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.