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Within hours of her murder by ICE agents in Minneapolis and mere minutes of her identity being publicly reported, the most ghoulish figures in American politics set about diminishing the value of Renee Good’s life. Trump administration officials falsely dismissed her as a “domestic terrorist” who they also falsely claimed “violently, willfully, and maliciously ran over an ICE officer” and thus her murder was, in the words of Vice President J.D. Vance, “a tragedy of her own making.” Their acolytes on television and online wrote Good off as merely another liberal white woman “with pronouns in her bio” who “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.” The ICE officer who shot and killed Renee Good described her as a “fucking bitch” mere seconds after shooting her three times in the face.

Good’s wife, Becca Good, said in a statement to Minnesota Public Radio “Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow.” Good’s mother said “She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate.” Good, an award-winning poet, was described by a former professor as “incredibly warm with her peers, generous with their work, and was just a bright and engaging presence that made folks feel good.”

Those who wished to diminish, or even celebrate, Good’s murder are galling in their moral depravity, their unmitigated eagerness to lie about the circumstances of her death, and their desperation to turn an avoidable tragedy into yet another gleeful spectacle of shared enemies and open cruelty. Few have been as visible in this display as Vice President J.D. Vance, who, from the White House briefing room to his obnoxious presence on social media, has devoted hours and hours to lecturing the American people on why Renee Good simply deserved to die. Vance has elected to make himself the face of Good’s murder in part, I believe, because Good’s life—full of creative ambition, love lost and gained, and queer freedom—is anathema to Vance’s own narrow, rigid gender ideology. The goal of devaluing her life is consistent with his transparently psychosexual and coercive natalist politics and his frequent jeremiads about the breakdown of the patriarchal family. Vance’s target audience—the only audience capable of looking past his mealy-mouthed distortions and middle-management comportment—is bitter, terrified men delighted by any opportunity to enact revenge on a mythical gynocracy.

Let’s remember, after all, this is the same J.D. Vance who infamously warned of a society run by “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and want “to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance has previously proposed that people with children should get twice the voting power. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, could be read as the Moynihan Report of the white working class, blaming his family’s plight and pathologies not on systemic causes but on missing paternal authority and dominance. Alongside his Big Tech sponsors like Peter Thiel, Vance voraciously clamored for American women to have more children while supporting the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, with the Trump administration occasionally gesturing at carrots like baby bonds but largely relying on punitive measures against female professionals and social engineering designed to “masculinize” the American workforce. Vance criticized no-fault divorce, telling a group of Christian high school students in 2021:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear…maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

The ex-wife—defiant of a patriarchal dominance Vance and many conservatives assume to be their birthright—looms large as a figure of deviance and degeneracy. Regardless of the circumstances of her past and present marriage, Good has been cast as yet another defiant, entitled woman in part because what little we know of her life course suggests she benefited from the gains of feminists and queer rights as the ex-wife of a man, the wife of another woman. the queer mother of three children, and an accomplished poet. These facts alone are enough in the eyes of Vance’s or Watters’ audience to cast her as the byproduct of social changes which, they’ve assured their audience, are the source of their dispossession.

One could describe the United States in 2026 as a country of ex-wives ruled by a confederacy of aggrieved ex-husbands. mostly (but not entirely) men convinced they have been robbed of their masculine authority and restrained by the demands of others for equality and dignity, be they women like Good or the immigrants she and her wife were trying to defend from state violence. What Trump, Vance, and their acolytes promise is a return to the rule of power, a restoration of a mythical past in which might made right and challenges to that might were justly put down. Stephen Miller put it succinctly in a response to CNN’s Jake Tapper about whether the administration—following its disastrously brazen kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro—would make good on Trump’s many promises to capture Greenland:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time…We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

Though meant as a description of its foreign policy, it’s an apt description of the administration’s domestic policy. From its militarizing of American cities to its terrorizing of immigrant communities to its eugenic demolition of public health and public services, the Trump administration’s defining belief is in the inherent righteousness of the powerful over the weak. From this perspective, the do-good mentality of both liberals and the redistributive politics of the left are a perversion of an order that is presumed to be good and pure because it is natural, biological, or ordained by God. The crowds that stormed the Capitol on January 6 were wrongfully persecuted in the eyes of the administration because they were defending this order; Renee Good is being cast as guilty not because of the direction of her car tires or he state of mind of the ICE officer who killed her, but because she defied that order.

She defied that order when she and her wife stopped on that street to show solidarity with her immigrant neighbors. She defied that order when she pursued a life of her own, a creative life, outside of but not exclusive to her role as a mother. And she defied that order in the ways so many of us do, following the queer passions and loves too complex to be contained in the tiny little boxes of matrimony and subservience people like JD Vance want to lock us in. If the world is truly governed only by force and power, then a life built on the qualities mourned by Good’s wife and loved ones—kindness, queer love, and poetry—is a structural threat to the state’s authority. Every such life, every queer life, exposes those “iron laws” as not the natural order of the world, but the desperate impositions of men who fear any freedom they cannot control.

2025 has been an exhausting and torrential year for transgender people in the United States. Within weeks of his return to office, Trump issued an executive order threatening any provider of gender-affirming hormone therapies to a patient under 19 with the loss of all federal funding, effectively coercing hospital networks into dropping their transgender patients under threat of federal investigations into patient medical records. This has had a devastating impact on families across the country, many of whom have already had to navigate the changing map of state law banning this care for minors, and some of whom are making the arduous and heartbreaking decision to leave the United States altogether in pursuit of a better life for their children.

Any mention of transgender people is being purged from school curriculum and public libraries in states across the country, an effort the Trump administration has elevated to the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute of Health, and apparently the Smithsonian which refused to exhibit a portrait of a Black transgender woman in the robe and crown of Lady Liberty by the esteemed artist Amy Sherald. Schools that recognize the rights of transgender students are being threatened with defunding by the administration, and curricula–from history books to sex ed classes–are likewise being purged of any discussion of gender that may differ from the administration’s definitions. Transgender people across the country–including the actress Hunter Schafer–were shocked to find their passports returned to them with the wrong gender marker, potentially forcing them to out themselves as transgender to airport security (which is already a series of humiliations for trans people) or while traveling abroad. Transgender people were banned from military service in an order claiming that transgender people inherently lack the “honesty” needed to serve in the military, and transgender federal workers have had their rights stripped and any language recognizing their identity censored.

The most dire situation for transgender people in the US is unfolding in the federal prison system where incarcerated trans people, already subject to routine abuse, violence, neglect, and torturously-prolonged stays in solitary confinement, are being explicitly denied whatever little dignity they may have previously maintained as the administration forces transgender women into men’s facilities (where their well-documented risks for rape, assault, and suicide are being ignored).

This was kicked into overdrive following the assassination of Charlie Kirk which, while carried out by a cisgender man who authorities say acted alone, was almost immediately blamed on transgender people by figures on the right like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Jr. and Nancy Mace, fueled by spurious and retracted FBI reports (repeated by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times) and a healthy dose of confirmation bias. The Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 fame) even urged the FBI to begin investigating “Transgender Ideology Violent Extremism,” mapping the strategies used to associate Palestinian student activists with terrorism onto all 2.8 million transgender people. President Trump soon issued a national security bulletin, NPSM-7, including in a lengthy list of potential leftist “terrorism” networks those who are “extremists” on “gender” or against “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” with Attorney General Pam Bondi offering cash rewards to those who report them. The Department of Justice is reportedly looking into means of suspending the Second Amendment rights of “trannies,” raising the specter of forced disarmament of an entire minority group.

It also follows five straight years of legislative and judicial battles at the state level, which, in June, resulted in a devastating Supreme Court decision upholding age restrictions on gender-affirming hormone therapies and, next month, will result in arguments over bans on athletic participation that conservative activists hope will implicate our rights under the Constitution’s equal protection clause altogether.

All of this has added to a prevailing sense of dread among even the most privileged transgender people I know. As a population—one that already experiences heightened rates of poverty, homelessness, illness, and criminalization—we are no strangers to precarity. But whatever grasp some of us have on anything like a stable foundation is being shaken by forces much larger and wealthier than us determined to ring the last drop of political value and sadistic pleasure they can consume from our misery. How does one plan for the future when the healthcare they or their child needs to live is subject to the momentum of Congressional debates? How do you allow yourself to dream when the constant tantrums over your existence won’t even let you sleep? To live in this environment is to experience the vertigo of the free diver floating above an ocean canyon, unsure of how deep the water descends or how far the light can penetrate. The only thing you are sure of is the need to stay afloat.

We are far from alone in this. The terrorizing of immigrant communities, the destruction of public goods and government services that took decades to build, the coercive threats to free speech and free expression, the rewiring of our public health infrastructure to honor a deadly and eugenic philosophy, and the open robbery and corruption at the expense of the world’s poorest and to the benefit of the world’s wealthiest. The years since the start of the COVID pandemic have left the country teetering on the edge. Biden’s presidency was clearly a failure to pull us back from it; Trump’s first year in office has felt like a desperate effort to push us off of it. All of it is meant to establish the most narrow vision imaginable of who is worthy of the “privileges” of citizenship based on racist and archaic ideas about worth, culture, dignity, and the body, combined with a religious faith in the power of debasement, poverty, suffering, and violence to contain people as individuals and a population.

In one of the more holistic diagnoses from this year, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor described the uniting philosophy behind this administration, its anxious base, its billionaire benefactors, and the rise of similar far-right leaders globally as “end times fascism”:

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

As Klein and Taylor note, trans people’s role in this dark circus is as one of many demons haunting the mythical golden age the Trump administration sells back to its base. The most succint description of this dynamic came earlier this year from Laverne Cox: “they’re worried about the wrong one percent.” Our humiliation and suffering is meant to be redistributive in what the scholar Arlie Russel Hochschild calls “the pride economy”—that zero-sum mix of economic and cultural forces that assigns dignity to some but not to others. My own writing this year has likewise emphasized transgender people’s role as victims in an asymmetrical political war—an impoverished, politically powerless minority being steamrolled by all the dark money forces of the right-wing could muster—to contrast that reality with the right (and, increasly, the center’s) absurd distortions of us as mascots for an entitled elite.

As factual and essential as that corrective may be, it’s also quite degrading. It puts transgender people and the movement for our rights in a state of perpetual begging for relief. As Sarah Schulman noted in her essential book on the Palestinian solidarity movement earlier this year, solidarity is always an uneven relationship, one between the suffering and those immune to it by virtue of birth, privilege, wealth, or citizenship. It’s a hand reaching upward, grasping a hand reaching downward—rarely is it a relationship of equals and thus one that risks turning exploitative. Asking for relief from those more powerful than you requires humility—a valuable good in any instance—but it should never sacrifice agency, and the more I position transgender people as mere victims of circumstance, the further away I feel from ensuring we are part of the solution to the many crises at hand.

One of the best books I read this year was The Dream of A Common Movement, a collection of speeches and writings from the lesbian feminist Urvashi Vaid over the course of forty years of organizing and advocacy. Vaid, who died from cancer in 2022, was a longtime critic of the turn mainstream LGBTQ activism took over the course of the 1990s to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell. The vaulting of marriage rights as the premiere gay issue, Vaid said, pushed the movement away from grassroots organizing and towards a single-issue, identity-based approach, she warned in 2010, “is a vestigial burden we need to shed. It narrows our imagination and vision; it does not serve large numbers of our own people; and it feeds the perception that we are generally privileged and powerful, and not in need of civil equality.”

As far back as 1999, Vaid noted the LGBTQ movement was demanding and hurtling towards the precarious state of not true equality but “virtual equality” defined as “the creation of zones of freedom inside a fundamentally intransigent social system of family, marriage, state, and economy. In terms of public policy. We end up working piecemeal on small solutions that benefit particular communities in the short run, rather than working in a more concerted way to make systemic change that could benefit all of us in the long run.”

From this perspective, it’s easy to see how transgender people were left so vulnerable to the retrenchment we’re seeing now. The fight for this “virtual equality” under the banner of gay marriage was essential, but it left us with a movement whose “Achilles’ heel,” writes Vaid, was always its lack of a grassroots movement. Particularly following the capture of the Supreme Court and much of the federal judiciary during Trump’s first term, this left “LGBT rights” in the United States on a foundation of sand quickly washed out to see by the torrential tides of grievance, resentment, and fear.

In a lecture given at Vassar College in 2011—when public opinion and political momentum seemed to finally be marshalling behind the fight for gay marriage—Vaid urged advocates to be wary of “access politics” that grant some gay people entry into elite spaces while abandoning solidarity with those denied entry. “Should we take pride in the fact that we are now in the back rooms where deals are being cut, and politicians are being lobbied?” she asked. “I’ve been in those rooms. I do not feel pride at the devolution of our democratic, diverse movement into a moneyed elite pressing for rights (largely for itself).”

I, too, have been in those rooms, pressing for the most narrow of victories in the face of totalizing threats of impoverishment. I would not describe myself (or really any transgender person I can think of) as a “moneyed elite,” but I recognize the frustration of allyship with political leaders that routinely fail their own voters—an allyship that elevates trans people to new heights of visibility but only leaves us more vulnerable to backlash. Over the last half century, said Vaid, “Progress on rights has coincided with the destruction of economic security for the middle class and the consolidation of wealth and power by the most wealthy and powerful…the [LGBT] movement puts forward the optimistic message that ‘it gets better’ to young people to offer hope, in a context where the possibility of achieving the ‘good life’ has shrunk for most people.”

Earlier this year, Waleed Shahid offered a similar diagnosis through the lens of Black radicalism and the fight for racial justice. In a response to claims identity politics represents “a fox in liberalism’s henhouse,” Shahid rightfully notes that it was neoliberalism itself that built both the shallow, naive conception of identity politics adopted by elected Democrats in the 2010s and the conditions for its backlash. Black political thinkers have long argued that American liberalism is both indispensable and inadequate,” writes Shahid:

“Rights and neutral rules are necessary, but hollow if a racialized political economy decides where you live, who polices you, and what work you can get…By the Obama years, the classic liberal toolkit was exhausted. The big rights laws were already on the books. Congress had become a machine for gridlock, not for landmark legislation. If you can’t realistically imagine passing a new Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, or full-employment program, you stop arguing about those things and start arguing about behavior and culture. When structural reform is off the table, politics slides toward ‘microaggressions,’ representation, and speech codes.”

This is the true risk of identity-first politics, which Vaid called “a necessary mistake”—necessary to push back against reactionary efforts to divide us, but a mistake to render the only focal point of your worldview and activism. As Judith Butler told El Pais magazine earlier this year, “Identity is, for me, a point of departure for alliances, which need to include all kinds of people…But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandon our interdependent ties.“

For all the chaos and suffering we experienced this year, the “common movement” of Vaid’s dream, one based on Butler’s “interdependent ties,” seemed more than possible in 2025. Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City in no small part because he built the broadest coalition possible on a foundation of shared values and a shared vision. His campaign offered a model of what it means to grow beyond identity without gleefully abandoning the people who inhabit those identities (as some centrist Democrats have chosen to do). Mamdani’s core message was simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic, connecting universal dignity with concrete and comprehensible policy demands grounded in everyday life. Mamdani often quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., who, similar to Vaid, warned of the limits of legal equality even as he fiercely organized for it: “What good is the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford a hamburger?”

What would it mean to ground transgender people’s fight for health care, autonomy, and freedom in a similar framework? Our needs are often portrayed, including by some transgender people and our allies, as particular and alien, thick with the language of pathology and difference. But is the self-determination we demand so different from that of other people’s? Are the forces caging us inside their narrow, backwards-facing worldview any different from those demanding homogeneity and conformity in our communities and our culture? And is not the prospect that our freedom must come at the sacrifice of others, not being pushed by the same billionaires robbing our government for their own benefit?

2025 was a remarkably dissonant year—one could watch new political dynamics and cultural forces being born even as the old order, now typified by its former chaos agents like Donald Trump, refuses to die. It’s a cliche to say any year in history is a transitional year—history is always in a state of flux if not quite evolution—but 2025 has shown us both the darkness we’re being pulled towards and the path toward something brighter. For all the hardship transgender people have endured this year (and likely will in 2026), it may seem strange to say I’m excited for the possibility of what’s next. I still feel that the future lacks clarity, and I still feel the urgency of the crises we face. But both vision and resolve seem easier when you know you aren’t pursuing them alone.

(This post contains spoilers for the show Pluribus through Season 1, Episode 8)

When I first called this newsletter The Autonomy, I knew I was naming it after a lie. As much as bodily and personal autonomy live at the heart of many issues I write about—sexual freedom, gender beyond hierarchies, the sanctity of one’s own body—the notion is made tenuous by the permeable, interdependent way that societies and bodies function and the collective ways of living that are key to any liberatory vision. The fight for abortion, say, or transsexual medicine often deploy the rhetoric of bodily autonomy, and queer people often express our identities, desires, and rights in terms of individualized ownership—my sexual orientation, my gender identity, my pronouns.

Simultaneously, however, many reactionary forces—like corporations, capitalism, fascism—are eager for us to imagine ourselves as siloed, isolated beings with no obligation or connection to our neighbors. See how quickly the language of “my body, my choice,” was weaponized by anti-vaccine forces to defend their own freedom to expose their vulnerable neighbors to deadly diseases (which themselves betray bodily autonomy for the myth it is). Like our bodies, our identities and self-concept are dialectic, determined by our interactions with others. Liberal notions of identity portray them as internalized and innate, but in truth, they are interconnected and interdependent. How I live as a woman shapes how those around me live as women. We shape ourselves as much as others shape us, then we shape them in return.

And yet we understand that laws and systems that deny us agency over our own bodies and our identities are enacting a real, material violence. Autonomy is something we rely on and cling to even as we recognize its impossibility. To paraphrase Astra Taylor’s maxim about democracy, autonomy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

This conflict is at the heart of Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s sci-fi series about an extraterrestrial virus that silences the identities and egos of Earth’s 8 billion people and replaces them with one, united consciousness (which I’ll call the Hive). Under the spell of the virus, individuality is erased (and things like creativity and private property along with it), but all of humanity’s knowledge and experience is united such that each human body can give voice to the experience of all of humanity. What one “person” knows is what another “person” knows, what one body feels is what another body feels. The virus operates like the dogma at the heart of Ayn Rand’s dystopian novella Anthem, in which an authoritarian state has outlawed all individual expressions of creativity or identity—no “I” pronouns but simply “we.”

Pluribus follows Rhea Seehorne’s Carol Sturka, a recovering alcoholic, lesbian author of decidedly heterosexual romantasy, and one of just 13 humans on Earth immune to the alien virus. Most of Carol’s fellow survivors seem decidedly sanguine about the cheery and accommodating Utopia offered by the Hive, but Carol resists its every charm and searches desperately for a way to “cure” humanity of its newfound collective bliss and return them to their complicated, individualized selves.

It seems hardly incidental that Pluribus’s central character is a middle-aged lesbian with no children, one whose defiance of attempts to quash her sexual identity as a teenager, seemingly prepared her to strike out against a world demanding her submission, but who has already sacrificed her desires for the world. She reacts in horror when the Hive tells her its goal is to figure out “what makes you different so we can fix it. So that you can join us.” Carol quickly identifies Zosia, her “chaperone” from the Hive, as bearing a striking and gender-swapped resemblance to the swarthy male love interest of her best-selling fantasy novels. “My original version of him was a her,” she reveals. “But I talked myself out of it.” We see this suppression of her own desires—and likely resentment in her own role promoting heterosexual fantasies—turn into disdain for her readership in the show’s pilot.

In a conversation with the Hive (via Zosia), Carol describes the counselors at her conversion therapy camp—perversely called Freedom Falls—as “some of the worst people I have ever known, and they smiled all the time just like you.”

Queer people are decidedly sensitive to the ways our society, economy, and culture shape human desires to yield specific outcomes. There is very little in the world that rewards you for being queer and quite a lot that punishes you for it, particularly if your manifestation of queerness is visibly deviant, embodied, and divergent from the mandates we are given at birth towards specific gender regimes. We are asked to believe these restrictions are just the natural order of things when we experience them for what they are—collective choices disguised as inevitabilities, demands for conformity in fear of our nonconformity. All of our desires are shaped by the context in which we’re raised and socialized, but it is queerness that is often portrayed as itself a virus, a “social contagion.” As the queer author of heterosexual romance, Carol is herself a begrudging architect of desires she does not share. Her resistance to the Hive should be seen in this light, as someone intimately aware of how human will is suppressed by external pressures and, more alarmingly, how those pressures can be internalized into our own choices.

About halfway through the first season, the Hive responds to Carol’s efforts by abandoning her, leaving her to wander Albuquerque in isolation. Though the hospitality of the Hive is just a phone call away—meals and trash pickup on demand via quadrocopter—no human emissary of the Hive ever interacts with her. She takes advantage of Earth’s abandonment as much as she can, sitting for dinner entirely alone at four-star restaurants and replacing her framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe with the real thing (snatched off the wall of the artist’s Santa Fe museum). But soon—blasting fireworks and 80s hard rock to herself—she succumbs to the pressure of this forced exile and paints a large “COME BACK” on the pavement of her cul-de-sac, eventually falling into the arms of Zosia upon her (it’s? their?) return. Carol’s isolation is thus revealed as a manipulation of her very human need for contact and companionship by a mass collective keen to “fix” her individuality.

Following their reunion, Carol and the Hive (via Zosia) enjoy a series of flirtatious “dates” wherein the Hive does its best to appeal to Carol—picking up her sardonic sense of humor, reconstructing a favorite teenage haunt, and fangirling over her fantasy series. As much as it wooed the other survivors, the Hive is keen to appear to Carol as benevolent as possible and, in fact, build an emotional relationship with her. This results in Carol and the Hive (via Zosia) ultimately having sex. While understandably celebrated by many viewers as a unique moment of prestige lesbian representation, the entire relationship between Carol and the Hive strikes me as unavoidably reactionary, simultaneously an act of representation and assimilation. Whereas the counselors at the conversion therapy camp wanted to suppress Carol’s queerness, the Hive sees her queerness as the key to suppressing her entire sense of self.

Pluribus often seems to present the Hive—with its eco-friendly veganism, egalitarian attitude, and abolition of private property—as a fable for the excesses of collectivist thought and action, the danger posed to individual desires and creativity by calls for mutual responsibility and shared resources. Like Rand’s Anthem, it’s easily interpreted as a right-wing celebration of what Rand called “the virtue of selfishness” and a dystopian warning about what today’s conservatives might call “toxic empathy.” One of Carol’s fellow survivors is Manoussos, a Paraguayan man who rejects every ounce of food or assistance the Hive tries to offer him and fights to survive only on what he can create or earn. “Nothing on this planet is yours,” he tells the Hive. “Nothing. You cannot give me anything because all that you have is stolen.” Interpreted by many as a shadow critique of plagiaristic AI chatbots (and it may still be that), it also struck me as decidedly capitalist, especially when contrasted with the Hive’s collective benevolence. Manoussos and the Hive live at two extremes of the paradox I started with, two poles representing the risks of complete independence and complete dependence.

Which is why it’s fascinating to me the Hive has sent as its emissary the embodiment of Carol’s lesbian desires. As far as we know, the Hive itself has no desires beyond suppressing the individuality of the few individuals left and sustaining its own life on Earth. And yet it is the Hive (via Zosia) that first kisses Carol and makes the most direct appeals to her as a person. Carol’s very human need for affection is also a vulnerability for it to exploit, a mechanism to ensure her own freedom falls. But this is also generally true of romantic love—in fact, all human needs and desires are open to exploitation. Plus, the Hive sees itself as benevolent (regardless of how Carol sees things). As Seehorn said in an interview, “It is both manipulative and kind at the same time.” Unlike the pressures of compulsive heterosexuality that attempted to restrict Carol across her life, the Hive is open to meeting Carol as a queer woman—if that is the best way to suppress her identity altogether.

One way to interpret this choice is as a meta-narrative warning to queer people—that we are being swayed by appeals to our identity by leftist puppeteers and our identities as queer people are dependent upon individualism. What the Hive’s act of manipulation most reminds me of, however, is the appeals to queer identity already used to exploit us by corporations and politicians who regard us as a localized special interest or demographic removed from any other coalition and, ideally, in need of no solidarity. This is often very (and maybe surprisingly) appealing to queer people—decades of LGBTQ rights activism were designed by libertarian and conservative gay men with an undying faith in the privatizing effects of marriage and domestication. It also has the flattening effect Pluribus seems to be warning us against, rendering us “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan memorably put it) and indecipherable from the ways the straight world lives.

But what if we render the world something other than straight to begin with? Rather than let the world shape us to its liking, what if we let our experiences and subjectivity shape the world?

As Carol and the Hive (via Zosia) grow close, Carol urges it (and here, 'I’ll confess the pronouns may get a bit confusing) to embrace “I” pronouns when referring to its (her?) self. Zosia stumbles around the word, but slowly begins uncoiling a past memory of Zosia before the “joining.” She suddenly grows wistful, then her face drops into one of horror while the individual ego of the person called Zosia claws back her own awareness from the clutches of the Hive.

This self-discovery comes not only after Carol and Zosia have sex, but also after Carol shows Zosia a new first chapter of her fantasy series with its swashbuckling male love interest magically re-cast as a woman. Like any true fan, Zosia is overcome with awe and emotion at the story Carol weaves and her own representation in Carol’s story. If the Hive sees Carol’s queerness as a site of exploitation, Carol sees queerness (we might even more specifically say transness) as the key to unlocking Zosia from the cage the Hive has locked her in.

The most frequent criticism of Pluribus is its slow pace—the show delights in long shots of the New Mexico desert skyline or South American coastlines while it slowly unravels its philosophical tale. Each long (and beautiful) shot filled with not much happening is a chance for the viewer to sit with the show’s premise as it unfolds, grow comfortable in not knowing the resolution to its many contradictions. Writing this between the penultimate and final episodes of the show’s first season, I’d be surprised if the finale neatly tied them up together with a blunt-edged moral. But its explorations of queerness are already fabulously intricate and true to the contradictions many queers ourselves experience, living as the lonely truth that reveals the world’s popular lies.

Thankful for the opportunity to write for The Nation (in my personal capacity) about the week’s election outcomes, liberal backsliding on transgender rights, and NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s model of solidarity. Appreciation to Jack Mirkinson for working with me on it.

While Zohran Mamdani ran and won as a Democrat, he did so against the will of party leadership and the liberal establishment—the same groups now trying to distance themselves from trans people. Instead, he made his case directly to the people. This is no accident. In the face of liberal recalcitrance, institutional selfishness, and capitalistic greed enabling Trump’s destruction of so much, it is the people that have stood the strongest against him. There’s an old slogan from ACT UP, the radical queer movement born in New York City in the wake of the AIDS crisis, that could just as well serve as the Mamdani Doctrine: “We’re all we’ve got and we’re all we need.”

I am exhausted with begging for help and pleading for others to recognize transgender people’s humanity. I’m also exhausted with the shallow brand of identity politics removed from the material concerns of most people–including trans people–adopted by the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the 2010s when it seemed a useful wedge against progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Judith Butler told El País earlier this year, “Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandon our interdependent ties.”

It is exactly those interdependent ties that Mamdani won on and that our political future depends on. The politics of forced scarcity being sold by Trump and seemingly bought into by many Democrats is a myth deeply ingrained in our politics, our communities, and our culture. Rewriting it is not simply the work of rhetoric, talking points, and being open to disagreement. It’s also the work of changing how people experience politics to begin with, and showing them their freedom and dignity need not come at the expense of someone else’s. And what I see in Mamdani’s campaign is not only a promise of solidarity with a marginalized group I happen to be a member of. What I see is a promise that nobody will have to do that work alone.

The most important thing we’ve learned about Tyler Robinson is, by all accounts and despite the best efforts of the federal government to prove otherwise, that he appears to have acted alone. Ten days after he was arrested, federal authorities have reportedly found “no link” between Robinson and any of the organizations the Trump administration immediately blamed for Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder. Reading through news coverage and the charging documents against Robinson, there is no evidence of funding streams, co-conspirators, or even accessories after the fact. And while conspiracy theorists and amateur criminologists across the political spectrum are spreading their own speculations about Robinson’s motive and inner psyche, that strikes me as much less significant than the apparent fact that Robinson acted alone and there are few blank spaces in the details of Kirk’s murder where a conspiracy may live. There is no “magic bullet,” no second shooter, no getaway driver, no money changing hands, no sleeper cell of comrades and accomplices. Robinson is charged with killing Kirk with his grandfather’s hunting rifle—gifted to him by his parents—and escaped the scene of the murder on foot.

Within hours of Kirk’s murder, it became clear the tragedy was viewed as largely an opportunity by the Trump administration and the right wing more broadly to crush their political enemies. This has ranged from broad and as-yet unrealized threats of retribution against liberal organizations and donors to witchhunts targeting the careers of teachers, professors, Starbucks baristas, newspaper columnists, and Jimmy Kimmel, all charged with being insufficiently mournful or disrespectful of the memory of Kirk (a man who built a career on racism and sexism).

For transgender people and our families, Kirk’s murder has unleashed an onslaught of escalating threats to police, surveil, and restrict our lives and freedom, ranging from members of Congress like Nancy Mace calling “trannies” the “most egregious, most vile, violent people on earth” to Elon Musk speculating transgender women should be injected with testosterone, a literal Nazi medical experiment carried out to “cure” homosexuals detained in concentration camps. Despite the fact Robinson is himself not transgender and the evidence he was motivated by anything to do with transgender people is remarkably thin, Vice President JD Vance agreed with Jesse Watters that the “militant transgender movement” is a “domestic terror threat,” and the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 fame) has begun distributing a petition to the FBI to investigate “transgender ideology violent extremism.”

Transgender people are not new to accusations of violence or monstrosity. Stoked panic over our access to public bathrooms is founded on manufactured fears of sexual violence, and the history of Hollywood—from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs—is littered with transgender murderers and serial killers. The association between androgyny and fear is ancient, running alongside religious fears of poor morals leading to “monstrous births” of intersex infants. Even the FBI surveillance of queer people and activism would not be particularly new—the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover routinely spied on early gay rights activists like Frank Kameny and radical lesbian movements in the 1970s. But the past ten days represent a push for a terrifying new escalation of state surveillance and policing of transgender people on the thinnest of bases when the political project for our rights is more isolated and endangered than its been in decades.

In its fact sheet, Heritage defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable.” Its authors go to great lengths to suggest its concern is merely an ideology and not transgender people ourselves, claiming “individuals are free to identify as transgender or support LGBT causes and transgenderism in a nonviolent way.” However, it’s evidence that such an ideology exists as a form of organized “violent extremism” is a list of eleven isolated acts of violence carried out over the course of eight years, some by transgender people and others by those Heritage identifies as associated with transgender people, including Robinson (who some reports suggest had a transgender roommate that police have described as “extremely cooperative”) and a “lipstick wearing suspect” accused of firebombing a GOP campaign office in 2024. The acts they cite that were reportedly carried out by a transgender person—a workplace shooting in 2018, a school shooting in 2023, and last month’s shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota—apparently share no motive or ideology and bear a much closer resemblance to the tragically quotidian gun violence that we’ve allowed to become the backdrop of our national character.

The suggestion that transgender people represent an “ideology” serves two functions. As Heritage’s fact sheet attempts to emphasize, it helps those leading the witchhunt elide any accusation they are acting on animus towards any specific group. As the petition being shared by Heritage and the right-wing Oversight Project states about their desired FBI designation, it “does not mean that all transgender individuals are domestic terror threats, but instead narrowly focuses on those who adopt the worldview that violence is justified against those who disagree with transgender ideology.” Given this is being led by the same right-wing political movement and presidential administration that has censored our speech, criminalized our health care, and purged us from the federal government and the military on the basis that we are essentially less trustworthy than others, this is, of course, laughable.

But given the eleven acts cited by their fact sheet are disconnected acts of violence and vandalism carried out by a handful of the nearly 3 million transgender people in the United States with a wide variety of motives (from interpersonal domestic violence to vandalism of a Tesla dealership)—and some weren’t even carried out by transgender people ourselves—it is the (real or imagined) involvement of transgender people that seems to constitute this “ideology.”

The second goal is transforming a subset of the population into an abstraction, an amorphous toxin being spread into a culture that would otherwise be pure and good. This reduces state actions taken against our lives, bodies, and rights as mere chapters in another “culture war,” frivolous concerns of symbolism and rhetoric. But it also poses transgender people and, really, any gender nonconformity as a threat by virtue of our existence. Like its much older cousin, “gender ideology,” “transgender ideology” operates as what Judith Butler calls a “phantasm,” which once “firmly established as an existential threat, becomes the target of destruction.”

It’s simply absurd to suggest the FBI designation (particularly in this FBI helmed by Kash Patel who is quite transparently hunting for scapegoats that might save his job) would lead to anything but the surveillance, policing, and criminalization of transgender people on the basis of our identity as much as the “war on terror” was used to justify the same towards Muslim communities and “gang violence” is used to police Black and immigrant communities. Even the existence of this hypothetical, organized “transgender terrorism” movement would not justify the suspension of an entire population’s civil liberties or rights to due process, and the imposition our existence represents an “ideology” intentionally blurs the boundaries of who is being targeted and what acts, words, or ideas constitute material support for violence.

"How politicians treat trans people is indicative of how they will eventually treat everyone,” says the British model and activist Munroe Bergdorf. “People still aren't grasping that because they see being trans as something so different from their experience, and it's easier to create an image of somebody as an embodied ideology than a human being. That's how racism thrives, classism, ableism. That's how any system of oppression thrives."

Heritage’s fact sheet ends with a list of “terminology used by TIVEs [transgender ideology violent extremists]” including mundane in-group jargon like “cisgender,” “misgendering,” and “deadnaming.” The suggestion this is language used by “TIVEs” and not transgender people as a subculture is the critical bridge Heritage ties between transgender people, the community we create amongst one another, and the violence Heritage wants to define us by. The effect of associating terminology used by transgender people with this violent “ideology” of Heritage’s own invention is thus enabling the kind of censorship and witchhunts that have silenced critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza by broadly associating all activism and community among Palestinians with “antisemitism.”

Somewhat quixotically, this list of terms Heritage would like the FBI to associate with violence includes “the right to exist,” referring to claims transgender people’s “existence” is being “erased.” According to Heritage, this rhetoric fuels violence because it suggests “the denied ‘right to exist’ or ‘erasure’ is equivalent to killing them or genocide as opposed to merely acknowledging there are two sexes or disagreeing with transgender ideology.” I have long been critical of knee-jerk claims that transgender people in the US are enduring a genocide, largely because the word invokes the kind of militarized mass slaughter being carried out in Gaza as we speak and I find it disrespectful to suggest our subjugation—though clearly sweeping, painful, and unjustified—is on the same plane as that atrocity. I also find it exceptionalizes transgender people’s suffering as transgender when many of the worst fears about a “transgender genocide” are already being carried out through our carceral and immigration system, primarily based on other identities shared by transgender people. The problem with fears (largely, it should be said, among my fellow white trans people) that we’ll be put in “camps” or targeted with “forced detransition” is that we are already in the camps that are part of our immigration enforcement system, and we are already forced to detransition in our country’s prisons.

I understand the claim Heritage is making—that misgendering a trans person, for example, is not the same as denying their existence as a human. Banning a transgender girl from playing sports as a girl is not the same thing as murder. But taken as trans people live it—not as isolated scenarios and an “ideology” but as our safety, our bodies, and our material needs—it’s absurd to suggest the campaign against our health care, our speech, and our rights is anything but an attack on our existence as transgender people. The goal is to force us to exist as something other than what we are by suppressing what our freedom and our will bring into existence.

It is true that a person denied autonomy over their own body, privacy over their own anatomy and medical records, silenced by government censorship, banished from public service, endangered by government segregation, and forced to carry a document that potentially outs them as transgender still “exists",” but as what? What kind of existence is it to have these foundational rights not just withheld from you by capitalism or ignored by social stigma but actively suppressed by the state as hundreds of new state laws, sweeping actions by the Trump administration, and the Heritage Foundation’s own policy playbooks clearly demand?

The imposition pointing that out somehow endorses violence is absurd from the jump, basically akin to claims that “reverse racism” is as bad as institutional racism or that a victim of abuse is abusing their abuser by calling it abuse. And even if this specter of “transgender ideology” terrorism were a real organized force, naming the existential stakes in the political fight for our rights would hardly be an endorsement of it. And if it were, what to make of the claims that “transgenderism” must be “eradicated from public life entirely” or the demands “there can be no mercy for that species any longer”—do these likewise call for violence? On Friday, a man in Arizona was arrested on charges of terrorism for reportedly threatening an LGBTQ bar, claiming he would become a “martyr for Charlie Kirk” and “transgenderism should be eradicated from public society.” One imagines Heritage would push back if someone claimed their speech fueled that act of terror.

Kirk’s murder is a travesty committed by one man, but it is clearly seen as an opportunity by an entire movement. The imposition, made without evidence, that Robinson acted as an agent of any organization is fueling an effort by Heritage and the Trump administration to exploit this tragedy, cement their own power, and turn their base’s understandable grief into a bloodlust for vengeance. Transgender people have been wholly dehumanized in the eyes of much of that base and, given our tenuous position in the liberal coalition, make for a uniquely vulnerable scapegoat. That vulnerability is worsened by and enables the discrimination, subjugation, and, yes, erasure we experience but are being told not to name.