An Unwilling Soldier in the Culture War

or: I honestly don't really care that much about being trans but here we are

Hi! There’s only a couple days left on the Kickstarter for The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, the third book in the Danielle Cain series. It’s also a Kickstarter to finance the audiobook production of all three books in the series, so it’s a good way to jump in if you haven’t read any of them yet. And we are committed to making our digital content, like audiobooks, as cheap as possible, so you can get all three audiobooks for $15.

An Unwilling Soldier in the Culture War

I didn’t pick the culture war, the culture war picked me. Left to my own devices, I’d love to go back to not giving a shit about my gender. In my own head, my pronouns are “I/me/my” anyhow. I don’t look into the mirror every morning and think “ah, yes, there I am, a beautiful trans woman.” I just look for moles that might need a biopsy. I don’t shave my face thinking “I’d better do this so that I become a better trans woman!” I just want to look like me, so I use a razor to make myself look like me, because Covid interrupted my laser hair removal and I haven’t gotten around to starting over again.

Yet when I walk down the street, depending on how I’m dressed, I do think “here I go, walking down the street, a trans woman.” Not because I feel like I need to walk a certain way, but because, well, my safety depends on my awareness of how others perceive me. Gender feels less like something that I am but instead how other people relate to me.

I don’t introduce myself to people as Margaret thinking “oh boy, I can’t wait to make sure that this person realizes I’m a trans woman!” but because Margaret is my name. If were to list off the descriptors for myself that matter to me, trans wouldn’t be near the top of the list. Anarchist, writer, punk, goth, even just “woman” would come before trans. What I believe in, what I offer to the world, how I spend my time, my aesthetics, all of these matter so much more to me than my gender.

Yet here I am with my friends, the center of a culture war.

I don’t even like the culture war. The culture war is a distraction created by the powerful to keep the rest of us fighting among ourselves. I have to fight it though, because the only other option is to lose it. It’s like when people tell Ukraine it should seek peace—of course the people of Ukraine want peace, but when you’re not the one who started a war, the only peace offered to you is the peace of the prisoner or the peace of the grave.

Compromise is not possible in the culture war I’m part of, because the trans position is “we should be allowed to live as equals to cis people” and the anti-trans position is “get back in the closet and/or die.”

We did not ask for war, yet war is here. Anti-war movements only make sense when they’re aimed at the aggressor. “Give peace a chance” was a good slogan in the US during the Vietnam war, but wouldn’t have made as much sense if you lived in Vietnam.

It’s a surreal feeling to be criminalized for something that feels like such a minor part of who I am, but that’s just how oppression works. Some women care about being women, other women don’t care about being women, and that’s never stopped any of us, cis and trans, from being held down by patriarchal society.

It makes sense, then, to organize around gender or any other oppressed position. It makes sense to take pride in being part of the feminist movement, in being part of the struggle for queer liberation. I’m proud to be part of a lineage that includes the stonewall riots. I’m even more proud, though to be part of a lineage that includes Willem Arondeus, the Dutch gay man who, with his gay friends, burned Nazis records in Amsterdam. Whose last words before his execution, words that were passed to his lesbian lawyer, were “let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”

I’ve never flown a pride flag or a trans flag in my life. I’m not opposed to it, by any means, but I’ve always felt that my flag is the solid black of anarchism, or the black and red of anarcho-communism. My flag is the black with crossed scythe and spear, with “death to the bourgeoisie” written in Russian across it, that was flown by the rebels in Kronstadt who fought first against the tsar and then against the Bolsheviks who became the new tsars. To me, queer liberation means the liberation of all people from all rulers. Shouting “victory or death!” in a war against oligarchy sounds queer as hell.

Now, though, in a world in which states are working to outright criminalize both gender-affirming care and trans identity, I suppose my flag is a rainbow one too. My flag is a bunch of stripes of baby colors too. They’re my flags now because for some absolute garbage reasons, a huge percentage of people have become convinced by their right wing rulers that what’s in people’s pants, and who people love, are the important issues of the day.

People say that the culture war is a distraction, which is true. It’s just not the kind of distraction that can be ignored. When you’re boxing, the jab is a distraction from the cross, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the jab.

The culture war is being waged by our enemies to divide and conquer, to keep us from fighting authoritarianism and oligarchy. It’s better, though, to see the culture war not as a mirage, a thing to be ignored, but as one of our enemy’s minions. Think about it like you’re playing some old Final Fantasy game (this is the most trans woman coded thing I will say all day). You’ve got your boss fight, against big bad Fascism. He’s got a bunch of minions laid out in front of him. If you defeat one of these minions, another one will pop up in its place, until you defeat Fascism. The thing is though, those little minions are doing damage to you the whole time. Maybe we don’t fight them “first,” but we fight them at the same time as we fight Fascism.

The thing is though, if this is our Final Fantasy boss fight, we’re not here alone. There are others in our party. We’ve all got a stake in this fight (and there are other minions laid out before him).

I think at least once a week about something an old coal miner told me the first time I spent a lot of time in West Virginia. He’d just gotten out of jail for protesting mountaintop removal coal mining, and he was talking about being an anti-war protester in Appalachia in the late 60s. “We’d be out there on one street corner with our anti-war signs, and the gay rights folks were on another corner with their signs, and the Black liberation people were on yet another corner with their signs, and then we realized we’d all be a whole lot louder and more powerful if we were all standing on the same corner, so we all got together.”

It’s join or die, right now. I’ve read enough history to know that I mean that sort of literally. I don’t believe the stakes have been higher in this country in my lifetime. If we’re not speaking up for Palestinians, if we’re not speaking up for migrants, if we’re not speaking up for queers, if we’re not standing up together, then… well, we’ve all read the poem.

Oh, and, not to be a total bummer, but Fascism itself is only the miniboss. In order to stop the worst impacts of climate change and save life on earth, we’ve also got to take down the fossil fuel industry and more or less the entire world’s current socioeconomic order.

I believe in us, though. Mostly because believing in us is our only choice.

And then, once we win, I can go back to not really giving a shit about my gender.