Archive | January 2026

Wrong Life

Jan28

This was written by a friend. I have attempted to strip any identifying information from the original piece to protect the author. It expresses how it feels to be transgender in America in 2026. Right now, in 2026, transgender people are the target of government genocide. Each step becomes more explicit. Each action becomes more violent towards the trans community. This is how The Holocaust happened. You are living through such a moment right now. What you do, other than just posting on social media, will determine what happens to trans adults and children in the near future. If you let them murder us without a fight, you are complicit.

Wrong Life

Every once a while I encounter a quote that brings me up short and helps re-frame how I see the world. Such is the case when I came across this quote by Theodore Adorno as I researched the rise of Nazi Germany, and the origins of the Holocaust:

“A wrong life cannot be lived rightly”

Out of context I interpreted it to mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (e.g. Jewish, Sinti, disabled) nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good ones.” No matter their character, achievements, capability, “wrong life” can only have a negative value to society. The only way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum to zero on both sides.

This thought stopped me in my tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it explained everything I was both feeling, and seeing over the past year. It was the grand unification theorem of my inner world, and what I was seeing that was external to me.

I am wrong life. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter. Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication. Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the content of our character, and not government fiat that people like me are incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that ultimately decided I must be destroyed.

But none of it matters. My government, and the people that voted for it, have declared me wrong life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the President explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life was a feature and not a bug. The GOP spent hundreds of millions of dollars spreading the narrative that anyone who doesn’t want wrong life eliminated is against the herrenvolk.

At the same time, this sentence helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust than other civil rights atrocities in American history. For most other marginalized groups in American history it was still possible to be one of “the good ones”. For black people, there was room for acceptance of those who “knew their place”. Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy. Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater of Operations. Hispanics were long used for their agricultural labor or valued as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other Americans, but it wasn’t a negative number.

Mine is.

And that’s the fundamental difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today, and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as non-citizens of the Reich than previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place” as second class citizens.

This quote snapped into place why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of German history than the US. It’s also the most useful framework for understanding why Republicans are targeting transgender people with literally over a 1000 bills per year designed to make life impossible enough that they either leave the country, detransition, or live in a country where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.

They see us as wrong life. And even those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is the dark side of politics: it looks like the quick and easy path to power to take this position in public. Any Republican that does not behave as if transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party, and away from the levers of power.

I have expressed some of these frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of “well, I don’t think of you that way.” While appreciative of such support, they simply don’t matter because the people who express these thoughts have no institutional power. My own sense of self worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is meaningless if my transgender son and I are spending our last moments holding our breath and trying to claw our way through concrete with our fingernails while taking a “shower” with 100 strangers. All it provides is a further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared us to be “wrong life.”

Only the government’s opinion matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in their eyes, and the eyes of the people keeping the government in power. That government has made it clear it intends to remain in power in perpetuity at any cost. I will always be wrong life if I remain in the United States. The only way to change the equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can have some value greater than zero.

I want my life to have a positive value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a relief it will be when I do not have to spend every waking moment aware of being wrong-life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, here you find my soul laid bare in Hell.

The Truth About Sapphic Divorce Rates

Jan7

This information was originally posted as a thread by bambi_girl_wlw (Sumaya Si) on Threads. I have consolidated this thread here for easy reference for anyone that wants to use the data. Everything between the separators here is her work.

Lesbian divorce rates are not unusually high. Reality is lesbians have the lowest rates of cheating and some of the highest relationship satisfaction. This thread debunks a widely misunderstood statistic—using real data.

The “70%” figure comes from ONS data from England and Wales, but it is often misunderstood. The data do not say that 70% of lesbian marriages end in divorce. What the ONS data actually state is that among all same-sex divorces, about 70% involved lesbian couples and 30% involved gay male couples. Importantly, the absolute number of divorces is low for both groups.

If we look further into the ONS data, the percentage of same-sex divorces involving lesbian couples was:

  • 2017: 74% female couples, 26% male couples
  • 2019: 72% female couples, 28% male couples
  • 2021: 67.2% female couples, 32.8% male couples

From this, we can conclude that the gap has been narrowing each year.

You might still think this is high compared to gay male couples. However, lesbians are more likely to get married than gay men. In England & Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the female share of same-sex marriages was:

  • 2014: 56.1%
  • 2016: 55.7%
  • 2018: 57.2%
  • 2020: 57.2%
  • 2022: 62.8%

This shows that the marriage rate among lesbian couples is increasing. If we look closely at 2021–2022, the share of marriages and divorces was almost the same. 

According to the 2021 Census and recent surveys (which measure individuals, not couples):
About 2.8% of men identify as gay
About 1.2% of women identify as lesbian
This means there are fewer lesbians overall, yet they make up a larger share of same-sex marriages, suggesting that a higher percentage of lesbians are getting married. 

Yes, in most countries, lesbians do have higher divorce rates than gay men. However, there are exceptions. For example, in Taiwan, gay men actually have a slightly higher divorce rate. From Taiwan MOI / GEC data, when used consistently:
65–70% of same-sex marriages are female couples
~30–35% are male couples
~60–63% of same-sex divorces are female couples
~37–40% are male couples
When these numbers are normalized, gay male couples show a slightly higher divorce rate per marriage. 

Reasons why lesbians may initiate more divorces compared to gay men 

  1. Lesbians are more likely to get married A summary of LGB adults from the Williams Institute showed that: About 51% of women who identify as lesbian were married or cohabiting Only about 35% of gay men reported being in a partnered relationship In most countries, there are more gay men overall, yet lesbians make up a larger share of marriages. I reviewed multiple datasets across different countries, and most showed the same pattern. This suggests that many lesbian women getting married earlier.
  2. Multiple studies suggest that gay men are more likely to be in open relationships than lesbians: In an analysis by Blumstein & Schwartz (cited in Peplau & Beals), 82% of gay male couples reported being non-monogamous, compared to 28% of lesbian couples According to Wikipedia’s summary of available data, about 33% of gay men reported being in open relationships, versus only about 5% of lesbians This suggests that gay men may be less likely to divorce due to adultery or cheating.
  3. Parenting and child-related stress According to U.S. Census data (2019): 22.5% of female same-sex couple households had at least one child under 18 6.6% of male same-sex couple households had at least one child under 18 Overall, lesbians are more likely to have children than gay men, which may mean that parenting-related conflicts are less common in gay male couples. Additionally, lesbian women are more likely to experience pregnancy- and postpartum-related stress, which affect marriages.
  4. Lesbians are the group least likely to cheat on their partner. According to the study “Extradyadic Sex and its Predictors in Homo- and Heterosexuals” by J. Haversath & Kröger (2014):
    4% of lesbian women
    34% of gay men
    29% of heterosexual women
    49% of heterosexual men reported extradyadic sexual contacts (aka cheating).
    This explains that lesbians are individuals who leave the relationship instead of committing adultery.
  5. Lesbians are the happiest and most satisfied among all couples. This suggests that lesbians tend to leave bad relationships earlier. Studies show that lesbian’s tend to be the happiest and most satisfied among all types of couples. For example, a longitudinal study tracking lesbian, gay male, and heterosexual couples over time found that lesbian couples consistently reported the highest overall relationship quality on average across all assessments
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18855506/

In another Swedish follow-up study of couples after assisted reproduction, researchers found that lesbian couples reported greater relationship satisfaction and maintained stable, happy feelings—even when facing the stress of treatment.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12905-014-0154-1

When comparing lesbians specifically to heterosexual women, research also reveals significantly higher levels of satisfaction for lesbian couples.

Again, this information was compiled by bambi_girl_wlw (Sumaya Si) on Threads, and all credit should be extended to her.