Well, Shit

Some practical tips to get ready for what's coming

Fuck.

This sucks.

Right now, it’s Friday, November 8, and today’s the first day I’ve been able to do much of anything since the election. To say that I’m absolutely shattered by the scale of America’s racism and misogyny cannot be understated. I’m horrified at white women, who voted massively in support of abortion rights on seven separate state constitutional amendments while, with the same hand, voting for a man who says he intends to ban abortion at the national level. It’s mind-boggling. I’m am aghast with shame at my own demographic.

The ice-cold comfort that queer folks—probably everyone reading this, frankly—got the memo and turned out in droves just… doesn’t help. Somewhere between ten and fifteen million Americans who voted for Biden stayed home rather than vote for Harris. We won’t know the specific numbers for a few weeks, while the tail end of stuff gets certified, but it’s really clear at this point that Harris lost because white liberals stayed home. Trump lost three million voters from 2020, and yet he managed to win the popular vote this year because about ten million Biden voters stayed home. Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker, if that’s not shameful, I don’t know what is.

So… what now?

A few things to remember

Before we talk about what we need to get ready for in the next two to four years, I think there’s a few really important things that we owe ourselves to remember:

1. Donald Trump’s leadership style is not unknown to us. We’ve watched what he does, and what he does not do, over the course of his last presidency. We can learn some stuff from that.

   1. First and foremost: Trump is incompetent. Never forget that. He talks a big game, but that’s pretty much all he’s notable for.

      1. Remember his and Rick Perry’s plan to dismantle the Department of Energy? Yeah, that didn’t happen, did it?

      2. How about that wall, let alone getting Mexico to pay for a penny of it?

      3. And his response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Yeah. Yeeeeeeeah.

      4. Repeal and Replace Obamacare? How’s the insurance exchange treating you this year?

         1. In fairness, we got lucky on this one, because John McCain was an actual patriot.

         2. But, also in fairness, this one really wasn’t spearheaded by him—it came from Congressional Republicans.

   2. Secondly, remember that Trump is lazy. He’s gonna spend a lot of time on the golf course. And honestly? I hope he enjoys himself there. I hope he spends lots of time on the green. Personally, I’ll never criticize a minute he spends with a putter in his hand, because as long as he’s doing that, he’s not doing something else.

   3. Thirdly, remember that Trump doesn’t actually want to be the President. He ran because he didn’t want to go to prison.

   4. Fourthly, Trump is an incorrigible liar. He lies just because he can.

   5. Finally, and this is the part that I want trans folks reading this to hold on to: Trump doesn’t actually care about trans people either way. He doesn’t, and we know he doesn’t, because he spent his entire first term completely ignoring us and the medical, scientific, and psychological revolution that was cooking in America between 2016 and 2020. All those anti-trans ads he ran were just a way for him to gin up his base and try to get reelected.

2. A President, even with a trifecta, is not a king. Remember Obama’s first two years, and what a mess many things that he wanted to do turned into? It’s crystal clear at this point that Trump is going to be scraping by with a very slim majority in the House and a small one in the Senate—not enough to overcome a filibuster and, even if the filibuster is finally thrown out, nowhere near the 2/3 majority he’d need to rewrite the constitution, let alone the 3/4 majority of state legislatures.

   1. There will be elections in two years. There will be elections in four years. You will still be able to vote in the next election.

   2. Seriously, right now it’s looking like Republicans are only going to pick up only two seats in the House, which will leave them with one of the most razor-thin majorities you can even have. They couldn’t keep their own caucus from flying apart at the seams before. They’re not going to be able to now.

      1. Remember the House Speaker’s race—well, races, plural, one after the next, once McCartney got ousted last year? Yeah. Yeeeeeeeeah.

      2. The overwhelming majority of what Trump wants to do requires that bills be crafted and passed. While he, in theory, can do these things, he likely will not be able to get much of it done, due to defections within his own increasingly-unruly party.

   3. Even when Trump succeeds at things—and he will, make no mistake, if only by blind luck—there are huge, robust power structures in the country that will slow his progress to a grinding stalemate.

      1. Take his plan to deport everyone in America without a green card for instance. Due process is in the constitution, which he doesn’t have the majority to modify, so everyone he manages to catch needs to have a few trials dates, in a system with an existing multi-year backlog. And then, on top of that, legal organizations like the ACLU and Migrant Legal Aid can do an incredible amount to gum up and slow down the system even further.

         1. Seriously, the current immigration case backlog is about six years deep, and that’s on a case count of about two million, though that number has changed a lot in the last couple of months with new Biden administration restrictions on asylum claims. Multiply that by an order of magnitude to round up the twenty million undocumented folks Trump wants to deport and maybe they get through all the cases by the end of the century. Assuming nobody new enters the country and needs to be processed through the legal system.

      2. This reality applies to every single illiberal thing he wants to do. Even if Trump were to be able to wave a magic wand and ban HRT nationwide on day 1 of his presidency (spoiler alert: he can’t), the ACLU can keep that tied up in the courts for at least a couple of years before it’d be able to come into effect.

      3. This is maybe the most important part of this bit: there are more lawyers able to fight back against the federal government than there are in the Federal government to defend whatever Trump tries to do. And each and every one of those lawsuits need to be responded to in a timely manner.

3. Trump is chaotic, yet demands absolute loyalty at all times. As a result, he burns through staff at an incredible rate, and has his entire career.

   1. A lot of people have been speculating on whether Trump is in an age-related mental decline; I won’t, because I’m not an expert. I will, however, note that when a chaotic person gets more chaotic, and with even very normal age-related memory decline, his self-control will disintegrate. That means he’ll be lashing out more and more at the people immediately around him, and firing people on a whim.

   2. Remember The Mooch, as a unit of time? Pepperidge Farm remembers. That sort of nonsense is coming back.

   3. Ask anyone who’s worked staffing or HR: when your turnover is high, you can’t get anything done, because you’re constantly training up replacements.

In the end, the most important thing to remember is that Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. On his very worst day, he’s a Dollar Store Benito Mussolini, and most days he isn’t even that competent.

We don’t need to win.

Let me say that again.

We don’t need to win.

We just need to not lose.

Our liabilities

At the same time, we all need to have an honest and frank talk about our own liabilities, as a community. Trump and his cronies are going to have a lot of power, and we’re definitely not.

The first thing we’ve got to face up to is the fact that trans folks are four times as likely to live in poverty as the typical American. So, the offhanded “well just go somewhere safe” advice that you hear from a number of people is frankly ridiculous. I agree that every person should have their passport in order, but countries will refuse you entry if you don’t have enough liquid cash—I personally know someone who’s been banned from Canada for life because she drove up for a day trip to Vancouver as a broke college kid and was refused entry because she didn’t have enough cash. They figured she might be a vagrant, and didn’t want to take the chance. Now they won’t let her in, period, because of that one border stop.

So, yeah, I’m gonna be frank: it’s a good idea to have your passport in order. You should. But updating your passport is not meaningfully helpful for the vast majority of American trans folks—at least, not for leaving the country. It is an incredibly useful top-level document that will prove your gender to anyone who wants to check for the next ten years, though.

Secondly, many of us are medication-dependent for our survival, and those medications are all prescription. We require hormones on the regular or we’ll slowly die. That means we need to be able to get those medications, and there are both financial and practical limits to that.

Thirdly, we’re a relatively small portion of the population, and we’re not centralized. That means a lot of us don’t have practical, physical community to help support us or much organized political power. Without local, physical communities to build physical resilience, a lot of us are at much higher risk of the worst possible outcomes.

What’s coming

We know what Trump says is coming, but the thing is? Trump is a liar. So, we don’t know where in the space between “he’s actually gonna do this” and “completely forgot about it” he’s going to fall. That, in many ways, is a point in our favor, because it means that if we plan for some of the worse scenarios, we’ll come out ahead.

The gender-affirming care ban

The one that’s got everyone most scared right now is a flat ban on gender-affirming care. If you look both in Project 2025 and on Trump’s campaign website, there’s a lot of overblown conspiracy theories about us—the normal transphobic stuff you all know very well, so I won’t repeat it here.

So, can Trump just ban HRT? Believe it or not, no.

There are two other massive laws in the way, and while he and Republicans might want to throw them out, doing so will create massive consequences which will absolutely consume his administration if he does. The first is the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of, among other things, sex, and even in 1964, the CRA enjoyed a 2-to-1 support margin in the public. If Republicans repealed it, there’d be riots in the streets. The second is the ACA, better known as Obamacare. By black letter federal law, under the ACA, HRT must be covered by all insurance as medically necessary for everyone who a doctor determines needs it.

These two laws have been extensively litigated when it comes to HRT, and the sum total of those federal legal cases is that a medication cannot be medically necessary for one type of man or woman and not necessary for another when they face the same core medical problem: low hormone levels.

Now, that’s just coverage. But what it means in practice is this:

1. As long as the ACA stands, HRT has been repeatedly ruled to be medically necessary under its auspices by federal courts at every level. If a medication is medically necessary, no fiat ban will survive. Imagine the President banning blood pressure medications—no court would let it persist.

2. As long as the CRA stands, HRT cannot be appropriate for some but not all members of a given legal sex, and this Supreme Court itself has weighed in on that very clearly with Bostock v Clayton County. To quote Niel Gorsuch, the conservative judge who wrote it:

…It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.

So, in a nutshell: they’re not going to be able to come for your HRT quickly, and not without clearing a lot of very big stuff out of the way first. They might try, and you need to be ready for that possibility, but this is not a day-1-with-an-executive-order-and-it-works sort of thing.

In other words, now’s a good time to start stockpiling meds. Pills and vials have multi-year stable shelf lives if properly cared for. Is it best to follow expiry dates religiously? Absolutely. But we’re not in a perfect world anymore.

What’s a lot more likely is a youth gender-affirming care ban, because rkids are a lot less well-protected under the law… but that could change, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in US v Skrmetti, which the Biden administration will argue next month, taking the ability to interfere out of Trump’s hands. I’m actually cautiously optimistic on this one; Roberts seems to like to use trans issues to pinkwash his corporate agenda, and Gorsuch seems to be a true-believer libertarian in keeping the government out of places. Those two have consistently sided with the Court’s liberal minority on trans issues for the last four years, and I don’t see any clear reason why they wouldn’t now. And if they do rule that way? Almost the entirety of Trump’s anti-trans agenda collapses on the spot.

Let me repeat that: If we win in US v Skrmetti, the only thing left in Trump’s anti-trans that’s even possible agenda is harassing doctors and teachers, and his attempt to porn-ban us (more on that in a minute).

What the Trump administration can and probably will do is harass providers with bogus “investigations.” That’ll clog things up and increase wait times for care a fair bit. Similarly, he can cut funding for gender-affirming care on Medicaid/Medicare, though those cuts would face (probably successful) legal challenges without an ACA repeal, because they're medically necessary care. In general, if it's medically necessary, Medicaid and Medicare have to cover it.

Economics

This one’s gonna suck.

Trump is going to be imposing tariffs as high as 60% on all imports, and has brought Elon Musk into his circle. Musk has made it clear that he wants to crash the economy, maybe to stave off a shareholder revolt at Tesla that could cost him his chair. So, people are gonna lose jobs and the prices of just about everything are about to go up a lot.

Why am I talking about it here? Look again at the trans poverty levels. When the economy crashes, we generally get hit the hardest.

Take a serious look at the status of your phone and your computer, because those are essential remote-work tools that you can use to hold down a job or do gig work. Are they relatively new? Were you already thinking about replacing one of them some time within the next year?

If so, do it now. Get your replacements before tariffs increase the pricetag by half. Losing your phone or computer in the middle of an economic crash and not having the money to replace them could be the difference between gig work to pay the rent and being out on the street.

Paperwork

Get your documents in order. As many as you can. Trump says he wants to pass a law that basically writes us out of existence by defining gender as being set at birth. It’s bullshit. It’s cruel. It’s wrong.

Here’s the thing about that, though: he doesn’t actually have the ability to do that.

Almost all vital records in America are created at the state level, not the federal, and stuff like an updated birth certificate or passport is considered a gold-standard permanent document at every level of the government. Even an expired passport is always enough to prove your citizenship and—most importantly for our purposes—your gender, and once you have it in hand, they can’t actually get it back from you without court proceedings.

So, if you haven’t updated your birth certificate or your passport? Get them updated. If you live in a state that won’t let you update your birth certificate, get your passport updated and use that instead. There’s plenty of time, starting today, before his administration hits office, let alone before any law could be enacted, for you to get those updated documents in hand. And once you have them? There really isn’t much that the government can do about you having them without tearing up and rewriting reams of law about how passport control in America works.

And even then? You’ll still have the damn thing in hand. There’s just… not much they can do about it.

Pornography

One of the most alarming proposals put out in Project 2025 is to reclassify trans existence as inherently pornographic, and to then ban all pornography at the federal level.

Yeah. That’s fucking terrifying.

And to do it, they’d have to, for starters, roll back the Civil Right Act. Again, as long as Bostock v Clay County is the law of the land, there is no legal mechanism for distinguishing between trans and cis folks in the eyes of the law; there is simply no legal difference. Gorsuch was pretty explicit about that, so until and unless that can replace him, Roberts, or one of the liberal justices, that’s almost certainly the legal reality they’re going to have to grapple with.

However, to successfully define transness—ourselves, our literature, our art—as pornographic, they’d have to pass the Miller test, which comes from Miller v. California, decided in 1973. To satisfy the Court’s standards, they’d have to meet three standards (I’m paraphrasing very slightly):

1. That an average person, applying common, current-day standards, would find the thing under consideration to be inherently arousing.

2. That the thing under consideration “depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions.”

3. The thing under consideration, as a whole, “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Specifically, the Miller precedent declared that:

Under the holdings announced today, no one will be subject to prosecution for the sale or exposure of obscene materials unless these materials depict or describe patently offensive 'hard core' sexual conduct

Set aside for a moment that they’d have to declare, before the whole-ass world, that they find trans people to be inherently arousing. Simply put, for a thing to be obscene, it’d have to have no scientific value whatsoever (let alone literary, artistic, or political—which is what they’re doing in even trying to define things this way), which is demonstrably untrue. There are reams of scientific research ongoing about us, with tens of millions of dollars worth of funding at the very least, and mountains of literature, art of every kind. And politics?

I mean… this whole-ass issue is trans politics.

So, even after they overturned the Civil Rights Act, they’d need to navigate court cases to the Supreme Court which would fundamentally upend the very definition of what obscene material is under the law and what we’re allowed to do about it, and in doing so shut down a $13 billion a year industry.

That’s a lot of money, and pornographers would fight like a cat in a sack to stop it, because their entire livelihoods are on the line. And that isn’t even taking into consideration the entire entertainment industry, a $649 billion industry that is absolutely dependent on a stable definition of what pornography is, so they can make damn sure their movies and TV shows aren’t.

Do you really think that John fucking Roberts is going to throw a two-thirds of a trillion-dollar industry into total chaos? Or that Niel fucking Gorsuch is gonna go for that level of federal government intrusion into private life? Seriously?

So, like the other Big Ideas that Trump and his gang have proposed, for there to be any chance at all for this to become a reality, it’d be a massive, drawn-out legal fight at every level, from the legislative to the judicial branch. It’d take years to settle out.

And we only really need to make it through four, at the outside.

And that’s assuming that Donald J. Trump, who himself has coupled with a wide variety of mattress actresses over the course of his life, even actually wants to.

I’m going to be honest: this was the thing that scared me the most, out of all of Trump’s proposals. But the more I look into it, the deeper I dig? I think it’s the least likely of everything.

Blue state, red state

It’s vastly more realistic for trans people to move to a blue state than it is for us to flee the country, and that’s irrespective of income. Emigrating from a country is tough, and while getting a work visa abroad is much more doable, they generally come with the requirement that you regularly return to your country of origin to renew those visas.

And before you ask: you can’t claim refugee status in any other nation on earth on the basis that you’re trans.

The US is what’s known as a presumed safe country, meaning that every country in the world presumes that anyone in that nation is fundamentally not at risk of death based on who they are. Regardless of whether or not that does or will reflect reality, that’s the legal structure in place right now. As an example of this, I’m pretty certain that Canada has never granted an American citizen refugee status; the only cases where I’m aware that someone physically present in America was granted status by Canada were both undocumented migrants when the first Trump administration rescinded protections for them.

Many blue states and cities have sanctuary laws that bar any local resources from being used to help the feds do, well, anything when it comes to trans people. These laws are surprisingly effective, because without them, the federal government can send a fancy letter to the local authorities to come round someone up if they want them. Without them? They have to physically mobilize those federal officers themsleves, all of the equipment they’ll need to detain a person, and then transport and house it all again and again and again. It’s a surprisingly effective way to resist these sorts of federal initiatives, and that’s why conservatives loathe them so much.

Even if you’re in a deeply red state, moving to a blue city can make a huge difference in your daily life. Better yet is getting to your nearest blue (or swing, with good protections—I live in Michigan, and that’s my reality) state, where you have meaningful safeguards.

Some other folks are a lot more pessimistic about how well these legal protections will hold up against the weight of the Federal government. We’ll find out, obviously—but the thing to remember is that we don’t necessarily even need to win. We just need to outlast them.

And in the American court system? It’s not that hard to buy two to four years’ worth of time with procedural delays.

Community

All right, I’m gonna need white trans folks in particular to bring it in for a minute.

As a category, white folks are fucking dogshit at community-building or holding community with people who are different than we are, and we need to grow the absolute hell up. We’ve got this independent streak in us born of generations of insulation from the consequences of our actions because of the color of our skin. We all too often carry the idea of being a hero, of being exceptional, of having the revolutionary ideas that will magically change the world.

Cut that main character syndrome shit out, and do it now.

Being in community with people means finding allies with the same goals and same means that you share, even if you don’t like them, the way they are, their politics, any of that. Ideally, you want to be in person, but it also means online these days. It’s coalitional, big-tent, Tolerance-with-a-capital-T stuff, and that means that you all need to leave that Twitter-style purity rage behavior not just at the door, but in the fucking garbage can.

Now is not the time for purity politics, if there ever is a time for them.

The way we make it through the bad times that are coming is through practical, nuts-and-bolts helping each other. I’m talking mutual aid funds. I’m talking housing your friends and compatriots when they’re unstable, or need to leave a dangerous place. I’m talking helping other trans folks get their meds when they’re out. I’m talking food and clothes and rides and practical stuff, including holding space for hurting friends when they need to cry.

We’re all gonna need to cry a fair bit over the next four years.

And yeah, that’s going to include people you don’t necessarily like, but with whom you can ally to build a safer world. Sit with your discomfort. It’s a small price to pay for your mutual survival.

Now is the time to be selfless. Not self-sacrificing. Selfless.

Sisyphean work

I don’t often quote Erin Reed, despite the remarkable work she does, but this is one that more people need to pay attention to:

It was always going to be a generational fight for transgender people.

We are a deeply marginalized community, on the very edges of our society. When shit rolls downhill, it’s going to hit us first, and it’s gonna hit us hardest. It sucks. It’s unjust.

But it’s our reality.

In many ways, the fight for trans rights feels like a Sisyphean task, to endlessly roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to fall and for us to have to start over again. But the thing is—it’s not. The boulder rolls back down, but each time it doesn’t roll as far down as it had before, and each time we push it farther before it falls. And yeah, it’s about to roll back down, and it’s gonna suck.

But we’ve been here before. Whether it’s Marsha and Sylvia at Stonewall and—more importantly—running STAR, or it’s Christine on the cover of the Times, or it’s the goddamned Chevalière d'Éon, we’ve been deeper down this slope, facing harsher odds, with fewer allies. We’ve never been in as strong a legal, medical, social, or political position as we are right now when the bad times have come, which means we’ve got so fucking much more power and resilience and allies to help us come back, stronger and better.

Shoulder to the boulder, guys, gals, and nonbinary pals. We’ve got this.