The Emperor’s Luxury SUV Isn’t Good, But He’d Still Kill Us All To Keep It

I wrote what became this piece on the flight home from what was, I knew, my last press trip. After unsuccessfully pitching it around for the past two months, I have decided I will just publish it here.

Monday, January 27th, I woke up in my third-floor walkup apartment in Seattle next to my wife. The two of us—both trans women—had rushed our engagement and gay-married in a King County courtroom a few months prior. We wanted to be certain that, if marriage equality fell, we had a prayer of our love being grandfathered in. 

I did not want to leave my wife’s side, but I had to work.

This week, my job was sending me to Napa, California, for a typical three-day gig. The format was simple: I would fly in on day one. I would drive a brand-new Large Luxury SUV—before dealers or buyers get their hands on it—the second day. I would fly out the third day. I would pen a review of the Large Luxury SUV on the flight home, and publish it at the same time as all the other auto journalists on the trip. This routine is a large component of my job. 

That evening, over a dinner of lentils with my wife, I read through the notes for the Large Luxury SUV. Major points: it is an environmentally-conscious hybrid (EPA estimated 20 miles per gallon). It is the most powerful vehicle the company makes (almost 500 horsepower). It is the heaviest vehicle the company makes (6,250 pounds). It retails, in fully-loaded guise, for roughly $150,000. It is in competition with four or five virtually identical SUVs. 

After I’d brushed up on press releases, I checked the news. I’ve never been in the military (nor had I ever wanted to), but I read that the President had called transgender people dishonorable, selfish, and unfit for military service. A trans friend of mine was a naval officer; she’d just uprooted her whole life to move to her new port near Seattle. She’d almost certainly be stripped of her career. I needed to call her after the trip and make sure she was okay.

All ‘Round This Country

Tuesday, January 28th, I packed for the trip. I chose some killer fits—a tan-on-brown vintage dress and blazer I had found in a dusty thrift shop in Missoula, MT; a teal leather jacket and a hand-me-down Coach bag—for the dinners. I always agonize over my choices. Male auto journalists frequently don’t care how they dress, but women in the business are not provided this luxury.

As I held my wife that night, I scrolled once more through the news, and there had been more strokes of the President’s pen. Trans kids and trans adults—18-year-olds—were legally barred from autonomy over their bodies. With the right-wing Court, it would be a well-greased slope into my medication being made illegal. At that moment I was still, thankfully, safe in my bed. That night, it would just be thousands and thousands and thousands of teenagers like me who had to deal with the existential problem of losing their rights to their bodies. 

I texted the parents I knew with trans kids. I told them I would help however I could. I had no idea how. 

On Wednesday, January 29th I went to the airport. I flawlessly passed through security, thankfully ungroped and with dignity in front of the morning crowds of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. I landed in San Francisco, and a livery driver in a brand-new Luxury Vehicle was there to shuttle me to my five-star Napa hotel. 

When I made it to my lavish room, I browsed the headlines as I got dressed for dinner. The news was dire. In my hotel, I was safe, but I read that the two thousand trans people in custody of the Bureau of Prisons were, in the course of the past week and a half, withheld hormones, kept in solitary confinement, mocked and belittled by guards. They were all going to be sent to prisons that matched their “natal sex”, where they were now specifically exempt from laws meant to protect them from rape. For many, this will likely amount to a summary death sentence. 

Dinner Wednesday night was top sirloin. 

Trouble In The Air

The first thing you learn when you are an automotive journalist is that car companies spend a lot of money on you. Boutique hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, business-class international flights. Precious few of us could ever afford to travel like this; hell, we usually can’t afford the cars we review, and most of us—myself included—prefer to wrench on old dilapidated wrecks from long-dead brands anyway. The lavish displays serve as a reminder of our place in their world: guests that can be uninvited. 

When I entered this new world as a kinda poor, very disowned, freshly out, and sorta clocky trans woman living in a van, I was stunned by it. The first event I attended, many years ago, for a different aspirational Large Luxury SUV, had a $200-a-bottle wine tasting for the writers. I celebrated my 21st birthday at Olive Garden. This was pure shock and awe. 

As a freelancer desperate to maintain a toehold on my new career, I realized that my ability to navigate this new world deftly would dictate whether I could feed myself by writing. I tried to meet these companies where they were, thrift the labels and wear their signifiers of wealth, so I would hopefully go unnoticed as an outsider. 

With practice, I developed a fluency in the language of this imagery, and I adopted it as my own. I used it to try and meet more people where they were. I wrote and photographed a book on the intersection of fashion, automobile culture, and transness. It was an attempt to portray trans women as successful and powerful and desirable using the visual language of the automotive industry and of wealth itself. The book is called We Deserve This.

For a moment, it worked. I spoke as a guest of massive car companies, as an oh-so-rare trans voice at internal Pride events. I knew in the back of my mind that rainbow capitalism was an uneasy alliance, but I was trying to work with what I had. It felt like maybe—slowly—we were gaining the capital and the toehold that might allow us to eke out our lives. Maybe the trans kids that came after us would have it better and easier. 

It took five months after the last speech I’d done for [specific car company] for it to disband its LGBT advocacy group, in an obvious and immediate capitulation to the whims of the incoming administration.

I Hear The Voices Calling Me:

I drove the Large Luxury SUV on Thursday, January 30th. I headed into the hills before I could check the news for the day. After a week of fear, I needed release, and the sport-tuned SUV promised catharsis; after all, I’d become an automotive journalist in no small part because I truly loved the machines.

So when I tell you I pounded this Large Luxury SUV  down through the twisting hills alongside Lake Hennessey and I felt no joy, no relief, it means something. This three-row, 6,200-pound, 500-horsepower, efficient-hybrid-sport-tuned SUV, this rolling contradiction, sparked all the mirth of a school bus. I have driven enough super-SUVs to know they are all like this, deeply unsatisfying and utterly stupid as a concept. 

How had I ever expected release from this?

I gave up on feeling good, and I decided I needed to feel something. I turned on a Phil Ochs album, as I often do when I attempt to make sense of living in this nonsensical society. As I wept to one of America’s most talented folk singers in the heated leather cocoon of my Large Luxury SUV, I could no longer maintain both of the realities I was living in. 

In one reality, a rational man buys a $150,000 “sporty” SUV at the recommendation of an automotive journalist who says it’s worth it. I, insane, allow the news that affects other people to seep into my mind, make me worse at my job, threaten my livelihood, despite the fact I am unharmed. 

In the other reality, this SUV is terrible. It is patently obvious that this machine is destroying the earth. The man buying it is insane. I am sane when I see this SUV as the waste that it is, and I am sane when I weep for the destruction of my people. 

Do You Know, And Do You Care?

About a year into my career and after months of fancy hotels, I noticed something funny. No matter how expensive the place is, they all use the same hair dryer. $100 or $1000 a night, it’s always the same plasticky folding-handle piece of junk. The art gets more expensive and the rooms get larger, but the one thing every woman in a hotel uses without fail, and it’s consistently worse than the one under my sink.

It turns out that the riches of the world, extracted from its lands and delivered to the bank accounts of a select few, don’t buy anything useful or even good anymore. The hairdryers are all garbage for the same reasons that rainbow capitalism failed: there is no progress left to make money off of. 

Inversely, I can assure you over my career I have tested dozens of these terrible hairy-chested SUVs. All $100,000 and up, all wickedly inefficient, all raucously overpowered to the point of parody. We pretend they’re impressive because of astronomical horsepower figures and massive tires, but all they amount to is gender-affirming care for insecure, wealthy men, each mind-bending statistic another piece of data meant to back up our consensus reality. 

In this late-capitalist culture, once you have food and a roof, all that is left to buy is imagery. As the truth—that we are running off of the rails—becomes more obvious, the justifications become more absurd and transparent. (In the auto industry, the clearest physical manifestation of this has been the world’s richest man’s pet project, the Cybertruck.) Meanwhile, our increasingly fragile consensus reality—that annihilating the Earth was worth it to build these outlandish toys for childish men, that these men deserve to rule us as kings—must be propped up with more and more force. 

Trans people are naturally inclined to point out the absurdity of our supposed realities. When we transition, we reject the false consensus of our society (man and woman are inherently different and immutable) and we replace it with the truth. We accept the reality in our hearts. We know ourselves, and we alone have the right to choose our bodies. 

Every trans person that comes out knows living a lie is worse than death. This is why we come out, despite knowing it could kill us. This is why fascists, who must construct a false consensus reality by force, must eliminate trans people at any cost.

I’m Gonna Be What I Have To Be

As I listened to Ochs croon inside of the Large Luxury SUV, straddling two realities, a realization struck me. 

The small lies—about the expensive SUVs and the fancy hotels—are the bedrock of the large lies. It is where consensus reality begins. We collectively validate it when we say these patently wasteful excesses are worth it. If we agree that the expensive SUVs are actually intelligent uses of money, then they can justify their wealth; from there, their power. These people—who we have collectively agreed are powerful and wise—can then declare the rest of their reality: gender is immutable, immigrants are evil, diversity is foolish. 

As the new self-made kings of America gleefully kill my wife and I, they will convince themselves they were right to murder us, for they own these expensive SUVs and they stay in the fancy hotels, and we have collectively agreed with them. It is an Ouroboros of self-justification. 

The current unease this culture feels—that the writers having top sirloin with me felt alongside me, that you feel right now reading this story—is that their consensus reality, all the way down to the bedrock of the SUVs, is more clearly a lie than ever. There is no point in driving a leather-wrapped off-roader if you have to sell your humanity to own it.

Many of you see the same cracks in it that I saw as I listened to Phil Ochs. You might be trying to decide what to ignore, and what is worth fighting for. You might be trying to live in both realities, too. A reminder of the one genuine reality: Empathy is the best human trait. Immigration is good. A society that values everyone inside of it is the only one worth living in. Diversity is desirable, and to encourage it is correct. 

We collectively create consensus; the reality we build should be the truth. Many, many people’s lives—wife and I included—are in the hands of what we choose. 

As for me, I decided inside the SUV that I could no longer live in both realities. I am transgender, and I feel no remorse. I chose the moment I came out that I would die in the name of that truth, although I would much rather live for it. I quit my job to save my sanity. I will no longer prop up a reality that is clearly a lie. 

I don’t need their sirloin. I will be at home having lentils with my wife and living in truth, and it will be better than any of their riches could buy. 

With gratitude to Phil Ochs.