Mourning In America
Trying to process the horror to come while the hate squads have poured out in celebration and intimidation.
Ed Note: No Friday Funbag this week for what I hope are obvious reasons.
The photo collage above is a window into how quickly America is falling into a fascistic hellhole after the election. White men came out in droves to vote for Donald Trump, across class, religious, and education divides. White men are celebrating loudly about what they consider “their” win, and many of them on the far-right are using this moment to begin the hate and intimidation campaign against minorities.
From CNN, we learned that Black people of all ages, from educated professionals to middle school and high school teenagers, have been targeted by a text campaign (top-left photo) informing them of their impending slavery to pick cotton at “the nearest plantation.” The texts are scary enough in how many phone numbers of Black people were able to be scooped up for this campaign across 20+ states, but even scarier when many of them are addressed to the receipients by name. The implication is that they know who you are and where to find you, leaving Black women especially vulnerable and coordinating walks around their cities and campuses so nobody is alone.
In Wired, we first heard about white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes’s declaration “Your body, my choice. Forever.” (top-right photo) that has been picked up by men across the country, who are leaving comments on the social media of female activists and other women with the same phrasing. The implication is, of course, we can rape you now and nobody will stop it, nor can you get an abortion. One Republican state senator in Arizona, where reproductive rights passed into the state constitution 61-39%, said he and his colleagues are going to do everything possible to overrule the decision. His male colleagues, that is.
One particular chud, a real scumbag named Evan Kilgore who works for the far-right Turning Point USA, posted to his 100,000+ followers on Nazi X (formerly Twitter) this lovely screed:
Women, back to the kitchen;
Abortions, illegal;
Gays, back in the closet;
Interracial marriage, banned;
Illegals, pack your bags;
Trannies, back to the asylums;
Jesus, back in our schools. We are so back.
It goes without saying that Jesus Christ would be horrified by this attitude, this statement, these people. But let’s face it, Christianity in America long ago stopped being about the actual faith for the majority of its adherents. It’s an identity, an “in” group, with social structures that fit perfectly for men unsettled by the approach of an egalitarian society. Donald Trump’s convenient embrace of evangelical Christianity has led to him becoming their false idol, and they have been in lockstep with him for almost a decade now. He is promising even more power, access, and special favors for them, although it’ll require some new friends, since some of his best pastoral friends from his first term are no longer in their positions, having resigned for sexually molesting young girls (it does not need to be said, either, how every accusation about transgender women being sexual abusers of young girls seems to be a confession—rates of sexual abuse amongst young girls by church leaders and pastors runs as high as 1 in 8 in places like Australia, which is home to the disgraced Hillsong Church—whose founding family has a bad history with that very thing).
And while we’re on that subject, the Trevor Project has been inundated with calls, texts, and chat sessions from transgender people across the country.
[If you want to help the Trevor Project and volunteer as a crisis counselor, click here to fill out a request.]
The middle of the collage is a screenshot of a Google news search, and just entering the search “Trevor Project Hotline” yielded those results. People who work on the suicide hotline or as a crisis counselor have reported on social media that some of those they talked with ended up committing suicide. Erin Reed, whose Erin in the Morning is a fantastic news source for LGBTQ+ rights issues, told the LA Times today she had to talk three or four people down from suicide Tuesday night. Why?
Ten years ago, the North Carolina ‘bathroom bill,’ which cost Republican Pat McCrory reelection as governor, and the similar attempt in Georgia, drew swift backlash over the specter of men inspecting women before they used a restroom. Sports leagues pulled events from those states. Now, nobody is standing up for transgender people, who’ve been left to twist in the wind. The GOP successfully framed the issue as “no men in sports with little girls (which isn’t going to happen!). No men in locker rooms with little girls.” They made it, like with all queer people before, a “child safety issue.” You even have some Democrats who are joining in the GOP chorus of “too many rights,” because white men cannot stand to think of rights as something that grows in proportion to the population. They always treat it like pie, and they don’t want anyone else to have any pie.
Transgender people are facing the loss of their medical treatments via federal legislation (if the Democrats don’t pull off a narrow win in the House), and bans on their very existence in public (legislation requiring them to conform to their biological sex in all aspects). Many minority groups are staring down a very dark, ugly period of repression, but for the transgender community, their future is especially bleak.
We’re about to find out just how much violence America is willing to tolerate as it’s inflicted upon the most marginalized of populations. I would be a liar if I didn’t say I’m extremely concerned on this front—you don’t spend $215 million to demonize a tiny fraction of the nation’s people for funsies. That sort of spending is meant to lay the groundwork to allow the outright repression and ostracization of the transgender populace. The ads worked, and nearly half of the country thinks that there’s “too many transgender rights.” There was a four-year period between the major civil rights legislation and the white backlash to civil rights. Four years! Four years is about the same length of time for transgender-friendly legislation/regulation from the Democrats and the backlash to them, too.
The Nazi freakshows who spend all their time on Trump fanboy platforms are itching to start beating and murdering. It’s such a small step. It doesn’t have to be an active command—the Trump regime can just refuse to do anything to stop the violence when Proud Boys start attacking transgender people in public, beating and murdering them. Most police forces are filled with wannabe fascists who adore Donald Trump and proudly voted for that convicted felon. They’ll not lift a finger to help transgender victims (they already don’t, just look at the unsolved murder rate of transgender women), because “protect and serve” is the biggest fraud of a motto since “Arbeit macht frei” hung over Dachau and Auschwitz.
It’s been three days and I have not stopped feeling absolutely gutted inside. The urge to cry springs up out of nowhere, borne of the multiple wounds inflicted on my soul: that America would rather choose an unqualified man instead of a very qualified woman to be President, that people are so utterly selfish that they would trade the mirage of economic prosperity under Donald Trump for the rights and lives of others, and that when they were presented with the bare fucking minimum bar to clear of not electing an insurrectionist, the voters managed to dig a hole under it instead. America has repeatedly let me down throughout my adult life, but this one is just unforgivable. For so many of us, now and in the future, we are mourning in America.