It was:

• Easy to hide behind the prevailing cisgenderism, the core idea behind transphobia, according to which only cisgender people’s gender identities are genuine and valid.
• Easy to hide in an anti-intellectualism, that conceals all nuance, and reinforces the most vulgar and stigmatizing, pathologizing, and demonizing stereotypes for transgender people.
• Easy to embed in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and link to a broader list of topics in the conservative agenda: political correctness, climate change, vaccine skepticism.

“If these institutions push something so outlandish that men can be hypersexual kitten and shit in special dollhouses, it is because there is Jewish-Marxist conspiracy at play, against the white man, against the Christian family”.

Now all the instincts of the authoritarian that felt oppressed all these years are running rampant. They have got the power.

But the reasons we reached a point that trans identities were recognized and protected was nothing of the above. It was the protections on freedom of expression, free speech even religious freedom.

It was the protections resulting from the developments in anti-racist policies, the developments in anti-sexist policies, and the struggle of queer liberation, which itself drew from the labor movement, the feminist and black liberation movements.

The recognition of trans identities was an extension of all we think as pillars of democracy, and decent society for the past 30 or so years. It wasn’t even subverting cisgenderism: It was mostly comprised of extensions to the rights and protections that capitalist courts have recognized to women, gay people, and generic freedoms in general, even paralleling freedoms of religious expression.

With the anti-trans rhetoric they have managed to de-legitimize all of these protections, and whoever thinks this is only lead to trans genocide and end there, is deplorably in error.

These people are not only conservative but outright backward, and profoundly undemocratic. They are against constitutional society, and they are against the rule of law.

They are corporate fascists, and they got here with four decades of plotting and agitating. I am sad and angry that we did not do all in our power to fight it, we instead ignored it, we let it happen.

Now we will have to witness the revival of hatred and irrationality, we will have to fight uphill, from a position of weakness and helplessness against their social media, their military, their sick, disgusting lack of reason and empathy.

NO PASSARAN