PM Mark Carney: “It’s a good day to be a polar bear in Canada.”

– Scott Robertson

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I’ve been reluctant to say this all day, but the schadenfreude I’m seeing over Kristi Noem’s husband spending thousands of dollars on his cross-dressing kink…

I’m struggling to understand it. Maybe I even question the intent.

I don’t feel schadenfreude. I don’t feel amused. I don’t feel the least bit satisfied.

I just feel angry. Angry at everything, really.

Most of that anger is directed at the Noems and people like them who have built careers and fortunes off ostracizing and demonizing and dehumanizing trans people, seeking to obliterate us while they do what they’ve been doing in private.

They’ve made attacking trans people a core element of their political brand. They have shamelessly and ruthlessly sexualized our existence. They have declared us the canary in the coal mine for the fall of Western Civilization. They have framed us as humanity’s furthest point in distance from God.

I’m sitting here, on Trans Day of Visibility, in a country I served which does not recognize my service, from which I cannot leave with an accurate passport that will keep me safe abroad, upon whose roads I cannot drive in a growing number of states with an accurate driver’s license, to workplaces that will not hire people like me or hospitals that will not treat people like me or businesses that will not serve people like me.

I wake up every day wondering if there’s going to be a horrific and entirely preventable mass shooting that will be blamed on a trans person even if no one trans is within a hundred miles of that tragedy and what that may spur against us.

I go to sleep every night wondering if tomorrow will be the day that steps are taken to formally criminalize my existence.

While this is all happening, I am constantly challenged, asked, cajoled, implicitly demanded to ignore the devastating and resounding silence of so many millions upon millions of Americans who certainly know better but have tacitly decided that the rights of trans people–which is to say the existence of trans people because how are we supposed to live without rights–are a worth bargaining chip in the fight to save democracy.

I will not know the benefits of fully unencumbered citizenship and an equal stake in this nation in my lifetime. I am in my late 30s, and I know, deep down, that whatever progress is to be made, it will never be fully realized for trans Americans my age.

But I’m supposed to look at the humiliation of these terrible human beings, ugly in spirit and self-repressed and hateful and disgustingly narcissistic as they are, and feel a measure of, what, solace? Justice? Some brief, fleeting victory?

This doesn’t feel like any of that. I wake up tomorrow in a country that is exactly the same as it was yesterday, the small change being one or two fewer rightwing extremists with enough clout to inflict pain on people like me.

But nothing beyond that has changed.

There is still a Republican Party that wants us to be wiped off the face of the earth, a legacy media that treats us as disposable, a Democratic Party that primarily views us as inconvenient, and an American public that is largely wishing they didn’t have to deal with us.

I’m supposed to laugh at this situation regarding the Noems? Feel gleeful?

Why?

I don’t know how it’s possible for trans people in this country to be so visible in the national discourse and yet simultaneously unseen.

What a paradoxical hell this all is.

– Charlotte Clymer

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Love this. It’s true.

– Lilith Helstrom

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