queer expression, though they've destroyed themselves to do so. Queer and trans people still live, love and fight in Russia, North Korea and Iran, regardless of how much repression they deal with. So, any victory you win is going to be a temporary one.
You've also, right off the bat, made life a hell of a lot more difficult for yourselves. You see, it's a basic tenet of your beliefs that we don't exist: we're just a depraved or mentally ill version of something else. While this is... not good and rather genocidal in tone, it makes actually legislating against us a lot harder, as you've denied any kind of convenient label to latch onto. You'll have to write legislation targeting things we do rather than who we are, and while I'm sure you'll do an excellent job of making our lives hell with that method, it's a lot more work and a lot harder than simply targeting Jews or illegal immigrants. I'm entirely expecting this to trip you up a lot.
So, extermination probably isn't doable. Your next-best option, in that case, might be to make public expression of queerness or transness so risky that people simply don't. Now, aside from the fact that the threshold for that is a lot higher than you think... well, I have a history with repressive regimes. My family's from Poland, I spend a fair bit of time in Eastern European spaces online, and I have a very long and retentive memory. It's damn near impossible to stop the spread of information. And in order to erase LGBT people from existence, you will have to exert massive control over information. This was hard enough back in the day: Poland had a thriving ecosystem of illegal samizdat publications circulating which the regime was basically unable to do anything about. North Korea has massive issues with illegal literature and media being smuggled in in from the South and across the Chinese border. Illegal radio stations seem to proliferate whenever that channel is restricted, aided and abetted by people in other countries who dislike the regime in question. And all of this, I will point out, was before the internet.
The internet makes all of this much, much harder. It's decentralised, mostly robust to single points of failure, and importantly, open. To a first order of approximation, anyone with a computer and a basic knowledge of the technology can just put something up on the internet, and there's not a thing in hell anyone can do to stop you. The infrastructure is spread over multiple countries, so evading national laws proves to be extremely easy, and getting something actually off the internet is remarkably hard. It's no wonder that in the early days of the internet, it was hailed as a massive tool for dissidents and oppositionists everywhere. While it doesn't feel like it these days, that old internet is very much still there just under the surface. You can control (to an extent) what goes on on social media, and you can certainly surveil what goes on on the internet to an extent. But these things are very expensive to do, to the extent that the People's Republic of China (whom you'd think would be very good at surveillance) surveils significantly less than 1% of the population in any active way, and they have one of the largest systems of surveillance in the world. Even taking the Great Firewall into account, the PRC cannot meaningfully prevent motivated people from gaining access to the wider internet, and cannot cost-effectively monitor them when they do. So, realistically, if you want to stop us from communicating with each other across the internet, you have two options. The first is to randomly enforce the law and make an example of people: these are the same kinds of terror tactics that the PRC and Russia use. Unfortunately, this basically just doesn't work: you'll observe the fact that media piracy is still rampant across the world, regardless of how many massively disproportionate sentences law enforcement in the USA dishes out. Your second option is essentially to disconnect the USA from the internet, North Korea-style. That would work, but comes with significant other disadvantages, so I somehow don't think you'll elect to do that. So, as much as you're almost certainly going to be able to make it harder for us, you're not going to be able to stop us sharing information and building communities.
There's also the fact that in order to do this it takes more than control over information: you also need to be able to persuade the vast bulk of the population to go along with your campaign of public shaming and disapprobation. But you can only make being queer shameful enough that it needs to be hidden if a vast majority of the population goes along with it and supports it, actively shaming and punishing queer people. This was manageable in a low-connectivity environment where people didn't really know any queer or trans people and where queer people couldn't find communities that supported them easily. But we've been living openly as ourselves, with relative freedom, for almost fifty years now. There's a significant minority of the population that is proactively supportive of us and our rights (If I were to put numbers around it, I reckon that maybe 20-25% of the population are actively accepting of queerness, which is enough to stop things from seeming universally suffocating), and a definitely plurality of people who've taken the "live and let live" position, all of whom are going to be extremely difficult to sway back to "shame these people as degenerates". Try as you might, you simply aren't going to be able to get enough people to be hostile to us to make the social opprobrium truly suffocating: the numbers just aren't there.
And that's the population on average: most queer people live in urban centres, and the numbers there are even more against you, to the point where civic governments are dominated by your enemies. They are going to fight you every step of the way, and even if they can't stop you from passing shitty, repressive laws at the federal level, municipalities can make it really fucking hard for you to be repressive effectively. Stop and think for a moment: do you really believe that you can make it shameful and disgraceful to be openly queer in Portland or San Francisco? The federal government can barely enforce drug laws there, never mind much vaguer and harder-to-prove laws around personal expression.
Obviously, I'd like things to be safe for queer and trans people everywhere, but what this means is that whatever you do, there will always be places for queer and trans people to go where they can live safely and relatively comfortably, and there are going to be quite a lot of them. Your only solution to that is going to be to destroy their governments one-by-one and impose martial law, which not even the US has the resources for. If the state government is against you, you'll have to neutralise them as well. Oh, and you can't safely use the regular military for any of this: its loyalty is too much in question. You'll have to rely on the National Guard and whatever other paramilitaries you can scrape together. And looking at numbers, Russia has to keep several million of those kinds of troops under arms at all time to keep control of a population half the size of the USA with only two politically important cities and a population that's been thoroughly beaten into apathy. Good. Luck. With. That.
Related to this, there's also quite simply more of us than there ever has been in the past. The number of out queer people in 1930's Germany was tiny, largely disconnected from their families and already isolated. Right now, 8% of the US population identifies as some form of queer, we have accepting families (far less uniformly than I'd like, but still, anything greater than about 20% of families being accepting is enough to have an impact) and almost everyone knows someone who's queer. Dehumanising us, as much as people are doing their level best to do it to the trans community, is still going to be much harder than it ever was in the past. And even if people are currently only soft supporters, active attacks have a startling tendency to harden peoples' positions. Some people, I'm sure, will simply stop supporting us, but a significant minority are going to break in our direction.
I'd also be amiss in not pointing out the fact that we have a lot more resources now than we ever have in the past. Back in the day, people wouldn't employ anyone openly queer, which meant that our communities had very few resources to work with. These days, while this is still a very real problem, we have very meaningful amounts of money. The trans woman programmer is a stereotype for a very real reason, and a lot of us earn quite a lot. And this isn't necessarily because of some woke, enlightened tech industry: we know that isn't the case. It's simply because people will get over their bigotry to get their hands on the best engineers in the industry, a remarkable number of which are trans. Nothing you can do is going to change that. Realistically, the only way you're going to be able to cut us off from that income is by making it literally illegal to employ us, which is remarkably hard to do, even for you. And you can hardly strip our assets en masse without causing way, way more chaos than you might wish to admit to yourselves. This means that, one way or another, we have a lot more resources with which to make your lives difficult than we have in the past. You might, I imagine, be able to bring us down eventually, but it's going to be a much, much messier fight than you're going to expect, and one that's much costlier to you than you'd like.
Finally, the world is much more globalised than it ever has been in the past. I live in New Zealand and have worked in the USA and UK from here. We can communicate and get information from across the entire world, which, try though you might, you aren't going to be able to stop from entering the country for the aforementioned reasons. People are going to know that things elsewhere are different and that a different world is possible, which makes the kind of oppression you wish to exert (the kind dependent on totalising control and hopelessness) impossible. People will escape the country and build lives elsewhere, they'll get money from out of the country to help carry on resistance, you'll be subjected to significant international campaigns aimed at your policy (and if you think this is a small thing, look at the impact it's had on Israel, even with your backing). The time when a regime has been able to create a walled garden of information and hide what life is like outside the country is long past.
Individually, all of these things are potentially surmountable. But taken together? The fact of the matter is that you're going to have an unbelievably hard time pushing us out of public life: you might maim us, you might kill a lot of us, you might make our lives hell, but you aren't going to get rid of us. This isn't a winnable fight for you, and ultimately, all this is going to do is waste your resources and make a lot of people very, very angry.
So, no, LGBT people aren't going back. Not as a plea, an entreaty or as a challenge. As a simple, cold statement of fact.
For those of us who aren't fascists or their sympathisers, as scary as this current situation is, you can clearly see that the fascists are in a much weaker position than they appear, and we are in a much stronger one. This means that not only is action the morally correct thing to do, it'll also work. If we fight, we can win this. I'm in favour of a diversity of tactics and have written previously on practical steps you can take, and I will add that if you are in the USA, or even otherwise, contact your representatives or MPs, tell them that you will not tolerate backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights and that if they fail to stand up against attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, your vote will go elsewhere (I hear primary challenges are effective, or if you're in a country with proportional representation, you can safely vote for a third party). This includes my New Zealand readers: while Luxon isn't Trump, he is still kinda a dipshit and I think a pre-emptive reminder about how we feel about this might be healthy.