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 pedophile 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, naturalized citizens, 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 were used a Trojan horse to get at cisgender women’s rights— and children’s rights. Much of this attack on their rights could have been preventable had they not been so amenable to transphobic scapegoating. 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 us into a convenient villain 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 always have. It’s just that our deaths, our disappearances, 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 discomforts 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 hope people can spend some time stting 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.

And if you want to check out the larger essay that inspired this Substack Live, you can read more here:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit muppetgender.substack.com