Tag Archive | Fascism

The Evolution of “Biological Women” (Part Three: 2008 – 2026)

Sep21

THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL WORK!

I’ve made a copy here to be easy to reference. The work in question goes to American Samizdat, on Facebook. All credit and copyrights belong to that author. I’m making a copy here so I can always find it.

The Evolution of “Biological Women” (Part Three: 2008 – 2026)

There are three factors to comprehend about the state of affairs with respect to scientific, political, and public understandings of transgender Americans.

Trigger warning: many of you are NOT going to be happy with this article. I hope you read on, anyway.

ONE: There’s clear scientific/scholarly consensus that what defines a “woman” or “man” is not solely biological, that human sex/gender exists on a spectrum. Overwhelmingly, researchers see cultural conditioning about gender expectations as a critical part of the mix. Even biological influences are more complex than any insistence on genetics and genitalia as the sole determining factors.

This consensus, however has been effectively neutralized:

TWO: What it means to be “transsexual” (1949 – c.1990s) or “transgender” (post — 1990s) is disputed because those terms are both recent and seemingly malleable. In a sociopolitical milieu where certainty is rare, the simplicity of “biological women/men” has an edge over the nuanced complexity of “transgender” even in feminist, LGBTQIA+, and transgender communities.

THREE: The “biological woman/man” momentum has been sustained by masterful rhetorical strategy, changes in the social media milieu, and billions invested that no organization, political party, or wealthy contributors have yet matched.

Let’s be mercilessly clear: I agree 100% with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security “that the United States is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally.” [March 2026] (1)

I’m not writing from despair but stark realism, and the need to mobilize a better financed and organized strategic response. The stakes are too high to surrender.

Let’s document the scientific/scholarly consensus quickly:

From “Emerging Themes in Epidemiology,” an article by Hélène Colineaux, Lola Neufcourt, Cyrille Delpierre, Michelle Kelly‑Irving, and Benoit Lepage, “Explaining biological differences between men and women by gendered mechanisms,” (2023):

“Biological differences between men and women seem to not be purely explained by biological mechanisms.” (2)

From L. Camille Herbert, “Defining ‘Woman’: Biological Sex and Gender,” Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law (2023):

“Social conservatives do not have science on their side, because current understandings of biology do not support a strict male and female binary.” (3)

From “The Lancet” article by Katrina Karkazis, “The misuses of ‘biological sex,’” (2019):

“Research since (1950s) has expanded the range of variables that produce sex. As one example, the Y chromosome was once said to trigger testes development in fetuses. Later research showed a gene called SRY, located on the Y chromosome, “pushed” primordial germ cells in the embryo to become testes. We now know there are active genes involved in both ovary and testis determination across the genome, and not restricted to the X and Y chromosomes.

“As biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has observed, ‘[T]hose looking to biology for an easy-to-administer definition of sex and gender can derive little comfort from the most important of these [research] findings.’”

Yet that doesn’t matter, because academic journals aren’t where public debate occurs.

Why? Consider the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” “transsexual,” and “transgender.”

The term “lesbian” (referring to sapphic women from the isle Lesbos) is two millennia old, and “gay” dates back at least 400 years in the English-speaking world.

“Transsexual” was invented in 1949 to replace the 19th Century term “sexual invert,” and “transgender” did not replace it until the 1990s in a peacemaking attempt inside what we today call the LGBTQIA+ community.

As Jillian Todd Weiss wrote (2004) for the “Journal of Bisexuality” in “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community”:

“The term was used as an umbrella term referring to transvestites, crossdressers, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people, who seemed to have similar and interlocking interests with gay men and lesbian women. …

“‘Transgender’ was intended by its coiner to refer only to certain non-operative transsexuals, but later mutated to refer to anyone whose gender performance varied from the norm.

“This more open meaning … conflicted with the goals of the coalition builders, which was to capture public sympathy by appealing to an image of homosexuals as people ‘just like’ the majority of U.S. voters, … who wanted the same lives that the majority of U.S. voters wanted. As a result, some gays find themselves agreeing with straights who see in transgenders an assault on normative reality. …” (5)

In 2011, Talia Mae Bettcher (trans woman social scientist) tackled this fissure with “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman,” in “The American Philosophical Association on Philosophy and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues”:

“There … is a familiar view of transsexuality that speaks of women trapped male bodies and men trapped inside female bodies. On this view — let’s call it the ‘Wrong Body Model’ — transsexuality is a misalignment between gender identity and sexed body. At its most extreme, the idea is that one’s real sex, given by internal identity, is innate.

“It is on the basis of this identity that one affirms that one … has a claim to the surgical procedures that bring one’s body into alignment with one’s identity. …

”Another view, explicitly political, … says that trans people challenge the traditional binary between man and woman. Because, on this view, trans people do not fit neatly into the two categories ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ mainstream society attempts to force trans people into this system in order to make it appear that there is a sharp dichotomy between men and women. …” (6)

Bettcher rejected both approaches, working toward a resolution preserving the best of both. Her thought-provoking article didn’t resolve this dichotomy, however, so I leave it to you to read it if you want details.

Her article IS critical for the understanding that by 2011 — as fourth-wave feminism was spawning TERFs (Trans-excluding Radical Feminists) — the LGBTQIA+ community had already fractured in its own understanding of the term.

That’s the point Weiss had made in 2004:

“Some transgenders pass as heterosexuals and reject homosexual identity by calling their sexual relations heterosexual. The reaction of the gay and lesbian community, predictably, has been an attempt to limit the inclusion of transgenders … a result of the previously identified tensions between accomodationism and gender ambiguity, and between homosexual identity and ‘passing.’” (5)

Fourth wave feminism emerged between the 1990s — 2010; its advocates leaving trans individuals out in the cold, as Hyun Jae-Lee documented in “A Critical Study of Identity Politics Based on the Category ‘Biological Woman’ in the Digital Era: How Young Korean Women Became Transgender Exclusive Radical Feminists” (2020) in “The Journal of Asian Sociology”:

“At the end of the 20th century, feminists of the third wave had clearly recognized that the substance of identities like human, woman, and subject is a kind of fantasy. They have suggested that no essence exists behind gender identity and that the gender that we know is the stylization of the body created through performative repetition. …

”[But] around 2011, when social networking services began to connect with large-scale mobile environments, the so-called fourth wave of feminism appeared … fueled by online environments. … The fourth wave emphasizes the identity of the female body in the sexual dichotomy and, worrisomely, there is a tendency toward the exclusion of transgender people. …” (7)

Hello, JK Rowling.

Sociologist Judith Butler (via “Mother Jones’” 2026 “How the Right Uses “Gender Ideology” to Blame Trans People for Everything”) noted that “gender ideology” — which the right converted around 2015 into “transgender ideology” — traced back to …

“… the 1990s, when conservative Catholics began warning that the very concept of ‘gender’ had subverted God’s will and “inspired ideologies” that were imperiling the nuclear family. In a 2004 letter to bishops, the Vatican decried homosexuality, railed against feminists for making women ‘adversaries’ of men, and reaffirmed binary masculinity and femininity as the purest expression of God’s love.

“Any subversion of traditional gender roles wasn’t merely sinful. It wrought a culture, the Vatican said, that corrupted society at large.” (😎

Evangelical Christians and Christian Nationalists started riding this trend around 2011.

Meanwhile, TERFS appropriated the originally neutral term “transgenderism” for equally hostile reasons, as Jill Serrano noted in her 2023 “Medium” article “History of the Word ‘Transgenderism’ and why ‘eradicating transgenderism’ = eradicating transgender people”:

“TERFs … purposefully misappropriated it in a way that confuses the state of being transgender with a potentially dangerous political ideology” invoking “oppressive ideologies (e.g., sexism, racism, fascism, and others) that also just so happen to end with the suffix ‘-ism.’” (9)

Thus it became easier in rhetorical discourse to sell that sharp sexual dividing line of genes and genitalia.

Around 2022, X, Meta, and TikTok changed moderation practices, permitting more of what had been “hate speech.” Monica Armas-Neira in her 2026 article “Weaponizing Transphobia on Social Media” for “The Journal of Psychiatry Residents” calculated that on major platforms …

“… homophobic, racist, and transphobic posts [were] surging by 50% in volume and 70% engagement.” (10)

Maria Bonafonte Recio, Rubén García-Sánchez, Kátia Bones Rocha, and Konstantinos Argyriou examined responses generated by people without strong opinions on trans issues in “From Identification to Justification: How People Interpret Everyday Episodes of Sexism, Homophobia, and Transphobia” (Springer, 2026), finding that …

“… recognition of discrimination was shaped not only by judgments of disrespect but also by whether the victim’s social identity was deemed relevant. …

“Some participants framed the episodes as manifestations of structural inequality and objectification, whereas others denied or minimized them by invoking the absence of hostile intent, individualizing the behavior, or appealing to essentialist views [“biological woman/man”] of gender and sexuality.” (11)

As Schuyler Mitchell put it at “Mother Jones”:

“The right’s gripe isn’t just that trans people exist, but that their existence is tearing down the old world—of good men, obedient women, traditional family structures—and unleashing a new, godless age of chaos and precarity on you. …

“This is why Trump’s executive order promises specifically to ‘protect’ women. And why the right echoes the rhetoric of … TERFs, who have been some of the loudest voices calling for the eradication of ‘gender ideology.’” (😎

Funded by billionaire donors, Mr Trump understands that simplistic anti-trans messages win votes, as noted in Agence France Presse (AFP) in “Republicans find transgender issues a powerful political weapon in midterm campaigning”:

“Only a tiny fraction of Americans are transgender. But controversy over the minority’s rights, especially the presence of a handful of transgender athletes in women’s sports, has proved political dynamite in Trump’s hands before — and, he says, will again.

“Denouncing transgender athletes is ‘one of our great soundbites of all time,’ he recently told a rally. ‘I like to wait about a week before the election’ before raising it, he said, claiming that he was ‘petrified’ that Democrats would suddenly drop their support for transgender people.” (12)

Many Democrats agree with him, as Steve Peebles and Geoff Mulvhill opined for AP in “Some Democrats are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues as they seek a path to power”:

“Soul searching over transgender issues is one facet of a sprawling identity crisis that Democrats are confronting. … There is … a sense in some corners that the party must evolve on an issue where the overwhelming majority of voters — even many Democrats — agree with Trump.” (13)

Why do “the overwhelming majority of voters” agree with Trump on transgender issues?

Because the simplistic “Biological women/man” approach and its less savory accompaniments about mental illness, “homos,” delusions, presence, and threat … worked.

It worked because confusing terminology and definitions, combined with uneven support among LGBTQIA+, feminist, and Christian communities (as well as the Democratic Party) was driven by social media changes and heavy GOP donor investment …

… against which the trans community’s disjointed, underfunded response has been (bluntly) almost totally ineffective …

… putting all trans individuals at risk ..

When they say “eradicating transgenderism” they don’t so much mean the idea of transgender as they mean … erasing and eradicating transgender Americans.

I know you don’t want to believe that.

Neither did the Jews, transgender Germans, the Romany, or the mentally challenged in the 1930s.

A win in the 2026 midterms is only a delay. This edifice has been built so carefully, and the rationalizations for “good people” to be passive bystanders have advanced so far that without a better funded, more coordinated strategy … the trans community is in deeper trouble than most individuals within it understand.

I’ll talk strategy next time … if you are still listening to me.

========

SOURCES

(1) “Red Flag Alert – Anti-Trans Genocide in the USA – #3,” https://www.lemkininstitute.com/…/red-flag-alert—anti…

(2) “Explaining biological differences between men and women by gendered mechanisms,” https://link.springer.com/…/10.1186/s12982-023-00121-6.pdf

(3) “Defining ‘Woman’: Biological Sex and Gender,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4555608

(4) “The misuses of ‘biological sex,’” https://www.thelancet.com/…/PIIS0140-6736…/fulltext…

(5) “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community,” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J159v03n03_02 (If you go through Google Scholar by searching article name you can bypass the gated version for a pdf copy.)

(6) “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman,” https://philarchive.org/archive/BETQWA

(7) “A Critical Study of Identity Politics Based on the Category ‘Biological Woman’ in the Digital Era …,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/26979894?seq=3 (You will need to register for a free JSTOR account to get past the gate for this.)

(😎 “How the Right Uses “Gender Ideology” to Blame Trans People for Everything,” https://www.motherjones.com/…/gender-ideology-mother…/ (DO NOT seek out Butler’s groundbreaking 2024 book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” at Aunt Anna’s. It’ll set you back $10-12 at Amazon.

(9) “History of the Word ‘Transgenderism’ …” https://juliaserano.medium.com/the-history-of-the-word… (Be sure to follow the links back to her earlier work.)

(10) “Weaponizing Transphobia on Social Media,” https://psychiatryonline.org/…/appi.ajp-rj.2026.210307

(11) “From Identification to Justification: How People Interpret Everyday Episodes of Sexism, Homophobia, and Transphobia,” https://link.springer.com/…/10.1007/s12119-026-10608-4.pdf

(12) “Republicans find transgender issues a powerful political weapon …,” https://www.afp.com/…/republicans-find-transgender…

(13) “Some Democrats are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues …” https://www.nbc4i.com/…/ap-some-democrats-are…/

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.

America Was Never Great

Nov13

I’m copying this post from Facebook, so I have it available. The original post is by historian Jermaine Fowler. This is his work, reproduced here simply for easy reference. (Facebook is not a reliable reference.)

November 01, 2025 (Saturday)

On June 5, 1934, about a year and a half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany met to plan what became the Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece of Nazi racial legislation. A stenographer recorded every word—ink on paper, archived where most Americans will never look.

The transcript reveals something we’d rather not remember: the meeting opened with a detailed memorandum on the race laws of the United States.

For hours, these Nazi lawyers debated American legal precedents. They discussed whether to bring Jim Crow segregation to Germany. They analyzed anti-miscegenation statutes from thirty American states. They examined how the U.S. classified and constrained the citizenship and political status of colonized peoples (including Native Americans and Filipinos) across different eras.

They were particularly impressed by the “one-drop rule”—some states defined anyone with even one Black ancestor, however distant, as Black.

And here’s the part that should haunt us: as Yale law professor James Q. Whitman documents in Hitler’s American Model, some Nazi jurists considered parts of U.S. racial law too extreme to implement in 1934.

Let that settle in. The architects of the Holocaust looked at Jim Crow and thought, “That might be going too far.”

This meeting reveals what Black intellectuals had been warning about for years: Jim Crow was more than a failure of American democracy. It was American fascism, fully operational. Impressive enough that the Nazis used it as their blueprint.

We prefer to think of fascism as something foreign, something that happened over there. But as Whitman documented, America in the early 20th century was “the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” and Nazi lawyers knew it.

Here’s the problem: fascism has an American accent, but we’ve trained ourselves not to hear it. We know the Berlin book burnings but not the Tulsa massacre (1921), where a prosperous Black neighborhood was bombed from the air and burned to ash. We remember Kristallnacht but forget Rosewood (1923), where an entire Black town was erased.

We teach the Nuremberg trials but not Buck v. Bell (1927), where the Supreme Court legalized forced sterilization with the words “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” We built concentration camps for Japanese Americans (1942–1945) while fighting fascism abroad.

The U.S. ran medical experiments on Black men in Tuskegee (1932–1972) for forty years. We turned convict leasing into slavery by another name, we drew redlining maps (1930s onward) that still determine who builds wealth and who doesn’t, and we did all of it with legal precision and bureaucratic efficiency.

That’s not a catalog of failures. That’s fascism with American characteristics. And our refusal to name it has let it survive, adapt, and return.

While most Americans remained blind to the fascist system in their own country, Black intellectuals saw it clearly. They lived inside it.

W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the 1930s and ‘40s, explicitly connected Jim Crow to European fascism. He argued that American racial oppression had anticipated Nazi Germany. When McCarthyism emerged, Du Bois warned that anti-communist repression was “American fascism” that “would use the negroes much as Hitler used the Jews.” Hyperbole? Not at all. He was being precise.

Claudia Jones, a Black Communist organizer, spent the 1940s and ‘50s warning that Jim Crow, union-busting, and political repression constituted a fascist system. When she was put on trial in 1948, she told the court she was fighting “the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country.” For this, she was imprisoned, then deported.

Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940 and explicitly compared the psychology that created Bigger Thomas to the psychology that produced Nazi Germany. He was sounding an alarm. It went unheard.

Fringe voices? No. They were intellectuals with intimate knowledge of American fascism, describing exactly what they saw. We refused to call it by its name.

Jim Crow was a complete political system.

One-party rule? The Democratic Party controlled the South absolutely, just as fascist parties controlled their states.

Political violence? Thousands of lynchings, with state protection for perpetrators and zero convictions.

Racial hierarchy as explicit state policy? Enshrined in law from the Black Codes of 1865 through Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to the dismantling that finally began with Brown v. Board (1954) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

Economic exclusion? Sharecropping, wage theft, segregation that destroyed wealth accumulation.

Extrajudicial killing? Spectacle lynchings where towns gathered, took photographs, sold postcards.

This was a fascist system, running in America for a century. We just called it something else.

The Voting Rights Act didn’t end the system. It regulated it. And for sixty years, we’ve been systematically removing those regulations.

The Supreme Court gutted preclearance requirements in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). Voter ID laws proliferate. Polling places close in Black neighborhoods. Voter rolls are purged using the same logic as literacy tests—technical requirements that seem neutral but function to exclude.

Then 2025 arrived. The components rebooted in public.

Remember the components of the Jim Crow fascist system? They’re roaring back, operating in plain sight.

One-party rule? Republican-controlled state legislatures have gerrymandered themselves into permanent power. In several states, precision-drawn maps have produced durable majorities from minority vote shares, letting parties pre-decide outcomes before ballots are cast.

Manipulation of citizenship? Orders and drafts targeting birthright citizenship revive a legal architecture the Nazis studied—and it echoes here, the same state-by-state strategy that made Jim Crow untouchable for a century. Create the legal theory in friendly courts. Spread it through executive action. Let states enforce it locally.

Political violence with state protection? January 6th defendants are being pardoned and celebrated. Reporting shows federal voting-rights enforcement has receded—staff exodus, case withdrawals, and shifting priorities. Armed “observers” and intimidation resurface in Black and Latino precincts. No convictions. No consequences. The state protects the perpetrators—just like it did during Jim Crow.

Economic exclusion? DEI programs were ended by executive order, with knock-on effects in grants and contracting; parts of the contractor regime and equity rules are in flux or under court review. Wealth routes are narrowed by policy choices that systematically reduce opportunity and capital access.

Extrajudicial control? Police violence continues with qualified immunity intact. Mass deportation plans target mixed-status families, separating citizens from non-citizens using the same logic that once separated “Negro” from “white.” The cruelty is the system working as designed.

The question echoes across a century: Can states create second-class citizens? Under Trump 2.0, the answer is becoming clear. Not through mob violence this time but through executive orders, through captured courts, through laws that sound neutral but target with precision.

This is old Jim Crow putting its boots back on.

Stop asking if fascism is coming to America.

American fascism never left. We defeated its European students in 1945 but never dismantled the system they’d studied. We renamed it. We regulated it. We pretended the regulations were transformation.

The lawyers who met in 1934 would recognize what’s happening now. They’d see the same legal architecture, the same manipulation of citizenship, the same use of federalism to protect local oppression. They’d just be surprised we kept it running this long.

W.E.B. Du Bois saw it. Claudia Jones saw it. Richard Wright saw it. They told us exactly what it was. We ignored them because the truth was too uncomfortable.

This is the return of American Democracy to its original form, the one impressive enough that fascists crossed an ocean to study it.

Picture the ledger books from 1934, still filed in Berlin archives. Picture the voter rolls being purged in Georgia right now. Picture the same elegant legal language, a century apart, doing the same ugly work.

How much longer will we pretend it ever left?

A “Come To Jesus” Moment

Mar28

That’s actually an amusing title because I’m going to discuss why I’m agnostic/atheist and the inherent problems I see in religion in general.

And I’m bringing this up because I see Jews getting upset that Israel (and by extension, Judaism) getting criticized because of the apartheid state that Israel runs coupled with the ongoing Palestinian genocide that Israel is perpetrating. And no, don’t argue with me whether it’s genocide or not. It fits the UN definition and multiple international human rights organizations have all labeled it genocide. So I’m not arguing about this and if you come here to argue about it, your comment will just get deleted. I’m not playing games with genocide defenders (because YOU, the genocide defenders, are why Trump is in the White House right now).

Anyway, let’s get back to religion. Over and over again throughout history, you find a recurring pattern – every religion that has a deity or deities, and where those deities separate human beings based on whether they worship said deity(ies) or not, you have a religion that ultimately others non-worshipers and then commits atrocities, and often genocides, in the name of said deity(ies). Full stop. Historically, this is an irrefutable fact.

You cannot get around this flaw. Religion is completely just opinion because faith is just opinion about whether something invisible is real or not. You cannot scientifically test it. You cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or feel it. It’s just opinion and, to make matters as much worse as possible, it’s an opinion that, in the historical record kills non-believers.

Every religion that others non-believers has committed atrocities! Every religion that others non-believers is, therefore, a prime enabler of genocidal behavior.

No, I don’t care that your religion is “nice”. Look at the numbers. When you consider the “kind” versions of Christianity versus the Catholics and evangelicals, the Catholics and evangelicals are about 95% of the total. Again, don’t try to argue here. Catholicism and evangelicalism have been prime movers and supporters of colonization, imperialism, and destruction of non-western cultures. History is utterly clear on that too.

So why do we even bother trying to focus on the 5% who are usually “nice” versus the 95% who are hateful, murderous, imperialistic assholes?

I mean, statistically, if I were an alien visiting earth and I looked at religion, I’d conclude it drives humans to act in utterly irrational and violent ways. Sure, there are a tiny few who are special because of their religion, but there are kind atheists and agnostics too, and they didn’t need “faith” to get that way. Meanwhile, religion continues to drive genocides, “culture wars” that actually kill people the so-called “religious” don’t like, and these religions also seek to impose their opinions (their faith) on everyone else whether you like it or not.

So I am left with this question of why do humans even consider bothering with religion? Are y’all that afraid of death that you’ll murder others to guarantee yourselves seats in some fictional afterlife that absolutely does not exist?

Religion, all religion that tries to separate people into believers and non-believers, is toxic as hell. It’s violent always and it always devolves into mass murder eventually. Every single time. That is an inescapable conclusion of history.

Further, as we see in western nation after western nation, religion demands special treatment and to be exempt from the rule of law of the secular state. Christianity does this. Islam does this. And so does Judaism. Hell, the conservative Jews in Israel are now openly calling for a “civil war” to stop the leftist Jews, to kill other Jews because they see those Jews as a threat to their continued genocide of Palestinians.

I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t believe in a deity. I’m not going to tell you to stop being a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. But I am going to ask you to honestly try to justify to yourself if the very few decent Christians/Muslims/Jews that you know are worth the cost to humanity of all of the violent and hateful Christians/Muslims/Jews that you see daily on our news channels.

Because if you are going to cling to an opinion (a belief, without any factual backing) that some people are “lesser” just because they don’t believe the way you do, then no matter what else you say, you are not a safe person. Because, in the end, the safety of anyone is conditional on your belief in your particular sky daddy (or daddies, or mommy, etc.) and that’s neither safety nor trustworthy.

I No Longer Trust You

Nov29

This is an expansion of something I did as a series of posts on BlueSky.

Occasionally, I think about the poet, Renee Vivien, and what LGBTQ people went through to live as themselves in the past. Second photo is a copy of one of her poems called Prolong The Night. Its words shout to me of the pain that existing in patriarchal cishet society must have carried.

Make no mistake but conservatives are coming for all LGBTQ people. You won’t save yourselves by throwing trans people under the bus first. Now that he’s elected, Project 2025 is loudly proclaimed by his entire administration as their guiding document. If they win, the idea of freedom dies.

I used to believe that Americans were better than this, that they’d try to rise above this hate, these lies, this violent murderous intent that oozes from every corner of the GOP. But I no longer believe that. Even those few that voted against Trump still harbor that ugly hatred of LGBTQ people.

But I’m reminded of the voyage of the MS Saint Louis, a passenger vessel that, in 1939, with more than 900 Jews aboard, was turned back by the United States to Europe. Those people were taken in by other countries than Germany but it didn’t matter because Germany overran France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and more, and many of those 900 still ended up in concentration camps and died. America turned its back on those refugees and then incarcerated its own Japanese-American citizens. I wondered if America had changed since the 1940’s and I now have my answer. You have not and I have no faith in any of you anymore.

I hadn’t planned on being laid off in Dec 2023 but I was, and forced into retirement because, as the saying goes, the same people that want us to work until age 70 are the same ones who won’t hire us after age 50. And while I still run rings around younger software engineers, I’ve been forced out.

So I’m working towards a different career, with a different goal – enough financial stability to let me leave this rotting corpse of a nation and settle myself elsewhere. To those of you choosing to stay and fight, may Inanna bless you, protect you, and save you from what’s to come. I no longer think America is capable of avoiding an era of darkness that could put both Stalin and Hitler to shame. And I expect trans people to be just the first of many sacrifices on the altar of fascist scapegoating.

But as for me, I am tired. Years and years of this only to watch Kamala Harris and the entire Democratic Party turn their backs on us during the final weeks of the election have proven to me that, just like in the 1930’s, Americans will turn us in to the fascists as soon as they demand it. Americans have always been fundamentally moral cowards and they still are.

If you’re cisgender, I now automatically no longer trust you. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries, Seth Moulton, Colin Allred, Sherrod Brown, and so many more have proven to me that you’re never to be trusted. That you’ll turn on marginalized people if it’s your path to power. Do I trust a few cisgender people? Yes, I do, but they’ve been there for me. I’ve seen what they’ll do versus your own silence when all you needed were words to fight back. You don’t have the guts to fight back tooth and nail, when the violence really begins because you couldn’t even muster words when that was all that was needed.

So don’t come into my comments proclaiming that you’re different, that you can be trusted, that you’ll protect us. Because I know, with certainty, that as soon as the fascists point their guns at you, you will turn on us again. LIberals are joking that half of America turned out to be people they wouldn’t trust with the location of Anne Frank. Well, sad to say, Anne Frank wouldn’t be safe with you liberals either, and you just proved it.

All that Democrats had to do was fight back in September and October of 2024, yet you didn’t. You kept trying to change the subject. You kept trying to gloss over the existence of trans people. You wouldn’t stand up for 0.6% of the population. Hey, to the rest of you LGB people? They won’t stand up for you either. You’re a Jew? You’re just 2.4% of the population and they won’t stand up for you either. In fact, Trump might just deport you all to Israel, to help hasten this “end times Armageddon” madness on the right.

But in the end, I now know you’ll turn tail and run, hide, or do anything except protect those targeted by the far right. Don’t object because your actions, or rather, your lack of actions when it could have mattered, have already convicted you.