America Must Defend Trans Life

“Are you okay?” This is the simple yet infinitely powerful question that photographer Jesse Freidin has been asking trans children and adolescents throughout the United States for the past year and a half as a part of his ongoing series by the same name. A trans man himself, Freidin started his project as an antidote to both intentionally and unintentionally dehumanizing portrayals of trans youth in the mainstream media — portrayals that, in his view, emphasized their fundamental sadness more than anything else. What distinguishes his work from that of your typical shutterbug in particular is his distinctive framing. In his own words:

“People who live through trauma and pain cannot be photographed like everybody else. They must be elevated, they must be allowed to take up space. Through this series I created the kind of trans portrait that I wanted to see — that of a person standing in their power, their support networks flanking them, unconditional love filling the frame and a brief moment where the sitter can breathe without fear of violence and without the burden of stigma.”

In accordance with this principle, Freidin structures each of his photos as follows: the young trans person occupies the foreground, seated and looking directly into the camera; the parent(s) or guardian(s) meanwhile stands in the background, touching their child’s shoulders as a gesture of support while their face remains uncaptured by the frame. Below can be found just one of many items from Freidin’s gallery, in this case a portrait of a 14-year old trans boy named Mattie:

Each of Freidin’s portraits is moreover accompanied by an interview he conducted beforehand with the subject of his photograph. Mattie’s interview in particular contains a particularly striking excerpt that articulates the real parameters of the mythical “trans debate” in a way that few of us are ever exposed to. According to Mattie:

“None of this is about politics. None of our rights being taken away is about politics. It’s about people out there suffering and dying. It’s about empathy. It’s simply about trying to protect kids who want to be who they are. That’s it. That’s the bottom line.”

Nothing else so eloquently speaks to the nature of not only the Right’s renewed assault on trans Americans, but also the sheer meekness of the response to it thus far by this country’s self-styled “Left.” Indeed, it seems that as with every other issue they’re capable of commenting on, Democrats continue to frame the question of whether or not trans people have a right to live as an irrevocably political one. It seems unfathomable to us today that any other group could have its very existence be so casually treated as an object of debate, and yet the trans community is routinely singled out as an exception to this otherwise uncontroversial rule: the inevitable result of this exercise is the enabling of violence against trans people.

This process recently attained its zenith with the savage shooting at Colorado Springs, but let us not forget that it can and frequently does take on forms that, while less immediate to us, are just as murderous. Consider, for example, the many unique and unnecessary obstacles that trans people face in trying to obtain access to basic healthcare, thought to constitute a significant contributing factor to the shocking incidence of suicidality among members of their community. In any civilized society a fact like this would be cause for outrage, and indeed, for many Americans it has served that exact function. Where most sensible people would see a tragedy, however, others find an opportunity to add yet more skeletons to their already overstuffed closet. One particularly loathsome instance of this was provided by senior writer for the National Review Charles Cooke when he wrote:

“If the choice before me is between engaging in free dialogue and indulging threats of suicide, then I am on the side of the free dialogue every time. I will happily chat to anyone about anything, but I will not cower before threats of self-harm, and I do not recommend that anyone else does, either.”

Cooke’s message is unmistakable: according to him, the destruction of trans lives is a justifiable, nay, a necessary cost of imposing his totalitarian conception of gender onto the rest of society as though it were fact (news flash: it isn’t). We see this pattern reproduced almost everywhere in conservative media, from Fox News dedicating entire segments of its airtime to the dissemination of transphobic propaganda to the self-proclaimed “disaffected liberal” Tim Pool going so far as to accuse the venue of the Colorado Springs shooter’s attack of hosting a “grooming event”.

If there does in fact exist an afterlife, then it would be impossible to put into words the kind of hell that awaits every last one of these cretins. They are the desk murderers of the modern age, and as such no punishment on Earth could possibly be devised as would befit the true severity of their crimes. The only remotely suitable analogue I can think of here is the fate that the International Military Tribunal visited upon Julius Streicher, founder and publisher of the newspaper Der Stürmer, who was ultimately sentenced to death by hanging for the prominent role he played in inciting acts of violence against Jews throughout the Nazi era. As the tribunal itself put it:

“But it was not only in Germany that this defendant [Streicher] advocated his doctrines. As early as 1938 he began to call for the annihilation of the Jewish race. Twenty-three different articles of ‘Der Sturmer’ between 1938 and 1941 were produced in evidence, in which the extermination ‘root’ and ‘branch’ was preached. Typical of his teachings was a leading article in September, 1938, which termed the Jew a germ and a pest, not a human being, but ‘a parasite, an enemy, an evil-doer, a disseminator of diseases who must be destroyed in the interest of mankind.’”

Considering the immense popularity that Der Stürmer enjoyed in not only its country of origin but also abroad from the early 1920s all the way to the Nazi surrender in 1945, it was thus indisputably justified for the IMT to implicate Streicher in the ideological legitimation of the Holocaust among ordinary Germans (the ahistorical Goldhagen thesis notwithstanding). Why, then, do we not apply the same standard to people like Pool? Through their relentless demonization of trans people as “unnatural,” “disfigured,” “mentally ill” “groomers,” do they not also contribute to the formation of a cultural atmosphere that renders their mass murder a righteous act of retribution? Take the following comparison, for instance. Below can be found two images, (1): a headline from a special 1934 issue of Der Stürmer in which Jews are depicted as extracting blood from Christian children for use in a religious ritual (a classic example of the vicious antisemitic blood libel myth), and (2): the headline of an article published by the conservative media company The Daily Wire in which Ben Shapiro accuses “transgressives” of accelerating the breakdown of Western civilization by dint of their infiltration of American children:

Unless you were deliberately fooling yourself, it would be impossible to deny that there exists zero qualitative difference between these two headlines. This fact becomes especially lucid when we consider Shapiro’s statement in the above article that “the transing of the kids [like Mattie] has become the latest symptom of a far deeper and more profound evil in Western civilization,” as well as his equation of the trans movement in the United States to an “infect[ion]” requiring liquidation. Is this the type of rhetoric that is designed to encourage members of its target audience to utilize reasoned debate as a means of adjudicating political disputes? The answer to this question should be obvious to most of us by now, as it has been to the very people responsible for its being posed at all and just as it was to the prosecutors at the Nuremberg court in 1946, which makes it more than fair to state: if he was willing to look past Shapiro’s Jewish heritage, Streicher would therefore most certainly have found much to admire. For no matter how intensively Shapiro and the rest of his contemptible ilk condemn the consequences of their vile propaganda after the fact, to anyone willing to pay any attention whatsoever, it is starting to become increasingly transparent that, far from opposing such acts of manifest villainy as the Colorado Springs shooting, they in fact support them wholeheartedly (just not overtly).

We might hope that one day, these murderous fiends will be made to answer for their crimes in the same manner as Streicher. As things stand, however, that day remains a long way off, to such an extent that the time has now come for the trans movement to take matters into its own hands. This should not be a controversial position. Conservatives have already declared themselves unofficial combatants through their rigorous promotion and, for some, direct employment of anti-trans violence, so it is obviously more than rational to consider whether and how supporters of the trans cause might be able to respond to their provocations in kind. It is almost certain that conversations of this nature will cause many — especially cisgendered people — a great deal of apprehension, but alas, such is the nature of war: either you vainly cling onto the hope of negotiation with the aggressor (a la Iraq during 2003) or you show them in the clearest terms possible that you are willing and capable of retaliating to their aggression (e.g: North Korea’s nuclear weapons program). By definition, the latter principle excludes any action taken against the innocent, whether intentional or unintentional. What it does include, however, is the threat and/or use of force against your enemies with the aim of ensuring the stability of your political formation. To paraphrase Friedrich Engels: it is not possible to have organization without authority. What, then, might this encompass? A few ideas:

(1): The ostracization of transphobes from all sectors of government, business, and civil society (with the exception of welfare programs). We are told constantly that there exists an organized campaign to banish opponents of “trans ideology” from the domain of public life, so why not turn this fantasy into a reality?

(2): Giving LGBTQ+ individuals and organizations the option to solicit the protection of local police or, more preferably, trans-affirmative “gun clubs” for their events in case the worst should happen. Institutions dedicated to serving trans people like hospitals and homeless shelters should also be offered this same protection on a longer term basis.

(3): If you observe a trans person being subject to physical violence at the hands of an unarmed assailant, either call for help or attempt to defuse the situation yourself (even and perhaps especially if that means the exercise of violence on your part against said assailant).

(4): The physical destruction of materials intended to promote anti-trans hate, e.g: posters, flags, articles of clothing, etc.

(5): On the legal front, the intensification of criminal penalties for both the incitement and execution of anti-trans hate crimes, up to and including the death penalty.

Of course, this list is far from exhaustive. Nor is it the case that our society wouldn’t benefit from it being applied to groups other than trans people (American Jews, for instance, would be spared a tremendous amount of pain and suffering if they were to be afforded the same protections). I am thus open to having it be modified and repurposed as national circumstances change. But to deny its utility entirely would be hubris of the highest order: a crisis of such magnitude as that which we are now faced with demands a new approach. To do anything else would be to deprive the trans movement of access to the political valence it so desperately needs. And it’s high time that we begin to realize this lest our complacency leads us to an even worse place than we now find ourselves in.

BY ANONYMOUS