You should probably become a weapon
It’s morning again in America. We live in the future. O tempora! O mores!
Brynn Tannehill was right, although her timeline may have been a little pessimistic. If you’re like me at all, a sizable fraction of the population wants you dead, as in lined up and shot. They will unblinkingly accuse your suicide hotlines of being sexual predators. If you’re unlucky enough to draw the attention of some of them, they will harass you until you commit die — dox you, show up outside your house, get you fired from your job — for the crime of being trans on the internet, because they think it’s funny. The cruelty is the fucking point. It’s going to get worse.
A sizable chunk of the queer community — in the way that we predominantly relate to each other these days, i.e. social media — isn’t blameless either. Isabel Fall was absolutely right and the chucklefucks who ran her into a mental ward know it.1 If you follow anyone at all in the vague direction of the left you’ve heard of something like this happening.
Welcome to the Cool Zone.
Being a smartass on Twitter doesn’t fix this. Going to a protest with drag shows and people with clever signs doesn’t fix this. In this day and age the utility of a response to fascist calls for genocide is apparently measured in the number of white liberals with HRC bumper stickers that it enrages.2
Doomscrolling doesn’t fix this either. It’s your hindbrain stuck in a feedback loop. It accomplishes very little other than destruction. It destroys your mind, your relationships, and your life, all in the name of ad revenue.
There is a way out. I mentioned Isabel earlier for one very specific reason. Being, as I am, a disgusting freak with disgusting body-horror fetishes, I was both horrified and aroused by Helicopter Story. It was too emotionally powerful for me to revisit for some time. When my rational brain caught up with my emotional one, I realized that I would gladly submit to tactical gender reassignment, as long as I was fighting against the remains of the US on behalf of a trans paramilitary force or something like that. It’s not a question of being a weapon — that’s going to happen one way or the other — it’s a question of who you’re pointed at. The Korps explored this concept a couple years before Isabel ever did. M61 Vulcan go spinny.
The way out of the feedback loop is action. Here’s what has been the most helpful for me.
Keep your body safe. Most importantly, if you are at risk of self-harm, do whatever you must to ward that off before anything else. The rest of this advice is supposed to double as a mental health prescription, but if it doesn’t work for you then it doesn’t work. (What follows is my own personal experience. I am a GPT-3 instance with a blog, not your doctor.) Having been in those trenches for a long time, I can say that sometimes the usual advice — have functional coping mechanisms, go to therapy, be social, exercise, eat well, sleep well — just doesn’t always work, whether for neurological or systemic reasons. Sometimes it’s like trying to start a fire with wet wood. You need a spark. Intranasal ketamine has been extremely helpful for me in that capacity. So has psilocybin. I’ve heard exciting things about MDMA as well. If you can afford to have any of these administered under controlled clinical settings, and nothing else has worked so far, it’s worth a shot. If not, mushrooms are probably the easiest to source. Obviously do your research before you ingest any entheogen or dissociative. Don’t fly blind.
Keep your identity safe. Back when it happened, I heard someone say, “Isabel stepped on a landmine." This is accurate — even if I want to scream, “who put the fucking landmine there, you fucking dipshits?” Stay out of the minefield. Keep your opsec tight. Do not maintain any more than a cursory social media presence under your real name. Learn how to dox yourself and do it every couple months. A little paranoia goes a long way.
Train like a motherfucker. Lifting and running have been a godsend for me, if only because they give my anger an outlet. There are some who will say that the apparatus of state violence doesn’t care how much you deadlift or what your mile time is. That’s true, but the looming threat to your safety in coming years is probably stochastic violence, not out-and-out state violence. Some nutjob with an AR will act long before the government does. Becoming harder to kill is good praxis. Both volumes of Tactical Barbell are available on libgen. It’s simple and easy to remember, and I enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed any regimen. If you already lift and have a program you like, far be it from me to tell you what to do.
Learn to shoot. This was something I was afraid of for a long time, owing to the whole suicidally-depressed thing. It helped. If you’re in a major urban area there’s probably a leftist gun club or Discord near you. If not, you may be able to find a queer-friendly instructor in your area. Their politics may be too shallow or too statist for you, but it beats nothing. It should also be noted that you don’t need to own a gun yet if you don’t want to, but a couple of days at the range with a trusted friend is not a bad idea at all.
Read up. This need not be a dull affair. For theory, I like the RATM reading list. Hell, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to start with Abigail Thorn, who is very, very good about citing her sources. r/SocialistRA has a very nice wiki that covers many of the same points as this blog post. Between Libgen and Sci-Hub you should be able to get your hands on anything you need.
Don’t die twice. You are guaranteed to die once. Do not squelch the life within you for the purpose of your safety; your fear and self-censorship will not protect you. They already know you’re trans. They’ve already planned your death. You might as well be your entire self, immediate living conditions permitting.
Go forth. Contain multitudes. Tear shit up.
Flesh is temporary; the synthetic is eternal.