You want them to notice the ragged hem of your summer dress. You want them to see you like they see every other girl. But they just see a faggot. They hold their breath not to catch the sick. – Laura Jane Grace, Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Content note: transphobic slurs

Gaze. The quiet (loud) quiet looking. The other-orienting, the other-negating. The allos.

Staring. What does it mean to be stared at by an entire country? Where is the gaze of America drawn, where does the eye of its machinic libido fall? Trump. They keep using “storm” language. Hurricanes emerging, tornadoes swarming. Some dick on the internet says a storm is coming and suddenly NY Times columnists think they’re clever. As if the mob wasn’t already storming. Swarming, storming. Staring.

Do you know what it feels like to be dragged into the public sphere, to become an image of gender-terror screamed out by fascists — at the end, Trump spews a paroxysm of transphobia, gumming-up the radiowaves with psychosexual imaginaries of men-in-dresses, criminal men-in-dresses, groomers, traps, trannies. What is the left’s response? Harris calls hypocrisy and says Trump also gave healthcare to the transgendereds (we share the shame!) while the official opposition, the Green Party Nobody, gurgles something about men-in-women’s sports.

Are we nothing to you? Am I nothing to you?
America, what is it? Do you want me or not?

Do you want to kill me or fuck me? If it makes you sick to know we exist why do you keep saturating the world with your fantasies of us? We just want to exist and you call our existence a fetish – the fact that we breathe becomes a pornographic fact, and going out in public becomes a sex crime. Yet! We didn’t pornography ourselves, we were pornographied — we just want to live, but for you our lives are a psychosexual haunting. We don’t get a choice in the matter. We are the limit of freedom, a reminder that all of this is contingent. And that both entices and inflicts fear. And you don’t know. If you want to fuck us. Or kill us. Or be us.

All you know is you need Father to keep you safe.
And that maybe if there weren’t so many trans people we wouldn’t have these problems.
And the world wouldn’t feel so scary.
And everything would be normal again.
And they wouldn’t have to think anymore.
About whether they want to fuck us.
Or kill us.
Or be us.

Cause at the end of the day, Father decides.

You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights. – Marsha P. Johnson

Image: Stormy Sea by Peter Balke (1870)