When Democrats Abandon Trans People

A personal note about political compromise

Spring 2023 I was at a houseparty in DC with some friends when I encountered a guy we knew from high school. The guy himself is not important, but the conversation we had stuck with me. He absolutely could not wrap his head around why I refused to celebrate the quadricentennial of our hometown, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and he engaged me in a lengthy and very public argument on the subject. My stance was very simple: Fuck the 400th. I don’t celebrate colonization. For him, not so simple. In the years since we last spoke he had been a campaign staffer for numerous Democrats at the local, state, and national level. He had shed his own blood, sweat, and tears for the sake of Our Democracy and he took my criticism as personally as if I had just insulted his Supercuts fade, or his shit party etiquette. We both agreed that a civic body, whether 400 years old or brand new, is a political project: but while he argued that the nature of Portsmouth’s political project is the creation of an equitable, diverse, liberal democracy, I argued rather that it’s a settler colony dedicated to upholding racial capitalism and imperialism. This wasn’t a super hard argument given I wrote a book on the subject. When I told him this, he scoffed, said with one eyebrow raised, “Yeah? Probably isn’t published though, is it?”

This isn’t a post about a guy from Portsmouth or an argument we had, but rather about that guy’s one-time boss: Chris Pappas, eminent local homosexual and Democratic congressman of New Hampshire’s first congressional district.

My guy loved Chris Pappas. While I was out freezing my ass off in public parks, handing out sleeping bags or something like a loser, my guy was fighting alongside Congressman Pappas in the halls of power to win bipartisan victories for the working people of New Hampshire. He recited several such victories at me from memory, complete with statistics on the thousands of New Hampshirites who benefitted from Chris’s public service. The implication was that my localized and direct action-oriented approach to community betterment was myopic, pessimistic, and naive. You wanna make real change for people like you? Better start playing with the big dogs up in Congress.

I don’t personally follow local congressional news like a Catholic follows the pope, so he had me on the legislative victory stuff. I couldn’t say much against his statistics, or his undergraduate policy wonk credentials. Plus, I was a little drunk and dressed like a goth for some reason and my makeup was looking ragged at this point in the night. To be honest, he had me on the ropes. So the angle I took was the obvious one, a shot straight down the middle: Yes, maybe he did all that, but Chris Pappas doesn’t give a fuck about people like me. 

I played the identity card. The trans woman’s gambit.

It was true, though. I’d heard Pappas talk before at Portsmouth’s Pride parade. He’s a gay automaton. He’s got no principles; trans people are tokens to him. Given the embattled state of trans rights in New Hampshire and beyond, it was completely imaginable to me that he would put us on the backburner out of political convenience, or throw us out altogether if the Overton window kept on its steady shift right. That’s the politics of the place we both come from: compromise at all costs. Any good moderate would.

Fast forward two-and-a-half years to 2025. My book is getting published (fuck you) and Congressman Pappas just ended our last year of divided congressional control by bending over the aisle and abandoning trans kids. Christopher Wiggins writes in The Advocate:

Specifically, this prevents kids of people in the military who use state-provided health insurance from accessing healthcare.

And listen. I am pissed on behalf of US trans kids—constantly, forever—but I don’t want to play the identity card again as I write this. I don’t want to argue that gender is the central problem here. Yes, Pappas’s willingness as an out gay in congress to throw trans children under the bus is reprehensible. The bigger picture, however, is so much worse: this bill is Congress’s yearly allowance for the US war machine. The bit about trans healthcare is just a rider they shoehorned in as a volley in the culture war. While it is absolutely true that this bill will fuck over trans children, and also that it sets a very bad precedent for trans policy in the Democratic Party going forward, indisputably, the vast majority of violence caused by this bill will not be attributable to its healthcare restriction, but to its primary purpose as a military spending bill for the largest empire in the world.

This bill bolsters US imperial control in Europe and Asia, expands the military’s already massive application of drones and AI, and increases funding for nuclear arms infrastructure. It’s about ten billion more than 2024, when the Pentagon failed its seventh audit in a row. Lucky for them, this year’s budget removes key language to enforce audit protocols, allowing the Department of Defense to just go nuts with it. (They were doing that already.)

The bill also authorizes hundreds of millions in aid to Israel, a settler colonial apartheid state actively committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Pappas’s vote represents a rightward compromise on trans policy, but his enthusiasm for the Israeli military is nothing new. He has been unequivocal in his support since the start of the Gaza Genocide in 2023. 

You might have heard of this bill because of its capacity to kill trans kids in the US, but the real headline is that the same bill will definitely result in the mass murder of children and adults abroad. It’s not one or the other, but if we call it both/and, we do need to recognize that the mass murder part of the bill is its primary purpose and will entail far, far more aggregate suffering than the healthcare provision. We should be talking about both pieces—the killing of trans kids at home, and the killing of Palestinians abroad—not as disparate goals our government pursues, but rather as two different parts of the same strategy to maintain US hegemony the world over. Empire demands a gender-divided working class; empire demands land expansion at the cost of indigenous genocide. The struggle for trans kids and the struggle for Palestine are intimately connected. 

As a proud, bipartisan independent, Chris Pappas is an agent of compromise. He’s the kind of Democrat who treats the task of ceding ground to Republicans as a duty and a solemn honor. He’s also an opportunist and a coward. I don't doubt that, just as he was swayed against trans kids by a strong Republican surge, an effective pressure campaign could push him back the other direction. I’m sure with enough effort you could scare this guy into any number of things. The problem with that, though, is that doing so would take time, money, and effort that are much better spent elsewhere. A lot more Democrats are about to follow Chris’s example. The time for begging cowards is over: what we need now is dual power, mutual aid, and a robust underground infrastructure to ensure the provision of trans healthcare regardless of what the state chooses to do with us. 

Shortly after the reelection of Donald Trump, I went to the Poetry Project on the Lower East Side to hear a book talk with Stonewall veteran and Black trans revolutionary Miss Major. I'll never forget her perspective on our ascendent fascism. “Four years?” she said, “Honey, four years is nothing. We’re a tough bunch of bitches.” I believe that as trans people, we are extremely good at surviving impossible circumstances. They want to push us back, but we've covered a lot of ground over the last half century—and without the paternal oversight of assimilationist gay congressmen. I worry for trans kids’ access to healthcare, but I also think that we will take care of our own. We owe it to them to be bolder and more strategic in how we resist oppression, by taking community support into our own hands where possible, and by placing our liberation where it belongs in a tapestry of related struggles.

While liberals in the imperial core argue about how to push their representatives a little further left, those same politicians are busy burning Gaza to the ground. When progressives patronize us with visions of an equitable, diverse war machine, it is our job to say no, fuck you. Our vision of the US war machine has to be one of shuttered factories, shattered screens, and melted-down armaments. The lives of our queer children matter just as much as the lives of Palestinian, Yemeni, and Lebanese children abroad. And it's the same people—dedicated warmongers, yes, but also committed compromisers, men like Chris Pappas—who are killing them. 

In the face of ascendent fascism, we have to build a queer politics of liberation that also seeks the end of empire. The struggle for a queer life is the struggle for a Palestinian life. Both are more precious than any legislative victory. Their lives won't come at the convenience of cowards and we cannot afford to compromise a single one.

thanks for reading. if you hated it or enjoyed it please sub the newsletter, shoot me an email at eviewrites@duck.com, and follow on IG @everzines.

your most ambitious young intern,

evergreen<3