I come in peace to speak my peace, because what I have to say concerns all of us. Stochastic terrorism against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transfolk, and other members of the LGB and LGBTQI+ communities is at an all-time high. GOP politicians are calling for our rights to be stripped from us because we are “abnormal” or “sinful.” The “loose cannons” in our midst are only too eager to be turned into camo-shirted militia fascists or gun-wielding “lone wolf” shooters whose only aim is to clear away those that their leaders have publicly deemed undesirable. The thing is, they don’t care which of us is pro-trans or anti-trans, because to them we’re all QuILTBAG degenerates who need clearing out of American communities. They’re targeting all of us, and at this point, they are happy to watch the LGB and LGBTQI+ factions of the larger QuILTBAG community tear each other apart. We’re doing their work for them, for chrissakes, and if anything they are highly entertained by it. I’m not sure what it would take for the QuILTBAG factions to come together to resist this impending annihilation, but I am sure that at the very least, we need to come to terms of truce and non-interference so that we can ALL focus on fighting the clear and present danger: Republican Christian Fascism.
I’m stepping out of my LGBTQI+ lane here because there are general concessions that I think need to be made. The simple truth of the matter is this: For lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and other members of the QuILTBAG, to be openly ourselves in America is to be traumatized and embattled on a daily basis. If it’s not micro-aggressions we’re dealing with, it’s violent aggression. Another problem we share is that it’s nearly impossible break out of trauma-based reasoning once it has set in. When we reason out of our traumatic experiences, our bad decisions are compounded by more bad decisions until the situation becomes completely untenable. I think that at least part of the hostility between the anti-trans and pro-trans factions of the QuILTBAG is rooted in how each of us has experienced and negotiated living with this trauma. All QuILTBAG folks, regardless of faction, are focused on resisting annihilation at the moment. That is as traumatic as it gets.
To my understanding, anti-trans QuILBTAG folks feel that being trans–particularly in the case of transwomen–erases the gender identity of biologically female and male people. Erasure is a terrifying thing to contemplate. We already know that erasure of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and many other QuILTBAG identities took place in 1933 with the burning of the archive of the Institute for Sexual Research by the German Student Union. This fear we are experiencing is a valid response to things that happened before. In fact, this fear of erasure would be impossible for a person to hold if our society as a whole was not, in fact, deeply engaged with the elevation of a toxic, patriarchal masculinity and the subsequent erasure of women and QuILTBAG people from public and civic life.
When reasoning from the standpoint that other parties are the cause of our impending erasure, it’s only natural to lash out against them and defend oneself. To be honest, I suspect that one reason for the existence of the LGB Alliance and other anti-trans groups is that they may feel like trans people are why the entire queer community is under attack right now; that the TQI+ folks have muddied up the overculture’s gender identity and sexual propriety boundaries so much that the cis-straights wanna kill ALL of us now. It makes sense to abject away from ourselves those undesirable characteristics–and the folks who have them–in the belief that so long as we’re not “like THAT,” then we’ll be found acceptable and allowed to live in peace. This may not be the case at all, but I suspect that these beliefs do inform at least part of the impetus of some LBG and anti-trans partisans to vehemently reject those whose orientations and gender presentation are making them targets of fascist violence. We need to remember something else, though: history has taught us that appeasement does not work with fascists. It’s time to consider new tactics and new perspectives.
The hatred and intolerance that camo-shirted “militia” fascist thugs and their civically-minded million mom counterparts are unleashing upon QuILTBAG people nationwide is as terrifying as it is mind-boggling. When confronted with such intense and violent hatred, it only makes sense that some of us are reasoning through our trauma and finding that it might be safer to just let the fascists take the TQI+ people out of the LGB equation. Unfortunately, the intensity of the hatred we face is only half of the problem. The other half is that we don’t recognize how the Republican Christian Fascist politicians are opportunistically capitalizing on this violence to further their own political careers. THAT is the force of evil at work driving our current crisis.
The trick of it is that there are two kinds of Republican Christian Fascists at work in America right now, and we are only paying real attention to one group of them: the ones with the guns pointed at us. We are so cowed by the hostility, hatred, and aggression that we don’t really watch the bland, banal, mediocre, bureaucrat who is urging the camo-shirt thug fascists to enforce their social priorities by terrorizing QuILTBAG folks and innocent women. It’s this encouragement that ensures the camo-shirt thug fascists’ support of every other part of the Republican Christian Fascist agenda. THAT agenda, as it turns out, is actively harmful to the camo-shirts, who are also overwhelming members of the working class. The Christian Fascist GOP’s agenda involves the destruction of our meager social safety net, the toppling of our democracy to establish a Christian Fascist theocracy, the complete deregulation of business that will destroy decent labor conditions as well as the environment, and the transformation of the United States of America into a mercantilist, imperialist economy refusing to participate in a highly developed global free market. These are ALL of the things they are doing behind the scenes while women and QuILTBAG folk are being terrorized and actively oppressed.
The Christian Fascist GOP politicians in charge have long been making darn sure that the most violent members of the lower and working classes are actively involved in harming undesirable “non-people” so that they never figure out how badly they are actually being screwed by their own politicians. If the camo-shirts knew all that, they might just turn their guns on the real problem: banal opportunist bureaucrats with bad taste and zero humanity who want to split America up into a handful of straight, white, Christian Fascist fiefdoms. At the end of the day, the hatred driving the camo-shirts is truly breathtaking, but it’s also a strategic distraction from the political mechanisms being deployed by the politicians who exploit that rage to further their own careers.
And what is these bureaucrats’ biggest current priority? The legal subjugation and oppression of women, full stop. The Anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric is just there to keep the camo-shirts at work terrorizing the lot of us. The LBG and LGBTQI+ factions of the QuILTBAG may violently disagree on the definition of “woman” and who gets to be one, but we should at the very least be able to agree that the Christian Fascist GOP and their camo-shirts are waging a full-out war on ALL women. That nonbinary people like myself and transmen in need of abortion could possibly exist and be harmed by this legislation is of no consequence to the Christian Fascist GOP, because they don’t even think that ANY LGBTQI+ folks are people with human rights to begin with. Having said that, it’s undeniable that the abortion ban and the coming wave of anti-contraception legislation are designed to control women, specifically, and greatly reduce their ability to participate fully and meaningfully in society. This is certainly and without doubt the whole entire point of the Christian Fascist pro-forced-birth, anti-woman agenda. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a left-leaning AP Modern World History teacher to see this. It just takes a much wider view of the situation than our trauma typically allows for us to fully appreciate it.
What we haven’t reckoned with yet is that all of us will eventually experience the pervasive oppression that will come from this legislation. Along with these abortion bans have come rafts of legislation to limit the free movement of pregnant American citizens from one state to another, and establish bounties to incentivize regular citizens to rat-fink inform on any family, friends, and neighbors who may accompany or help them. This is already the legal situation in places like Texas and Oklahoma. These tactics aren’t new; the Nazis essentially did both of these things in the lead-up to The Final Solution. The big difference here is that the fascist red state governments of America are offering monetary rewards for turning on members of your family and community. If it hasn’t already, that financial incentive will soon encourage American citizens to develop bounty hunting networks to track the movements of criminalized American citizens: potentially pregnant women, reproductive healthcare providers, and any and all people who help them in any way. As the number of states with these laws increases, these networks will grow pretty strong. They’ll adapt well to whatever purpose to which they are next turned.
We know exactly which community is being targeted next: all members of the QuILTBAG community regardless of whether you are LGB Alliance kinda gay or LGBTQI+ kinda gay. The informant support network regular citizens are building to trap women will eventually be used to trap everyone else–including the camo-shirt thug fascists, eventually. Of course, long before that time, they will have been used to expel or exterminate People of Color, the disabled, Muslims, Jews, and finally, “Liberal Christians” in waves of Christian Fascist fury. This is the oppression that is likely to follow on the heels of these abortion bans. We’re already being hunted by Christian Fascists. We’re already being stripped of our eligibility for full humanity by the Texas Christian Fascist GOP, and more fascist-dominated red states are set to follow Texas’ example. We’re very clearly next up.
At their core, these abortion bans do two things that we should ALL be afraid of. One, they strip half of America’s people of their citizenship, human rights, agency, and humanity. Two, they legally establish the authority of the state to decide which people get to have full human rights, and which don’t. After that, it’s a short leap for the government to legally authorize itself to do whatever is necessary to prevent these undesirable persona non grata from threatening their Republican Christian Fascist society. This particular legal progression should be very familiar to students of the twentieth century because it is the same basic progression of legal and social reasoning that the Nazi regime used to build the foundation for the Final Solution. I’m speaking, of course, of the Aktion T4 program.
In October of 1939, Hitler ordered that disabled and chronically ill children aged 3 and under were to undergo “mercy killing” because they were “life unworthy of life.” Doctors and midwives were to register all children with symptoms of mental retardation, physical deformity, or other health defects with the government. Bureaucrats with zero medical training tallied up the score marks for those conditions and ordered the efficient killing of all children whose tallies were intolerable high. Infants and toddlers deemed too effective were subject to euthanasia. The parents were told their children had died of pneumonia or other vague causes. Soon thereafter, the program was expanded to cull disabled older children and adolescents from German society. Finally, Aktion T4 was expanded once again to include disabled, mentally ill, and cognitively degraded adults who were deemed “incurable,” and thus should, for the good of German society, be “accorded a mercy death.” Six Aktion T4 killing centers were built. The center at Brandenburg marked the first time the Nazis experimented with lethal gas and crematoriums.
When the sudden appearance two years later of large dark plumes of toxic smoke and gas alarmed those living near the killing centers that something was amiss, local clergy took action. Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen delivered a sermon sternly condemning the Aktion T4 program as “plain murder” and urging Germans to dissociate with the Nazi party. The program was suspended shortly thereafter on August 23, 1941. Three parish priests who had distributed the sermon were beheaded by the Nazis, but von Galen was left alive to avoid his becoming a martyr. The program’s legacy continued, however, as the physical infrastructure and legal frameworks put into place by Aktion T4 became the foundation for the Final Solution.
It’s quite clear that euthanasia centers served as vital training grounds for the SS in developing their “Final Solution” infrastructure in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and several other death camps. With shocking quickness, the legal framework authorizing the state to decide who did and did not deserve a “mercy death” was quickly updated to necessitate the killing of Europe’s entire Jewish population and all other marginalized groups. Through the T4 program, the Nazi party created and normalized a powerful infrastructure for efficient data collection from citizen finks. That, in turn, normalized the entire enterprise as a matter of public and civic health. For this reason, it went unquestioned for far too long and then it just went unquestioned, period.
The real news here is that a dire public health concern has already been created here and now, in America, by these fascist anti-abortion laws. Leagues of ordinary citizens are to be mobilized and compensated for surveilling, hunting, and perhaps inadvertently killing their friends, family, and neighbors in an effort to preserve phantom “pre-born Americans.” The legal framework that has newly established the citizen fink network will sooner or later be adapted toward the ends of hunting the QuILTBAG communities and others–whether the laws eventually call for that or not. The Republican Christian Fascists are working to build physical, logistical, and financial infrastructure to make these threats an American reality. Their efforts will yield bounty hunter hordes, over-crowded detention centers, women’s pelvic health check stations, barriers to contraception access, etc. We’ve seen this progressive dehumanization and stripping of citizens’ human rights by their own governments before. We already know that the elimination or extermination of millions of innocent people will soon follow. We know where it all ultimately leads.
THAT should lead us to take another look at our current situation. As things now stand, the Christian Fascist GOP politicians know that any time they want, they can interrupt any media scrutiny of their actions by spewing stochastic terrorism that triggers the angry young men to commit headline-inducing acts of violence against QuILTBAG people. First, the fascist politicos broadcast hatred and intolerance toward the next marginalized group on the list. Then, their fascist camo-shirt thugs and “lone wolves” take care of the rest. Given the mutual admiration society that has sprung up between law enforcement and the camo-shirt fascist contingent, we can expect that no crimes against the marginalized will be halted, no arrests made, and no prosecutions conducted by any law enforcement agency in fascist-leaning red states. But don’t be fooled; the violent elimination of “undesirable” queers isn’t the only point of all this terrorism.
Perhaps the bigger point to all this stochastic terrorism is to habituate Americans to accept Republican Christian Fascist governance as the only logical choice for stability and order in their communities. Hitler’s big win with this was the Reichstag Fire in 1933, which terrorized ordinary Germans into accepting the Nazi proposition that they were the only solution to the chaos. America’s treasonous insurrection of January 6th might have been a dress rehearsal for a future event of that nature, but I don’t think it matters. America doesn’t need one big fire in D.C. to get to where Germany was in 1933. We have tens of thousands of little fires going off in the muzzles of AR-15s that are being used against society’s most vulnerable people–children, people of color, QuILTBAG people, etc. Witnessing the Proud Boys and Patriot Front attack the Pride events and members of the QuILTBAG community while members of local law enforcement stand by, make jokes, and fist-bump these fascist thugs is a traumatic experience for all who see or experience it. When these acts of stochastic terrorism happen often enough, Americans might become willing to accept ANYTHING that returns us to order–in this case, Republican Christian Fascism.
When all the stochastic terrorism against QuILTBAG folks threatens to become a regular part of daily American life, the Christian Fascist GOP will start shifting the blame for it all onto the targets of the violence–QuILTBAG folks. In such dire circumstances, it’ll be easy to convince traumatized constituents that if “the queers” didn’t live in their neighborhoods, then the Proud Boys wouldn’t be shooting them up. At no point will the Christian Fascist GOP ever point out the evil insanity of a group of murderous cosplayers marching into a neighborhood and terrorizing innocent people. That part is fine for them. The problem, they will insist, is that they do not want us to co-exist in their precious sacred cis white straight Christian fascist society. More than that, they will insist that the best solution to the violence isn’t to rein in the fascists, but to get rid of the queers–LGB Alliance and LGBTQI+ alike. After that comes the stripping of our legal status, revoking of our civil liberties, and expulsion from our own communities.
Whether we like it or not, all QuILTBAG people are in the same boat, and there are thousands of other marginalized people in here with us. The mores and values of our idiotic overculture have been exploited by fascists to make good and sure we’re all pitted against each other. From this moment on, it behooves us all to put away the knives and lay off the incendiary accusations of “gender essentialism is evil” on one side and “transwomen are the erasure of women” on the other. This needs to stop because we all have to fight against the real threat: fascism. We don’t have to like each other, or want to have anything else to do with each other, but we need to stop cutting each other down and dragging each other through the mud. The fact is, all of us need to be fighting the same fight, and our fight shouldn’t be with each other right now. Honestly, If we hadn’t wasted so much time fighting over the definition of “woman,” or the use of “gender-inclusive language” or concerns about “the erasure of women” here in the QuILTBAG, we would have seen all of this coming a lot sooner and been able to effectively resist by now. ALL of America’s women need the QuILTBAG to get our shit together and help them out. Look at how much time has been wasted and damage done to women’s agency, freedom, and human rights while we’ve been fighting with each other. We need to step up, because if we don’t, we’re next up.
Women are absolutely being erased from American civic and public life. That’s a primary goal of the Christian Fascist GOP. Women are going to be hunted, possibly maimed, and possibly killed, by the fascists, who are planning to do that ASAP. Entire families lives will be ruined when their desperate mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters are put in jail for attempting to access basic reproductive healthcare. Republican Christian Fascists want these things to happen. And you know which cultural forces are driving this misogyny, oppression, and erasure? Patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and fascism. Not queer theory. Not CRT. Not trans people. Not nonbinary people. Not pansexual people. The enormous threat erasing women at this point in time is the Christain Fascist GOP and their camo-shirt fascist militias. We need to work together if we are going to fight them and their dominionism before it claims us all. However you may feel about the TQI+ folks in the QuILTBAG, we are not the ones threatening the most harm to women at this moment in time.
I’m not asking for or expecting any sort of kumbaya around the campfire here. If the best we can do is ignore each other’s existence for the time being and focus on getting rid of fascism, that would be a great place to start. If the best any of us can do is say, “Okay. You have a point. But I’m staying in my lane, and you need to stay WAAAAY over there in yours,” then that would work. It has before. The Soviets helped the Allies defeat Italy and Germany. After that, the former Allied powers and the Soviets were at each other’s throats for four decades. If that’s really what you still want to do after the fascist threat is passed, I’m not going to argue with you on that point. I don’t even care if we have one enormous battle group of QuILTBAG warriors who grudgingly work together, or we operate separately in two distinct battle groups that ignore each other and DON’T INTERFERE with each other’s work against fascism. All I care about is that we acknowledge that we’re all in this together and that it’s time we came to terms that allow us to fight the fascist threat instead of each other. We need to effectively resist our annihilation at the hands of the Christian Fascist GOP here, or there won’t be any of us left to squabble about “gender” and “inclusion” in the QuILTBAG.
Another thing I want understood is that when I’m coming at this issue, I’m coming as a rando queer knocking around in the QuILTBAG, not as some sort of full participant in the LGBTQI+ community. That’s because, despite my best efforts, my gender identity and sexuality tend to make me unwelcome in LGBTQI+ community social and mixer events. People like me are encouraged to show up civically and politically “for the queers!,” but we aren’t wanted at the community-building ones. LGBTQI+ folks with gender anxiety are uncomfortable with my non-binariness, especially as I tend to default to what I call “fella femme.” I’ve experienced a strong backlash against my use of the term “pansexual” in describing my sexuality on grounds that it somehow erases the larger bisexual identity. It’s true that bisexual erasure in the LGBTQI+ is a serious issue that demands addressing. Screaming at those relatively few of us who prefer to use the term pansexual won’t stop Bi erasure, because we aren’t the ones doing the erasing. The larger LGBTQI+ community is doing it–all Pride month long. Finally, rampant gold star-ism has definitely limited my dating and relationship options where I’ve lived, and the fact that I am autistic only exacerbates this issue. I know I belong in the QuILTBAG, but I don’t fit in the LGBTQI+ community any better than I fit into the LGB Alliance and anti-trans community. It’s pretty isolating, to tell you the truth. I’m still gonna fight.
But I’m not fighting for the LGBTQI+ community, because as I’ve come into my non-binariness and pansexuality, I’ve been shut out of participating meaningfully in it. I’m fighting for the freaky queers like me who are knocking around in the QuILTBAG whilst trapped in red states and red tidepools in blue states. The ones who know who and what they are but remain closeted and disconnected for fear of their lives. They live in small rural communities with no support, no financial resources, and no meaningfully enforced civil rights protections. These LGBTQI+ people are scared for their lives right now, and with good reason. If they get found out by the camo-shirts, they’ll be among the first to get dragged out of their homes and sent out of town–or killed–when it comes time for that. Until a few weeks ago, I was in the same situation.
I know what it’s like to find yourself in a position of having to fight alongside people who seem to constantly invalidate your views, your gender, and your sexual orientation. But as I look at this battle I now find myself in, one truth is clear: I can’t do it alone. And neither can any single one of you. It’s going to take all hands on deck to turn the tide of Republican Christian Fascism. It’s going to take all of us to fight for all of us. The more of us there are doing the fighting, the faster we can cut the head off of the fascist monster that has us in its maw. If anyone in the LGB Alliance and anti-trans factions of the QuILTBAG can see any sense in at least temporarily laying aside the chopping each other to pieces thing long enough to aim our axes at the Republican Christian Fascists, we’ll be able to get out of this mess a whole lot sooner…if we don’t, we may not make it out at all.
They’re coming for us. ALL of us.
P.S. The reason America is letting the window to control monkeypox pass everyone by is the same reason Reagan did nothing about AIDS when it emerged in the 80s: it primarily affects gay men, who the GOP wants dead.
