Transgender Dystopia Blues

In a few weeks, I am set to do my first performance in a year, a Halloween show with a group of people I love in a place with a bunch of other people that I love. The place is a queer bar. I don't work for them, but I work with them very frequently. I am friends with everyone there. My performance is a spoken word horror story about a trans person who loses it and kills and eats a transphobe. It's fiction, something over the top meant to give catharsis to all the other people in the room, much like how we used to have plentiful books and movies and shows and songs about killing Nazis, updated for my particular audience. Nazis used to be like zombies. A narrative could have a protagonist mowing them down without remorse, and this would be heroic. We knew they were pests, and you can't live or let live with termites. Before you know it, they're eaten everything around you.

In a few weeks, a man proclaimed that he would be coming back to this queer bar. He said this after getting kicked out and banned for making threats to trans women to their faces, and this bar is one of the few spaces that prioritizes trans lives over cis bullshit. This venue is well aware that you have to shut Nazis down immediately, lest your bar become a Nazi bar, and that's why I rarely go anywhere else when I go out. But this man said he would be coming back in "three or so weeks" with a bunch of buddies, and they plan to shoot the place up. Someone figured out this guy's name, and there are two things that stand out about him. 1: He is a sex offender, second degree, involving someone under 13. 2: He comes from a town that is well known as the KKK capital of Michigan.

Trans people always live under a general threat of violence. We have an entire holiday dedicated to mourning our dead every year. Every gathering has a chance of being disrupted by an attack. Every day, trans people are offered a choice of being free or being safe. Both is never an option. Many people receive neither. Whenever we choose to be free, to take a chance on any kind of joy, some small part of us has an awareness that we could die for this. It's the general background music of our lives. My friends who work at this venue have a little voice in their head every time they go into work: is the the night I die here? But they go in anyways, because what else can you do?

This is different. This is a specific threat. A specific man has delivered a specific threat. How seriously do we take it? Is he just "blowing off steam," just a boy bein' a boy? Or is this a man who got drunk and let his very real plan slip? By talking about this, are we spreading awareness, or fear? How are we supposed to act? Are we about to become the next Pulse?

Security is beefed up and a police report is filed, but they can't arrest him for his words. It's funny who's allowed to issue threats without repercussion. If someone like me said his same words to someone in power, I would be jailed immediately. But this man is out there. He got to be both safe and free. All we could do was spread the word by mouth, but even that ironically puts a target on our backs. Are we willing to be even less safe, so our friends can be more? If we make him a pariah, are we goading someone who was just bluffing into making it real? Will we be blamed for our own demise?

I think of the performance I am set to do at this place, during that week. I think of the performance I worked hard to create, and now I don't know if I can do it anymore. I don't know if I should do it anymore. If the shooting happens, it won't be because of my performance, but that isn't my worry. If the shooting happens after I give my performance, will my words and actions be used to justify the attack? If I say a transphobe, a Nazi, a rapist, a fascist should be killed, will the right wing spin it as me making a threat? Will they spin it into a bunch of "innocent people who just adhere to traditional values" protecting themselves from my fightin' words? Will I be used as the reason that me and mine end up dead? And I know every other trans person in the show is thinking the same, because even though my act is particularly gruesome, the fact is that being trans in public is seen as a threat in and of itself.

A photo of me performing on the stage in question. Photography by Kendall D. Lartigue.

But if I censor myself, is that letting him win? What if that was his real plan, and I'm now his pawn? Am I overreacting? Does it matter, when underreacting means death? Should I alter it, or simply remove myself from the show? Or do I owe it to my punk rock heart and activist spirit to take the risk and do it in full, because I know that the fascists don't need a reason to blame us for our own murders regardless of what we do? Do I risk my life for this? Will this put others' lives at risk? For community, for art, for everything I've been fighting for? My loved ones are split right down the middle when I talk about it. Nobody knows what to do.

This is far from the first time I've dealt with censorship this year. My entire body of work is under threat, because my entire body of work is about queer and trans people, with a lot of it revolving around sexuality. Despite the fact that I do not, never have, and never will write books for children, and have been making work for adults this whole time, the right wing has decided that the entire internet should resemble a 4th grade classroom, and trans people are inherently pornographic. I worry that my entire body of work will be illegal by the end of the year, and I worry that my body itself will follow it.

I'm dealing with all of this while I sit in the shop I've owned for almost 4 years, which is closing next month due in part to a wave of anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric that's been going around. That me and my co-owners are Satanists performing human sacrifices. That we're rapists and drug addicts. That we use our spaces to hunt for victims. Every queer business in town is getting hit with these baseless allegations, with every accusation coming from a straight cisgender person who is upset that they weren't the main character in our play.

We have proof that the claims are false, but the lies spread faster and farther than the truth, and I am meeting people who just moved to town who have already heard the lies and made up their minds. Nobody seems able to put two and two together and think "Hm, saying that trans people are all rapists is a right wing tactic, and I have just heard that a trans person is a rapist. Maybe this is a right wing ruse." Even other queer people are buying the bullshit, or at the very least they worry that associating with us will make them a target as well. My regulars have disappeared. I wonder if some of them are dead.

This is all happening a few days after sitting my parents down to have the hard conversation with them that a lot of trans people are having with their parents (those of us who are fortunate enough to still have a relationship with our parents) about how I may suddenly disappear, and they might not see or hear from me for weeks or months or years or forever, because I might be in jail, or I might have to flee the country or I might be dead. I feel survivor's guilt for something that hasn't even happened yet. Why should I live and be safe when others like me don't get to be? We could get every trans person to safety today, only for more to be born tomorrow. We are not all going to make it through this.

My mother has been paying attention to the world and takes my words seriously. Her heart breaks for me. My father listens to my anxiety about how the best case scenario for me might be to abandon everything I own and everyone I love so I can live in poverty in another country if the alternative is being dead at home, and he briefly pulls himself away from watching his war movie to tell me "Good luck with that." This same father who has been warning me my whole life that fascism will return within my lifetime, and to stay vigilant, but now that it's here, his head is in the sand.

"He spends all his time listening to AM radio and watching Fox News," Mom explains. "He says it's important to listen to the other side."

"Does he ever listen to our side?" I ask, and Mom says no. "Well then it seems the 'other side' is just his side."

In some ways, it's a comfort for him to ignore me in my hour of need. "Good luck with that." In four words, he has told me very clearly that I cannot rely on him, trust him, turn to him for anything, and I can finally stop trying. I can focus my time and energy and love on people who actually care about the person I am, not the person I failed to be. I feel a sort of relief, like when a loved one passes after struggling with a long and painful illness. He's been going down this rabbit hole for ages, but because he still denounced my uncle who is an actual Nazi, I had hope that he wasn't entirely lost, but his apathy has gone terminal.

I look into immigration and find it may be impossible. From logistics to money to disability to the fact that I don't know if I can leave everything behind again, lose everything again. I lost everything I owned in a devastating house fire 15 years ago. It was more than anyone should have to endure, but I survived it. Eventually, I healed from it. I let myself relax again, and settled in this new place four years ago. I started hanging pictures on the walls, started buying little tchotchkes, because I felt like I could finally rest and stay put in one place. I had a home. I love my house. I survived losing one, but I don't know if I have it in me to lose everything one more time. But would staying turn my dream house into my grave?

Each of these problems could have been its own individual essay, but the thing is: all of this happened in less than a week. And this isn't even getting into the world outside my city, my city that is above-average on trans rights, trans dignity. None of us feel safe outside urban areas, and my heart breaks for those of us struggling in small towns. In the time between starting this essay and finishing it, several more anti-trans decrees have been made by our dictator, and I am in even more danger now than I was at the top of this thing. Even just one of these dilemmas is traumatic to deal with. Each one of these makes it hard to think about anything else. What do you mean I still have to go to work? What do you mean I still have to do my taxes? What do you mean I still need to do my laundry? When you ask how any trans person in the US is doing right now, and they say "I'm okay," it's a mask. All of us are scared. All of us are traumatized.

I'm good at writing and expressing myself, but even those who don't write essays about their struggles are thinking these kinds of thoughts, and most people we meet don't have time to sit down and truly listen to the broad strokes, let alone the finer details. And to be honest, even when we do try to get into it, it often feels pointless, like we're speaking in a totally different language, living in a completely different reality from cis people. So many of them want to believe that things aren't that bad so that they can justify doing nothing to help. It is that bad. You do need to help.

And I know that for so many people, my struggles will be seen as overreactions, and only extreme injury or death could convince them otherwise, but by then, it's too late. Don't wait until we're dead to care about us. The best time to show up for us was years ago, but the second best time is right now.

I have found, in the past 25 years since coming out, that most "allies" aren't really allies. They're spectators. Sure, they're rooting for our team, but they'll never join us on the field, so if we lose, it doesn't affect them one way or the other. It's sports, it's entertainment. It's a snuff film. It's mostly us fighting for ourselves, but we're a minority. That's why we're being oppressed in the first place. Why are the weakest of us always the ones on the front lines? Every day, I feel weaker, while every day I am asked to be stronger. When is it our turn to be soft?

I still don't know what I'm going to do about my performance. At the very least, I know I'm going to make a high quality recording of it in a studio and put it online, but I'm 90% sure I won't be doing it live on the night in question. I struggle with feeling like a coward and a hypocrite, hitting the limits of my activism. Once upon a time, I was ready to sacrifice my life for this. I made peace with my death years ago, but I have people who love me, who don't want me to die. I have people I love, whose lives I don't want to drag into the literal crossfire.

None of us know what's going to happen in three weeks, but I'll be damned if they say there was no warning, that this came out of nowhere, that there's nothing anyone could've done to stop it. We're doing all we can. We desperately need reinforcements.

God bless our transsexual hearts.

Ro Salarian is a nonbinary Michigan-based writer, illustrator, and performance artist. They are fictionalizing the current dystopia in their series Magical Women.