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 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.
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.
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?
I struggle to find my words.
I have been sitting with a deep dread in the pit of my stomach since Tuesday night that has only gotten more intense with each day after.
This election is a pivotal moment in human history that is going to have long lasting, global consequences.
There’s a lot of blame being thrown around. People are angry at those who didn’t vote, or those who voted third party, and even at those who held their nose and voted for Kamala Harris but weren’t publicly enthusiastic enough leading up to election day (gross).
For my part, I am sickened and flabbergasted by the hapless normie Canadians around me, acting as though we are entirely separate from what has happened in the US.
As though the insane policies that Trump says he will enact won’t affect us here.
As though we won’t have to watch as millions of people are brutalized and immiserated.
As though we don’t have our own version of Trumpists up here who are watching and learning and already employing the same methods.
It’s a scary time to be anything other than the in-group right now. We have not only witnessed the rise of a truly evil political movement in the last decade, but also the very public failure of the people and institutions that were supposed to protect us.
But, as I said in my previous post on Monday, THEY chose this.
The liberal politicians who claim to stand against injustice, who insisted that they were what stood between freedom and fascism, ran a campaign that appealed to nobody. They continued the unpopular status-quo policies that caused so many people to be tempted by the honeyed lies told by Trump, and many more people to feel like it just didn’t matter to show up. If this truly was the last, most important-est election ever, they sure didn’t run like it.
It’s easy to feel alone right now. Like there’s no adults in the room. Like nobody is going to save you. Like it’s just you against a big, scary, unstoppable world that has it out for you.
But the one thing that has helped me during this time has been simply talking and spending time with friends. Even if we don’t have any concrete answers for one another, just being in another’s presence allows us to feel like someone has your back.
This is going to become increasingly necessary for survival, especially if you are a member of a marginalized group currently on the hit-list of Project 2025. Truly, it was always necessary to our survival. But just as the liberal welfare state post-World War II was a temporary oasis that was always doomed to be dismantled by greedy capitalists once they no longer had to placate an entire generation of veterans returning from Europe and the Pacific, that world’s atomized, individualistic mindset was also a temporary illusion.
The world many of us grew up in no longer exists, and while the future is a foreign land, it may also mark a return to the tried and true survival strategies of our true human nature. Not the false “human nature” that capitalists use to justify greed and exploitation, but the actual observed ways that humans survived both in the past and still today. Humans survived and thrived not just because we were capable of making tools or inflicting violence, but because we banded together and cared for one another. There is all manner of archaeological evidence that prehistoric humans cared for the elderly, the chronically ill, and the disabled. Contrary to survivalist fantasies, one human alone cannot survive in the wilderness. There is a reason why the most common form of severe punishment found past societies and in present day hunter-gatherer cultures isn’t execution, but banishment. By necessity, cultures and societies of the past were far more communal than ours is today. While this could often come with restrictive orthodoxies imposed by the group upon the individual, particularly once patriarchal religion was introduced into the power structure, it also meant the individual often didn’t have to face any significant challenge alone. That has increasingly been discouraged as the capitalist order took hold – it’s easier to control workers with no support, and there’s more money to be made off every individual person paying for single serving survival needs.
In my own experience, nothing is truly difficult if you don’t have to face it alone. Errand buddies, work parties (meaning parties where you get together with friends to accomplish a task, not “parties” at your workplace), and body doubling (no, not like in Dragonball Z) all make difficult things so much easier and less stressful. All of us – but trans femmes, BIPOC, and newcomers, in particular – are going to need to be there for one another in the coming years. If we are going to survive, it is going to be through mutual support networks and showing up for one another. Even if we can only offer meager support, even if we can’t fix the system or solve all of each other’s problems, our world will be that much more bearable, the fear in the pit of our stomachs that much less overwhelming if we aren’t alone. Voice or video calls are great, too, but in-person is better.
And if, like a great many people these days, you don’t have friends, in most places there are all manner of clubs, unions, and societies that can be opportunities for connection – many of which are engaged in charity and mutual aid already.
Even before this election, I firmly believed that the key to expanding trans acceptance in society lies in our participation in the world. If people can meet and see a trans person as just another human being who shares common interests and goals with them, then it becomes that much harder for them to believe the lies that are told about us, because they know a real, live human being.
Which brings me back to the blame slinging. I think it is important to resist narratives that lie in blaming our fellow citizens and voters. If you look at the turnout, Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020, it’s just that Kamala got even fewer still. Most people don’t even seem aware of what Donald Trump is actually talking about doing. Hell, a large number of people apparently were so checked out that they didn’t even know Joe Biden had dropped out of the election until November! You can call that privileged, but given how many of them will also suffer under Trump, I might call it terminally distracted by a system designed to do just that.
While it is true that there are a disturbingly large number of either cruel or indifferent people who outwardly support what Donald Trump says he’s going to do, so long as they see themselves as benefiting from it, I still believe that most people are fundamentally good. Most people don’t *want* to do “evil”. 60% or Americans were polled as supporting mass deportation, but 60% of Americans ALSO polled as supporting mass amnesty for Dreamers. This tells us that many people just do not understand what they have voted for, and what this terror regime will look like. However you might feel about this level of ignorance or apathy, these people make up our communities. They will be facing many of the same hardships as us, and those hardships will not be made easier by giving in to a narrative of division. I’m not saying that we need to come together with nazis – I’m saying we need to be open to regular people being woken up by their situation and learning from their mistakes. We are not going to get through this by fighting against one another AND an oppressive system. The system is the enemy, and our fellow citizens are its victims as well, even if they don’t realize it, yet. The blame is and must always be on the nazis, and the coward liberals who decided they’d rather compromise with them than resist them. If the way to survive the next few years will be in trusted networks of mutual support, then the long term way to defeat our oppressors will be in a broad coalition of regular people who want change. They can mutate society into a fucked up nazi vision of universal competition, but we can build our own parallel societies of trust and cooperation. You don’t HAVE to buy into their fake delusions about what we are and how we should live our lives.
As an introvert, alone time is basically a requirement for me. But these days I’m feeling like what I need more is to not be alone with my thoughts and fears so much. I know that in the coming era I am going to be making a point of opening my home up and spending a great deal more time with my friends and loved ones.
Because whatever happens in the future, it won’t be so scary when you’re not alone, because you’ll be with your friends.
Bria’s Note: A lot of this entry was written before that fancy new poll came out the other day and made everyone way less freaked out about the whole “maybe the most powerful nation on earth is gonna re-elect the fascist’ thing, but I stand by what I have written here. Also, I’ll try to chill a bit in next week’s post – but I mean, c’mon, these are political comics, I’m gonna rant about heavy stuff from time to time!
Today’s comic comes on the eve of what is perhaps the scariest US election any of us has ever had to live through. The US presidential election has global consequences, to the point of being potentially apocalyptic, and those of us living outside of those benighted borders can’t help but look on in grim and terrified anticipation. For trans people and immigrants living within US borders, the potential outcome could mean life or death.
I remember well the awful feeling of waking up in 2016 and learning that the unthinkable had happened, and Donald Trump had been elected. But then, I had also thought in my teenage punk rock anarchist bubble that it would be unthinkable for the US to re-elect the bigoted, idiot, warmonger, George W. Bush, and yet they did – with the popular vote, no less.
I also remember well the fear that Trump would, despite all the awful things he did, be re-elected in 2020, as
well as the hollow sense of relief when he was defeated by Joe Biden on an uninspiring platform of “Back to Normal”.
Somehow in 2024 we yet again find ourselves in the same place, fearful that somehow, despite all of his obvious flaws and crimes he’s committed and all of the people who absolutely loath him, America will once again elect the worst man on Earth to its highest office.
How did we get here? How is it that this man who praises Hitler and promises the emmiseration of tens of millions of people, who is openly pathologically selfish and has an extensive history of scamming people and shorting workers, who quite clearly is mentally declining to a similar degree to the old man who was already forced out of the race, and who has 34 criminal indictments against him, including for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, how is it that somehow he is in a near 50/50 split race for the most powerful office on Earth?
There is absolutely no excuse for this race to be this close.
It is sad that apparently America really is that racist that so many people are willing to vote for Trump, but it is even more sad that the Democrats are so unwilling to offer anything to people to convince them that voting for a Democrat even means anything. Kamala Harris enjoyed a brief boost to her popularity when she entered the race, purely on the optics of her not being an old white man too senile to debate an almost equally senile old orange man, and then another when she picked Tim Waltz, the friendly woke football coach, as her vice-presidential candidate. But ever since then, at every turn she has undercut any possibility that she will do anything to actually address people’s needs. She has adopted Republican framing and positions on immigration and the border (including building the border wall that Donald Trump was ridiculed and rightfully called a racist for campaigning on in 2016), she has made no indication that she will be different from Joe Biden’s completely permissive stance on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and aggression towards Lebanon and now Iran, she has done very little to message how she will address the affordability crisis, and she has been completely non-committal on actually doing anything to tangibly protect reproductive and transgender rights. All she really ever does is gesture to how bad Donald Trump would be without really saying much about what she would do instead. And when she does, terms like “Opportunity Economy” and “Most Lethal Fighting Force in the World” are what get thrown around instead of obviously popular things like “Ending Price Gouging” (mentioned, like, twice?), “Enshrining Roe V. Wade into Law” (weirdly not promised?), or “Medicare For All” (disavowed). Despite being the first Black-Indian and first woman president of the US, if elected, Kamala Harris doesn’t seem like she will be anything beyond the current status quo, which is to say, awful for a great many people. Poverty and servitude at home, imperial destruction abroad. No, instead of offering real change to win over the very large numbers of disaffected people who either don’t see Democrats as being able to help their day to day struggles or those who can’t in good conscience vote for the party currently aiding a genocide, her campaign has been entirely directed towards trying to win over a small group of conservatives who don’t like the optics of Donald Trump. Picking up such voters doesn’t require Democrats to offer anything that would upset the status quo or the corporate donors who back the party.
They only want to win a certain way.
If Donald Trump wins, many Democrats and Democratic donors will still keep on being rich. They see their own lives and status being somewhat protected even as Trump punishes his enemies and tortures those deemed undesirable by conservative culture. But if broad sweeping change happens to the housing market or to worker’s ability to collectively bargain, or people’s ability to have social mobility, or if the vote bargaining chip that is the precarity of abortion access were to be taken off the future campaign issue list, then their lives might change! Their donors might get upset, and the elite’s stranglehold on power might be challenged in some small way!
So they only want to win a certain way. They only want to win in such a way that they get to keep on doing all the shitty little Neo-liberal non-solutions they offer instead of actually fixing anything. They only want to win by shifting their voter roster to people they don’t really have to do anything for other than scare with the threat of what the alternative might be.
And they are fine with losing if they can’t get that.
If Donald Trump wins in 2024, it will indeed be a dark day for the United States, and for the planet Earth. It will not only likely plunge the USA into a cruel(er), (more) authoritarian state, but set the precedent for conservatives in Canada and other “Western Democracies” to follow suit in their political stances and tactics.
But, in truth, we are already living in a grim precedent of political tactics. How many times have we been told this is “the most important election of our lives”? Why is it in just about every election, Canadian and American, from the national down to the state/provincial, every single time we are given the choice of either an ineffective liberal who offers nothing to nobody and who represents all of the worst aspects of the system, or a right wing psycho who promises to destroy millions of people’s lives while otherwise also offering nothing to nobody? Every single time we are told to suck it up, swallow our pride or our desire for a truly better world, and vote for a piece of shit whom we hate and who will enable the continuation of all the things currently sucking the life out of us, or else we will face the threat of the evil ogre who will come in and wreck everything.
Also every single time, we are chastised for even slightly criticizing the good, nice liberal protecting us from the conservative ogre. We are admonished for demanding they actually do something or for suggesting that maybe we could vote for another party that might offer us something more. How dare you attack them during the most important election ever? Don’t you know that this shitty liberal is our best chance of defeating the evil conservative ogre who will ruin everything? Never mind that it’s basically always an election, since election season begins, like, two years before the date, and there’s midterms and by-elections in the meantime. Much like right after one of America’s daily school shootings, it’s never the right time to criticize the shitty liberal.
So we keep voting for the shitty guy instead of the even shittier guy, all the while, things get progressively shittier, culture and politics gets ratcheted rightwards, and nothing is done to address those existential problems facing us, like Climate Change.
If every single election you MUST vote for a specific party, and you aren’t allowed to ever criticize the party or demand they change policy or do better, or else face the threat of tyranny, oppression, and violence, that already sounds like tyranny with extra steps.
Liberals, and the corporations who fund both them and conservatives, benefit from an unhinged right wing. They get to wield one wing of politics like a stick, getting the donkey (that’s us, not the Democrats, they don’t deserve to claim donkeys) to work, while the other wing of politics is the even bigger stick they keep around for when we get out of hand. They don’t ever have to inconvenience themselves or their donors by actually helping us or giving us anything, because they can always scare us into supporting them. So the corporations get to carry on their merry little way, plundering the earth, and immiserating us in slower motion.
So where am I going with this? I dunno, I think this is just something every person living in a “democracy” needs to be keenly aware of going forward, regardless of who wins tomorrow.
Should Kamala Harris win, what then? We all breathe a sigh of relief and go to sleep while she continues all the worst parts of the current system while enacting new, bad things to satisfy the conservatives she’s chosen to cater to? So many said they would push Joe Biden leftwards after he was elected. How did that work out?
How did that work out for Gaza?
And Joe frankly signaled and acted out far more left-leaning and pro-labour policies than Kamala has. No, if anything, what the Harris campaign is trying to show with this election is that they can win by disregarding the Left. They can pick up all the suburban conservative votes they need in a handful of swing states by offering them what essentially amounts to Bush era Neo-conservatism. Not voting or voting third party will be even more fully nullified as a “protest” vote, they’ll never have to listen to the Left again, and they’ll never have to give the working class anything again.
The NDP in my province just did this in our recent election. In what is supposedly the most progressive part of Canada, and in a system that is not two party, our last election went basically 50/50 between the newly reformed provincial Conservative party who are every bit as MAGA as the US Republicans and who didn’t even really exist until a few months before the election, and the NDP, the supposedly left-of-centre party whose origins lie in fighting for public healthcare and worker’s rights, but these days governs more like our
federal Liberal party or the US Democrats. The NDP has increasingly moved rightwards over the years as the old provincial Liberal party slowly Brundlefly’d into the Conservatives. They now focus exclusively on the needs of wealthy property owners and resource extraction companies. They ran a campaign focused entirely on how bad the Conservative are (and, sure, like Trump, they really are that bad) while implementing policies once only proposed by conservatives, such as mandatory rehab treatment for drug users (i.e. locking people up). They barely skated by this election but showed they could win by only catering to a certain kind of well to do liberal who is turned off by the boorish antics of MAGA conservatives. They’ll most likely continue to skate by, giving nothing to help anybody struggling, building up more and more resentment against them among the rural working class who see their material circumstances declining. Meanwhile, conservatives whip their rural stooges into hate-filled frenzies over trans healthcare and sex education in schools, and blame their worsening conditions on carbon taxes and climate refugees. Can the conservatives ever win in BC by stoking hatred in the hinterlands? Maybe. Maybe not. But as long they are too rude or crazy for a certain kind of petty bourgeois voter, then the NDP can depend on those well-to-do types to vote for them to secure their material interests without having to appear as being a bigoted yahoo. Yes, the Green Party took two seats – a huge downgrade from their position last election, their party leader even losing her seat – which means they could hold some control over the balance of power, preventing either the Conservatives or NDP from enacting some of their worst policies. But people’s fears over the Conservatives encouraged “strategic voting”, so the Greens lost a ton of progress they had made in recent years, despite launching one of the best and most thorough party platforms I have ever seen. I hope in the future more voters become willing to give the Greens a chance, but for now the shitty establishment liberals get to continue not helping anybody but their wealthy constituents and corporate backers, laughing all the way to the bank.
So that’s what we get to look forward to with a ‘win’ by the shitty liberals.
Of course, if Donald Trump wins, may god have mercy on us all. A whole lot of people are going to suffer if he does, and his victory may very well signal the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.
And, like, I don’t want to be an accelerationist, but a big part of me these days wonders if maybe that’s what has to happen? Maybe nothing real is going to change until things actually get bad? Nobody ever risks anything or does anything drastic unless they are forced to. Understandably, nobody wants to sacrifice themself for a cause if they don’t have to. Maybe the status quo needs to be so destructively upset that people are forced to demand drastic change, or take matters into their own hands and remake society out of the ashes of the old? Like finally finding the will to exercise and look after your health after your first heart attack. But, unlike exercise, which is fun and cool, this would no doubt be a terrible and harrowing time to live through, with trans and queer people at the very tip of the spear, and I do not wish for it even as I fearfully ponder if it may be necessary. But if this were the case, and nothing would ever get better until a big drastic change borne out of a crisis happened, would you want to live your entire life under an increasingly soul crushing system if it meant avoiding the upheaval? Would you be willing to adopt the politics of “Do it to Julia” and go along with the destruction of others if it meant your own status within the system were preserved?
I suppose more than anything, this kind of musing is cope in the face of a terrifying and more tangible possibility like Donald Trump winning. Nobody should be wishing or hoping for these things, but perhaps it’s better to think about how to face catastrophes in a manner that elevates our society rather than degrades it.
All I can say is that, if this is the best that our current system can offer us, if the choice is more of the same or the destruction of Western Democracy, then I’m not surprised so many people are flirting with the idea of destroying Western Democracy.
Gosh! That sure was a lot of words, on top of drawing a comic, too! Consider supporting my work on Patreon and gain access to comics and videos in advance, behind the scenes material, and hang out with me on the Life of Bria Discord!
I have mentioned previously that I had illustrated a couple of coloring books in the past year. My second book, Slayer Maidens, came out in June of 2024, but it was borne out of years of conceptual development.
Many of the book’s illustrations were based on my art series, “Lady Dino Knights”, which occupied much of my drawing time in 2022 and 2023. But those dino knights themselves were based off of my world building sketches and notes for my uncompleted graphic novel, Starfist Gemini.
Starfist takes place on Tyrant-221, one of many moons orbiting a distant gas giant exoplanet. This planetoid is populated by extraterrestrial dinosaurs, including intelligent humanoid saurians who had built a longstanding and technologically advanced civilization. Starfist is the story of the arrival of humans on Tyrant and its consequences, but Slayer Maidens depicts that world’s future. A world where humans and dinosaurs have fully integrated, and where peace and justice are maintained by the brave wayward warriors of the Dino Knight Core! There are settings and characters and creatures I envisioned in my notes that I brought to life in both the original Dino Knight illustrations and the coloring book pages that followed.
It was also an excellent opportunity to make use of my many excellent dinosaur reference models, including my homemade ones
I’ll close this post with a sample of the book. Feel free to download and color these pages below, either digitally or printing them out and coloring them like a coloring book.
And if you really like them or if you just want to help support me, you can pick up a copy of Slayer Maidens on Amazon – I make a very modest royalty from every copy sold.
(Or my other coloring book, Ultimate Dinosaur coloring #1!)
Of course, royalties take a while to add up, so if you really want to support me, I recommend signing up to a monthly donation on my Patreon
Or if that’s too much of a commitment right now, you can give me a one-time donation on Ko-fi.
Since starting up the blog I’ve been spending some time this week cleaning up the website, fixing links, and archiving old comics that never got an archive page. What I’ve learned doing this is that memory is a tricky thing.
In my previous posts, I talked about becoming burned out. This most certainly happened, but my recollection of how it happened is skewed. It was skewed by burnout itself – and the depression that followed it.
In my mind, I got fully burned out on comics at the end of 2020. But going through and archiving my old comics, I see that I was making comics steadily for most of 2021, which is kind of incredible because I was doing a ton of other stuff in 2021, such as making this goofy homebrew Power Rangers video. It wasn’t until 2022 that I truly slowed down on comics, but that had more to do with physical health issues than anything else!
2022 was a real low point for me. I was suffering from joint pain all throughout my body, from the top of my neck all the way into my fingers and toes. Just holding a pen or stylus hurt and I seriously questioned my future as an artist, and consequently whether I had any future at all.
I think, in my mind I stopped comics in 2021 because that served the narrative that “Depression Brain” would have me believe in. “Depression Brain” is a state that I have observed in myself and numerous others where we frame everything in the least flattering manner, where we shoot down any suggestions or attempts to help, and where everything is bad, has always been bad, and always will be bad. In my mind I had built up my lapse in routine comics uploads far longer than I had because that would reinforce the narrative that I was a failure or that my situation was hopeless.
But going through my old comics not only showed me that the narrative that I gave up on comics in 2021 wasn’t true, but it also got me going back through my old art from this era of supposed reduced productivity. Some of it I posted to social media, but much of it I did not.
I find it amazing that I evidently continued to make art despite dealing with many other challenges during this time.
Here are some of my digital works that I think are of quality. They would have been sketched on my couch during some afternoon with my beautiful partner.
This is by no means every digital piece of mine from the 2022-2023 era, but also not shown are the pages and pages of sketches and art pieces I made in the real world, as well as my many other art obsessions from this time period, such as my custom pens and the posable art models I built.
Like I said in my previous posts, I was constantly drawing and creating, but it was posting that I truly lost confidence in. And that loss of confidence poisoned my mind and skewed my view of just how much I accomplished even when I wasn’t feeling my best.
So hopefully this reminds you to look at your perception of things and give yourself credit for anything your Depression Brain has selectively edited out of your recollection to serve its twisted narrative.
[This is a long read, but an important one. Not all my blog posts will be like this, I swear. No matter where you stand on this matter, I hope you will read it in full with a sincere and open heart, just as I have written these words with a sincere and open heart and with nothing but positive regard for whomever may read them.]
In my previous post, I briefly touched on my feeling of making comics not mattering anymore.
That feeling was informed by many things, so many increasing injustices and blatant hypocrisies. Outright lies being told in public by the likes of news personalities, pundits, politicians, and billionaires. Ever-increasing poverty and inequality, bigotry and xenophobia. Literal fascists running for office and even being elected in some places. The creeping stranglehold of tech companies over public discourse and the creative professions. But not the least was the genocides being committed right out in the open.
My comics were at one time singularly dedicated to combating injustice and standing for what I believed in – which is the dignity and autonomy of all conscious beings. Sure, most of them ended up being about transphobia, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to touch on other issues affecting the world, and I think I always aspired to take on other issues more and more as time went on.
But, to my shame, I never commented on Gaza. For a long time I didn’t feel like it was my right to speak on it, nor was it worth the hornets nest it would likely invoke if I did.
But in order for me to feel like comics matter again, like I have any right to speak on other issues that sting closer to home for me, like I deserve to make my living doing what I love in the name of justice and my most cherished beliefs, I need to speak on the 21st Century Holocaust happening before us.
Not only happening before us as though we are mere onlookers, but being funded by our tax dollars, cheered on by our elected officials, and supported of the greatest military super power on Earth, all while western news media presents it as a war between equal foes – one side righteous, the other barbaric – rather than calling it what it is: ongoing settler-colonial imperialist aggression against a displaced people who barely possess the means to fight back in any serious manner.
There is no two ways about it: what is happening in Palestine is atrocious. It is unacceptable. It is a genocide.
The civilian death toll is massive – upwards of 100,000 at this point. The majority of the victims are women and children. The stories of death, mutilation, and general human misery are beyond harrowing. The cruel and inhuman tactics used by the IDF read like those of a science fiction villain – things such as snipers shooting children to lure first responders to cluster around them and thus fall easy prey to a bomb, or playing children’s cries and screams out of drones to lure out victims for the drone’s missiles and gunfire, or using an AI (called “Where’s Daddy”) to track individual’s daily (and often incidental) physical proximity to “suspected terrorists” in order to sign-off on bombing the apartment buildings they live in as they sleep next to their wives and children. Just about every single hospital and university in Gaza has been destroyed. Doctors, journalists, and international aid workers are being murdered, and Western physicians returning from Gaza report extensive evidence of routine direct, intentional murder of small children by Israeli snipers. Israel recently had it’s own “January 6th” style riot, that was enacted in defence of Israeli rape and torture prisons that hold untold numbers of Palestinians civilians. The primary defender of institutional rape of Palestinian prisoners is now a prominent media celebrity.
I firmly believe that what is happening in Gaza is the worst thing happening on Earth at this moment, but unfortunately, it most likely only sets the precedent for greater still atrocities lying ahead for us this century.
Throughout the years during this ongoing destruction of the Palestinian people by Israel’s settler-colonial project, we in the west have always seen Israel portrayed as a lone beacon of democracy and tolerance amidst the barbaric swathes of Muslim nations, who ruled by authoritarianism and persecuted women, non-Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
The comic above was inspired by a particular instance relatively near the beginning of the most recent Israeli military campaign of destruction in response to October 7th. An IDF soldier raised up a pride flag amidst the destroyed rubble of Palestinian homes, proclaiming to be raising it in the name of love after having “liberated” the land and making it “safe” for LGBTQ+ people.
Frequently, queer people who support the Palestinian cause are ridiculed for supporting those who would “throw you off a roof top”. As though we should be in support of a genocide because it’s happening to people who don’t like us?
In truth, Israel is no protector of LGBTQ+ Palestinians. If you are queer in Palestine, and the IDF finds out, they will blackmail you into becoming an informant for them under pain of revealing your identity to those in Palestine who are against such things. If you ask most queer Palestinians, or Lebanese queers for that matter, they will tell you that the primary threat they are concerned about is the IDF blowing them up rather than the religious bigots among the ranks of those fighting against their oppressor.
Never mind that Israel itself doesn’t allow gay marriages to be performed within its borders and has increasingly moved in a right wing theocratic direction that is against the existence of queer people in Israeli society (I know multiple Israeli trans women who want nothing to do with their home country in no small part due to how they were treated there). Or that Israel’s biggest backers are the Christian fundamentalists attacking queer people over here in North America, and who Israel props up in turn.
But even if Israel were a queer paradise, no matter how many pride parades happen in Tel Aviv, I will never be OK with a genocide, with a colonial occupation, with an apartheid state being defended by invoking the name of my people. We will not be your human shields for committing war crimes. You will not brutalize and immiserate the Palestinian people in our name.
I have many Jewish and Israeli friends and readers. I know how deeply the feelings on this matter run. I know the fear many Jews around the world have about ever-increasing antisemitism. I know how the rhetoric around us spins this issue into being a matter of either supporting Israel or antisemitism. Of any support for the Palestinian cause or criticisms of Israel as tantamount to being a nazi. Of speaking against one holocaust being an endorsement for another.
To any of my friends or readers concerned or hurt or offended by the comic above or to the stance I’ve taken here, if you are afraid that my distaste for the destruction of an entire people means I have joined the ranks of the anti-semites, I will quote an Israeli friend of mine whom I greatly respect and admire, “I love everyone from everywhere.”
I don’t want anybody to die. I want Israelis to live in peace, just as I want the Palestinians to live in peace.
No serious person I’ve known who supports the Palestinian cause does so out of a hatred for Jews or a desire to see Jews harmed or ethnically cleansed from the land of Israel. I hope I don’t have to point out the many brave Jews – many of whom are also queer – at the forefront of pro-Palestinian activism, protests, and scholarship. I also hope I don’t have to point out that every First Nations leader I’ve seen publicly speak on the matter did so in unequivocal support of the Palestinian cause – people who know a thing or two about colonization, oppression, and genocide. Global opinion is not on the side of Zionism. All over the world, essentially everywhere besides Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe, people are appalled by what Israel is doing, and even within those nations is a broad disgust with what is happening – with 100’s of thousands of people showing up at some protests. But since Israel serves as an outpost of the West in a strategically important location, and also because to condemn the Israeli settler project is to lay bare the genocidal basis of our own societies, our government and news media continues to frame Israel as justified and any objection to that as stemming from antisemitism.
To any who are still unconvinced of my motives in my criticism of the Israeli state, or who are incensed by my comparison of Gaza to the Holocaust, I want to remind you that my people were there, too.
It has been proven in German court of law that trans women were in Auschwitz. Those infamous photos of nazis burning books? They were books on trans and queer people from the Berlin Institute on Sexuality, and in the wake of that burning, they hunted down and killed all the trans people in the institute’s patient records. Their hatred of us is entwined with their hatred of Jews, for they claimed then just as they claim now that the Jews are somehow behind the existence of queers, in some scheme to undermine Christian civilization. We were put in the camps even before the Jewish people were, but the difference was, once the camps were liberated and their surviving inmates freed, those with the pink triangle on their uniform were not. They were put into “regular” prisons for the “crime” of “homosexuality”.
So make no mistake, we are in this together, Jews and Queers. There is no world where the nazis only come for one of us. When they come for us, like they are coming for us right now, they will come for you, too. Of course, these days I can’t help but notice that many of the nazis we have today like to insist they like “Real Jews” – meaning the religiously conservative ones who support Israel. With the “Fake Jews” being the Marxist ones who care about social justice and who made the queers happen. But how long before they turn those sights of theirs upon the so-called “Real” ones?
There is so much more I could say, but I will finish with where I started: with my loss of hope.
It is so easy, in the daunting face of all the horrific calamities and challenges laying before us, to feel utterly helpless. Like nothing we do can possibly matter, so why do anything at all? But even as I myself so frequently fall into this trap, one thing I am continually struck by is how, amidst the destruction, horror, and tragedy surrounding them, the Palestinian people continue to pray.
These people who have had everything taken from them: their land, their homes, their families, their culture, their dignity. They’ve been scattered to the four winds time and time again, only to be bombed and terrorized at every new “safe zone” they reach. They’ve lived their entire lives inside an open air concentration camp, being tormented daily by sneering zealots who are so utterly self-assured in their own righteousness that they post their war crimes to Tik Tok, and who are funded and cheered on by the most powerful nations in the world. These people who by all accounts should spit in God’s face for the hell they are living within the so-called “Holy Land”, they continue to sing praises to Allah. Of how good he is, how he is just and fair.
I am neither a Muslim nor a believer in any deity that interferes in our physical world, but if these people can still have faith, then perhaps I can, too. Faith doesn’t have to be in any specific thing. It can simply be faith in faith. You don’t have to know exactly what it is, or how to get it, you just have to keep faith that somewhere out there, there is goodness somewhere in the world. Faith that all your struggles will be worthwhile, and that justice prevails in the end.
Free Palestine.
– Bria
I’ve been in a weird place for a long time.
When I started this comic site back in 2015, I was just starting out in transition and making a fresh new beginning in life. I was going through a lot of big life changes and dealing with some heavy emotions, and the way I worked through those feelings was making comics.
But once I got a bit of a following online, I suddenly was under a whole new level of scrutiny, and I no longer felt like I could actually work through my stuff in the same way I used to. Combine that with increasing political ennui as a result of seeing the worst people continue to gain traction in society despite all the work done by people like myself pointing out their hypocrisy and how they were harming others, as well as discouragement by the increasing enshitification of social media platforms for independent creators, I just didn’t feel like making comics mattered anymore.
Ever since around 2020 I’ve been in varying degrees of burnout. Finishing my horror story, She Never Came Out, and then my other non-horror graphic novel, Coming Out Again, shortly after, burned me out. But it wasn’t until I tried to do the follow-up to SNCO, The Urban Animal, that I got REALLY burned out, and just stopped drawing comics with any kind of regularity. You can maybe see from the content of those horror stories where my head was at. I still did quite a bit in those years, but I wasn’t the same me I used to be. I didn’t believe in myself or my art in the way I used to.
I also had some physical health issues in that time that I will talk about in a future post.
I’ve been working at all kinds of odd activities – from acting, to voiceover, to teaching karate, and running community programs in my local area. I have tried to be more open to doing a wide variety of things in the past few years. I needed to gain perspective on what mattered to me and why I do what I do.
And what I’ve learned is that making art and comics is my life.
It’s who I am.
I’ve never stopped drawing and creating in all this time, but I’ve posted extremely little of what I’ve created. I am deeply grateful for all of the people who have stuck by me and who continued to follow and support me, despite my lack of public activity.
Moving forward, I am going to be posting more. Maybe social media is a lost cause, who knows? But what I do know is that I still have my very own website where I can post basically whatever I want without fear of an algorithm crushing me. I’ll still put things on social media, but I want this currently long-neglected website to be where you can best find all things Bria. I have new comics coming, I have new art projects in development. My art is looking better than ever and I feel stronger and more vibrant than I have in years.
One new place you can follow me for updates is my BlueSky, which I made a while back but haven’t done anything with until now.
If you would like to support my work and keep me focused on making art to share, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or you can purchase one of my new coloring books, “Ultimate Dinosaur Coloring and Slayer Maidens.
(I have new coloring books in the works among my upcoming projects 😉 )
Expect more frequent updates, by all means watch my social media channels, but also maybe consider getting out of the social media sphere and spend more time on some good old fashioned websites!
This comic is indicative of my mental state – NO I am not befriending neo-nazis. I mean I sketched it up on a whim but then sat on it for over a week because I was unsure what to do with it, before accidentally posting it as a blog post when I meant to just make a web page for it. (don’t manage your website before coffee, kids!)
Art is my life, but I feel all my hard work isn’t being properly focused. This is why I am planning to finally get some help – NO I am not checking into a psych ward (though I probably should). I am planning to take on an assistant, somebody to help me in my studio and manage my page. I know I could be a lot more effective in my efforts if I had somebody backing me up and taking care of things that, frankly, I am not very good at. I’ll keep you posted about how this proceeds, and hopefully it will translate into things running more smoothly around here.
