Category: 100 posts about patriarchal misogyny

Not very far away from where I live, just the next county south, a 13-year-old boy was arrested today for unlawful firearm possession. In addition to having 23 firearms and ammunition, including handguns, hunting rifles and tactical rifles. The boy had assault rifle magazines in his room upon which he had written references with school shootings all the way back to the 1999 mass shooting in Columbine High School, and the police had come investigating because the boy had been making very threatening social media posts about wanting to kill people and posting photos of himself dressed like past mass shooters.

This is a pretty unsettling, not the least because it happened so closely to Seattle, but also because I have a son now, and I am going to have to consider what that means in relationship to living in a country where masculinity, a culture of violence, and access to firearms are so inherently linked together. I wrote a little bit in post 56 of 100 about why I am personally not interested in owning a firearm, because of the danger that brings into the lives of the people around me, and some of the links in that blog post go into detail about the risk of minors gaining access to loaded firearms, but I don’t think any of those cover a situation quite as complicated, ugly and difficult as something like a 13-year-old getting access to so many guns, with such clear and dangerous intent.  

Now, the kid’s mother insists that the child was not actually a threat to anyone, and that he was just aesthetically into all the mass shooting stuff to be cool amongst his peers. I am incredibly sympathetic to this plea, both as a parent myself, and a teenager who got myself into a fair bit of trouble for pretty stupid reasons. Mine was mostly dumb property related bad choices, but there was a kid in my high school who said he wanted to “kill the president” just to see what would happen…this was right before president Bill Clinton came to speak to our high school, and the Secret Service was all over our building, crawling through the ductwork and covering up all the windows. The kid was arrested almost immediately and not released until a few days later, after the president had spoken. The point is, kids do say very unthoughtful things, just to see what will happen, and sometimes even as a cry for help. Is that what this kid was doing, posing with guns and dressing up like mass shooters? It is possible that the answer could be yes and that this kid still was/is a threat to shoot a lot of people, and there are very few ways to collectively handle the situation that are not going to either absolutely trample this kids future or leave a community in serious threat of mass violence.

The child is facing 5 charges related to unlawful firearm possession and making threats (4 of which are serious felonies), and, as of the writing of this post, the parents do not yet face any charges of their own. I kinda suspect that will change as the case builds up, as it seems like a lot of the firearms were displayed throughout the house, so there is little evidence that the parents were unaware of what had been going on in this situation. I am not stating any of this as personal opinion of what I think should happen legally, only what seems probable given the way I have seen the US legal system operate previously. I have a hard time imagining this kid doesn’t spend nearly all of his teenage years incarcerated, and it is likely his parents will do some time as well, because this feels like the kind of case that the state of Washington is going to want to go after pretty hard. Remember that just back in June, in the next county over from Pierce County, a bunch of stolen military weapons, alongside Nazi paraphernalia, was found in a joint federal and state law enforcement raid. Washington is also a state pushing heavily for laws allowing the state to force people convicted of domestic abuse charges to have to surrender their guns, with a particular case, the Flannery decision, likely to end up before the Supreme Court. Which is all to say that I doubt the State of Washington is going to spare any expense in trying to make this kid and his parents an example of what states can do to stop gun violence. 

I know I know folks who want the State to be able to stop gun violence. Or maybe that is an unfair way of stating that I know a lot of people who are tired of hearing “the State can’t do anything about this,” especially when there are a lot of examples of states taking actions that have massively reduced the frequency and severity of gun violence within their borders. I agree that it is really hard to imagine any kind of cultural shift happening in the US around gun ownership and the responsibilities of gun ownership that isn’t compelled by the state, but I think expecting the US government to fix this the problem of gun violence with laws regulating individual firearm usage is excessively problematic because the US Military is largest purchaser of weapons in the world and the largest exporter of weapons. The United States of America is a country built upon gun violence, profiteers off of gun violence, and uses gun violence as tool of political authority on the rest of the world. The US does have a massive gun problem, but that gun problem starts with excessively funding weapons manufacturing and then looking to turn a profit on that industry, selling off the inevitable excess and obsolescence around the world, including within our borders. This is what makes the US different than all the other countries in the world that seem to be able to limit gun violence with laws around gun ownership, even as many of those countries are being undermined in their ability to do so by the influx of cheap, illegal weapons manufactured in the United States and sold all over the world. It is not the existence of the Second Amendment that has led the US to being a culture that worships firearms and the violence of which they are capable. It is the foundational embrace of firearms and their use for the purposes of genocide across North America, violently seizing land, and policing indentured and then slave labor that led to the Second Amendment in the first place. Owning weapons more powerful than any of your neighbors and believing whatever bogus philosophy allowed you to preemptively use them (white supremacy, westward expansion, American Exceptionalism, etc.) are the bedrock of US imperialism that has persisted from before the colonies seceded from the British crown through to today.  It is my very firmly held belief that trying to regulate firearm ownership internally, after 250 years of defining American exceptionalism by our collective capacity for violence,  by overly focusing on creating laws that regulate who individually can own and purchases guns within the US is just going to end up targeting the most scrutinized, surveilled and repressed people in this country, again and again. It is going to result in situation after situation like the US Justice Department considering how to ban trans folks from buying guns (or replace transgender folks with any other minority group who are overwhelmingly more frequently the target of violence than the perpetrators of it). Expecting the most violent, weapon obsessed nation on earth to regulate its population’s access to weapons is inevitably a practice in deciding who should be victimized by state authoritarianism, and that is never going to be the most heavily armed and most powerful communities within this nation. We are already seeing how wealthy corporations are building their own heavily armed private security forces that will almost certainly bypass any kind of restrictive firearm legislation that passes within this nation, assuming such legislation could ever be passed. 

And so that leaves hundreds of millions of regular folks living in the US having to face a difficult and constant reality that incredibly lethal firearms are all around us, all the time, and easily within the reach of 13-year-old boys that go on to idolize school shooters, because school shootings and shooters are the constant spectacle that affects the psyche and daily lives of US school children. Unlike tornados or earthquakes or other natural disaster phenomena that results in drills and discussions that disrupt the normal tedium of  school days, school shootings are something that are easily replicated by any student who feels like the institution of school (or the social environment created within that institution) is preventing them from living the life they want to live…and who has access to the weapons to do it…and who is not normally under such heavily surveillance by social and state security measures that they can formulate and act upon these plans before being stopped. This is an untenable long term reality that will inevitable spiral into heavily fortified micro communities that all hate each other, and seek to increase surveillance and authoritarianism against each other.

That is why, even though I never intend to own a gun in my life, I think it is still a massive mistake for the left to embrace measures that target individual gun owners and not focus instead on defunding all of our institutions of State violence, while simultaneously taking responsibility for destroying surplus military weapons instead of selling them around the world. We absolutely must stop subsidizing weapons manufacturers with massive governmental contracts that finance the infrastructure of their industry and allow them to mass produce cheap weapons, and we must collectively acknowledge that US global power is rooted in our willingness to employ overwhelming violence and come to terms with what culture that has created here at home and into the minds of our youth.  Until the US can actively disarm itself as a global bully that earns its respect through extortion and protection racketeering, efforts to disarm US citizens and limit access to firearms are always going to be a question of “which US citizens are we going to disarm,” because the ones with the power and wealth this nation has bought with violence will make sure that it is not going to be them. 

PS: I wrote the vast majority of this post last night and this morning, before Charlie Kirk was shot while discussing mass shootings in the US. There will probably be more to add to this conversation as details about that situation become clearer, but I am not going to try to speculate them into this conversation right now, because I am not even sure what I would say.

It is tempting to be alarmed by the administrations most recent executive order to rename the Department of Defense and return it to its previous title of the Department of War. Certainly, listening to an abusive womanizing alcoholic TV personality turned Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth,  say the name change is to show how the US is going to go on the offensive and use “maximum lethality” is incredibly disturbing, seeing as that already seems to include the military preemptively firing on civilian boats in international waters with no warning or opportunity to surrender, on of suspicion of drug trafficking. There is no doubt in my mind that this change premeditates much more aggressive use of US weapons in many different parts of the world, almost certainly illegally by standards of international diplomacy and law, and I hope it is a change that forces past allies of the US to strongly consider dissolving their military commitments and allegiances to the US. This is the move of a war hungry authoritarian planning on bullying everyone he possibly can.

At the same time, I actually do find it to be one of the most honest executive orders of the second Trump Presidency, and think the idea that the branch of the US government that includes the military was ever going to be about “defense” and not imperial control and intervention was a pretty pathetic lie.  While technically, the US has never officially been at war since the end of WWII, because according to the US constitution, only congress can formally declare war, most historians would say that there have been maybe 17 years in United States history where this nation was not at war. That really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, and it is not even that uncommon for nations with imperialistic intentions, like most of Europe back to the collapse of the Roman Empire, but it should be a stark reminder to anyone in this country who thought that Trump was an isolationist and opposed to US involvement in wars overseas that he is only opposed to US involvement in wars that are not directly and immediately profitable to the US, and more importantly, US war profiteering companies. In that regard, Trump is being incredibly transparent in his admiration for periods of wanton Imperialism in US history, including Westward Expansion and the Gilded Age. 

So will this just be a name change to make DT feel like a big strong boy? Or is this actually indicative of policy changes that are already in progress to increase US militaristic aggression around the world? Personally, I think it is a fair bit of both. For Trump personally, I think it probably is about the projection of his personally power. The big boy dictators of the world just got together and did their own horn tooting and military parading that didn’t look nearly as much like a pathetic joke as Trump’s military parade earlier this year, and I think he is well past tired of having people tell him that he has obligations to nations and allegiances around the world that are not immediately profitable to him. However, I think there are wolves all around him looking at places like Venezuela and Gaza as future sites of future US imperialist development and economic exploitation. Behavior that is distinctly US American and something that has happened many times under nearly every political party that has ever held power in the US, but probably never before with such blatant disregard for including Congress in planning and executing this imperialist violence. 

As much as today’s democrats will talk a big game about the changes they will make if they ever usurp power from Donald Trump, if the US has already toppled the government of Venezuela and begun Trump’s rebuilding fantasy in the Gaza Strip, the US will do nothing but continue to allow US companies to exploit those opportunities under the pretense of obligation to peace and global prosperity…just as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and throughout the Middle East, and South and Central America and East Asia, and Africa through Wars like our War on Terror, our War on Drugs (Both wars that have not ended), as well as the Cold War, and everything before it. 

So while the specific talk of “Lethality” and the desire to stop letting anyone else in the world tell us who we are going to kill when we feel like it is upsetting and something relatively new and deeply rooted in Trumpism’s authoritarian strain of Patriarchal Misogyny that should raise warning flags even for US citizens who have largely drank the US imperialist Kool Aid, I think for the rest of the world the only people who are probably really being put on notice by these rhetorical maneuvers are the leaders of traditional US global allies that are now going to be up against it trying to justify dealing with Trump as a wayward friend and not a bully that is here for everyone’s lunch money.  

My pace on writing these blog posts has slowed considerably since I started, but I still have a lot to write about related to why I am so focused on dismantling Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) and the authoritarian structures it props up, so whether I get to 100 posts before the end of December or not, I am not done with this project yet. It has been a heavy couple of months with a lot to think about and little time to write about it, but I started to talk about Misogyny and Guns in post 55 of 100, and given that US cities are in the process of being occupied by federal troops and law enforcement enforcing presidential decree, it seems like a necessary time to talk about why I continue to not want to own a firearm.

Firstly, I am not a pacifist and never have been. It is not my place to tell anyone how to respond to violent acts of oppression and control they have experienced in their lives and armed revolutionary movements have accomplished both great and terrible things in the world. I have close friends who have guns and I don’t think it is bad or wrong for anyone to want to be trained in how to use them or how to coordinate their usage with others safely and effectively. I especially don’t advocate for trying to use the state to disarm people, as that will almost inevitably result in focusing on taking guns away from the most marginalized, oppressed and surveilled people in this country and almost certainly not taking them away from the people I am most scared of encountering with guns. It is a very real possibility that community defense collectives are going to be a necessary part of the process of abolishing the police and prisons, and I have absolutely no desire to pretend like that might not necessitate some people from possessing firearms for some significant amount of time into the future. I am not here today to preach an end to gun culture, or to make people who own guns feel bad. But I am going to call out the connections between US gun culture and PM and draw attention to some of the realities that has created that make me much more comfortable facing what ever is coming in the US political future without a firearm in my home.

The idea that people generally use personal firearms to protect themselves or their families from direct harm is a myth. I wanted to say it is a lie, because the people who profit off of manipulating studies and statistics to get people to believe that “good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns,”  absolutely do engage in knowing deception to perpetuate the myth, but I think it is valuable to acknowledge that, even with my incredibly skeptical position towards the institutions that repeat and reinforce this myth, it is so foundational to the existence of the United States and the shaping of an “American” identity that I think it is probably more harmful to call it a lie at this point than it is to acknowledge that the traditions and stories that have been created around the relationship between firearms and safety have become nearly supernatural justifications for explaining social and cultural phenomena I the US, and in the heads of many of its citizens. The gun in the United States is a religious artifact and conversations about what that means, or the world it has created are essentially conversations as core to a person’s identity as their religious and spiritual beliefs. While I believe this is directly connected to the long term project of PM colonialism, I also recognize that many people in the US believe it to be true that guns are an ultimate tool of safety and not political violence, and there is probably little that can be discussed philosophically to change that belief because it is a belief that built this nation into everything that it is today.

What I do think is important to point out though, is that no matter how hard you believe in the myth that it is possible to own a firearm with the intention of using it defensively, there is a very dangerous and difficult reality that accompanies this myth, and that is how much gun ownership increases the likelihood of everyone around the gunner of getting shot. People who live with owners of handguns are more than twice as likely to be killed by a gun as people who do not live with an owner of a handgun, and spouses and intimate partners are seven times as likely to be shot by a partner who owns a handgun than they would by a partner who does not own a handgun. Additionally, related to my last 2 posts, People with access to firearms are three times as likely to die by suicide as those who do not own guns. It is important with that last one too to understand that isn’t people who own guns, it is people who can get access to them, which includes the children of gun owners. 

The decision to own a firearm or not is not one of personal freedom, protection or responsibility…even though it is almost always framed that way in contemporary debate…even though the framing of the second amendment to the US constitution frames the right to bear arms as being a subordinate clause to the need for a well regulated militia. This is probably because of the 2008 District of Columbia v Heller Supreme Court ruling that basically changed 200 years of court precedent to prioritize the myth that guns are necessary (or even statistically useful) in protecting oneself or one’s property.  So I don’t know, maybe my own belief that it is necessary to entertain personal “Defensive Gun Use” as a myth instead of lie is not some deeply rooted artifact of US American culture but is actually a fairly recent construct of an out of control gun lobby who’s exact profitability is not even reported  (or those accurately measurable) in the US.  Personally, I know too many people who have been shot by firearms or shot at by firearms. I have even had a guns pointed at me more than once. I don’t know that I know anyone who has ever been in a situation where they drew their own firearm and used it to protect themselves. Perhaps this personal experience is coloring my perspective on this topic in ways that make me more inclined to disbelieve the myth of defensive gun use than is justified, but at least the statistics seem to support my anecdotal experience more than counter it.

There are communities around me and in the US that need protecting, and I am not going to tell the people in those communities how they should do the work of protecting themselves or that they are wrong for considering armed defense to be necessary or strategically viable in their given circumstances. But the odds of me showing up in those communities armed, especially armed with military weaponry, and being welcomed as an ally or accomplice seems like a pretty intense delusion on my part. The fact that I have no where personally to store such weapons safely is a very strong indicator of how delusional such an attitude would be for me. 

Back when I was in the middle of being investigated by the FBI, being followed everywhere I went, having my friends and family questioned and harassed, and feeling like the state repression I was experience was going to define the rest of my life, I sincerely considered trying to form an armed anarchist militia. For over a year after the FBI stopped following me around, I discussed the idea with friends and comrades and I know many folks who ended up going that route in their own communities. Thankfully, I, personally, was too economically unstable to be in a position to purchase a firearm, because I was also in situations where I was living collectively with lots of other people, including a child, and I was not going to be in any position to safely or securely keep a firearm, and safely and securely keeping a firearm is a much bigger commitment and responsibility than is represented in US culture. Our movies are filled with people carrying firearms on themselves at all times, even while consuming drugs and alcohol, and often even while making out or engaged in foreplay. Guns are very frequently portrayed as symbols of power, authority and sex appeal in US culture, and in St. Louis, when I was growing up, people would frequently go outside and fire guns into the air during  New Years Eve and sometimes even on the Fourth of July. None of that was about respecting firearms as tools of self-defense. Firearms in the United States are much more about demonstrating the power to be able to pro-actively claim property and the willingness to use violence to “defend” that claim, than they are tool of personal self defense. Even in the face of growing authoritarianism and state violence, I think the strategy of buying a gun for personal self-defense and keeping it in my own home is only buying in to colonial and PM ideas about power and authority, and I don’t see how feeding into those narratives is worth placing the people I live with and love in greater danger. 

I want to be blunt and up front about the content of this blog, what inspired it and my fear that I might come across as “profiting” off of or sensationalizing suicide as topic to write about (Please take that first sentence as a content warning for this whole post and if this post is making you have thoughts or desires related to self harm or violence, please reach out to someone and talk to them about it. Some options for that include the 988 Lifeline, the Trans Lifeline, or the Trevor Project, depending upon what kind of support would be most helpful to you in your current situation). I am still processing my friend’s death, that I wrote about in Post 54 of 100, and I need to do that in writing. He killed himself with a gun. He is not my first old friend to do this with a gun. Nor has every person I’ve known, who identifies as a man, and who died by suicide used a gun. I am going to go into a little bit of that history here, and be real honest about it, so this might be a difficult post for some folks to read. 

I have only personally ever experienced suicidal ideation one time really in my life, and I kind made a joke out of it, but really myself, in writing, in the final section of I Fucked Up, the autobiographical anthology of the mistakes of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett. The Final section is called: S1.02.02 – Section III: the End, and you are welcome to read it, is kind of-all about-this experience. The secret truth is that was pretty much the very first thing that I wrote that I knew was going to become I Fucked Up.  I can already tell this topic is going to be too big to cover in one blog post that I sat down to start writing at 10 pm after waking up at 4:30 am, because that is my life now. I want to write about why I don’t own a gun; why I am thankful I didn’t go down the path of trying to be a part of an armed militia after being surveilled by the FBI and subpoenaed to appear before a US Grand Jury; about how people (plural) I have known have used the threat of suicide and even possibly attempts at suicide to manipulate and control romantic and soon to be ex-romantic partners, sometimes without even realizing or intending for that to be the consequences of their actions. I want to write about the absolutely filthy, disgusting pressure that gets put upon people to find meaning and fulfillment in romantic (especially monogamous) relationships and the amount of hate that the world I grew up in seems to allow to be directed at oneself for experiencing life, and oneself and the world in ways that fall outside of compulsory heterosexuality, monogamy,  authoritarian child raising, and of course, capitalism. So not only might I be exploiting the topic of “suicide” for one or two blog posts, I might be doing it for the next several posts, and if that comes across as a thing I am doing, I really hope someone calls me out on it.

 Anyway, with all of these things that I have to write about the intersections of self harm, social harm, and patriarchal misogyny, I am probably going to just write this post about the most fucked up topic for me to write about, especially because I have actually no idea what was going through my friend’s head before the bullet.

The thing I need to write about tonight, that I have been thinking about for 2 weeks, and in a weird metaphysical sense for long before my friend died…is that I think the way we talk about suicide and the moral and ethical responsibilities that are supposed to stop people from committing suicide are fucked up, promote abuse and violence…and are sometimes really fucking hard not to fall into when you are trying to keep a loved one alive. 

Life is not an obligation. Not to yourself, not to your family, your romantic partner, your children, your friends, your community, your faith, your nation, or anyone. When people tell you that you have a responsibility to keep living, for whatever reasons they try to feed you, they are manipulating you…just as manipulatingly as when someone tells you that they are thinking about committing suicide based upon your actions, or feelings or response to their actions or feelings. I think generally, society is much more tolerant and accepting of trying to manipulate people into living, and in all transparency, I have been the person telling someone that I love with all my heart that “YOU have no right to kill yourself because I love you too much and your act would just be too selfish…and think about your family and all the other people who love you…and yada, yada, yada.” I’ve been there, and the people I have told that to are still here, and some of the people who I never told that too are not…

…but even when it doesn’t feel like the wrong thing to say from some kind of moral or ethical perspective, and even when the outcome feels worth it, and the person later thanks you for being the one to say it…it is not the actual truth about life or death. It is a rhetorical power play to manipulate another person into doing what you want. It is every bit as selfish an act as anything you are accusing another person of, because life is not a responsibility. Life is a fleeting, terrifying, painful opportunity that has a real (and not improbable) chance to be beautiful, extraordinary, and yours…for as long as you can hold on to it.  Absolutely no one else in the entire world gets the opportunity to live your life, or experience what you will get to experience, or can know what the consequences of living your life for yourself will be, so no one can tell you with any real conviction what your life is worth, or what it could yet become. 

So yeah, there are a lot of things I wish I could have said to my friends who chose to end their lives, and to all my friends out their struggling with feelings about how crushing and impossible it is to navigate this world without just feeling like you are causing harm to others and the planet and yourself by continuing to live…I want to talk to you about your life, and choices that you might still be able to make that will give you more opportunities for those moments of pure awe and amazement at how kind and beautiful and undeservedly joyous the world and your place in it can be…but a really dark and dangerous reality of this world that too much rainbows and sunshine and trying to guilt trip people into living can and does cause, is that sometimes people make the choice to end their own life before they do something really fucking horrible, instead of after it. And I kind of hate myself for even thinking this could have been otherwise about my friends and the people I love and have cared about so much—but the truth is that no one I have ever cared about who killed themselves did it immediately after they did something unforgivable and terrible to someone else…

…and that is actually something that I respect the fuck out of, and think deserves to be remembered as a strength and blessing about each and everyone I have lost to suicide. 

Look, I worked in Sexual Violence prevention, and very well might again one day. I worked at a shelter that had to keep its location secret and have bullet proof windows because spurned lovers, partners, or just possessive stalkers felt entitled to the lives and minds and bodies of others, and thought to themselves that “if I can’t have her (or him or them) then no one can.” There is a very pervasive idea in at least the US, that a powerful and successful person in this world is supposed to have at least one romantic relationship in their lives where the other person’s thoughts and labor and body are essentially an extension of their own property, wealth, and success. This idea rests at the very heart of patriarchal misogyny, and it is so heavily reiterated through cultural media, memes and institutions that it is actually very difficult to know with any kind of certainty whether anyone raised within this culture is going to be able resist its command when that person is at a low point of emotional, physical or economic despair. This is a reality that has to be acknowledge if it is ever going to be addressed, and so when I have a long lost friend (a different story than the one from the last post) who shoots himself in the head, in a car, in front of his partner and his child, and I can barely process how horrible and fucked up a situation that would be to survive for the partner or the child…and how much I wish my old friend would have lived in a world where much, much better options were available for handling the host of potential problems that were tearing his life apart…I also thank all that can be thanked that my friend had the strength in him to point the gun at himself, because there are many in that situation that don’t.

This is kind of spilling over into some really heavy shit, and some of the stuff about guns and masculinity that I am too emotionally and physically exhausted to go into tonight, and that I will want to come back to later, but I will never judge anyone for deciding it is their time, even if that decision breaks my heart and shatters my world, because: I don’t need to be anyone’s judge; I will never really know what other people are going through unless we’ve both created a relationship where they feel safe and comfortable enough to tell me; and the ugliest demons that people wrestle with are not the ones that people wear on their sleeves and show off to the world.  I have been trying for about a paragraph and a half to find a natural way to work in this link to a zine about anarchist accountability processes and the failure of well intentioned people to build a community that offer more than the illusion of safety, called “The Broken Teapot”, (that I would love to talk to others about who read it), but the section “Love you Too Much” talks about the reality of the “murder/suicide” that is often explored in fiction and media as romantic plot line or a sensationalized thriller/horror hook, that really drives home for me the importance of remembering to talk with those I love about how life is an opportunity and a choice, not an obligation. 

If I love you, you have earned it. You deserve to be loved, and you deserve to be treated with honesty, respect and compassion. I want you to be a part of my world, and I want you to know that your participation in my life brings me much light and joy. I am saying this to specific friends and family, and even some people that I probably shouldn’t because I can’t possibly know you well enough for my ability to love you to be well earned, that I know I need to be saying it to more than I do, and I am saying to more folks who I might have no idea need to hear it all, particularly from me…but I want you here. I want you here, but my love for you means that I trust you  to know yourself, your limits and your strengths better than I ever could, and I will keep loving you everywhere this universe will ever take you.  

I kind of tried to put the content warning right there in the title, but I can add that I don’t really talk much more about suicide than pointing out that it happened in this post.

Jim has been dead for a week. I don’t know if that means anything to you or not, but it meant its been a difficult week for me, even if I’ve gotten to see and connect with old friends, and tell a lot of people I haven’t talked to in too long that I love them, because it also has meant a lot of crying and hard reflection and admitting that I am not as good a friend as I want to believe I am. Jim last texted me in January. He reached out, out of the blue just to tell me he was thinking about me and wish me well. I asked him how he was doing and he said “kinda terrible.” Then we talked about my boy and his nephew and that’s the last I’ll ever say to him. No, “I am sorry to hear you are having a bad time, do you want to talk about it?” No “I miss you Jim, it is really nice to hear from you.” No follow up responses from me, just like I don’t think I had ever reached out to him proactively since we stopped living together 25 years ago. This might be a little “boo-hoo! Self-blame-y.” I am a Jewish boy who wears the world on my back. But, in the context of this blog post, I really do intend it to be honest reflection about the person I am and the person I want to be in my friends’ lives. I am not so conceded as to believe that Jim was particularly hurt by my specific absence in his life, or to think that one of the replies above would have changed the course of events that happened, but I recognize that I still have room to grow as a friend, and that listening better to my friends when they are asking me for help is something concrete that I can start working on right way.   

So why am I writing about this in this blog about patriarchal misogyny (PM)?

Because many blog posts ago, in Post 7 of 100: Mental Health and Patriarchal Misogyny, I wrote about how important it is for folks who identify as male to really think about the ways that internalized PM thrives when men stay silent about the expectations that they feel imposed onto them in the effort to be successful men and the problems and stresses that result from trying to live up to that alone. I talked about how creating communities of care for each other, especially with our friends, and especially in resistance to ideas about male-identified folks being bad at exploring deep and difficult mental health topics, is a really critical tool to fight back against this current surge of PM we are seeing in right-wing politics. I wrote all about that, but on the personal level, I really let myself stay far too theoretical and not even put forward any steps I wanted to take to get better at providing that kind of space for anyone around me, much less my friends…and I think that process of telling ourselves to be better, but not actually take steps to do it is a failure that we are conditioned and encouraged to make. When people feel guilt ridden and overwhelmed by their own failures, it is really difficult for them to stand up for anyone and not just capitulate to a system that say “you are too pathetic to function on your own, just do what we tell you and things will go better for you.” 

So 47 blog posts later, after a really heart breaking tragedy that makes me feel a lot of those “you are a failure” feelings and threatens to saddle me with guilt and convince me that I am the wrong person to be talking about any of this…I realized that out of that pain, I see steps forward. I see ways to participate more actively in the relationships I have built with others over the course of my life, and that to be able to take these steps I can put a plan together: 

1. When friends reach out to connect with me socially, I want to make sure that I take the time within a couple of days really read the message. Not just skim through it, especially if it is long, but actually sit down and read it, looking for signs that it contains an emotional, physical or economic ask in it. This isn’t me promising that I am going to respond to every communication sent to me, especially not within a couple of days. But I do want to respect that people who take the time to reach out to me are doing so for a reason, and if they are putting that reason in a message to me as a direct request, I really don’t want to be looking back at any more messages from someone that I skimmed or didn’t really consider, and then realizing that I’ll never have the opportunity to respond to them again…again.

2. When someone tells me they are feeling bad or terrible, I need to believe them and believe that they are choosing those words for their own reasons, not for reasons related to controlling or manipulating me, even as I acknowledge that I may not be in a position to do anything about that situation, not even make additional time to be present in their lives. Like, obviously, I want to be able to be present in the lives of my friends and those I love, but as a stay at home parent of a toddler, I don’t always have the time and emotionally energy to spend to be the good friend. That doesn’t mean I have to be a bad friend though, and if I see sincere efforts to communicate intensely strong and scary emotions, I can be a lot more intentional about how I respond to them if I acknowledge them first as I read them, and not assume that the person who expressed them is doing so in the hope that I brush that work off with an attempt at ignoring the problem.

3. I need to make sure that I am not trying to position myself as a super friend or a hero or any bullshit like that, but instead make sure I am trying to be a part of a community of care, for myself and for those I love, so that no one is dependent on any one person for their mental support network. Folks socialized as men get real bad about this, and creating these networks can be hard because opening up to the wrong people can make a lot of problems a lot worse. These networks are not going to be perfect, but they need to practice skills like active listening, not judging the people coming to them for support, and not trying to prescribe answers or solutions to problems that are not being presented to be answered or solved. I can’t make other people be a part of any of these networks either, and some people will never want to, or want different networks of care and support than I will ever be able to be a part of, but when people are reaching out to me to begin with, to tell me they are feeling bad, then that is them asking me to be a part of their network, and I can try my best to make sure that that situation is not turning into one of individual dependency, but of that person expanding their own personal network of care.

I am getting pretty loopy from lack of sleep and need to go to bed now, but as much as I still feel sad and bad about the kind of friend I ended up being to Jim, I am thankful for all the times that we got to be together as friends, and how earnestly and passionately he cared about creating the kinds of conversations where people could be real with each other about their feelings and situations and needs. You keep teaching me Jim, how to be a better friend and a person and I really wish I had told you that six months ago.  

In post 52 of 100, I ended it talking about how the liberal left (as opposed to the radical left) in the US tends to argue a position of “we can harness the authority of the state to protect vulnerable people from the violences of authoritarian ideologies like patriarchal misogyny (PM)” and that argument often ends up feeling convincing to many folks who have become disillusioned with seeing anarchist/anti-authoritarian communities fall apart and fail to protect vulnerable people, even within their own communities, much less in the communities around them. I have even seen this argued online by relatively hierarchical communist and socialist organizations as “the reason why anarchists will always fail.” Almost every time a Democrat gets elected to president (or someone with liberal/progressive ideas becomes head of a large institution), it feels like many on the left shift from wanting to wanting to attack the authoritarian structures of the state (that were so scary under conservative leadership), and instead harness those authoritarian structures to push through liberal policies. A very common argument in defense of this is that “the people” expect results, and if the new “good” leadership can’t quickly show their policy progress, then “the people” are going to stop supporting them. 

This is a progression that nationally has been going on at least since Obama took over from a W. Bush who saw the powers of the presidency and the executive branch absolutely balloon after 9/11, and carried over after Biden took over from Trump. It is tempting to believe that Trumpism 2.0 has gotten so out of control with its authoritarian power grabbing that there really cannot be a democratic United States after Trump is removed from office without completely readdressing the position of the presidency and stripping it of massive amounts of its authority, but I have a gross, sinking feeling in my stomach that that isn’t likely to happen, at least not if the next person to assume the position of president of the United States does so through the current electoral process. My understanding of US history suggests that it is extremely rare for either congress or the Supreme Court to ever take powers away from the position of the presidency, but if any US history scholars want to give me reasons to be more hopeful, I am willing to listen. 

Left or right, Nationally, locally, or confined even to a specific organization or institution, the more authority a leadership position offers, the more susceptible to abuse and corruption it becomes, and the more attractive the position becomes to people who want to abuse authority. This is a reality that has always left me very uncomfortable holding positions of authority within the academic organizations and institutions I have chosen to work within, and the extent of corruption and abuse at the national level is making it very difficult to imagine being able to return to academia within the current political climate of the United States, if I would even be able to get hired, but that is not really the point of this post.

The point of this post is supposed to be that I think there are a lot of older folks like me, who strongly believe that we are all better off when we share power with each other than try to horde it and use it over each other, that have gotten out of the practice of putting that belief into action. I think many of us are starting to see that the organizations and institutions that we eventually gave up some of our own personal power to…for the sake of expediency and access to resources that let us do the work that we felt was the most productive use of our abilities….are pretty impotent in the face of people willing to utilize the structures of our nation much more violently and authoritarianly than we ever were, and that the safe guards we thought were going to protect us turned out to be dependent upon the people taking that power still willing to treat us like human beings and equals. The institutions and organizations we gave part of our power over to, under the guise of promoting ideas or taking actions that we didn’t know how to make happen without their authority, are quickly crumbling away or conceding to authoritarian bullies, and the only people that are really effectively standing up to this wave of authoritarianism that is really fairly global, even if it feels concentrated in the US from a US citizen’s perspective, are the people and groups that are standing up autonomously and collectively, without having leaders that can be threatened, bribed and pacified. 

This isn’t me trying to hate on people doing hard work with other people that they trust, that are utilizing resources and knowledge banks that have taken a lot of specialization to create and operate, I promise! But it is me urging folks I know that are in those kind of positions to think very carefully about how vulnerable those institutions and organizations are to authoritarian attack and to consider whether trying to decentralize and share resources and knowledge right now, as broadly as possible isn’t going to end up being the more effective long term strategy than expecting some kind of hero to step in and save the day/ prevent all that work from being destroyed or corrupted for use by people who will use those resources and information to cause harm. I think it has probably never been more important in my life time to stop looking for organizations and institutions that are going to protect me from the things that I already see them failing to protect others from in the world and nation and communities around me, and start looking to build up my communities of friends, family, and neighbors so that we can collectively be ready to stand up and protect each other.

I will talk more in future posts about what that could possibly look like, and especially how important it is to recognize how desperately Trumpism 2.0 is hoping that its enemies fall into easily controlled and manipulated authoritarian practices of organizing and distributing power, because that is Trump’s bread and butter of political power: turning allies against each other and offering gilt, poisoned bribes to those willing to be the first to put on his collar of shame. I will also talk more about how difficult it is not to turn to Patriarchal Misogynistic ways of communicating and organizing resistance when those are the ways that we have been raised to wield power, but how that difficulty doesn’t have to stop us from trying and succeeding to do better than any of us have ever done before.

Its late as I write this and even later as I post it. This feels like a kind of big idea to me though, so I am going to be a little more active in trying to get people to read it, so if you get to it early on in its life cycle, and there is anything that doesn't make sense or makes me look stupid for saying it, feel free to let me know. 

So, now of the writing projects that I have been working on the last two months has been investigating what happened to the Great Plains Anarchist Network (GPAN), a group of many amazing people that I used to organize with against the State, authoritarian hate-filled ideologies, and capitalism. This is the group that I was working with when I was subpoenaed to appear before an FBI Grand Jury and if that is a new story to you, then you can get a sense of it by reading this short story that is a part of a collection of writings related to my life.

This blog post isn’t going to be about any of that experience, or even that much about GPAN or the research I am doing about that, except to point out that one of the surprising things to come out of that research is to realize how much bigger a role patriarchal misogyny (PM) played in the eventual end of GPAN than I realized. I am not even talking about organized, intentionally authoritarian attacks on GPAN that came from state repression, I am talking about deeply internalized patriarchal misogyny that led to members of GPAN and its affiliated organizations and groups harming each other physically, sexually, economically, emotionally, and mentally in traumatic, life impacting ways. Like, on the surface, I always knew that there were abusive people within GPAN, some of whom participated willingly in accountability processes to varying degrees to success, and some who very much did not—including people involved in organizing within my own close organizations and affinity groups…and I even knew that some of those specific incidents led to the dissolution of some organizations and groups, as well as made some people leave anarchist community organizing entirely for feeling the lack of support…but, even though many have called me obsessed with gender and sexuality and confronting patriarchal misogyny…I never really put it together just how thoroughly unchecked or badly-checked patriarchal misogyny was more responsible for breaking up communities, groups and organizations I have loved with my entire heart than any act of state repression or even the demands of a capitalist society. 

In the process of trying to understand and answer the question, “what happened to the Great Plains Anarchist Network, and why is there no collective memory of what happened there over the years it was active?” I started to realize that as much as I thought we were thinking about and trying to address sexual violence, gender violence, domestic violence, heterosexist violence, transphobic violence, racist violence, colonial violence, ablest violence, capitalist violence, and all the other violences that patriarchal misogynistic authoritarianism uses to destroy or repress communities, these violences were continuing to happen and enough people were turning away from the difficult conversations of addressing them in the interest of expediency or the immediacy of other conflicts, that the violences continued to happen, over and over again, with the people most responsible for inflicting them bouncing around from community to community or group to group in ways that enabled them to lessen, or even outright evade accountability for the harm they caused. For every one incident or person who caused multiple incidents of violence against vulnerable members of our communities that was called out or into accountability, it seems like there was always at least one more that either no one knew about, or that was actively being ignored for one bullshit reason or another. 

At some point, I am going to go into a lot more detail about this, especially as I try to collect my own experiences with GPAN as well as the experiences of others, in what could probably become a book or a digital collection of writings, but that is going to be way too much and too heavy of a load to smash into a blog. The conclusion that I will put forward here, especially in the hope that maybe some folks end up reading this blog who have thoughts, experiences, angers or frustrations that they want to share with others, or process collectively with people who still care about them…is that anarchist organizing within the whole of the United States, and especially within “Red State” regions of the US, has had a very serious problem with internalized patriarchal misogyny that is a bigger and more dangerous threat than the State itself. I recognize that that is a big claim that is going to get some people I care about very, very angry, especially as it might feel dismissive of the struggles of many people and groups trying to confront the multitude of other authoritarian violences that are assaulting the people of planet earth every day. I am personally ready to have difficult conversations with just about anyone who wants to talk to me about this subject, and why I might be totally wrong. But I am also tired of pretending like I haven’t seen immediacy and militancy used by people (including myself) promoting very masculine-centered (and white, and ablest, and cisgendered-centered) means of revolt and resistance as weapons against their communities and as tokens of social capital and prestige. The trauma and fatigue of this repeated cycle has disenchanted so many people from anarchist projects and organizations, and led many into the arms of organizations, institutions saddled with “justified authoritarian” structures, policies and secret, power-holding stakeholders that not only also end up engaging in or directly covering up patriarchal misogynistic violence, but even when they are “being run right” they are so entangled with innately authoritarian bureaucracies that they will only ever be able to address the most surface level symptoms of the underlying problems. 

I am not casting stones with this statement. I recognize that it happened to me too, that I dove into academia, where I felt like I had to hide many of my beliefs and goals for what ways of knowing and processes for critically examining those systems of knowledge I was trying to share with my students…and I can only imagine how much worse it has gotten in the last year and a half I have been out of academia. That is feels like an inherent part of “growing up” as an anarchist that you just have to eventually accept that there are some authoritarian practices that are somehow “the good ones” that really protect vulnerable people and not the people in positions of authority. Positions of authority in the US rooted in authoritarian practices that are historically and immediately tied to PM colonial structures that have committed genocide (and continue to) and forcibly transport (import and export) people over hundreds and thousands of miles into hostile environments to use as free/cheap labor, sexual property, and human shields against all those who don’t immediately capitulate to those authoritarian systems. We are seeing the powerlessness of the US political left to live up to any promise they have ever made about using the power of the most violent nation on earth to protect vulnerable populations, due to the ease at which the system discards democratic or anti-authoritarian practices when they are inconvenient for maintaining its control and authority, but it is going to be very, very difficult to welcome the people who are falling out of love with that system when anti-authoritarian autonomous organizations, groups and movements continue to provide the same kind of safe harbor and protections for abusers that are provided to abusers in the most authoritarian political and social movements.    

July has been a busy, thought-thinking month. 

Firstly, the long predicted starvation of children in Gaza is killing babies and toddlers (the pictures in this article are heart breaking), children just like mine, and the US is fully complicit in playing along with the State of Israel’s genocidal refusal to let international aid organizations save people’s lives.  France has already recognized a Palestinian State, something that seemed impossible only 2 years ago, and even though I don’t think states do a good job of taking care of people, I do hope more states around the world recognize Palestine as one of them so that the stranglehold the State of Israel has over the people of Palestine can be broken forever. And also, fuck the world and every nation in it that pretends like what Israel is doing is in the interest of self-defense and is not mass death, murder, infanticide, and genocide. I have a lot more to say on this topic and might come back to it from specifically a critical perspective on patriarchal misogyny, but not tonight.

Secondly, I presented a lot of the research and writing I did over the last 2 months about the rise and fall of the Great Plains Anarchist Network, and realized how heavily themes of patriarchal misogyny and authoritarian attitudes and behaviors towards anarchist organizing infiltrated every other topic I thought I wanted to write about and share with younger folks carrying on the fight today. While the writing and presenting for that project came and went, the on-going research and reflection have stirred up feelings and ideas that are going to take a lot of time to process and write about, and I am going to try to upset folks I am just meeting who are sharing theoretical resources with me that make me concerned about how cyclical some of these problems have continued to be for over 20 years. Hearing about how we used to use vinegar-soaked bandanas to fend off tear gas and pepper spray did get a rise out of the kids that was worth a chuckle. I have a lot more to write about with this project that is going to overlap heavily with this project, including going public with somethings that are going to upset old friends and possibly new and I am being exceedingly cautious about how I approach this topic. I have more people I need to reach out to ask if they want to talk about any of this before I make the mistake of missing vital perspectives on something that was much bigger than me. 

3rdly, July has been hot, and the days are long and the child wakes with dawn and sounds from the street and sometimes the smell of burning…things from the street that do not smell pleasant, but we have to keep the windows open, and so the stress and the lack of sleep and wasps and being social and like and such can really eat up the writing time when you pass out early and during his every nap, and the weekly Mutual Aid Social/Self Therapy thing that you were doing regularly for months hasn’t been happening as regularly as I was used to attending it, so I think I am sitting on a lot more heavier things without talking to people about them than I was a month ago, and that too builds up and makes it harder to write…

…Which is, in all of these excuses and revelations, to say that I needed to be reminded that I write best when I let myself be present in the things that I write and don’t try to pontificate from outside of myself about things that might look like they don’t affect me unless I make it very clear how they do. I think a Fat, Lazy and Good For Nothing (a reference to my old Zine that I might be in the process of trying to bring back) old dude like me can very easily appear to just be some lonely man writing on the internet about topics that don’t appear to have anything to do with me personally, and who has time to read boring shitty takes by people who don’t know what they are talking about?

So moving forward, in future posts, at least for a while, I think I am going to focus more on the personal perspective I have into a lot of this shit that might seem like cis-white bros like me can’t really be thinking about anyway, like how nations half a world a way murder children in my name to reproduce the patriarchal, colonial, genocidal bullshit of the country I live in, or how anyone in the US can think that they don’t know anyone who has ever been abused or have abused (or both) someone else domestically, sexually, or interpersonally within groups of friends, organizations, is probably ignoring very apparent clues, lying to themselves, or allowing themselves to be lied to about how blatantly manipulative and abusive patriarchal misogynistic culture is in the United States, especially in positions of authority and power, which include families, friends and work places, as well as all of the more  obvious institutions of authority in our society. This might get awkward moving forward, as the blog might take on some “writing in my diary”-esque elements, but, only halfway through this project, I still have a ton more to write about this topic and why it still feels like I need to be talking a lot more with my friends, family and larger communities around me about recognizing the grasp patriarchal misogynistic thinking has on the way power exists in the world around us.

“Hey Ben, you are still writing these?”

Yes, The month of June has been a busy one, filled with traveling and other writing projects, but always, in my heart and somewhere in my mind, I am asking myself and my community: How can we stop letting patriarchal misogyny ruin our lives?

So for this blog post, I want to talk about the challenges of building communities are are resistant to the influence and violence of Patriarchal Misogyny. I think most of this would apply to any community or group that doesn’t want to be controlled by someone exerting hierarchal authority over the group, but I tend to specifically think about groups that are actively dedicated to dismantling authoritarianism on a large scale, not just existing without it in their group. Perhaps I should take time to explain why, at least in the US (I haven’t really experienced community building in any other country enough to speak on it), authoritarian power structures are inherently patriarchal, but that gets me away from the topic I want to write about. So if anyone is skeptical of that claim, or wants me to try to explain it better, they can ask and it can be the subject of a future blog post. 

So what I have noticed about people working together in groups that have been derailed or destroyed by one or more person attempting to dominate and control the group, in order to steal the power of others?

1. Without talking about how power is used within a group, people who are effective at harnessing and controlling the power of others will do so. 

2. Using or accepting authoritarian methods of decision making and action taking is a trained/socialized behavior of being a US citizen that will serve as a default for the vast majority of people (in groups in the the US) in instances of crisis and immediacy. 

3. Expecting everyone in a group to always be capable of listening openly, considering all possible options for decision making, and then patiently participating in the process of collectively making that decision is unreasonable. 

4. Catching authoritarian tendencies and behaviors early on in a group’s formation and decision making processes will almost always result in less severe consequences and more generous and forgiving group members than when these tendencies are ignored until they can’t be ignored any longer.

5. At the same time as 1 through 4 are all true, communities that over-commit to establishing rules for the flow of power and its utilization can create internal structures that act as controlingly as any authoritarian leader. These institutionalized rule systems can be tricky because they can appear to be for the purpose of not privileging any individual within the group, but the reality is that all rules that get followed are to someone’s benefit. This is why rich and powerful people almost never feel compelled to follow their own rules unless the consequences for breaking them are incredibly swift and powerfully enforced. Think French revolution levels of enforcement on economic and political rulers. 

6. This usually means that groups that are really resilient to the creep of authoritarianism into their power structures and dynamics are not groups that have one certain, specific set of rules in place to stop it, but instead are groups that are composed of people that are comfortable and confident in their abilities to work together to solve problems given the specific contexts in which they arise.

7. It might be more effective if people stop thinking about the idea of community as existing as a static noun, that just is, and might even be commodified into a property that some people directly own, and instead think of community building as verb which its members must keep doing and will only be “done” when that community no longer exists. 

8. Patriarchy arose around the “domestication” of land, the establishment of property, and a need to enforce rules around the distribution and acquisition of property. It will always be present in situations where people are acting as if the community is a property of its members, even when its members might not be socialized or recognized as men. You don’t earn the right to be a member of a community. You practice the values that bring that community together, which means being capable of listening to what those values are and showing how you respect them/live them. 

9. Communities that want to make standing up to authoritarian power structures a part of their community practice have to make talking about power and authority something that is a shared community value that requires a constant and evolving conversation and not a one time workshop or training. 

As I write this post, the president of the United States deployed 2000 National Guard troops to the city of LA  to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers performing detainment and deportation raids that have resulted in over 100 arrests in the last 2 days. This was against the wishes of the state of California government and the LA city government. There will be no sanctuary cities in the second Trump administration and the only thing slowing ICE down is direct protest in the streets. 

I have kinda, sorta, started to touch on how the Trump administration’s crack down on immigration connects with the values of patriarchal misogyny (PM) and Transphobia in post 47 0f 100, but after some conversations with awesome radical folks here in Seattle, I want to come back to talking about the connection between Transphobia and Anti-immigration sentiment within the framework of patriarchal misogyny being used by the Trump administration, because these have been 2 of the most successful rhetorical tools he has used to galvanize his base and win elections in particular counties and states that have swung federal congressional elections. 

Maybe some of my readers might question whether it really makes sense to try to draw a connection between transphobia and the xenophobia of anti-immigrant rhetoric, as the immigrant community and the trans community are often depicted as being antagonistic to each other in media that paints immigrants as ardently religious and  anti-LGBTQIA2S+, and the trans community as both predominantly white and fairly well off economically. In the few months of organizing and anti-authoritarian/anti-capitalist community building I have done here in Seattle, I have seen some tension in who will show up to events, actions and demonstrations centered around immigrant rights and safety and trans folks rights and safety, and I think it is natural for people to have specific issues and concerns that motivate them to action. However, within a PM framework, especially the one at the heart of 2nd term Trumpism, I think it is absolutely vital to understand where the attack on trans people and the attack on immigrant communities is intersecting and how they can be countered simultaneously. 

In post 48 of 100, I talked about how hierarchies require essentializing value traits into the people these hierarchies are meant to control. This is why the very possibility of trans identity is an attack on patriarchy. Because patriarchy cannot exist if gender identity is any kind of flexible or fluid in nature. The authority of men over women has to be seen as fundamental or else it is exposed as arbitrary. In other words, when the border between masculinity and femininity becomes porous, the privileges and authority that comes with being identified as a man become vulnerable to critique and attack in ways that don’t happen when everyone believes that gender is fixed and based upon innate traits. 

National identity occupies a much more similar place to gender than gets talked about in mainstream media, or even radical/academic criticism. Especially for white US Americans, our national identity is a deeply rooted building block of personal identity that feeds into everything from what language we think and speak in, what defines our “inalienable rights,” and thus what power and privilege we are entitled just by being born here. Perhaps most US citizens acknowledge that citizenship and national identity are a little more flexible than they think of gender, but making sure that national identity remains a very restrictive container for power and authority is absolutely why people like Stephan Miller, have risen so prominently in the Trump administration. 

To be an immigrant is, inherently, to transgress the borders of national identity. For some, like the wealthy, identity categories that are used to control and enforce hierarchies have always been more fluid than they are for others, and you see this flaunted in ideas like Trump’s Gold Card Visa. But for pretty much everyone else, especially those trying to cross borders for reasons of survival and obtaining the most basic opportunities of living in a different nation, nation states lean heavily towards being restrictive about opening up the category of “citizen” to anyone who might jeopardize the power and privilege that having that national identity currently bestows. National identity tends not to be as binary as gender identity, as in people don’t usually immediate dismiss the possibility of being a dual citizen, or people changing citizenship multiple times over the course of their lives, but people do tend to lose their minds as soon as they start to think that just about anyone could come and start claiming the same national identity as them, infringing upon their access to the limited powers and privileges being a citizen in that country entails.

All of this tends to be a bit nebulous for most people in their daily lives, and thus easily ignored unless either their national identity or gender identity become something of concern to the people with authority in the immediate world around them, but authoritarian governments, like Trumpism, immediate draw this into much more real and practically situated terms when they do things like declare English to be the official language of the United States and try to create an essentialist definition of gender in an executive order. They absolutely know that creating legal barriers that force people into accepting essentialist identity categories is the first and most important step in establishing authoritarian control over society. The way they want to accomplish that is to label the people who step outside these essentialist categories of identity as criminal, not just in their actions, but in their very act of existing. 

There is much more to say about these essentialist categories of identity and authoritarianism in future posts, like about why Trump relied on race baiting much more in his first term than he has thus far in the second term, and how much of that has to do with political expediency and how much his base already was looking at black people as inherently existing as criminals, but I think that will derail this specific conversation about the intersection of national identity (which also includes much more complicated racial components of identity than I talked about in this post) and gender identity. 

So as the Trump administration promises to crack down more on sanctuary cities that are protecting immigrants and refusing to look at undocumented people as inherent criminals and threats to the national identity of US citizen, I hope people realize that the work of standing up to that repression and violence is the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny and transphobia at the same time. Because who we are is defined and constructed by the society around us and if we let authoritarians have that power—of defining what are safe and protected identities under the law and which are criminalized and not worthy of protection under the law, then the other world that could still yet be is already lost.