Thread by @chasestrangio

I hate engaging in these conversations about people with large platforms who make trans people's lives miserable & more precarious. In all my despair & anger over the current landscape of course I do not want anyone else to be in danger. But let's talk about precarity....

Trans people are facing so many systematic and interpersonal assaults on their existence. From violence at home, in the street, in employment, shelter, health care. The rates of unemployment, homelessness, poverty set off a cycle leading to criminalization & premature death.

Hating us and devoting your life to exacerbating those conditions is a choice. Being trans is not. Or if it is, I choose it every day because the alternative is unimaginable.

In over 35 states in the US in 2021, lawmakers introduced bills to make trans survival harder. In Arkansas, the state passed a law banning health care for minors. We are now on appeal defending our lower court win blocking this insidious law.

I spent the last week reading briefs defending this law. Defending the idea that we should not be who we are. That we should not get health care. That we should not survive. An institutional, systematic, death threat - made by the government, supported by a global campaign...

...leveraged against young people. Not against billionaires. Not against adults with time to debate our existence. Against Kids trying to survive in a world that tells them over and over that they should not.

There are briefs from parents of trans kids saying they want their kids to suffer, states saying they want our health care banned, "medical providers" claiming that we will never live full lives. This is animated & legitimized by the rhetoric of powerful voices on these platforms

We feel so stuck, so unable to navigate and fight back and it is excrutiating and then somehow those who hate us become the victims and we are left to fight for survival in a world that not only exacerbates our suffering but then uses our suffering to claim we deserve more.

You are not protecting us from ourselves, you are not protecting children, you are weaponizing your own fear that the world is more nuanced than you imagined and using that fear to try to stop people from finding survival, joy, and possibility.

We are about to face another onslaught of attacks compounding generations of attacks and yet we find ourselves having to carefully mediate our rage and pain because that rage and pain will be shoved in our faces as a justification for our eradication.