I recently responded to a white cishet man who presented himself as a Democrat that trans people must forgive Representative Robert Vindman for voting against the safety of trans kids. Below is my response to him. I’ve linked the article that generated this response after said man said this was a “purity test” that would hurt Democrats generally.

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Virginia congressman’s meeting with transgender Democrats erupts into profanity. Then he walked out.

Nobody gets to declare themselves an ally then betray that community. He betrayed that community, period, full stop.

Hopefully, he learned something in this exchange. Just because he is a loving parent doesn’t mean every parent is. He had actual trans people explaining this to him and he refused to listen.

I guarantee the entire LGBTQ community would have been up in arms if the bill had included outing gay kids because they’ve lived through this too.

LGBTQ kids are 5%-10% of the total under 18 population, based on different attempts to measure that number. Yet LGBTQ kids are over 40% of homeless children. Of the remaining 60% of homeless kids, the overwhelming majority left home voluntarily. Of that 40% who are LGBTQ, 99% left home because they were thrown out.

Vindman is refusing to listen to the lived experiences of trans people who came to talk to him. This is no different than a white man refusing to listen to the lived experiences of Black people and trying to justify a racist vote. It’s the exact same thing.

I want to ask you a question. Do you know what the Lemkin Institute is?

It is a private non-profit organization set up after WWII to try to identify and stop genocides before they become full blown mass killings. They have identified every single genocide in progress since WWII before it became mass murder. They also have never successfully stopped a genocide before it became mass murder because Western governments refused to act.

The Lemkin Institute has issued three separate warnings that the Trump administration is on track to commit genocide of transgender people. Such a warning has never been issued against the United States before. Yet now we have 3 warnings from the Lemkin Institute.

If they are as successful as they’ve been in the past, assholes like you will be erecting monuments to dead trans people saying “Who could have seen it coming?” and “I wonder what we could have done to stop it?” once this is all over.

Yet some huge number of trans people are going to end up dead if this continues down this road. And now we have Democrats piling on to the genocidal actions of the Trump administration.

Genocides start by identifying the target, dehumanizing the target, making them an enemy that the majority no longer cares about, separating them from the “good” majority (often for their own “safety”), and then eventually, mass killing them as a final solution.

The Trump administration is actively engaged in those first three actions listen above and Republicans across the nation are calling for trans people to be segregated from public life. Some are already calling for them to be “rounded up”. What do you think comes after “rounding up” trans people?

The only expectation I have from any Democrat is that they are not bendable on human rights. Because any Democrat willing to throw one group under the bus has proved himself willing to throw other groups under the bus.

Vindman is a privileged white man who refused to listen to trans voters or Black voters who tried to talk to him then tried to justify his actions against human rights as “being a parent”.

Fuck Vindman. If that’s the sort of Democrat he is, trans voters don’t need him as a representative, because, to us, he’s no different from a Republican.

And don’t bring up other rights and freedoms of other groups because if we’re being put in camps, what good are those “freedoms” to us?