My Dead Planet, Part I

 I'm afraid.

Pendulum

    Two months after The Worst Night of My Life, in the middle of group therapy, I called my old job to tell them I was all better now and would like to come back to work. Neither of those things were true. I don't remember why I said them. One month later, I clocked out at the end of a shift, bought a Canada Dry from the liquor store in the shopping center and walked home in the rain. I got into bed and pulled the covers over my head and decided I would not go into work tomorrow, and then two years passed and I still haven't. I will occasionally get an email from a rich person who will ask me to stay in their house and watch their dog. I will eat their food and watch Bee & Puppycat on their Netflix account and make about 40 US Dollars. I'll make $100 at the end of the month if I keep my parents' kitchen relatively clean. I will spend this money on shit I don't need. I feel that I am reasonably happy. I feel that I am buried beneath the earth, and that it is raining. In two years I will be 26 years old and have to pay for my own health insurance to afford therapy and medication.

    A few days ago my friend strongly encouraged me to apply to work alongside him at a small dog kennel in town. They're hurting for people, the pace is slow and the interaction with people is minimal. They only want me to work weekends. I'd take home $200 per month. I've sent him my resumé. He knows my situation. His boss doesn't. Someone in charge is going to ask me about the missing two years. And I'm not going to tell them.

    About a week after I began writing this post, I went in and interviewed and got the job. 

    Four months after I began working, I was informed that the kennel would be shutting down. I had done it. I had completed a job without quitting or being fired. I hadn't even called out once. I liked that job. It was slow and it paid okay. Every so often a person walked in, and I fumbled my way through that. Then it was gone and I was sad about it then, but I'm not now. 

    One month ago I got caught for a bad thing I had been doing for two years, and the consequences are that I have to go to college now. I'm learning about career lattices. I was one day late on the assignment I turned in today. That's always how it starts. Every night I go to sleep praying that there is no such thing as a pattern and that my grip is not slipping.

    Anyone who has watched me for the last six months will tell you that I've been trying as hard as I can. I've always quietly taken exception to that. There must be an amount that I can try that will not result in failure and ruin. In two months and one year I will be 26 years old and have to pay for my own health insurance to afford therapy and medication. 

    Here is the point, and yeah I promise there is a point to this: I was in college and living at home in 2019. Then I ran away for four years. Now I'm back and I'm starting college again. It's as if none of it happened, except in two months and one year I will be 26 years old.

   

    

 

 

Just My Luck

    A word on gender: demographically, I’m about as lucky as an American can be. Privilege is not a free ride up the ladder, but it is a running start, and no one is actively attempting to knock me off. The hitch is that I might be trans. I don’t know. It’s on the table. The current label I’m rocking with is “genderfluid”. I present male in every official capacity but there are internal consequences to that that I have not yet unwound. There is a very real calculation that my trans friends have had to make: If I transition, it will improve my quality of life minute-to-minute and undo the silent curse that has dogged me since childhood. It will also make navigating the world as a political being one-thousand times more difficult. Just recently I saw a tweet by a game developer comparing her experience in the industry before and after coming out. It is harder to get a job, people trust you less, your voice holds less weight. You are more likely to experience violence, sexual violence and workplace harassment. The amount of money you make decreases. This is as much an indication of misogyny as it is transphobia, and of course, this is all intersectional. It stacks. It is, for example, easier to be white and trans than it is to be black and trans. I also recognize that to be in my position, to decide whether or not I present in a way that opens me up to misogyny, is a form of privilege. But ducking that incurs a blood price. I pay it silently, psychically, every hour of every day, with every eye cast upon my skin and every “young man” and “sir” sent my way. Like in any economy, the price ebbs and flows. Sometimes it’s nothing. Sometimes it will ruin my day. That’s where the “-fluid” comes from, in my case. The value calculation is still ongoing. Maybe I can take it. But maybe, as James Baldwin says, “I duck it, and I die.”

Happy Birthday, Leelah Alcorn

      

    

Leelah Alcorn died by suicide on December 28, 2014. She was 17 years old. She was trans.

Her tumblr blog has been archived by people who may or may not have known her. She expressed the feeling in her suicide note that no one really knew her, that she was alone, and that that loneliness had been enforced by her parents, who placed her in conversion therapy when after she came out as trans at age 14, who pulled her out of school and cut her off from her friends, online and offline, when she was 16.

Freshman year, then sophomore year, then junior year. The walls around you growing higher every day, the gulf between your body and your soul widening until the thing that is you is mostly empty space and a darkness that blots out the sun.

Who knew her? Not her parents, she says, and it's hard to argue with her. They couldn't even get her name right. Not her friends either, when her parents let her speak to them again after five months of solitude.

Not me. I didn't know anything about her until the news of her death radiated out from tumblr, to LGBTQ+ news outlets, to the Boston Globe and beyond to American history.

Still, she's lived in my brain for what will soon be nine years. Today I found her blog, archived by someone, because the internet doesn't forget, and I had a look. Her suicide note sits at the top. Below that, her posts unfold in reverse-chronological order. Many of them are just images, things she saw on her feed and decided they belonged in the digital scrapbook that was her blog. She loved Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena, Harajuku fashion, digital art and historical photography. She uplifted advocacy for women, for gay and trans people, for immigrants and minorities. She celebrated expressions of gender nonconformity, not just her own, but everyone's, across the spectrum and in every direction. She had no patience for bigotry, for exclusionism or infighting in the community. Her blog was a wonderful place to be.

And then I scroll up, and it feels like a clock ticking down to zero.

Leelah Alcorn's story is not unique. Quite the opposite, it's an archetype, both now and then. I think Leelah knew that.

"My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year," she wrote. "I want someone to look at that number and say 'that’s fucked up' and fix it. Fix society. Please."

This past Day of Visibility, I did what I do every year and looked at the twitter thread memorializing every trans person who died in the 365 days prior. Each person had a picture, an age and hometown or country, a short blurb about how they died. Suicide, suicide, murder, suicide, murder, murder, murder, murder, suicide, murder, suicide, suicide, exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure. Found dead in a roadside ditch, found dead in a roadside ditch.

Leelah's death brought with it an outcry against conversion therapy, a wish she specifically expressed in her final note to the world. There were results: Cincinnati, the third largest city in her home state, made conversion therapy illegal with City Ordinance 373 on December 9, 2015. As of today, it's illegal statewide in 25 states, either totally or for minors. Texas has not enacted a ban, not even in Travis County.

Unbelievably, the still-widespread legality of conversion therapy for minors is not the most pressing issue facing trans people this Pride month. Their right to exist at all in public is being threatened by fascists at every level of government, in bathrooms, in schools, at pharmacies, in clubs they own and frequent. Two of my closest friends, people without whom I would be long dead, are preparing to leave Texas specifically because despite the fact that they are 21 and 23, there is a very real risk that their hormone treatment will become illegal or inaccessible for people under 25. Similar bills were proposed in Oklahoma and Texas as recently as this spring.

The website translegislation.com is tracking 64 anti-trans bills in Texas as of this writing. All target children by hamstringing the legal ability of parents and institutions to listen to and care for a child who says that they are trans. Under these bills, if they are passed, public colleges can be forbidden from forming diversity, equity or inclusion offices. Trans people can be denied participation in sports. Pharmacies can refuse to fill HRT prescriptions on religious grounds. Children's mental and behavioral health facilities can be refused grant money if they "provide mental health services, including treatments or procedures, to a child that affirm the child's perception of the child's sex if that perception is inconsistent with the child's biological sex." (HB 1898)

Let me be unmistakably crystal clear on two things. First: the fact that these measures target children means that the fascists who wrote them trust their constituents to go after the adults. It's easier that way. Cops, PTAs, subscribers to InfoWars, angry men with guns tucked into their pants hearing the muffled bass of a drag club across the street at night, these people are not bound by the same rules the politicians are. They don't have to sign anything to kill or terrorize trans people. They might face consequences for it (they just as easily might not), but the result is the same: Trans people are either dead, or too scared to be trans in their line of sight. That is what this comes down to. When people say "children shouldn't have to see this," what they mean is "I shouldn't have to see this." Gender, to them, is sacred and immutable, because it is a source of power. Samuel R. Delaney once wrote that misogyny is the oldest bigotry, the one on which all others are based. Bigotry is a tool of power. For it to function, there must be a clear delineation between in and out, empowered and disempowered, man and woman. What fascists call "Gender Ideology" threatens that, and so threatens the basis of their hegemony. You hear it in the language they use. It's not just "Gender Ideology," it's "dangerous Gender Ideology." So they want it, and the people who in their eyes represent it, to shut up and go away.

The second thing:

Earlier, I said that Leelah Alcorn's story was an archetype. For Republican lawmakers, it is more than that.

It is a model. It's a success story. Trans kids grow up into trans adults, unless they do not. If you create an environment where the child is denied their identity at every turn, you limit their options to either giving up, accepting the identity you have forced upon them, or killing themselves, which achieves the same result: you, victorious, them, silent.

I would normally end a post like this with a call to action but I'm too exhausted and angry for the research required to do that right now. One will probably come later. All I can think about is Leelah, and why I chose her to haunt me nine years ago. She's like a fishhook in my brain, Leelah the symbol, yes, but also the woman, living with a few friends in an apartment in Cleveland, or maybe further away, sparsely decorated with what she can afford, a Sailor Moon wallscroll hanging above her bed. Today is her birthday. She would be 26 now. Should be.

TLC

Ground Rules

   

1.      Love is as real and powerful a force in the universe as gravity. It is, among other things, the primary determining factor in the outcome of baseball games.
2.      I will indent every paragraph and put one space after every full stop. I understand that two spaces are preferred for readability, but if I try to fight back thirteen years of muscle memory I will never type another word.
3.      I will post at least twice per year, once on Leelah Alcorn's birthday (November 15th) and once on Ice Cube's (June 15th).
4.      I will operate on the expectation that no one will ever read this blog. 
5.      I will not allow any comments I receive convince me that someone has read this blog.
6.      I will insist (and I do) that any person reading this blog install an adblocker (uBlock Origin) on their browser of choice (Firefox). Firefox is a condom for the internet and ad blockers are condoms for your brain. If you have a "favorite commercial" you are not welcome here, and I'm only kind of joking.
7.     Aw damn it I already broke rule 4
8.      I will honor the sanctity of parentheticals.
   
9.      I will do my best to source every claim I make and quote I use. 
10.      I don't know if a blog can receive copyright claims and I'm not gonna look it up. I won't like post the full text of a book or anything but I'll be embedding videos and images and music if I can and I don't particularly give a spit.
11.      I will provide content warnings when applicable.
12.      I will be as unrelentingly earnest as I can possibly manage. It will take a few posts for me to be comfortable shedding my protective coat of irony.
13.      I will only blog sober.
14.      I will not lie except to protect my identity.
15.      I will not use the C-word when talking about my work (the C-word is "content")(I can say "content" here because it's in a parenthetical).
16.      I will allow myself a 2-month grace period, after which I will not tell anyone in real life about my blog.
17.      I will never stop treating blogging as something novel and interesting, which may hinder my ability to comply with rule 16.
18.      I will indulge in novelty and gimmickry at every opportunity.
19.      I will abide no fascism.
20.      I will abide no hatred except that of cops.
    
21.      I will abide no shit-talking toward my friend, Bruce Springsteen.

                That's about it

TLC