I have the TRANSA music compilation album in my head as I write.

TRANSA is the latest offering from the Red Hot Organization.  It is a celebration of the Trans community and amplifier of Trans rights’ awareness.

Several weeks ago, after the United States chose Donald Trump as its president, again, and decisively so, I was broken.  Many of us were.  Are.  It’s critical to note that I am but a massively existentially privileged cisgender heteronormative credentialed Standard English fluent Christian baptized white man.  I also happen to exist at the lower rungs of socioeconomic status, am multiply neurodivergent, am an agnostic and anarchist leaning loud mouth, and have developmental trauma, anxiety and depression.  It’s complex.  All of it.

I’m a coach, mentor, advocate, and counselor for neurodivergent people.  We know that, within the communities of Autistics and neurodivergents, the existence of LGBTQIA+ness, of neuroqueerness, is substantial.  I spent a lot of time across the past several weeks with dysregulated young people, friends, colleagues, and chosen family in tears.  Tears of rage, sorrow, grief, pain, disbelief, deep understanding, fear, and eventually resolve.

According to a recent headline from The Mirror, dated November 22, 2024, “Vile moment Minneapolis onlookers cheer as two transgender women were savagely beaten at train station. Traces of the victim’s blood from the attack could still be seen on the concrete by the station during Sunday’s rally following the brutal attack in downtown Minneapolis.”  (Linked here)

Considering Minneapolis’ status as a Trans refuge city, The Advocate (linked here) adds, “Jess and Dahlia recently moved from Iowa to Minnesota after the latter passed a Trans refuge law last year, preventing out-of-state interference with gender-affirming care. It was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who became Kamala Harris’s running mate this year. ‘A lot of people are moving to Minnesota and have moved since we passed the trans refuge bill, but I think we’re going to see a real spike after the election outcome,’ state Rep. Leigh Finke, who sponsored the legislation, told local TV station WCCO at the rally.”

Representative Nancy Mace, a loud and proud MAGA Republican from South Carolina, introduced, on November 18, 2024, a resolution to ban transgender people from using bathrooms other than those of their sex assigned at birth at the U.S. Capitol, in anticipation of the swearing in of Sarah McBride, who is the first Trans person elected to Congress.

Erin Reed, a journalist and trans rights activist, offered (linked here), on November 21, 2024, “Over the past several days, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and Republican leadership have escalated their attacks on Sarah McBride, the Democratic representative from Delaware and the first transgender congresswoman, targeting her over bathroom and gym use. The fight culminated on Wednesday when Speaker Mike Johnson declared that McBride would be treated as a man under House rules, forcing her to use men’s restrooms or gender-neutral facilities—despite her having used women’s restrooms for a decade without incident. While Mace tried to justify her actions with claims of “safety,” even suggesting McBride might be a threat of sexual assault, her true motives became crystal clear during an appearance on Greg Kelly Reports. Dropping all pretense, Mace declared it “offensive” that McBride could ever dare to consider herself her equal.”

That McBride could ever DARE to consider herself Mace’s equal.

That McBride is not her equal.

Folks, Donald Trump and his choices for White House positions, the so-called Supreme Court of the United States and all federal courts at lower but VERY influential levels, both houses of federal Congress, and most state-level Governorships, judicial and legislative bodies… are transmisic.

Why am I using transmisic/transmisia and not transphobic/transphobia?

It well might be semantic, and perhaps there’s no reason to use a word nobody knows to replace one that everyone understands.

But that’s just it.  I believe “phobia,” referring to psychiatric/psychological conditions of having life-impacting fear, is NOT what is happening in this moment.  Nancy Mace isn’t afraid of Sarah McBride.  She hates her.  She hates her to the point of full dehumanization.  That is why I choose the suffix –misia, meaning “hatred of.”

Transphobia = the fear of Trans people

Transmisia = the hatred of Trans people

I think it’s important that we use accurate words for what is happening, because the type of hatred that we’ve seen and the preponderance of hateful rhetoric we’ve heard from the Trump, MAGA, libertarian, conservative Christian supremacist camps.  Point in the direction of actual final solutions.  Have been at least since 2016, and certainly heading into the 2020 election through just a few weeks back.

Democrats with power have remained largely silent, or rhetorically tepid, and now, we see, from the Democratic National Committee and other prominent Democrats that our Trans species siblings and everything happening to them is mostly a distraction that should be ignored for issues that are more important.  I use the term “species siblings” to refer to all humans.  We are a race, a species, a family, of sorts, hurtling around a massive sun on this third rock as the whole thing careens through space and time.  We are all siblings.  And at this point in time, our Trans siblings are being scapegoated, gaslit, traumatized, and erased as larger plans unfold.  (Everyone would be well served to at the very least read this incredibly well vetted and referenced Wikipedia entry for Project 2025.)

PBS (linked here) offered the following, “After losing the White House and both houses of Congress, Democrats are grappling with how to handle transgender politics and policy following a campaign that featured withering and often misleading GOP attacks on the issue. There is plenty of second-guessing after President-elect Donald Trump anchored his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris with sweeping promises on the economy and immigration. But Democrats also will not soon forget the punchline in anti-transgender Trump ads that became ubiquitous by Election Day: ‘Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you’.”

Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.

Slick, actually.  And it worked.  A group of people who are no more than 1% of the population are on the chopping block.

Folks, there is NO MORE important issue than protecting our trans siblings and pointing out the eugenics-driven paradigm of forced assimilation, detransition, developmental trauma, and erasure that is happening.

We, non-trans and non-gender-queer people, must absolutely refuse to acquiesce. We must protect each other, all of us, with our full chests.  Full-throatedly. Because yes, this fascism will continue to stride confidently into all aspects of all of our lives.

And here?  A personal vow: I will not sacrifice one Trans, one genderqueer, one disabled, one neurodivergent, not one vulnerable species sibling for the sake of my comfort.  My ability to hide in the shadows with all of my intersections of existential power.  That’s it.  It’s a line jackhammered in the concrete for me.  There is no place for transmisia in my life, and I will do all that I can and perhaps must, to practice what I preach.  To, in the words of Fred Rogers, be the helper.

I only ask you, my cis and intersectionally privileged siblings, to consider where you have stood, where you are standing, and where you will stand as the weeks and months unfold.

It feels deeply important that we do whatever we can to stop, reverse, and repair what is happening, even if… in fact, particularly because it feels impossible.  Likely is impossible.

Many people talk analogously about hills on which they would or would not die.  Understand that Trans siblings are dying on hill constructed by many of us and tacitly permitted by all of us.

We, all of us, stand at a critical crossroad.

If you are honestly afraid of that which you don’t understand (i.e. phobia), you have the opportunity to step back from the inevitable turn to active hatred (i.e. misia).  How?  The answer, so simple yet simultaneously terribly uncomfortable, is by looking in the mirror – contending with trauma and indoctrination, rather than looking out of windows – spying, pointing, and throwing stones.

The planet spins, orbits, careens.  And we are ALL WE HAVE.  Species siblings.

Folks.  Transmisia has no place here.

143.

-G