Julia Serrano has encouraged people to participate in a mass action today (12/03/24), demanding that LGBTQ+ people are not going back. In support of this, I thought that I might post the public comments I submitted to the Texas Legislature for their recent hearing on court orders and designation of sex on government documents. This hearing was convened to examine the recent changes to Texas DPS and Vital Statistics policies barring transgender people from updating their gender marker or names on driver’s licenses and birth certificates. My comments were as follows (though the version I filed was abridged because of a word count limit):
My name is Dr. Emmie Malone, and I am a trans woman and a third generation Texan. I was born here in Houston in the same neighborhood where I currently live, in the hospital my mom worked at. I have family in Broaddus, Wichita Falls, San Augustine, and all over Henderson County. My roots in this state are deep. I grew up fishing for crappie on Sam Rayburn and floating the Comal (always making sure to stop by Naegelin’s Bakery in New Braunfels to pick up a strudel on the way out of town). I love country music and, for better or worse, I expect free chips and salsa when I eat at a Mexican restaurant. I've lived through more hurricanes than I can count. I will always be a Texan at heart.
I try to donate to those in need to the degree that I can afford it, but probably not enough. I try to volunteer locally every weekend, but sometimes it’s closer to once a month. I teach at a community college because I love my community and I want to give back. I love this state and I always will, but I have recently come to recognize that my relationship with the state has become fundamentally abusive. Over the past few years, I have come to feel like my state, my home, my community, and my government are trying to destroy me.
My mother passed away about a month ago after a seven year fight with colon cancer. I loved my mom. In a lot of ways, she was my world. While I am tempted to say something about death, it defies the limits of our language. To talk about death is to attempt to photograph the ocean. You can zoom all the way out and get the whole thing in view, but you wont get a sense of what its actually like. On the other hand, you can zoom all the way in and really see a piece of it, but you will never capture its scope and scale. While I can't describe her death in an any serious way, or the injustice of it, I can describe my grief. Sometimes it's so much that I think it’s going to swallow me alive. The process of her death was prolonged and it was an unthinkable horror. I tried, throughout this, to find small things to look forward to, to professional successes, to nights out, and to time that I got with my family. It probably seems silly, but throughout this grief, especially in the weeks before and after her passing, one thing came to take on a lot of symbolic weight in my life. I just wanted to hold that ID in my hands that had my new legal name and correct gender. To be clear, it was certainly never going to solve all of my problems, but it was something to be hopeful about.
I followed all the rules to get that moment. I provided all the documentation, got letters of medical support, filled out the forms, got fingerprinted, and paid the fees. I did everything right to get the court order and to get those updated documents.
I won't lie, it broke me when I found out that the state was going to simply ignore my lawful court order. I don't feel like I ask for that much from my state. I try to be a good person, a good Texan, but I don't know what the state wants from me, or why the government wants me to suffer or to flee. It's getting so hard to live here when the people in charge of this state, who I take to be my neighbors, whose children I try to educate and be there for, attempt so furiously to extinguish me or expel me from public life.
I know that you probably can't understand why I would be so invested in an ID. To you it's just a piece of paper. You may never have had to fight for social recognition. You’ve never had the medical appointments, the invasive questions, the looks of suspicion, the harassment, or the constant pressure, costs, and physical pain that goes with needing to maintain a certain performance of your gender in order to be seen. These things aren’t my gender, and many of them I love, but underlying everything is the threat of social exclusion or worse. To you an ID might just be a piece of paper, but to me it's my community seeing me. It’s my community seeing my experience and thinking that my life, my hopes, my point of view, and my mental health matters. I could tell you that a recent study in Nature Human Behavior showed than these anti-trans laws are associated with up to a 72% increase in trans suicide attempts, and that 32% of trans people with uncorrected gender identification report being physically assaulted, verbally berated, or discriminated against. I could tell you that I cried for days when I found out about these policy decisions, and that it took my grief over my mother out of a manageable place. I could tell you about the people in my community that I have seen saying that they had lost the will to live. I could tell you these things as if it would compel you in some way, but I understand that the suffering is the point.
There is no legitimate rationale for these changes to the gender marker policies and, accordingly, none has nor will be provided by the Attorney General. There is no ‘why’ beyond my suffering, beyond the suffering of my community. The effects of these policies will be more hurdles for trans people across the breadth of their lives, more discrimination and violence, more declines in mental health, and many more trans people leaving their families and lives behind in anguish and fleeing the state. Given that there has been no reasoning offered in defense of these policies, we can only be left to conclude that the consequences I am describing are the reasoning.
Things have been hard for me this year, but the state does not think I've suffered enough and I don't know how to convince it otherwise. To you, as a trans person, I am an invitation for politics. You see me as trans first and a person second. You don't see my mom or my grief, my work, my hopes, or my life in this state, but what this state does matters to a whole person. I write to you now so that you could see one whole person affected by this, because you don’t see the ways that policies like this fit into the life of a complete human, and what it can mean and how it can feel. You don’t see this because you have designed your professional lives and the institutions you inhabit to keep it out of sight. I don’t write this with the thought of convincing you to see things my way in mind. I write this now because I want to know that you saw the whole me and still wanted me to suffer. I cannot convince you to undo this policy. The extent of my agency is in asserting myself, my experience, and my reality. I know that I love this state. It will be helpful to know, in the same way, that it sees me and still does not love me.
Since this hearing, an election has happened in the United States, the results of which have been catastrophic. 41% of Republican ad dollars at the close of this election were spent on anti-trans ads, more than ads on immigration, housing, and the economy combined. This amounts to $134 per trans person in the United States. The ads which were seen as the most effective on voters concerned the treatment of trans women in prisons, arguing that trans women in men’s prisons have life too easy, getting free gender affirming surgery. Given that only two federal prisoners have received gender-affirming surgery, Republicans have spent 200-400 times the amount of money the U.S. government spent on gender-affirming surgery for prisoners running ads complaining about it. Republicans made this election a referendum on ‘the transgender issue’ (which strikes me as uncomfortably close to the 'Jewish question'), and the results are that a majority of voting Americans believe we have too many rights. In discussing the election, trans issues are the elephant in the room, so we might as well let the elephant speak.
Currently, Florida is a do-not-travel-to state, with it being a Class 3 Misdemeanor (Fraud) for a trans person to show or use an updated ID. Similarly, it is illegal for trans people to go to the bathroom in, at least, Arkansas, Florida, and Odessa, Texas (where it is punishable by a $10,000 fine). 669 anti-trans bills were introduced across America in 2024 and 32 were filed on the first day of filing for the Texas Legislature this session. Bans on drag have been used, in Tennessee, to police the public existence of trans people and a similar bill proposed in the Texas Legislature would award a $5,000 bounty for reporting anyone dressed in ways deemed gender non-conforming. Staying out of legal trouble while traveling across this country now seems to require, for a trans person, some kind of guide book to navigate the various restrictions placed on our everyday life. Indeed, when Iowa proposed a bill last year (HSB 649) mandating that trans people be issued IDs showing both sexes, officially identifying them as trans, the language of the bill even called upon the doctrine of 'separate but equal' in its rationale. To be clear, this is the situation which a majority of voting Americans think is too good for trans people. I will not go into detail here describing it, but those who are interested in the conditions of trans women in men’s prisons (which is apparently most of America) are encouraged to look up ‘v-coding’. America apparently believes that v-coding is trans women in prisons getting it too easy.
In the aftermath of this election, many Democrats, liberals, and progressives are asking what happened. Why did this happen? This question is a salve. The people asking this question are looking for something to pin their hope on. The problem, we are told, is merely one of messaging. ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ We need only phrase the reality of the political situation in the right terms and America will come to its senses. We are told constantly, since the election, not to give up hope. We are told that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. That may be true, but it is an arc propped up on the bodies of the vulnerable people who did not live to see justice in their own lives. If you want something to plan your political future around, let it be this: this is the devil’s world. The only rational conclusion one can draw from this election, at least for trans people, is that things will continue to get worse, at a rapid rate, for the foreseeable future. The fact of the matter is that this election has shown us that the coalition of Americans who either 1) support fascism with giddy enthusiasm, 2) are willing to tolerate a bit of light fascism if they (erroneously) think it will help them economically, or 3) don’t care enough about fascism to spend fifteen minutes voting to prevent it, is larger than the coalition of Americans who would resist it. I see no hope in this, and I find it patronizing that I am being asked to.
Yet, do we really need hope to have a politics of liberation? Do we need to think that we are working towards an achievable better future in order to act now? For most of human history, people did not live with the idea that the future would be substantially different than the present in any way, much less better. Plenty of people find themselves in circumstances where hope makes no sense. Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever, has no real reason to hope for an end to his punishment. Yet, Camus tells us that we must imagine him happy. There is certainly a political project grounded in Whig history, which requires that we find glimmers of hope to motivate us towards the promise of the future. However, the politics of hope are as fragile as fortune itself. The philosopher Boethius, imprisoned and sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit, had no reason to be hopeful about his situation or his prospects for justice in his lifetime. He ultimately was executed on these charges. However, it was not before writing The Consolation of Philosophy. Here, Lady Philosophy visits him in his cell and counsels him on his grief. One passage in particular stands out to me in the current political moment:
“If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion.”
To my eyes, writing in post-election 2024, Lady Philosophy has also diagnosed the problem with the politics of the left as we move into a second Trump presidency. Many of us are or are still attempting to operate on an Obama-era politics of hope and change. We need a politics free from hope, more resilient than that. Fighting fascism is worth doing, not because we might one day be rid of this social illness for good, but because fighting it is a good in and of itself here in the now. We have only two choices in the present moment: to fight or to die. The only way out is through and our choice is only one of whether we will suffer the moral injury of being complicit in our own demise. The reason to fight is because we refuse to do the fascists’ dirty work for them. I will assert the agency I have in every way that I can because, to paraphrase Donna Haraway, I am not made out of mud and I couldn’t dream of returning to dust. We don’t need a politics built on the prospect of us getting some glimmers of hope. We need a politics of glimmers full-stop, of moments and acts which are valuable here and now and in and of themselves. Self-assertion is our primal right, and even Hobbes held that we have no obligation to go to the gallows willingly.
Without further justification or hope for the future, here is my politics: I will not go back. I simply refuse, here and now and for my own sake, to be smeared off the face the earth or pushed out of polite society. In keeping with this, and in keeping with the motivations for this call to action, I encourage the reader to call their representatives and assert themselves as well.