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.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.”

So goes the fascist aphorism originating from a post-apocalyptic novel and favored by toe-shaped men everywhere as an explanation for why society is the way it is (i.e. shitty). It may mostly just be an exercise in stroking the modern cishetero-male ego by insisting that the hard, sterile, and unforgiving life that is impressed upon every human born with a penis by modern masculinity is the supporting pillar of civilization, and as such, it must be maintained and enforced at all costs, lest we slip into weakness and degeneracy, but, truth be told, I am not entirely against the notion that struggle and difficulty is a powerful basis of character development. My favorite movie is, after all, Conan the Barbarian and to some extent I do ascribe to the Nietzsche quote that film opens with, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.“

“Necessity is the mother of invention“, is another expression which hits to the heart of the true strength of trans people, and indeed all of those who have struggled against adversity. I only began the process of coming out as trans after almost dying of stage-IV cancer, and the gender dysphoria I experienced in my youth, but didn’t fully understand, drove me to train my body to a high level of fitness and ability in the martial arts – anything to feel OK in my own skin. These challenges pushed me past a point of comfort or even safety. There was literally a 50/50 chance that I could have died from my cancer, and I endured depression and alienation across decades due to my dysphoria, suffering psychic wounds that I may never fully heal from. I had to undergo these difficult processes, through which there was no guarantee of my survival, in order to be forged into a person who can endure that much and perhaps more. I would never wish cancer or gender dysphoria on anybody, but without these challenges, I wouldn’t be who I am today.

I don’t think I have ever met a boring trans person, and it can’t be a coincidence that I happen to know so many incredible trans people who are just such overachievers. People who have accomplishment lists that look like the work of several lifetimes – which makes sense since we kinda do live multiple lives. We can be found in the top ranks of all manner of professions, and we frequently dive into our pursuits with a neurodivergent obsession rarely found outside of the nation of the Pink, White, and Blue. I have every belief that the unique struggles us trans people face drive us to become some of the most interesting and impressive people on the planet.

But, while a life of appropriately measured challenges can build a person up, too much adversity will keep a person beaten down before they ever have a chance to grow. Untold billions of incredible geniuses and talents around the world languish in poverty and famine, never receiving an opportunity to develop or utilize their gifts. Too many beautiful and magnificent souls are taken from us too soon by bigots who hate what they don’t understand, and by our society that doesn’t value anything beyond making money for some old man. Lifting heavy weights increases the size and strength of your muscles, but if you try to lift something too heavy (or that is being held down by some a-hole while you try to do your set) and you can’t even complete the exercise, you won’t see much in the way of growth. For every overachiever trans, I also know someone whose brutal and unfair life beat them into the ground. Their confidence shot, flinching at every loud noise, apologizing for even existing, their physical health deteriorated well ahead of schedule by constant stress and anxiety. An enforced diet of cruelty starves a person ‘s soul. I have known more than a few trans women who have clawed their way back up out of hell and reclaimed themselves from a lifetime of horrendous trauma, and I hope all of my C-PTSD friends can some day find some healing as well.

Challenges need to be something that can actually be overcome in order to stimulate growth. If it kills you, you’re not gonna be around to get stronger.

Like the Toe Rogans of the world, I do enjoy both fighting and training for fighting. As I write this, all over my body I can feel the satisfying aches and bruises of a fun, but aggressive three hour sparring session with my training partner of nearly 25 years. I think overcoming a violent attacker working to inflict harm upon you is one of the most empowering experiences one can go through. If you can get through that, you can get through most anything else in your day to day. Trans women, even those who don’t train in martial arts, often know this all too well. Just about any trans woman you talk to who came out prior to the 2000’s – especially if she was a sex worker, as most of us had to be back then – typically has multiple stories of getting beaten up, usually by the cops. And pretty much all of us from any era experienced bullying or even just a general sense of perpetually being unsafe while we were growing up. Even before I understood that I was trans, I have always looked over my shoulder when out walking, I have always been on my guard. I have always known intrinsically that I am not safe in this world, and for most of my life, the sad truth is that the only person who I could truly trust to keep me safe, was myself – for if I told a soul who I truly was, I would most likely no longer be safe.

Trans women are never NOT living in the hard times.

Our lives are like Conan’s – constant toil and battle. In our Before Times, we grind against every structure imposed upon us like the suffocating prisons that they are, before struggling upstream to find ourselves amidst a hostile world that seeks to discourage us at every turn. Then, after we come out, we must battle against endless armies of the least informed, yet most obsessed people on earth for our continued existence in the world. We never get to take our existence for granted, and we never get to fully rest or relax.

I mean, our main “holiday” of every year is reading the names of those of us who were MURDERED.

As hard as trans lives are, I also believe we are in an era where most people feel utterly helpless. They are working as hard as they can, and yet their lives keep getting worse. In a culture that worships strength, power, and success, struggling under the pressure of a system that was rigged against you feels like… weakness. When those who conditionally value themselves on the basis of their strength feel weak, they need a scapegoat. They need somebody to beat up on to prove they’re not weak. Somebody who validates the contempt they have for the weak – which usually means, in their minds, a woman or otherwise feminine person – while at the same time somebody they can view as being strong enough to be a justifiable target of scorn or violence – i.e. someone they think of as being a man.

Any group of people come to mind?

Trans women – because, let’s be real, as much contempt as the transphobes have for trans masculine and non-binary people, the real locus of their hatred is reserved for we, the ultimate heretics of Patriarchy – Trans women make for the perfect targets for abuse in the minds of the Weak Men (and Women) created by the previous era of Easy Times in the American Empire, and who are now responsible for the Hard Times coming all of our way. A trans woman is somebody you can beat up on and not only get away with, but for whom you won’t have to feel any shred of guilt. Why feel guilty for a man who CHOSE to be weak, like a woman? Women, the Sex Gender, are only good for sex, and Men, the Apparently-Not-Sex Gender, only care about having sex. So therefor, any “man who becomes a woman” must be doing so for gross, weird sex reasons, and therefor EXTRA deserves to get beat up.

They believe we are weak, that we are the cartoons of us they have created in their minds. They don’t see us as real threats, even as they pronounce us to be such to “their” women and children.

Trans women who are either into swords, or knives, or guns, or martial arts make up a Venn diagram that is effectively a circle. Last I had read several years ago, the US Department of Defense is the single largest employer of trans people worldwide (though perhaps not so today since Donald Trump’s attacks on trans people in the service). Trans women of previous generations frequently spent much of our lives trying to hide in the flight into hypermasculinity, which often came in the form of military service, lifting weights, or obsessive training in martial arts. We tried our very hardest to be the men the world kept telling us to be, often to the point of achieving levels of strength and hardness beyond most cis men, who are only rarely compelled to push themselves in a similar manner. We’re built different! We got that dog in us!

While HRT changes our bodies and melts away whatever physical advantages our natal hormonal levels may have given us before transition, we still retain the skills we learned, and the attitudes we cultivated. Physical strength matters far less than the Strength Worshipers of the Patriarchy want to believe, especially when it comes to fighting. Being clever, and having a strong reason to win matters far more. MMA is one of the few sports where someone can be competitive into their 40’s on the basis of skill and experience alone – it is rare, but ‘rare’ is more common than the ‘never’ of most other sports. While we were all disappointed by Mike Tyson v Jake Paul, I assure you that I have been beaten up by plenty of wily old men in my time. When watching any combat sport, I usually bet on whichever competitor comes from the “harder” country – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Mongolia – places where people’s daily lives involve strength and difficulty. When combined with hard training, those daily habits of life build up into more formidable fighting prowess than all the training in a fancy modern gym can give you. Often they don’t have the most impressive physiques, or the prettiest technique, but they have a hardness to their gaze, and more often than not, they win over whatever soft American they are fighting. I’m not saying it’s a ‘good’ thing that these people must live hard lives, but it sure does make them have a higher than average per capita of tough fighters.

Once again, I can think of few ‘harder’ countries than that one where all those pretty ladies come from.

One particular beautiful young trans girl of my acquaintance – my trans goddaughter, if you must know – seems to have a new story of some pervy or bigoted man she beat the living shit out of every time I see her – courtesy of skills she accrued surviving life on the street after being kicked out of her home as a teen for being trans. This pretty, young girl, who loves wearing makeup, jewelry, and corsets, and who spends more time on her hair than most have free hours in the day, has no doubt beaten up more grown men in her life than most guys who train in MMA. Let me tell you, I am one proud mama!

“Who runs faster? The Fox or the Hare?” Asks Aesop.

“The Hare. For the fox merely runs for his dinner, while the hare runs for his life.”

These people who are against us have the upper hand. They currently have the force of government and society behind their hateful beliefs. As tough as trans people are, we are, at the end of the day, far more frequently the victims of violence and systemic discrimination. But at the other end of the day, their hatred and discrimination isn’t coming from anywhere that truly matters. They won’t die for their hatred. Like all predators, they want a victim, not a fight. We, on the other hand, are fighting for our very lives. We have no choice but to fight as hard as we can.

Or, to paraphrase Osama Bin Laden in a way that I often repeat in my head but never publicly admit to (until now, I guess) “We love our genders as you love your lives.“

This is why I believe that we will win, in the end.

[just as Osama Bin Laden low-key did in the end lol]

But what truly is ‘winning’?

Is becoming so hardened by a cruel world that you can crush your enemies worth it if it means you lose your softness in the process?

What truly is ‘strength’?

Is it possible to be strong AND soft?

“A Piece of Iron Wrapped in Silk”

You may not be surprised to learn that I am, among other things, a Taoist (pronounced “Dow”, not “Taow”) – a religion/philosophy from 5th Century BCE China based around harmony with natural forces. This includes one’s own nature, and the natures of those around us. I came to Taoism as a result of my lifelong love and study of Asian martial arts, which are deeply and irrevocably tied to Taoist precepts due to its historical ubiquity during the time of their development. As a white person, I have a complex relationship with Taoism and other aspects of Asian cultures that is probably best saved for another post, but in so many words, Taoism was the “first set of eyes” that I learned to view the world through. Even as I investigate and embrace other beliefs closer to my own ancestral cultural background, this belief still colors how I understand everything I encounter.

The famous Yin-Yang symbol of Taoism shows the two primal, complimentary forces that exist within and govern all things. Yin, the soft, flexible, yielding force that is typically associated with “femininity”. Yang, the hard, rigid, forceful, uh, force, that is typically associated with “masculinity”. See how the black contains a bit of white and the white contains a bit of black? All things contain these two essences within them in differing amounts, and indeed, each side of the duality contains the other in it’s perfected form. To be “strong” is to be able to overcome difficulties and challenges, which leads to the question of how can one be truly “strong” without being capable of softness, gentleness, and flexibility if a challenge requires it? And if to be “flexible” is to be able to adapt to all situations, how can someone be truly “flexible” if they aren’t capable of being strong and forceful when occasion for it arises?

This, too, is the great power of trans people. By having been forced to walk a path that has traversed both ends of this fluid spectrum, we have the capacity to utilize both aspects of existence interchangeably. We can be both hard and soft at once – as all things truly are, but so very few invested in the gender binary are capable of accepting.

As we trans women walked the path of ‘Yang-ness’ and strength that was forced upon us in our former lives, on some level, to varying degrees, we kept the soft, feminine core of our Yin nature alive inside us. I never wanted to be a hard, tough, strong man. I was a gentle and sweet child that didn’t want to hurt anybody. It was a hard, cruel world that forced me to harden up an exterior Yang shell, and learn how to defend myself. As we trans people enter the crueler, harder future that undoubtedly lies ahead for most of us, we will be forced once again to become “Hard”. This will be a necessity, as it always truly was. But in doing so, we mustn’t lose sight of our Yin-ness as well.

Our strength lies in our duality. Our soft side will make our hard side stronger and more resilient, and vice versa. Our future will depend upon care and compassion as much as it depends on strength and toughness. We will have to yield at times and be flexible with ever-changing and often disappointing circumstances, and we will have to stand up and fight when the time for direct challenges to danger and injustice are required.

Those who hate us believe us to be the “Weak Men” who resulted from the Soft Times, rather than the Strong Women who are forged in all times, as all times are hard for women like us. To exist as we are is to overcome challenges we thought to be impossible, becoming stronger than we could have possibly imagined. But through it all, we also kept our Softness, and that makes us truly unbreakable.

So don’t lose your softness, don’t be afraid to embrace hardness, and don’t sell yourself short or count yourself out. Because, chances are, you are far stronger than you know, simply by being who you are.

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This Wednesday, on November 20th, at 7:00 PM PST, I will be hosting a TDOR memorial at the Vic West Community Center (521 Craigflower st in Victoria, BC) and also broadcast over Zoom. You can follow the QR code or go to https://tauwellness.com/event/trans-day-of-remembrance-south-islands/ to RSVP and find the Zoom link.

I hope to see our Victoria friends there, and anyone else who needs community around the globe on our Zoom broadcast.

Peace and Love to all Trans people.

Bria’s Note: I talked a little about this concept in my ‘Stick or Bigger Stick’ post, but I want to hit home the importance and ubiquity of the sentiment of “Do it to Julia” in the democratic politics of the meta-American Empire. My goal with these heavy political posts is not to lead you to fear and despair, but to anger and righteousness. I hope you read this and feel better resolved to resist those who are oppressing you, and who oppress us all.

The Politics of Punishment are essentially all that’s been on offer by either side of democratic government in North America for certainly most of my adult life. Since apparently everything’s been all cinched up and figured out by capitalism perfecting everything in society ever since the End of History, nothing can fundamentally be changed (duh). So all that can be done each election is offer your voter base promises of punishing your hated enemies! Conservatives get elected on promises of hurting immigrants, people of color, and queers, while liberals, once elected, try to shore up their popularity by promising to use the force of law to punish conservatives for being rude… without ever really doing anything to protect the groups conservatives target. In fact, the “protection” of liberals frequently just seems to paint a bigger target on our backs. They always seem to do it in a way is very easy to circumnavigate, while at the same time very annoying and preachy. Because if our rights are always under threat from conservatives, then we HAVE to vote for them, don’t we?

Take Canada’s Bill C-16 – the trans protection bill that Jordan Peterson used to launch his career of becoming a cult leader. It supposedly enshrines protections for gender identity and expression into the Canadian human rights code, but, despite all of the hollering about Nineteen Eighty-Four from conservatives and the patting themselves on the back by liberals, to date not one single person has been prosecuted under C-16. Of course, I shouldn’t need to tell you that this doesn’t mean that transphobia was solved in Canada. I assure you, quite a bit of transphobia goes on here every single day. The standard of evidence required for C-16 to be enforced makes it essentially toothless to combat discrimination done by anyone other than a dullard who openly states in a voice recording or in writing that they are firing you or refusing you service due to your gender. No protection for “We found a better candidate” or *blaming you for everything and holding you to a higher standard in performance reviews* or *no response* – you know, the ways that discrimination is actually expressed. Of course, conservatives are barely able to hide their throbbing excitement at being openly permitted to abandon subtext and say the quiet part out loud; their politicians have known that’s all they have to promise them to ensure votes for a long time. Meanwhile, all the conservative caterwauling around how C-16 supposedly polices their sacred right to be horrible to trans people has stoked the fires of transphobia around the globe.

The real issue isn’t that we need these kinds of protections to force people to behave politely, but real, universal protections for things like housing and employment. Make no mistake, I think there should be consequences for spreading disinformation and hate propaganda about groups of people. But if your boss can’t fire you at will or if your housing wasn’t a privately held – and therefor capable of being withheld – commodity, then it really isn’t of much consequence if some individual person has shitty opinions about trans people. What’s more, a lot of people’s bigotry would evaporate pretty quickly if their material needs were met and they didn’t feel like their existence was a constant precarious struggle of competition against others. Not to mention that benefits that are selectively given out to specific groups are far easier to demonize and take away than universal ones. To play the game of selective protections and benefits for certain groups in an environment of artificial scarcity, while outwardly trading on the aesthetic of social justice and helping the historically marginalized, is to continue to pit different groups of people against one another; to keep us fighting over the scraps that fall off the feast table of our masters.

But outside of these little back and forth trade offs between the two sides of the empire’s public relations wing every election, there is another form of punishment that is built in to our society.

It is the background radiation of constant war waged by the empire or on its behalf. It is the economic exploitation of previously colonized nations crushed under massive IMF loans designed to lock them into servitude (kinda like the loans we have here). It is the destabilization and toppling of socialist governments to ensure those nation’s loyalty to and subservient position within the capitalist economic order. It is all the dirty business it takes to keep the empire going… and that so many of its citizens turn a blind eye to.

Which leads me back to a certain scene in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

OK, I know, I know, Orwell is pretty tired. Conservatives drove that one into the ground years ago with their comparisons to C-16 or “woke razors” or whatever. George Orwell was kind of a pos and whether he intended to or not, his work played a large role in the capitalist undermining of the global socialist movement. But it doesn’t mean that some of that shit he wrote didn’t go hard.

In the scene I’m talking about, the protagonist, Winston, has been captured and is being brainwashed/tortured in the Ministry of Truth by an authority figure he once trusted. His torturer has placed a cage contraption on his face that will release a frightened rat (Winston’s greatest fear) upon him that will devour his face – a supposedly common torture in Imperial China. In his frantic desperation to avoid his own horrifying suffering, he sells out his lover, Julia:

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then—no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment—one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over:

“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

This posing of a horrifying threat, of brutalization at the hands of the state, that can be avoided by allowing the state to inflict violence upon others, lies at the core of how so much consent is manufactured within the empire. Wars must be continued, borders must be guarded, and economic austerity must be enacted, all in order to maintain the tenuous “liberal coalitions” that are supposedly the only thing standing between us and conservative fascists taking power to brutalize the marginalized among us. We need to keep voting for the liberal status quo that just so happens to continue the violence of the empire that we totally don’t want to be doing at all but we have to for some reason, or else face the consequences of a conservative regime – who, naturally, will also continue the imperial violence but just also turn more of it inward. It’s ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop‘ – even when the ‘good’ cop is the one talking to you, their words carry with them the implicit violence that the bad cop could inflict on you if you don’t cooperate, so just tell them what they want to hear, okay?

[What I especially like about the Orwell scene is that the rat, too, is being coerced into violence. The rat is locked in the cage and forced with a flame towards Winston’s face. The rat has the choice of either eating through Winston’s face or be burned by the flame.]

With Gaza, they have proved that they can get away with basically whatever violence they want. People deemed disposable by the meta-American Empire can be brutalized essentially at will, regardless of what the United Nations or broader international community says. If you protest, they shut you down and call you a nazi. Now, upon being elected, Trump reportedly told Netanyahu in a phone call to “do whatever you want in the Gaza strip”, while Israel has now passed a bill stating that anyone who is a suspected terrorist (that’s suspected, not convicted) as well as anyone “praising or supporting attacks that target Israel” will be deported to the Gaza Strip. They have their own little human garbage dump where they can brutalize and destroy anybody within its borders in the name of “security”, and if you step out of line, you’re going there, too!

It could be worth pointing out that Israeli military and police train the military and police of the US and other imperial core nations. The weapons and surveillance technology they use is both supplied by America (and Canada) to Israel, and at other times, developed in Israel and supplied back to America – with the permanent killing floor that is Gaza as its testing ground. Of course, Gaza is a test for more than just weapons and surveillance tech; it is also where they test to see how far they can push it. Of how much they can get away with before people get too upset.

If the past year has been any indication, that is whatever they want.

And so now, everywhere is Gaza.

The Homeless Holocaust and The New American Slave State

The following section might freak you out a bit. Read it if you are wish to be prepared for the worst of what could be coming down the pipe in North America. Skip it and read the end if you are feeling fragile – look for the picture of a leopard.

Because, there is another, final piece of background radiation of implicit violence baked into our system. That is the continual, ever present threat of poverty and homelessness. If you fail to sufficiently tow the societal line and provide labor to capital, if you miss your rent or your mortgage on the property you supposedly “own”, you can be evicted and be unceremoniously dumped into total misery and squalor. Exposed to the elements and harassed by authorities everywhere you go. Looked down upon by all around you and blamed for society’s problems.

In every town and city in North America, there is a little Gaza strip. Shanty towns and encampments of disposable people cast out by the system. Like the Palestinians, their inhabitants are blamed for their own squalid conditions, accused of posing a danger to the nice, respectable people in the surrounding area, and every so often, the authorities come in and destroy what little they have, completely upending their lives even further and leaving them in even deeper ruin. But despite their massive mortality rates, more and more people seem to be ending up there all the time.

You are meant to see the homeless, just as the rest of the Global South is meant to see Gaza. You are meant to look at them and go “I don’t want that to be me!” and you keep your head down and you behave.

When people think of Trump doing a 21st Century Holocaust in America with his mass deportations and Project 2025 anti-queer agenda, they seem to imagine it being very direct and literal, rather than being enacted through layers of plausible deniability baked into the already existing structures of society. Yes, ICE gestapo will still round up immigrants and take them to militarized detention centers – Stephen Miller’s already announced plans to de-naturalize millions of American permanent residents. But this process will also likely involve simply expanding the current barbaric process of sweeping homeless encampments while also creating pressures that cause an increase in the already ballooning numbers of unhoused people in America. This time rounding up everyone in the camps, regardless of immigration status, as ‘illegals’ or ‘criminals’ or ‘terrorists’ and taking them alongside non-citizens to detention centers, deporting anyone not useful for work, with the rest to be used as slave labor in the for-profit prison system – you know, something America already does, and which liberal haven, California, recently failed to vote for a ban on such practices in the state.

[Notice how emptying out undesirables from America would be Trump doing that thing he and other fascists love to do – where they accuse others of doing exactly the thing they themselves plan to do.]

People talk about Trump’s ridiculous tariffs as being an economic wake-up call to those who voted for him, as they will find themselves paying 30% or more extra on most things they buy, as well as the massive shortage of labor created by deporting the undocumented migrants who are currently relied on for most agricultural work. But I suspect that their plan is to incentivize American manufacturing and agriculture by shoring up these domestic industries and offsetting costs of tariffed materials with an influx of slave labor via the prison system. Increasingly criminalized homelessness and increasing pressure put on people that make becoming homeless all the more likely will create a self-sustaining forced work pool. Pressures will be put on nations like Canada to side with the US and impose tariffs on China and Mexico in order to avoid some of the US’s tariffs, roping us into this depraved system of the New North American Slave State. If our conservative politicians, like Pierre Polliviere, get into power, they are almost certain to cozy up with Trump and enact the same sorts of policies leading to similar results. As Climate Change “opens up” the Arctic, Canada’s north may become the breadbasket of the increasingly desertified and industrialized United States via a similar system of enslaved farm workers.

RFK Jr has already said he wants to create ‘wellness gulags’ where “drug addicts” and the “mentally ill” (hmm, I wonder what that could refer to?) would be segregated from all communication with the outside world and made to work on “organic farms”. See, they don’t need undocumented migrant labor when they can just sweep up and enslave anyone they catch outside of the safety net of ‘being able to pay your bills on time’.

I mean, what’s better than paying low wages? No wages!

Anti trans and queer legislation will make it near impossible for openly LGBTQ+ people to maintain a living in many areas, and so they will become homeless at much higher rates (you know, like we already do), so you don’t even need to specifically, directly send queer people to concentration camps; we’ll “send ourselves there” by not being able to hold down a job. If Project 2025 goes ahead in anything close to its full form, then at some point openly queer and trans people could be labelled as sex offenders and sent off directly.

They probably won’t even need to gas chamber anyone themselves. They could, like the first concentration camps in colonial Africa that helped inspire the Final Solution, just deport them into Mexico and leave them to die in the desert – you know, the deserts that are getting increasingly lethal every year due to climate change. Or, like the rat in the cage, try to force Mexico to do the dirty work of genociding the growing mass of deported people and any others fleeing climate destruction in the South. Of course, there’s always a steady supply of readily available fentanyl to thin out a population of miserable people stuck at a border with no options. Either way, the streets get ‘cleaned up’, the gross trannies go away, and suddenly there’s all this free labor for corporations to take advantage of.

What else can you expect out of the empire built on the colonization and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples’ land?

If you think this is hyperbole or that I’m just being delulu, as I see so many comments on Facebook suggest to people upset about Trump’s victory, I should remind you that both Canada and the United States forcibly interned their Japanese citizens and put them to work on slave farms less than 80 years ago. Nice, friendly Canada actually did it much worse than the US, in fact.

My wife is Japanese Canadian, so in my time together with her I have had the privilege of being immersed in the stories and experiences of the Japanese-Canadian community and given many opportunities to witness intergenerational sharing of oral histories. My grandmother-in-law was in the camps. My queer auntie was BORN in a camp. I can tell you that Internment was a big deal to not only the generation of people who were interred, but to each subsequent generation after. The wounds created by the betrayal of the government that they trusted, of having an entire generation’s property seized, of continuing racist suspicion after they were released – they continue to run deep into the grandchildren of the camp survivors, and working heal the scars left behind dominates much of the community’s politics. As such, a lot of incredible work has been done to preserve the memory of these events, so that history might not be repeated.

Japanese Canadians and Americans trusted their government and worked to be model citizens. When the order came for them to be interred, they obeyed, trusting that justice would be served. And they took everything they had, put them to work on plantations, and even made them build their own concentration camps. This happened within a human lifetime ago. The bigoted and hateful rhetoric surrounding this time is at least as volatile as it was then. Do you really think they won’t do this again?

What Trumpists who embrace such policies have done is asked that violence be done to others so that they might prosper. Those who say “Hitler did some good things” are talking about this – uplifting one group of people by immiserating another. This won’t so much “uplift” Trump supporters, since the homeless and undocumented migrants don’t have much in the way of assets to seize, but they sure seem to think it’s going to get rid of crime or whatever. All that is required in turn is that you embody the conservative orthodoxy of white Christian America, and you pay your rent. Or else you’re getting your face eaten, too.

It’s Face-Eating All the Way Down

To any who relish in Trump supporters getting similarly punished by their own evil policies, perhaps under the classic internet mantle of “I never thought leopards would eat MY face!”, I should remind you that you, also, voted for the Leopards Eating Faces Party.

The LEFP isn’t Trump or conservative politics, it’s America writ large. It’s the empire.

For many of you, it was apparently fine for the US to do all these awful things to others either outside of American borders or to those within them deemed non-persons, or to, you know, those who were here before America even existed and whose entire world was destroyed so that America in its current form might exist. Even if it made you squeamish, even as you expressed regret or a desire for an end to the bloodshed, you accepted that, on some level, it needed to be done in order to maintain some aspect of the social order that you benefit from – that it wasn’t a deal breaker for such violence to be done as long as your life didn’t get disrupted. But once the empire is turned towards you and your god-given American freedoms, then it’s suddenly unacceptable.

Similarly, to those I see decrying the Muslim and Arab voters who, by whatever means, did not cast a vote for Kamala Harris, blaming them for inflicting Trump upon America, I feel like pointing out that 1) Trump won by a whole lot more than the total number of non-Kamala voters over Gaza, and 2) even if they were responsible, what they would have simply done is democratize the suffering that you were apparently willing to inflict upon Gazans. Now all of America, and, in time, perhaps the rest of the nations in the meta-American Capitalist Empire, gets to be brutalized by the Empire, just like so many others across the globe. You, nice respectable liberal voter, were apparently fine with the US inflicting war and violence on everyone else, as long as you get to keep your “civil rights”. Well, now you’re in it with the rest of the world. Maybe you’ll do something about it finally? Of course, many of these people are already succumbing to the politics of punishment as they revel in the idea of these Muslims being persecuted and deported under Trump. We must resist this temptation to Schadenfreude. Fighting amongst ourselves is how autocrats maintain control.

I, myself, don’t want to relish in the immiseration of any of these citizens of the Imperial core – before long, it’s going to be me under that boot, too, for one thing. I don’t want any violence to be done. Not to me, not to someone else in my place, not to my hated enemies who themselves wish for violence to be done to me.

I would prefer a world where the state is not doing violence to people, thank you.

A nice, liberal order of civil rights is fundamentally built on a lie if it comes at the expense of doing violence for the empire. We shouldn’t wish that we might go to heaven by sending others to hell. We shouldn’t want to live in the liebenstraub community outside of Auschwitz. We shouldn’t wish to dance at a music festival next to a concentration camp. Had Kamala won and the American liberal order continued as it had, the empire’s violence would have also continued exactly as it had before. Gaza would have continued to be bombed, the borders would still be closed to the swathes of desperate climate refugees, and the merciless American economic system would have continued to grind the impoverished into dust. And liberals would have celebrated because “American Freedoms” would be maintained.

Change Your Heart or Die

Like many trans people, both in the States and in Canada, I have found myself fearful of the real possibility of a conservative government deciding it no longer recognizes trans identities. That they might stop issuing government ID that reflects trans people’s gender, or, like Texas, even start retroactively changing their gender marker on their government files and identification. As depressing as it is to think of social progress back peddling like that and the liberal social order that transitioning temporarily allowed me to believe in becoming unraveled, I try to remember that a state willing and capable of doing that to its citizens is nothing to be invested in. That a state that was fundamentally built on genocide and enslavement, both past and present, would do that to its citizens, wouldn’t it? If our social order is built on lies and oppression, then being excluded from it, as precarious and frightening as it might be, is practically a badge of honor. I don’t want to be a member of a privileged in-group at the expense of a tortured out-group. I already spent all of high-school eating lunch with the outcast kids, so if we’re casting people out, then I’m once again eating lunch with the outcasts. That’s what the Jesus that so many people claim to believe in did. But I guess I missed the part of the sermon where he said “Nah, fuck those people. Only my homies get fishes and loaves.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.”

“All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.

“And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t feel the same.”

I don’t write these things to shame anyone. I don’t wish to trade in fear and division… unlike some people. My hope for this awful moment, where the violence of the empire is looking set to turn inward to a far greater degree than most of us have experienced in our lifetimes, is that it eventually leads us to abandon imperial violence altogether, and free not just ourselves, but all people across the globe who’ve been trapped under that same boot. The brutal treatment we are forced to authorize be dished out to our fellow human beings is dehumanizing – both to them and to us. To dehumanize another is to dehumanize yourself. You stray further from your humanity the more you are willing to harm somebody, and the less you think of them as worthy of existence. To be forced to look at this brutality seriously may force us to see our fellow human beings in a new light, and to see ourselves in a new light, as well.

If we end the Politics of Punishment, and cease to inflict harm upon our neighbors, we may find we no longer feel the same, fearful way towards them that we used to.

Whew! This was a long-ass article to write, and it took a considerable amount of time to produce. If you get value from my works, and you have the means to do so, please consider supporting me on patreon.com/lifeofbria or sending me a tip on ko-fi.com/lifeofbria

If you have followed me for any amount of time, you know the deep love I have for martial arts.

As a pre-adolescent, I was obsessed with ninjas, but it wasn’t until I turned 13 and started going to high-school in the big-scary-next-town-over that I decided to follow in my big sibling’s footsteps and enroll in Karate classes at our little island’s local Shotokan Karate club, which ran out of the elementary school’s gymnasium. I instantly fell in love with Karate, and shortly afterwards I also started private Sil Lum Kung-fu lessons with the local glasses shop owner. By age 15, I was helping to teach students at the club, and by the end of my teens, I was making money on the side running Karate Summer Camps for kids and teaching at my sensei’s other dojo in that big-scary-next-town-over.

Then I went away to Art School in Vancouver and didn’t have much time or money for formal training with a dojo, so I just kept training on my own. Here and there I would find myself teaching karate, such as when I was volunteering in Nepal and I taught karate classes of literally hundreds of students at a time in a village outside of Kathmandu. Later on in my 20’s, after my bout with cancer and I found myself training more actively to rebuild myself, I got a job teaching at what was essentially what many would call a “McDojo” – a chain of commercialized martial arts schools with a poor reputation and dubious traditional pedigree. I didn’t care, I was just happy to be teaching martial arts.

It was when I was laid off from that job that I began pursuing art as a career more seriously, and once again I found myself with little time/money to train in an organized manner, and I certainly wasn’t interested in working as a teacher when I had a big exciting art career to focus on 😉

But I never stopped training – except for a couple of years there – and I never stopped thinking martial arts are cool as hell.

Flash forward to around this time in 2023, my friend from art school and former colleague at the McDojo, sensei Kyle Duske, reached out to ask if I would be interested in teaching once again. His dojo, Kumakai (“Bear Society”), was set to take over a large Kyokushin ryu dojo out at UBC and they needed more instructors to help cover the large classes. Naturally, I said yes.

Kyle sensei also hired me to draw up this animal mascot for the club – of our four mythical animals, The Fire Bear.

I have now been teaching at Kumakai for almost a year, and in 2025 I will be teaching classes all on my own!

Karate used to be a thing that I thought was a coping mechanism for my life in the closet – an “alternate masculinity” that I could hide in. I thought after I transitioned that maybe I needed to let it fade into the background and allow myself to explore other things. I think I needed to spend some time away from karate in order to understand just how important it was to me. Today I understand that Karate is an integral part of who I am, even going so far as to half-jokingly say that Karate is my Gender (maybe more on that another day).

So if you live in Vancouver and are interested in learning some martial arts, why not head out to the Wesbrook Community Centre or to our dojo at the Vancouver Mind-Body Centre to train with yours-truly at Kumakai?

Or if you are a martial artist passing through town, we’d love to have you for a drop-in guest training session.

I am also thinking that I may perhaps create my own little club.

Over the Summer I ran a seminar at CampOut!, the 2SLGBTQIA+ youth Summer camp, called “Buff Aunt Bria’s Real Ultimate Karate Club“, and I’m thinking I might bring that out into the world outside of camp. I think a queer/trans community martial arts club might just be what this city needs. I could also put up aspects of our training online.

What would you think about that?