El: Wednesday

Some years ago, I began a book with the sentence “Let us assume that we are fucked,” and man hasn’t that proven a sound assumption.

As being the author of that sentence suggests, I am not prone to optimism. Quite the contrary—I’m the soft of person who takes seriously the possibility that being born is, on balance, an unfortunate development, and that it would have been better if the world simply did not exist. Needless to say, nothing in the past twenty-four hours has done much to disabuse me of that notion. But as someone who’s been staring into that abyss for some time, I can perhaps offer some suggestions to those who have more recently plunged into it.

The first thing to do is accept it. We have long been living on a sick and dying planet. We cannot fix this fact, and we ought not be surprised when depraved things follow from it. It really is that bad, and pretending otherwise is not helpful. Genuinely, astonishingly horrible things are going to follow from Donald Trump’s second term, just as they did from his first. People are going to die in large numbers, just like they did last time. History is an abattoir, and there is no escaping it.

The second thing to do is to realize that being fucked does not mean that you stop caring about the things you care about. This morning the cats still needed to be fed, my appointments were still in my calendar, and all the art and magic that animate my brain were still there. You can embrace philosophical pessimism as deeply as you want and rail against the deep injustice of being born, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still want things. You still experience joy and hope and wonder. The fact that the world shouldn’t exist changes about as much as the fact that Donald Trump shouldn’t be President.

For my part, the things I care about are kindness, strangeness, and defiance. None of these things are served by my absence. They are things that can only be experienced by the living. Which sets the shape of the task pretty clearly, frankly. I’ll use being trans as an example, but it’s easily extrapolated from. Because the simple fact is that I believe trans people should exist. I think the world is not simply a less shitty place if trans people can exist, it is a less shitty place because of the existence of trans people. And as a trans person, in the face of a serious threat to our ongoing existence, my responsibility becomes to survive. In fifty years or so’s time, when I am dead and gone, there will still be people born who are trans, just as there were fifty and five hundred and five thousand years before. There is a duty to ensure that those people know that they have history—that whatever historical horrors are unfolding for them are not the first that trans people have seen and collectively survived. There is a duty to keep going for the simple reason that there are those who cannot, and so those who can need to step up.

I have seen plenty of people say that they are continuing out of spite, or anger, and these are reasonable, appropriate emotions, just as grief and fear are. But emotions change. Most likely you will experience joy again, just like you’ll experience horror again. This too shall pass, as they say. The thing to keep going for are values. There is simply work to be done, and it’s not going to do itself.

For trans people, or members of any other vulnerable population, it is time to have plans to survive and maintain your basic dignity as a person. If you are in a part of the country where your right to exist is going to be immediately imperiled, work towards getting out. If you are in a part of the country where things will stay stable for longer, work on having a plan for fleeing. No matter what, work on finding communities of people you trust that can support each other. I know these are not realistic goals for everybody. All I can say is “do the best you can.” We’re not all going to make it out of this alive, but the more of us who try, the more of us who will.

I’m not going to end this with some sort of call for hope, or rallying cry. This is terrible. Being devastated is the only remotely rational and decent response. But it’s not the end of the world. Or at least if it is, it’s still a slow-moving apocalypse. Life goes on, and must be lived in spite of itself. Roll up your sleeves and do the work.