We’re ordinary people. We work, pay bills, discuss what to make for dinner, watch our stories on streaming, fret over minutiae, are servants to our pets. There is nothing glamorous or exciting or dangerous about our lives. Still, we’re being targeted as “the enemy,” a threat to family values. Our gender nonconformity has been transmuted from a fact of us to an illness, a sickness, a disease intent on infecting “the children.” Because transgender folk are the smallest minority, we are the easiest to attack.
In conservative states across the country, we are being criminalized. The conservative patriarchy prefers restrictions on bodies to restrictions on guns, or on environmental pollution, or on anything that restricts profit or that taxes the wealthy. It’s a “look, squirrel” distraction laid out by authoritarians and greedy corporatists, who don’t care if innocent ordinary people are harmed in the making of their wealth. Elon Musk seems to want to destroy his trans daughter’s life. He seems to be taking pleasure in his awfulness.
And somehow, these money hoarders have convinced Johnny Doe-eyed and Julie Juke-joint that the LGBTQIA+ community’s need to express their authentic selves threatens the social fabric. Now, ordinary people on the right are beating up beer cans and screaming about rainbows in Target as if the sky will fall if the “alphabet mafia” isn’t reined in and shoved back into closets.
Because of the hysteria whipped up against transgender folks, Natalie and I have to be careful where we shop, eat, and travel. We don’t have the luxury of freedom white cisgender people do. According to the people who want to hurt us we’re monsters, we’re groomers, we’re deviants. These angry people will feel justified when they bash skulls to “protect the children.”
Our mundane lives, our averageness, the fact we pay taxes, and are law-abiding citizens (Tallie was recently disappointed because she wasn’t selected for jury duty) won’t protect us against fear mongering and righteous (not righteous) rage.
Friends sometimes ask me how we’re doing. We’d be doing better if fueling hate wasn’t so easy. We’d be doing better if people would stop buying into the bullshit. We’d be doing better if people realized just how ordinary we really are.
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