Every once a while I encounter a
quote that brings me up short and helps reframe how I see the world. Such was
the case when I came across this quote by Theodor Adorno as I researched the
rise of Nazi Germany and the origins of the Holocaust: “A wrong life cannot be
lived rightly.”Adorno meant it as a critique of life under capitalism, but out of context, I interpreted it to
mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (Jewish, Sinti, disabled),
nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good
ones,” or being life worthy of life. No matter their character, achievements, or
capability, a “wrong life” can have only a negative value to society. The only
way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum
to zero on both sides.This thought stopped me in my
tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it
explained everything I was both feeling and seeing over the past year. It was
the grand unification theorem of my inner world and explained what I was seeing
that was external to me.I am wrong life in the United
States. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter.
Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication.
Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a
good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the
breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the
content of our character and not by government fiat that people like me are
incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the
hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that
ultimately decided I must be destroyed.I’m being kicked out of the National
Guard. I can’t legally use a public bathroom on federal property or at most
airports. As a veteran, I have a free pass onto national parks that I effectively
can never use because I’m wrong life. I will never be able to work in my field
again because I am wrong life. At the VA, the only treatments I can receive are
essentially reeducation—namely, unwanted therapy and medical treatment aimed at
detransition.I spent decades of my life as a
service member, and in my final years I chose to be a MEDEVAC pilot to save
people rather than kill them. I volunteered as a superhero cosplayer to raise
money for desperately ill children and their families. I spent my summer flying
as a firefighter, saving ranches owned by Trump donors, properties owned by the
Mormon Church, and Bible camps run by people who would never let people like me
attend. I went on to fly air ambulance
helicopters in one of the reddest parts of the country while awaiting my
Canadian permanent residency paperwork. When I was flying people around who
needed urgent medical care quickly, I could take a pretty good guess that they were
likely the sort of people who voted for Trump and would happily support
“putting all those transgenders in mental institutions where they belong.” But
they couldn’t because they were intubated, and I was busy flying them to a better
hospital, regardless of what they might think of me.But none of it matters. My
government, and the people who voted it into office, have declared me wrong
life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the president
explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life; it was a feature and not a
bug. His campaign spent hundreds
of millions of dollars promoting the idea that anyone who doesn’t want
wrong life eliminated is against the Herrenvolk. It was messaging
straight out of the Nazi
playbook, just targeting a different group.At the same time, this sentence
helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust
than other civil rights atrocities in American history. At the end of the day
in that history, for most other marginalized groups, it was still possible to
be one of “the good ones.” For Black people, there was room for acceptance of
those who “knew their place.” Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the
South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy.
Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater
of Operations. Hispanics and Latinos were long used for their labor or valued
as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other
Americans’, but it wasn’t a negative number.Mine is.And that’s the fundamental
difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today
and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being
enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push
Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as noncitizens of the Reich than
previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place”
as second-class citizens. The Adorno quote snapped into place
why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of
German history than within that of the United States. It’s also the most useful
framework for understanding why Republicans around the country are targeting
transgender people with literally over 1,000 bills per year designed to make
life impossible enough that they either emigrate, detransition, or
live in a country (this one) where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses
for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.They see us as wrong life. And even
those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is
the dark side of politics: It looks like the quick and easy path to power to
take this position in public. Any Republican who does not behave as if
transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party,
and away from the levers of power. Democrats and hospital administrators in
blue states aren’t generally willing to enforce their own civil rights laws for
fear of the federal government and the belief that transgender people aren’t
worth the effort of protecting.I have expressed some of these
frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of, “Well,
I don’t think of you that way.” While I am appreciative of such support, people
saying this simply doesn’t matter since they have no institutional power. My
own sense of self-worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes
nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.Not to put too fine a point on it, my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is
meaningless if I’m spending my last moments holding my breath and trying to
claw my way through concrete with my fingernails while taking a “shower” with
100 strangers. All it provides is a
further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in
the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared
us to be “wrong life.”If this seems like exaggeration: It’s
not. One of the cruelest ironies is that my friends and I constantly receive
messages that are some variation of “Kill yourself, tranny faggot,” sent by the
same sorts of people who five years ago smugly informed us that “all lives
matter.” The world’s first trillionaire routinely brags about “killing the woke
mind virus” on his own social media platform.Only the government’s opinion
matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in
their eyes. That incumbent party has made it clear it intends to remain in
power in perpetuity at any cost, no matter how people vote. I would always be
wrong life if I remained in the United States. The only way to change the
equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the
same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can
have some value greater than zero.I want my life to have a positive
value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a
relief it was when I did not have to spend every waking moment aware of being
wrong life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, it’s being
in a constant state of sadness, betrayal, and futility at the possibility of
leading a life that matters.