While the Winds Shake the Trees

or: board games and storms and violence of action

I’ll be speaking in Thomas, West Virginia this Sunday, February 2, at 5pm, at Gradient Project Space, 218 East Avenue.

We’ll be kickstarting my upcoming book The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice in March and you can sign up for notifications about that on the kickstarter page.

Usually, half of my posts are more personal and are paywalled. Considering the current circumstances, I’m mostly doing non-paywalled posts. I am eternally grateful to the people who are paid subscribers and don’t worry, exclusive content will return.

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When the Winds Shake the Trees

Last weekend my family drove out to the mountains to visit me. There’s a bunch of us in my family, and my dog alternated between overwhelmingly happy and regular overwhelmed. I made bread and cookies and we ate biryani and drank soda. My driveway was iced over and my dad successfully white-knuckled it up the drive while my sister made it halfway up and then slid back down and got stuck in a snowbank.

She walked up the driveway, unperturbed. She figured her prepper sister had it handled. We walked back down with my traction boards and got her unstuck easy enough.

My family is trying to build new traditions, so we played a board game, and me and my dad won. He’s a technical writer, so he might be annoyed that I wrote “me and my dad won” instead of “my dad and I won,” but he’s not the one writing this.

While we were playing, my mom teased me: “you should take this moment and write it into your substack, use it as a metaphor to explain some grand political or philosophical idea.”

Well, here you go, mom.

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What my family might not know is the reason I don’t write about them is for the sake of their privacy. I decided long ago to leave my family and romantic relationships out of my writing as much as I can, because around the time I was really coming up writing essays for my old blog, I was getting aggressively doxxed by fascists for being one of the “leaders of antifa.” That stalking soon expanded to my family.

Writing personal essays is always a bit complicated, because you’re telling stories that aren’t wholly your own. When I first set out to “be a writer,” I wrote a novella that followed the adventures of a young squatter—a character who transitioned around the same time I did and became Danielle Cain (looks like I can plug that kickstarter for the third book again). That novella was a zine, long out of print. I’d decided to write a novella instead of memoir because I wanted to write about my own life but fictionalized because I didn’t want to misrepresent my friends and frenemies. I’ve been in the travel memoirs of other people, both friends and strangers, and I haven’t always liked how I was represented. I didn’t want to do that to other people.

But you all can know that I have a large family and you can know that we play board games together. And I’ll tell you one more story about my mother, because it’s a story where I’m the one who doesn’t come out of it looking good.

When I was little, she was in a dance recital, held at another school in our district. There were signs posted around that school in both English and Spanish.

“Mom,” I asked when we got back into the car, “why were there signs in Spanish? Don’t people have to learn English when they come to the US?”

I don’t think I asked this out of anger or resentment. Just confusion. I thought the world worked one way, and it clearly worked a different way.

My mom though, she was almost angry. Not at me, but at, I guess, the fact that I would have been led to believe such a thing. “No,” she said, sharply. “There is no official language in the US.”

Slowly, the neighborhood I grew up in became more and more Spanish-speaking. My dad would come home from work (he was a clerk at trader joes at the time) and excitedly tell us all the new words in Spanish he’d learned that day. Because immigrants are not in any way a threat. They’re neighbors.

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I don’t know that I can do what my mom asked. I don’t know that I can turn their visit to the mountains into some kind of political metaphor. I can just say that I come from kind people, and they’re kind still, and we don’t agree about everything about politics, but all of us understand the severity of the current situation and I’m proud of us for looking to find ways to celebrate joy when we can, and I’m proud of us for figuring out how to play a board game together last weekend. Usually we break down into arguments about tactics or rule interpretation.

I’m grateful everyone came to visit. It hasn’t been the easiest week to be a trans girl in the US.

It also frankly has been one of the hardest weeks of my professional life, because my job is, basically, to help us all avoid despair, and we’re in a hard moment for avoiding despair. A friend who reads this substack put it to me the other day that they appreciated that I’d shifted my newsletter towards becoming “pep talks.” The fascists who doxxed me were wrong—I am not now nor have I ever been any kind of organizer or leader of “Antifa.” I am a cheerleader. I hang out with pompoms and say “we can do it, even if we’ll die in the process!”

(That’s a traditional cheer at football games, right? You’ll be shocked to know I was not heavily involved in sports as a teen, so I wouldn’t know.)

But I also study history, and I am not the worst at pattern recognition, and things aren’t going to be okay in the immediate future. Not on the larger scale. The current administration really, truly has it out for both non-white immigrants and trans people. You would think that the trans people part was just a side issue for them, something to campaign on. Why would anyone bother to hate us so much? There are so few of us, and we’re clearly not hurting anyone. (Immigrants aren’t hurting anyone either.)

I don’t really need to tell you the news, and that’s not really my role, but this week the government has enacted a sort of collective punishment of trans people and “DEI” in general, freezing federal funding for everyone until everyone can prove their projects don’t promote “a woke agenda” or “gender ideology.” You would think, you would hope, that this would turn the center right against the man who is taking everything away from them. Far more likely, the government’s tactic will work, and people will direct their anger against the queers, and we’ll be run out of our employment in federally funded programs. I hope, almost desperately, that I’m wrong.

One post I saw referred to it as a sort of Kristalnacht, the night when Nazis attacked Jewish businesses en masse. I don’t think this is a hyperbolic comparison. What’s happening now with the funding freeze and the audit against “a woke agenda” isn’t a moment of physical violence or the destruction of our property, but it is a moment that exists to drive us out of public life.

You likely already know this, but it is never far from my mind that the first Nazi book burning was of the Institute of Sexology in Berlin, the first trans-affirming clinic and research center in the western world.

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Pattern recognition will deceive you, though. History doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes, or it comes back to certain refrains. And I don’t like the refrain that it seems to be returning to right now, because I like being alive and I like my family being alive.

I have a Canadian friend who wakes up from nightmares about dying in a US invasion. I have Jewish friend talking about how much it would cost for the nose job it would take to hide their heritage. I have other friends with darker thoughts in their minds, the kind of thoughts they might not survive.

People are organizing, too. My inbox is full of DMs I don’t know how to answer, about what can we do, how can people get involved. Old radicals are coming out of the woodwork, new radicals are coming out of the… whatever new radicals come out of. Probably also “the woodwork.” The woodwork is full of good people.

The fascist state wants us to despair. Their goal is shock-and-awe, to numb us into submission through sheer overwhelm. This tactic, shock and awe, is not the tactic used by someone who is certain to win.

See, imagine you’re the state, and you’re storming a building. If you spend too much of your time watching tactical videos on youtube, you might know what I’m talking about. Clearing a building is considered pretty much the most dangerous thing you can do in modern warfare. The odds favor the defenders, always.

This is actually important to understand for home defense: if someone breaks into your house to kill you, and you’re both armed, your best bet is not to go around and clear your house room by room, but to make the attacker do that instead.

Anyway, the only way that attackers have a chance in hell of surviving clearing a building is if they use what’s called “violence of action.” They must act with absolute violence and without any hesitation. They must kick down the door and start firing. They must act incredibly quickly, so as to overwhelm the defenders and negate their inherent advantage. The attacker must present the idea that they have absolute control and destroy the defender’s morale.

It’s still a long shot for the attacker. Violence of action is the best strategy for clearing a room, but clearing a room is still fantastically dangerous.

The fascist elements of the state are acting as fast as possible because it is their only hope. Cowing us into submission is their only hope. They have to act faster than the courts, they have to act faster than communities can organize. They have to try to keep us off balance, because by default we are actually in the stronger position.

They have to try to get us to give up. They have to get us to despair.

Our job, then, is to not let them.

Well, and to destroy them.

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This turned into a pep talk again. It turned into a pep talk because I needed that pep talk.

I also needed that time with my family, playing board games. I needed that moment wherein my sister wasn’t worried about getting stuck, because she knew that I could handle it. I needed the cupcakes they brought, and I needed the plans to see them soon.

Last night, the power went out again, because there was a windstorm (there still is), and half-awake I was glad that I was prepared. That if the power stayed out, I knew how I would heat my home. That my deep freezer was full of plastic water jugs to keep the thing cool. That when my driveway ices over, I have the supplies I need to be stuck inside for awhile.

Because yes, the storm is here. And yes, we’ll be okay. Or we won’t. But we’ll have tried, and we won’t despair.

How’s that, mom?