letters from a weirdo

Teachers, you see what’s happening. You know it’s bad.

You can either dissociate with reruns of The Great British Bake-Off or you can help your neighbors build a wall of resistance to prevent us from collapsing into decades of dictatorship. But I promise you: if you miss this window to help your neighbors, there will soon be nothing to distract you from the agony coming for women, queer people, trans people, disabled people, autistic people, and people of color. This is not “spicy Republicanism.”

This is a genocidal regime, fueled by child-raping techno-fascist apartheid money and a white Christian nationalist goon force.

Endangered democratic nations that don’t have a backup plan for how to identify and respond to fascist electoral skullduggery don’t get a second chance— not for decades.

Can you imagine living under decades of this?

What about your students, your children, your friend’s kids?

Don’t Collapse! Organize. There’s Something YOU Can Do

Use the skills you have to create scalable that teach-in pods in your communities that actually help people recognize where they’re at and develop a whole-of-society response to reject totalitarianism while we still have a chance.

That’s the ride we’re on, babes. We can take the off-ramp, or we can be dragged into hell. Be the teacher you wish to see in the world.

I’ve created a free list of resources and videos [below]. I explain why and how these resources are invaluable for outsmarting the fascists, and I suggest reading them in order and breaking them down for people who you know, because you are an educator, won’t do the reading because they don’t have time.

Visibility brigades and scheduled mass protests do not topple dictatorships: community organizing and alliance building does. Let’s. F*****g. Go!

I was editing an essay of mine, called “Teaching Trans at the End of Democracy,” and I added a new footnote to the piece. Which then inspired me to record a Substack Live expanding on this point:

This was, of course, in the before-times. Before a child-raping mobster was propelled into office by techno-fascists and had the entire infrastructure of the government weaponized against trans people, Black people, Hispanic people, Latino people, Muslim people, people who are immigrants, autistic people, disabled people, asylum seekers, childhood-sexual assault survivors, working-class people, undocumented immigrants, First Nations, and, yes, even white cisgender women themselves. I wonder how many of them really believed Trump when he claimed his intent was to “protect women and children” from trans people. No doubt that “promise” rings hollow now, given his now documented history of predation against women and children. Do you want to know who invades women’s spaces and mutilates children? It’s Donald Trump and the Epstein class. I wonder if there will ever be any kind of acknowledgement from cisgender people, when this is all said and done, that the Epstein class and white Christian nationalists used trans people as a Trojan horse to get at children’s and cisgender women’s rights. Much of this attack could have been preventable had upper-middle-class white cisgender women (the JK Rowling class) not been so amenable to transphobic scapegoating in the first place. Trans people just want to live their lives. But many in our country, up to and including Bari Weiss at the New York Times, spent an enormous amount of ink turning trans people into villains of convenience over night. This was no accident. The Epstein class needed a boogeyman, and some of y’all fell for it, and now people like very well might die because of it. Some of us already have. It’s just that our deaths, our disappearances, and the violence that comes to us— it still doesn’t seem to matter to the rest of the country. Our lives, as ever, are always-already disposable. We become the pariah onto which people project their own discomfort with their gender journey— how life has taught them to be uncomfortable in their bodies, their looks, their desires, their sense of embodied freedom. Trans people may be a vulnerable group, but fascists and white Christian nationalists hate us not because we are some “danger” but because our lives point to a range of gender experience that allow all people breathing room to be themselves. They hate us because we know how to be free, in spite of all it costs us— and that kind of integrity scares the s**t out of people who have only benefitted from regimes of control and conformity.

I genuinely hope people can spend some time sitting with these words.

Trans people were never the problem. We were the scapegoat to offload the actual danger to women and children posed by the Epstein class. Fascism might be new for some people, but many of us have been wading through its waters for quite some time now.

I share all of this because I so badly need people to understand that the way out of this is to embrace fascism’s scapegoats—to save our lives through your actual solidarity—and, in so doing, you will end up saving your own lives.

It’s not just Republicans who could stop this. Everyday people have a chance to interrupt fascism wherever they encounter it in their lives, but that requires seeing fascism less as one political party and more of a broad sense of a group of power-hoarders who think they’re better than everyone else, and use scapegoats to rip apart the social fabric and collapse a democratic spirit.

Fascism doesn’t win because it’s so powerful. It wins because people don’t fight it. And it’s all around you. Embrace your scapegoated neighbors. The way out is through us.

If you’d like to check out the essay that inspired this post, and this Substack Live, read more here:

the heart of it all — by flightlessblrbs

The Trump regime has just removed temporary protected status (TPS) from our Haitian neighbors— and has plans to raid a community in Springfield, OH, to hunt down our neighbors for sport. We cannot let this happen. Our neighbors in Springfield, Ohio need our help.

In this Susbtack Live, I explain all the ways we can help our neighbors under siege. The calls to action are recapped in the blog below.

Use your stubborn ounces!

democracy is a verb! — by flightlessblrbs

CALL TO ACTION: Demand Republican Governor Mike DeWine step in to protect our Haitian neighbors, who have been living here under temporary protected status and who are now poised to be hunted down by a violent, masked, and lawless paramilitary. Join, too, in other solidarity efforts for our neighbors in Springfield, Ohio, who are standing up together as their home comes under siege. Your efforts may feel like a drop in the bucket, but together we become an ocean of resistance. Learn how to help below.

Neighbor, this call to action is personal. As a community college teacher, I have had the pleasure of teaching a number of students who are Haitian refugees, on my small campus in northeast Ohio. The thought of any of my students being hunted by body-snatchers is simply unacceptable. I rebuke it!

More than that, I am asking you to intervene, because there are things WE can do.

1. Contact Governor Mike DeWine!

Governor Mike DeWine is from Springfield. He knows this targeting of our Haitian neighbors is wrong, and he has institutional leverage to stop this. At the moment, he is choosing cowardice.

But that does not mean he cannot be pressured to change course!

I encourage everyone, whether or not you’re in Ohio, to contact the Governor’s office in one of the following ways:

* Call Governor Mike DeWine, during business hours, at 614-644-4357.

* Email Governor Mike DeWine! Free free to use my email [below] as a template or to help you brainstorm your own letter.

Make your objection to ethnic cleansing a matter of the historical record!

YWF’s Personal Letter to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R)

Dear Governor DeWine,

I demand you stand up for our Haitian neighbors who have been living in Springfield, Ohio under temporary protected status. You yourself are from Springfield; these are your people. Whether or not you live in the governor’s mansion, in Columbus, Ohio, these are still your neighbors.

You know JD Vance lied about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio. In fact, you spoke out about his lies, especially once JD Vance’s words resulted in death threats to the people of Springfield.

Though I did not vote for you, I appreciated you then for having the courage to speak up. I need you to speak up now.

JD Vance later admitted he was lying about the character of our Haitian neighbors, in order to score political points before the General Election. Such behavior that reflects poorly on all Americans, and especially on us Ohioans.

Governor, we are both adults with eyes and decades of life under our belts. We both know that this is not immigration enforcement. This is about vilifying neighbors for the color of their skin and their country of origin.

As someone with Lenape (Delaware) kin, I want you to know that the Lenape welcomed the “undocumented” people who first came to Turtle Island. You are all immigrants to the Lenape— and to the Chippewa, the Ottawa, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca, the Tuscarora, the Miami, the Caughnawaga, the Shawnee, and the Wyandot people.

To see an immigrant like JD Vance assert that he gets to decide who lives on this land, and who doesn’t, is not only a moral injury to us all but a masterclass in the grand delusion of white supremacy and the harm it has always brought to these lands.

JD Vance speaks the language of death, and I rebuke it.

The removal of our Haitian neighbors’ protected status allows a masked paramilitary force, with an ongoing track record of violence and murder, to hunt down a once-protected people in our country, place them in concentration camps, and (if they are ever released) send them to a country that our own national intelligence has confirmed is still too destabilized for their return. These actions comprise a profane breaking of our bond to a vulnerable group. It is also a breaking of good faith with all decent Ohioans, who object what is obviously an ethnic cleansing. This is a genocide in action, and you can stop it.

You have remarked that JD Vance’s bid to remove our Haitian neighbors’ TPS is a “mistake” while, at the same time, refusing to use the powers and influence of your office to intervene. This shows an impoverished level of moral courage. Adding insult to injury, you have attempted to trick Ohioans out of exercising our First Amendment right to protest the lawless, inhumane abduction of our neighbors. Such complicity to fascism is a violation of your oath of office; it is also a violation of our Constitution.

As an educator in Ohio, I see and object to your cowardice. I write to share a chorus of objections that have been expressed to me by my neighbors. You bring shame to Ohioans, and we demand you change course.

You have a singular opportunity to speak up for our Haitian neighbors. You also have a duty to speak up for the Springfield community, who are traumatized by this violence and betrayed by your lack of leadership in a time of crisis.

Your failure of leadership isn’t just observed at the state and federal levels. International journalists and political leaders are documenting your response to these human rights violation. This brutality is a breach of the social contract and an affront to humanity— not just in Ohio, but across the world.

The world is abundantly aware that what is taking place here is not immigration enforcement. This is white nationalist domestic terror. This is meant to scare communities from availing themselves of their Constitutional rights.

I also want you to remember that children in Springfield, Ohio are watching you. Children all over Ohio are watching you. Your children and grandchildren are also watching you.

Governor DeWine, you have a chance to live your values and protect our Haitian neighbors. We urge you to stand up for our Haitian neighbors. You will be celebrated for your courage. This is a catastrophically unpopular President; we can all see he is not cognitively well. We also recognize that unelected bigots are engaging in elder abuse to enact a white nationalist coup in the United States.

No one voted for Nazism. No one voted for a state religion. No one voted for our neighbors to be hunted down by unaccountable paramilitary forces, while simultaneously being lied to on national television by agents of these atrocities. No one voted to hand over their constitutional rights to a man who believes he is king, nor did we agree to hand our civil liberties to his unelected puppeteers who are looting the treasury for their personal gain. We see the government corruption. We see the rot.

Is this the future you want for your great-great grandchildren? How do you want them to remember you, when they see your name in Ohio’s state history books? Surely, it is not like this.

While your political career may be in its twilight, your legacy will live on forever. You will be remembered not for the long tenure of your career but for how you have behaved when history came knocking at your door. It is knocking!

This is the moment that will define how history remembers you. We are waiting. We are watching. We encourage you to use your power for good

You have a choice to be remembered as a true Ohioan and patriot or to be reviled as a man who sold out his country because he couldn’t stand up to bullies, even as an entire nation was at his back.

snap out of the fog + use your stubborn ounces

I know many of you are likely distracted and doom-scrolling in a chronic freeze state. I understand the siren call of wanting to memory-hole the scenes of human cruelty which are unbearable to witness. But we must witness it all the same. And we must intervene, in any way we can. We are not helpless!

In addition to contacting Governor Mike DeWine, your Congressperson, and your Senators, take one more step to advocate for our Haitian neighbors and the community of Springfield, Ohio:

* Spread the word for our neighbors in Springfield, Ohio, who are under siege. Share this message across as many social media forums as possible. While it’s best to use your own words, because they’re more persuasive, you can also just share my words.

* Take part in a community mutual aid network in Springfield, Ohio.

* Help churches in Springfield, where neighbors are organizing as sanctuaries. You can train to volunteer with them.

* Show up and record these lawless abductions of our neighbors, who are being sent to concentration camps. It is well within our First Amendment rights to record and loudly object to these abductions. Don’t let these cowards try to scare you out of using your constitutional rights; that’s exactly what they need to pull this off.

* Be creative in your civil disobedience. There are many effective paths to help our neighbors, who are systematically being rendered stateless by a lawless government and hunted for sport by white Christian nationalists and pick-me-minorities, who think their proximity to the bullies will protect them.

fascism feeds on your need for “normalcy”— which keeps you in a fog, in denial, chronically online + dangerously uninvolved in the battle for our country

This is NOT normal immigration enforcement. They are sending our neighbors to concentration camps. This is ethnic cleansing and domestic terrorism.

Don’t just take it from me: listen to what Timothy Snyder has to say about this targeting of our Haitian neighbors— and how much it mirrors of pogroms of the Holocaust.

We can and must intervene!

“Stubborn Ounces” — by Bonaro W. Overstreet

(To One Who Doubts the Worth ofDoing Anything If You Can’t Do Everything)

You say the Little efforts that I makewill do no good: they never will prevailto tip the hovering scalewhere Justice hangs in balance.

I don’t think I ever thought they would.But I am prejudiced beyond debatein favor of my right to choose which sideshall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Do not allow yourself to get trapped in an endless loop, where lawless goons act with impunity, then engage in a petty, selective wielding of law/policy to punish the very people in civil society holding the line for democracy.

It is time to recognize that, when law is being weaponized and our neighbors are being stolen, it is time to move outside and around those systems to engage in strategic civil disobedience. This podcast includes a veritable laundry list of things people can do to safeguard their democracy, their neighbors, and their civil liberties— without waiting for institutional permission to do so.

People who want to act with impunity will tell you that only people with institutional power have the agency to shape the future. That’s a damn lie. Everyday people have an immense amount of power and agency to hold people to account.

I need you to shift from saying “accountability is coming” and recognize that WE are the accountability that is coming.

democracy is verb! — by flightlessblrbs

It is past time to revisit the Declaration of Independence, and to remind ourselves that this document is not trapped in amber but is a living document, reminding us that we don’t have to take this s**t:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among People , deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This document right here reminds us that we have a right to throw off despotism and create a government that works for all of us— not just the Epstein class, their white Christian nationalist goon squad, and a shameful stream of businesses and institutions that have abandoned both their integrity and discernment.

The leadership we’re looking for comes from regular people like you and me.

Don’t Despair: Organize!

There are so many more of us than there are of them. When we turn our collective efforts from symbolic mass protests into coordinated, interconnected local power structures, there’s nothing that can stop us.

We win this by creating a whole-of-society resistance that is hyper-local, organized and grounded in meeting community needs, protecting neighbors from harm, reclaiming our dignity, and securing our collective liberation.

Here’s a loose map of how to move alongside your neighbors with purpose.

Read the linked blog [below] about developing parallel systems of support. Watch the embedded video that explains the process in more detail. Most importantly, take these ideas into your community and make them better. It is time for 41,704 bespoke communities of resistance.

Alice Walker reminds us that “the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” This podcast is meant to remind you of your power and point you in the direction to use it.

It’s up to us to hold the line. Get off the sidelines. Get off your screens. Get into your communities and move in a purposeful formation.

Thank you Laura A. Drury, P. J. Schuster, DarBid 🇨🇦, M Hope, Lizzy B, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Thank you Laura A. Drury, LeftieProf, Jack, CI Carlson, Sharon Rousseau, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Thank you Andy Collen, Carmen, Noble Blend, Laura A. Drury, P. J. Schuster, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Thank you Mnera, Sharon Rousseau, Andrea Maria Romandini, M Hope, Lizzy B, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This is a first-person account of how an anstroturfed campaign of anti-trans hatred affects actual transgender human beings. This is my story. I'm not sure the impact it'll have on you, but I hope you'll listen.

I’m a community college teacher; many of you already know that. I talk about it a lot, because I love my profession.

What I don’t talk a lot about is the particular grief I carry into this moment. I don’t talk about my embodied knowledge of how quickly, how efficiently, a crowd can become docile, suggestible, and even active converts in the project of scapegoating.

This is the part where I tell you that I’m also the only out nonbinary trans professor on an eight-campus system in the Midwest. Indeed, I was the first out transgender professor to earn tenure at my university.

I’ve won national awards for my research and community service, but I’m proudest of my twelve commendations for teaching (all student-nominated). I tell you this not to roll around in my accolades but to mention the reality many marginalized faculty confront: that we have to do four times as much, only to be taken half-seriously— half of the time.

But let’s get into what matters more to me. I’m known, both in my field and in my community, as a person who centers connection and practices solidarity. I’m also fierce advocate for transgender, BIPOC, disabled, femme, and neurodivergent students.

Since I was hired, I did the job I was asked to do, and it took some doing as an “institutional only.” I had no mentors, but I did get a lot of sideways looks and invasive questions. I took it on the chin, every day at work, knowing that I was most likely the only trans person most folks had ever met. When it came to me, personally, I bit my tongue.

Hurt me all you want, but not my students.

As you can imagine, in this particular role, especially in this political climate, I had cause to stand up for my students, and for other marginalized faculty and staff, owing to the DEI work I was explicitly asked to perform.

But when I took that part of my job seriously, I suddenly shifted from “trans token” into a “trans problem” in the eyes of my “betters.” My career imploded, catastrophically so, the moment I began to advocate for trans students’ right to an education free of harassment.

Though my union acknowledged that transphobia appeared to be at play in my situation and that our collective bargaining agreement had a non-discrimination clause that included trans people, they claimed they couldn’t stick their necks out for me because I was “the only trans faculty member” in the bargaining unit.

At the time, I was serving as my campus union rep. Not too long after, I resigned. Solidarity, as it turns out, isn’t forever— or for everyone. I still pay dues though.

Anyhow, I ended up standing alone, even though I was scared and knew I’d get clobbered— because I knew my students would be left standing alone if I didn’t.

Eventually, a friend of a friend in the rainbow community found someone who could represent me “on contingency,” which was helpful, because I make a bit less than a high school teacher.

The case built slowly: discovery, motions, other legal stuff.

In the meantime, the wheels fell off. I was living my own personal “soapbox derby,” where life unravels downhill. Somewhere along the way, my wife and I got divorced. My mother died, and my familiy’s collective pain bubbled up along with it.

Life is, indeed, relentless. Particularly mid-life.

What were once looming legal depositions became a deluge.

I was deposed thirteen hours in total. Much of it feels like a blur now.

But what I will never forget is my College of Arts and Sciences Dean referring to me, in her deposition, as a rodent she was trying to clobber. The turn of phrase may have been common enough, but it chilled me to the core. She was so clinical, so obviously unaware of the dehumanization, when she uttered it.

I sat through what was, in practice, a rhetorical annihiliation. I don’t know why I was surprised when my character was maligned, through outright confabulation and other skullduggery, but I was. Some innocent part of me really hoped when they looked at all the discovery they’d say: “Oh, we see this mistake. We can fix this.”

Alas.

Instead, my eyebrows climbed into my hairline, as I was called a mentally unstable “bully” of white women— with anti-Christian overtones. It was kafkaesque.

In a moment that felt like an episode of Candid Camera, I was told, by my university’s lawyer, that “cis” was a slur. When I explained, calmly, that cis is a Latin phrase for “on the same side,” he looked right through me as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

The gaslighting threw me for months afterward. Friends reminded me, on patient loop, that a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. I resolved to put my boots on.

Given how the legal system typically treats transgender people, I tried to manage my expectations of the outcome. I told myself that even if I didn’t win, I’d at least get it all on public record.

I tried to be brave, even as I was also falling apart.

The case went on. Painfully so.

There was some moment when my university’s lawyer appears to have realized that his case, if it relied on the evidence, was pretty indefensible, behind its wall of DARVO.

I tried to be hopeful that they’d acknowledge the harm and move to make it right.

Alas, once more.

Instead, my employer’s lawyer requested another deposition. I refused. The judge had given him his allotted eight hours to depose me, and I had given my answers. It wasn’t as if my lawyer and I were allowed to ask for more witnesses— that was limited by the judge from the start. So, when I said no, the lawyer went back to the judge, who granted them even more time to depose me.

I was, in the end, coerced into a third deposition.

At this point, it felt like more like an inquisition than a deposition.

I walked into the meeting room, on the second floor of the school library, where I’d once studied dutifully as a Masters student. Inside, I saw my College Dean, a School Head (also named in the lawsuit), the university’s general counsel, and their defense lawyer, sitting on one side of a large wooden conference table— each with tabulated binders in front of them.

Our side of the conference table was empty. They offered me no such binder, no mutual exchange of exhibits. The asymmetry was palpable.

As it turns out, those binders held five years of my personal counseling notes.

Submitting them is a demand made of all plaintiffs who claim damages. I tried to hold my center. My lawyer had assured me that, so long as I hadn’t gleefully announced I was fleecing my employer, there would be no reason to worry. I reminded myself of that: There’s nothing in there to see.

When their lawyer began asking me questions about my personal life, I objected, as it wasn’t relevant to the case. He threatened to call the judge if I didn’t comply.

I relented.

He then began to read my counseling notes at me, page by page— my employers’ avatars turned, page by page, right alongside him.

In lockstep, a silent jury.

When he asked me about my mother’s death— with pupils so dilated his brown eyes turned black—I left the room in tears. My mother had only recently died, and because of my complicated family situation, I was unable to attend the funeral. It was complicated grief, and this was such an obvious violation.

My lawyer eventually found me in a corner office, face blotchy, with wads of toilet paper in my hand. He ran to get me tissues, then asked what he could do.

I requested that my workplace harassers would, at the very least, leave the room and give me some privacy. I asked him to remind these individuals that they’d get a read-out of my answers, either way.

Both refused to honor my privacy.

These colleagues were the very same people who expressed a fear that I would “erase women,” an offshoot of a common transphobic narrative that trans people invade cisgender women’s spaces. My colleagues did not object, however, to putting me, as a trans person, under a microscope.

I asked my lawyer what my options were.

He said I could go in there and answer their questions, or we could drop the case. Per the Republican judge’s orders, apparently, my university’s lawyer could ask me anything he wanted— even if it wasn’t germane to the case.

“They’re just trying to wind you up,” my lawyer said.

I reentered the conference room, feeling an upward, churning energy of revulsion.

Their lawyer continued to read my counseling notes at me, while the women who refused to honor my privacy thumbed through the pages of my once-private life.

At one point, he even had the inhumanity to make me admit, under oath, that my father sexually abused me when I was a child. Not only did this have nothing to do with my case, but this happened to be the first time I had ever acknowledged this fact outside the container of a counseling session.

This didn’t feel like a personal invasion. It felt like psychological rape.

They kept turning the pages.

There was an odd moment when their lawyer pried me to talk about writer’s block I’d been working through on a book project. The project focused on 2SLGBTQIA+ teachers and their allies navigating the intersection of homophobia, transphobia, and Evangelical antipathy toward queer and trans life. When he implied that I may harbor anti-Christian bias, I countered that my research examined how framing 2SLGBTQIA+ people as a “controversial topic” opened the door to our dehumanization.

I sat there for four hours, watching privilege center itself and losing contact with the sensation in my body.

At the end, my university’s lawyer submitted five years of my personal counseling notes as “evidence” in the federal case. Just for kicks.

The cruelty was the point.

And every bit of it was enacted with your tax dollars.

Not long after the deposition, the weight of what happened in that room began to unfold. After forty-odd years of radio silence, a small child inside of me whispered that I’d die because “I told on” my father.

Every survivor of childhood sexual assault, it seems, has a version of this dormant fear.

For weeks after that, I couldn’t leave the house. I’d get vertigo when I’d try to walk the block at night. The terror clung to me, just as it had when I was a little kid.

I even put a swing-lock on my bedroom door, hoping to quell the fears of the child I’d once been, who genuinely believed that telling that truth would mean the annihilation of everyone they loved.

Life went on in stops and starts.

I eventually sold my house, with a garden I adored, because I was terrified of running into my colleagues at the grocery store. I was also scared I’d run into a member of my immediate family, because I had said the thing aloud that I was never allowed to say.

I moved five hours away, living with my then new boyfriend (now husband).

I doubt it ever occurred to my colleagues how much harm would cascade from their desire to dodge accountability. Sometimes, I’d imagine having the guts to communicate the impact of their cruel choices.

But I didn’t have the guts.

I didn’t want to jeopardize my case.

I was also afraid that my truth, once more, would get me branded a “toxic bully.”

So I kept my mouth shut.

I built flower beds for my boyfriend’s concrete patio. I took up running and yoga. I tried to work on a different book project but wondered if, in the end, any of it mattered. I kept on reading and taking notes anyway.

Life went on. The herbs in the garden box bolted.

The federal judge assigned to the case, who insinuated from the outset that my lawsuit was not “serious,” dismissed it, claiming I hadn’t sufficiently proved any harm.

He didn’t even deem my First Amendment claim worth acknowledging.

Once more, it’s like I’d never spoken at all.

It seems the real boogeyman of “transgender for everybody” is just a convenient vehicle for using invented grievance to disappear the voices of everyone but white cisgender men.

My life, my gender, my lived experience, my access to civil rights rendered into a silent scream. I guess we’re all transgender now.

We appealed the dismissal.

Then, in the wintry weeks before Trump got in office a second time, both the DOJ and DOE reached out to my lawyer and committed to file amicus briefs on behalf of my case. I felt a glimmer of hope that they’d been monitoring it and found the serious enough for intervention.

Those offices are now eviscerated, and my legal support evaporated right along with them.

I was suddenly trans, in the dockets, and at the precarious intersection of AI, fascism, and white Christian nationalist antipathy toward trans people.

It seems worth highlighting that, on page 5 of Project 2025, trans educators are singled out as criminals who should be jailed as “sex offenders.”

To say my world has become a one of chronic tailspin is an understatement.

My colleagues actively stalk me online.

I have deleted every single social media account with my name on it, cutting ties with dear friends to avoid further stalking.

Mysteriously, around the time when everything became public record, a Koch brother’s funded news-rag just so happened to smear me in exactly the same way my university’s lawyers had— chapter and verse.

Though I am no Mx. Marple, this appears to be an attempt to both discredit my character and distract from damning public records.

The worst part is that it’s impeding my ability to find a job. That hit piece has attached to my name like a heat-seeking missile, and I suspect that was the point.

I’m constantly monitored at work; my university’s lawyer drove that point home during the thirteen hours under which I was deposed, put on trial for having the audacity to speak up.

I can’t tell you what it feels like, at a cellular level, to have your economic survival hinge upon someone abusing you with impunity.

When my university found out recently (through a Google alert) that white Christian nationalists had run me out of my home, as a consequence of my being in the federal dockets, they began making moves to fire me— in spite of my tenure, union, and ADA protections.

There was no institutional concern communicated as to my safety. No one called to check in, after reading the news story. Instead, they held a private meeting and worried over the phone about how the news story would make them look.

The story wasn’t even about them.

It was about fascism, about an ordinary trans person getting run out of their home.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t a person to them, at all.

At the time of this writing, my husband and I have been living out of suitcases since April. We miss our community. My husband misses his job. I grieve for my books, my plants, and my dog’s ashes, still sitting on the altar I made for him in my office.

I still occasionally cry over the black stray cat, Friend Cat, who regularly visited us for food. I hope he’s ok.

I think some part of me is writing this story, because I worry I might be disappeared before getting to tell it. But above all, I’m writing this to tell you:

I miss feeling like a human being.

There is a human cost to trans antipathy that rarely gets articulated from a first-person narrative. Mainly, we get obituaries, where we are misgendered.

I want to live, even as the walls are closing in.

Trans people are still here. Trans students are still here.

And, even if it costs me, I refuse to stop speaking up, because this moment is too important to remain silent about what matters.