I was talking to my mum the other day about the political climate against transgender activists and just general people in the street; about how I saw it described as a "pogrom" on Substack and how much that shook me, since pogroms are traditionally things that organised mobs carry out against perceived threats to normalcy and tradition. And she replied, "Oh, just like women's lib."
What? Mum, I just bared my entire soul to you about why I've been feeling like an ounce of wheat-germ lately and that's all you've got to say?
The fact is, she's right. Until the word "pogrom" was employed, I hadn't been feeling like there was any condition other than normal when it came to existence as a trans woman in America. I said it myself back on January 1: even the queer community doesn't accept us with any reliability. I also said it back on March 2: AMAB transgender people have never had a solid support structure. The fact of the matter is, despite the fact that Elon Musk, transphobe extraordinaire, is Trump's right-hand man right now, and maybe a few hundred more hardliners with concealed-carry permits feel comfortable targeting trans women to murder in a drive-by shooting, nothing has really changed. I think the fact I reacted the way I did was that I felt vulnerable for the first time in my very boring, very white, and heretofore very male life. I feigned vulnerability at several points in the past, but I was no more targeted than a white evangelical complaining about his religious freedom becoming endangered. For the very first time in my life, I genuinely was vulnerable, and I reacted the way any animal does when suspicious of its surroundings; took the nearest exit and hightailed it the hell out of there. The way I was talking about it on that day's blog entry, it was like I was insinuating that being in danger by going outside in a feminine outfit was a new development that only started in January 2025.
My mum was around for the rise of both women's lib and gay rights in the '70s and '80s, and she's seen some shit. Groups of right-leaning men going to rallies and "converting" lesbians by raping them, nearly 3/4 of her gay friends contracting AIDS (when it was still called GRID even) and then dying of it, stuff like that. She's been around, so this newest attempt by Reaganesque faux-evangelical corporate feudal fascists to curtail the rights of a certain group of people is nothing new to her. Certainly, having been a boy at one point, I know what cis men talk about in the locker room; and it's nearly always something possessive about women. A woman, no matter what her form may be, is an object. In the eyes of the conservative male, a woman is not a person; she is a servant, a punching bag, a sex toy, and a baby factory. She has no rights except to get married as soon as she can, no possessions except tools of housekeeping, no desires except to serve her husband.
It was like that before women's lib, it's like that again. Only this time, we call it "cottagecore" or "RETVRN to tradition". A dream-world version of 1700s colonial America where everything is binary, nothing violates the status quo, and a man can sexually-assault his wife as is his God-given right. By this logic, it makes sense that transgender people are in the way of that, because our very nature demolishes their Ideal of the Binary.
So, really, not much has changed. It's just puritanism wearing a different hat, just like before. While I know the internet at large isn't like tumblr ("this site's reading comprehension is piss poor", "how dare you suggest we piss on the poor"), I feel like some fellow AMAB trans person is going to read this and feel that I'm belittling their situation. Maybe they've already been beaten by Elonazis and barely escaped with their life, maybe they've been thrown out of their home by a sudden convert to the Church of Trump, or something else directly related to Trump having the top post again has caused a radical and necessary change to their life. I'm not belittling you. I'm not trying to say that it's actually easy, neither am I saying that nothing has changed. I'm just re-iterating what I've already said, as AMAB transgender people we have no existing support network to help each other through tough times, and now, the fascist decision-makers have discovered that. Moreover, a man whose gene-perfect sons all became daughters is running a fake government agency that is dedicated to stamping out transgender people, black people, and homosexuals in the public scope. I'd say that's a pretty substantive change to the transgender experience. The thing I'm trying to get across, above all else, is that once the lawsuits and injunctive actions prevent the so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" operating, the underlying social problems have not changed really at all from where they were from the '50s through to the '90s. Women are still treated as objects rather than people, transgender people are still treated like genetic abnormalities, gay people are still cannon-fodder for evangelicals.
I guess the glib remark would be: everything has changed, yet nothing has changed.