At the beginning of this year, I celebrated a major milestone in my life: 10 years on HRT. I have a lot of thoughts on what I’ve learned in that time that I will release in a post perhaps later this week, but to accompany this comic, I thought I would write today about the more political side of what has happened in those 10 years (*eye-roll*). 2015 was another friggin’ universe, not just when it came to trans people, but just in regards to how many of us in the “West” thought about our society and its institutions.

I have often talked about how martial arts was and still is a very important part of who I am, and I remember in the early days of my transition thinking that perhaps I was foolish to put so much time and effort into training for self-protection. On the one hand, I felt that, as a woman and as a trans person to boot, martial arts and self-defense might now be more relevant to my life than it was before I came out (oddly enough, not many people want to fight you when you are presenting as a muscular dude). But on the other hand, I naively thought that we were increasingly moving towards an era of peace and prosperity. It was the Obama Age, and online social justice activism was shining daylight, the “greatest disinfectant of all”, upon every form of ignorance and injustice. It seemed like only a matter of time before society became a relative utopia of social progress. People seemed to be getting overall more tolerant, technology was making life easier and bringing people together, violent crime was on the decline and the wars of the past were probably only going to become increasingly rare, right? RIGHT???

This was an era that gave rise to online “slacktivism” and an attitude that social change could be real and meaningful even when it was largely something you performed online for social clout. The political beliefs people held increasingly became consumer identities that had more to do with what products you consumed and what social media accounts you interacted with than they had to do with any actions you took. Cis, white feminism reigned supreme with a kind of smug assurance of inevitable ascendance, and the most important issues to fight against were things like “manspreading”. The T-shirt slogan “The Future is Female” comes to mind as an emblem of the rhetoric of the era. There was simultaneously a belief that things could change if you liked, shared, and argued in the comments enough, while at the same time a kind of learned helplessness that things couldn’t really change under the system, so all you could really do is fight intellectual battles online in order to win hearts and minds. This is what I like to call “Plucking Leg Hairs“; actions that feel meaningful, but are actually just a waste of time.

And, yes, I firmly blame The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for the mindset of this era.

Due to my naive belief in online social activism and the complex interactions of my different feelings around “gender”, I decided that martial arts training wasn’t the best use of my time, and that in order to reach my full-potential both in my new life and in this new, more tolerant world, I should focus on my art and in fighting the last remaining “social battles” that would be waged and won (and they most surely would, inevitably, be won) with words, not violence.

But it took barely one year after I came out for the seeds of what would *actually* be the new world (same as the old world) to sprout and bear fruit. The first bathroom bills came into law in 2016, then Donald Trump, then increasing year-after-year conservative hyper-fixation on attacking trans people and blaming us for everything. It’s easy to put the blame on one orange man as the turning point that soured an otherwise upward trajectory, but the truth is, as I often say in so many words in these posts, we were always living in this world.

They were always going to find someone to blame for everything.

After WWII, the West needed to enact social programs and government spending to placate legions of returning veterans and build societal prosperity in order to ramp up for the next war with the Soviet Union. Additionally, they needed to enforce rigid gender roles in order kick the women who had been working to keep the war economy afloat out of the factories and into the home to have children to become good little soldiers to fight the commies. The USSR largely did the same; banning being gay after WWII in no small part to encourage sexual reproduction and rebuild the absolutely devastated Soviet population. The social safety net and the gender norms went hand-in-hand; well-paid and well taken care of workers allow for single income households, which allowed for child-rearing, which allowed for a fast new generation of soldiers.

Ever since that time, the corporate powers in the West have been fucking pissed and have been doing everything they can to claw back those hard-won workers’ rights and destroy the social safety net that aggrieves them so much. The gender role stuff, aggrieved them less so. While a case can be made that Women’s Liberation did help set the precedent for two-income households becoming the norm, which makes price increases and reduced wages easier to pull off, I hardly think it’s fair to blame the destruction of worker’s rights on the desire of 50% of humans to not be obligate domestic servants. Far more relevant is the fact that workers that are cared for don’t need to rely on their employer for everything. Such workers can demand fair wages and better working conditions, and they can strike or sue or quit when they don’t get them. Can’t have that!

Enter Neo-Liberalism.

It is somewhat reductive and not fully-accurate to say that the hollowing out of society in favor of privatization of social services and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy began with US president Ronald Reagan, but, yeah, basically everything bad in Western society today can be traced back to his policies and the conservative precedent he set. As much as Canada, the UK, and the rest of “the West” like to pretend we are separate countries from the USA, the fact is that, as the biggest swinging dick in the Capitalism, US policy effects everywhere else. When a policy or strategy works there, everyone else tries it. And when a political faction holds the reigns of power, it sends its money and influence elsewhere to elect governments that will enact policies favorable to its ends. The sad truth is that “Western Democracy” has been captured by capital from the get-go, and the fat cats have no intention of giving up power, even if they were temporarily set-back in the middle of the 20th century by the existence of a powerful socialist bloc and a population of angry young men who had been trained to fight.

Ever since Ronnie in the 80’s, and then Bill Clinton in the 90’s, policy has increasingly moved towards increasing corporate power and diminishing the returns of government to the people. Services have gotten worse, regulations have been weakened, and politicians have become increasingly in the pocket of corporate lobbyists. Government has become calcified into mostly a matter of shuffling things around. Nothing can ever really change because that would cost some awful, rich, old man money, and any politician who defies that and tries to enact real change will be smacked down and have their career permanently torpedoed.

So what do you do as a “leader” in a society that is being strip-mined for parts? How do you placate the people who elect you without actually giving them anything to improve their lives? Why, you find somebody else to blame for their problems, of course!

This week’s comic, in particular, was made after I read last month about the state of Alberta’s Conservative government. Did you know that Alberta premier, Danielle Smith, lost over $80 million on some kind of hair-brained scheme to buy unregulated Turkish off-brand Tylenol? Most of the product was never delivered, and what did get delivered, was less effective and was subsequently recalled. It sounds like people are pretty pissed about it. That combined with numerous other fuck-ups regarding privatizing pensions and healthcare might have a government trying to do better, maybe give people something to restore their faith in their elected leaders? No. Far easier to, when confronted, issue attacks at trans people. Why waste time and money enacting policy to fix your fuck-ups when you can drown out the narrative and pretend you never did anything wrong by enacting the worst anti-trans policies yet put forward by any government in Canada?

The worst part? It seems to mostly be working (for now). People are so propagandized that doing culture war BS is a viable strategy to cover up your own incompetence/social vandalism. We see this in governments all over. They tear society apart in order to sabotage public services for their masters, and then cover up what they’re doing by attacking minorities or “wokeness”. There are, of course, many targets – from migrants to Muslims to feminists to China – but LGB and most especially T and Q people are some of the easiest to stir up hatred towards. We are a relatively small part of the population that many people don’t understand/dislike, and for trans people, our existence is largely dependent upon access to healthcare, social services, and legal structures that allow us to officially affirm our identities. We’re a completely low-effort target that basically delivers the best divisive bang for your buck.

Back in my more naive days that I began this long diatribe with, I used to believe that sufficient evidence and argumentation would win the day over bigotry. That if we could just educate people on the realities of trans peoples’ lives, they would abandon their hateful beliefs. Now I fear that bad faith Right Wing actors know full-well what trans people are. They know we are innately the way we are, that we won’t ever fully “go away”, no matter what hateful policies they enact. That even hateful policies they put forward but get defeated still serve their ends because the important thing is for them to be seen fighting for what their conservative constituents have been told to want. They want a permanent population of hated outcasts they can continually demonize and punish. Just as abortion was a political football that was passed back and forth in the US for decades without any meaningful progress one way or the other, LGBTQ issues can be a new intractable issue that is battled over. The new pinata to hit.

The online slacktivist social identity of the 2010’s has come full-circle. Now conservatives can also have a performative political identity based around laugh-reacting to trans people’s profile pictures and tranvestigating celebrities. Given the rhetoric of many of these people who have made transphobia their entire personality (something which most certainly did not exist in any meaningful numbers back in the halcyon days of 2015), the sheer totalitarian evil of what would be necessary in order to police trans people – gendered dress codes, washroom policing, restrictions on name changes – would be nakedly bad for cis people, too. Already, numerous cis women have been physically attacked in washrooms because they were suspected of being trans, cis women have been thrown in men’s jail because their jailers were convinced they were trans, and cis female athletes (always of colour, interestingly) are having their achievements questioned on the basis that they may have had the advantage of being a “biological male” – with no evidence whatsoever, of course, other than looking a little muscular, due to, you know, being athletes. Anti-bullying programs that include educating students at an age-appropriate level on the reality of the existence of LGBTQ+ people – you know, the programs that conservatives are obsessed with destroying – overwhelmingly help cis and straight students. How are most kids bullied? By being called “gay” or by saying they are not performing their gender well enough. By reducing the stigma around queer and gender non-conforming people, you reduce the avenues by which cis/straight people can be bullied. Can’t have that!

I’m frankly amazed that more people are not outraged on principle that the government would have control over who you are and how you present. So many people supposedly in favor of “small government” are apparently fine with a police state that dictates your very identity to you. I guess they just see it as not effecting them. “I’m never going to not conform, so why should I worry?”

We’ll see how long it takes for that to change.

In the meantime, I guess the fat cats will just keep getting away with their agenda of social vandalism, and everyone else can enjoy their Two-Minute’s Hate they get each day from social media. After all, hating on somebody who can’t fight back – either because they are a tiny minority or because they just exist as an image on your screen- is a whole lot easier than actually doing something to improve society.

As for me? I miss 2015. I miss when I lived in the fantasy that things were just gonna keep getting better. I miss being able to at least somewhat trust our institutions. But I can’t keep living in the past, hoping for a future that so far hasn’t materialized. So I have returned to training in martial arts. Because I have no intention of not fighting back. 10 years after I came out, we are living in a new world that is not the one I thought I was coming out to, but I still intend to fight like hell to defend the wonderful new life that I found within it.