This article is excellent and well worth reading
I would also like to discuss this matter with my own words.
I will not fucking vote for Pete Buttigrieg or Gavin Newsom. i would not vote for them if i lived in a swing state, and i sure will not vote for them here in my D+20 enclave. if you care about my vote and “electability”, throw your primary support elsewhere. Similarly, i fucking hope Josh Turek loses. he deserves to lose. if i still lived in Texas, i would likely still vote for Talarico, whose comments were much more mild, and considering that these comments are a reversal from his actions in the statehouse. i am hurt and disappointed to see him reverse this late in the game, in a move that nets him zero votes. but yeah, Ken Paxton is likely the worst transphobe in the Republican party, and that does mean something.
i also will not disengage from politics on November 9. i will be loud and i will scream till i die. but that engagement also means that i care, and that i refuse to compromise on my own rights. that if a politician running for high office calls me a slur (and yes, “biological male” is a fucking slur), then i take them at their word for what they mean, and I will label them as my enemy.
I will not listen to centrist scolding about “electability.” After all, if these people cared so deeply about electability, one would then wonder why they seem to go silent when their preferred “centrist” loses primaries. If they cared about “electability”, why even discuss trans people at all, when trans issues are consistently ranked as low importance by voters, and those same voters trust Democrats more than Republicans anyway? And of course it is a low-importance issue to most cis people, when only 2/3 of US respondents even know a trans person. But the thing is, it’s a life-and-death issue to **me**, because, of course, this is about my right to exist in society
And more than that, my path to get to where I am today was a painful one. I grew up in a society that found Ace Ventura, Pet Detective the funniest movie ever made (amongst numerous, numerous, numerous other examples of pop culture transphobia from that era), and I live in a society where Jim Carrey, who made that hate crime of a movie, still does not have the self-awareness to even apologize. Finding myself in that environment was hard. Working through the dissociation and self-harm and addiction and actual material abuse that followed, which wound me through threads of transmysogynistic “just be genderqueer, transition is bad” stuff to actual TERF feminism at various stages before I realized who I was was harder. By the time I got to here, there was so much damage built up that getting to who I was was difficult. For a brief time, it looked like that there might have been no more trans kids growing up in a world like that, that I was the last generation to have these experiences.
And then all of this happened. And we look to the UK, where even the mainline LGBTQIA+ orgs are outright abandoning trans rights in the face of Labour’s (and the Greens even!) abandoment of trans rights, and I see our future here. I know that we are only 3% of the vote, at the MOST, and that we can’t swing anything, but all I have is my voice, and with my voice, all I can say is “this far, no farther”. I will not compromise on basic human rights. If you care about my support, you will not punch me, and you will definitely not fucking punch me while I am down. I am frank about myself when I say “death before detransition”. It is not some political slogan, it is a physical reality that has been written into my body by my own choice and consent. And when you turn on all of us, I will only say “get fucked” to you.
In short, I will not compromise on my own rights.
