Completely contrary to what I said back in December, I'm going to NPR and APNews every morning just to make sure Trump hasn't declared martial law (he actually has, but only at the southern border, I guess I'm waiting to see about the rest of the country now). However, in doing this, I'm also finding all the other shit that's going down more-or-less independently of Dongle Dumpus's influence, and one of those was the US Supreme Court upholding state bans on gender-affirming care for minors (ie. persons aged 17 or below). In the short term, this is going to drive a lot of real actual children to suicide (I can think of 2 offhand) and will empower all republicans in all legislatures across the entire country to introduce bans of their own. In the long term, this is an open door to banning gender-affirming care for everyone, regardless of age; to say nothing of an increase in anti-trans discrimination, just like what happened to Black people. The transgender public restroom bans have already been expanded to include intramural sport and a ban on transgender people entering college and university residence halls is being teased in Texas and Alabama. We're setting ourselves up for a Jim Crow-style situation, only applying to transgender people instead of just Black people now.
Really, being transgender or not wasn't the point of this post. It was just a handy entry point to introduce this:
The United States government has always been a white evangelist fellatio festival. Rich white men and their token lapdogs sitting atop heaping great piles of money in a circlejerk of confirmation bias, intentionally flawed science, and personal greed. Whenever one of them coins a neat phrase, the others start parrotting it without hesitation, entirely unencumbered from the Annoyance of Thought, whatever that phrase happens to be. "Segregation today, tomorrow, and forever", "Stay the course", "Pray the gay away", "White genocide", whatever. These people use the fear of an unseen shadow force coming in and taking jobs or guns or bibles or whatever to drive their unthinking followers to violence against their chosen target, commuting sentences of anyone who may accidentally have been rounded up and arrested for something related to it. Transgender children are beaten then left to die on the floor of the school restroom in defence of a free America, whereas a group of 250.000 protestors holding signs suggesting that Black people's lives are worth any more than a mote of dust are a threat to democracy and are treated no better than cattle in an abbatoir. A billionaire trustfunder can suggest that a genocide against white people is currently ongoing in certain unspecified parts of the world, while at the same time an actual genocide against Palestinians and their culture is demonstrably taking place, using weapons whose guidance systems were designed by the same billionaire trustfunder's company. A machine-gun massacre at a school can be put on the back-burner by bringing up an hallucinatory Islamic terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Fortunately, the government's continued control hinges upon a single point of failure: people not realising that they are capable of direct action. In the case of transgender care bans, all it takes is a few people who are willing to stand up and defend trans people's rights while the government tries to beat them down. People willing to administer the gender affirming care themselves at their own expense, be that a simple change of wardrobe or acquiring the therapeutic chemicals, applying professional makeup to a trans girl so she can feel feminine or committing fraud by mis-entering a patient's age on their chart so they can access the care they need. Whatever it takes to uphold rights that the government has denied need upholding, people will do it. Most do it out of the kindness of their hearts, others do it just to stick it to The Man. I know this because it's been happening for years. Food banks, community-funded clinics, advocacy organisations, immigration attorneys working pro-bono, even office workers on the state's payroll looking the other way and issuing licenses to prohibited persons, knowing the case will simply disappear into the impossible stacks of paperwork. All of these happened because people recognised that poor people, immigrants, and ex-convicts have rights despite the government saying they don't. The next generation of affirmative action will uphold the rights of transgender people. It will require volunteers who aren't afraid of the corporate feudal state, but such people do exist. Are you one of them?