Colorado Springs Has Metastasized

In less than a year conservative rhetoric has gone from “of course we support trans people but they should not compete in sports” to “if trans people don’t want to be murdered they should stop being trans.”

Many Conservatives with enormous platforms are calling for mass violence like a supervillain might in a bad superhero movie. But Tim Pool and his horrible friends do not think of themselves as supervillains. They imagine themselves heroes.

It is good to understand what these people think they are doing. It is good even though they will never extend the same courtesy to us, even though they would rather cheer on a killer than ask a simple question; they are fundamentally incurious or perhaps addicted to the feeling of rendering an entire group subhuman, to pinning all the pain and horror of the modern world on something that is easy to shoot. As Matt Walsh put it:

So what is the horrifying thing we believe, Walsh. Let’s hear some quotes.

That’s our quote, but it’s their definition. Walsh and people like him do not view queerness as an identity but as a fetish that exclusively involves sexual gratification. He likely does not find a woman and her husband holding hands while wearing matching wedding rings ring perverse or degenerate, even though that ring broadcasts to the world that these sickos are fucking behind closed doors, she’s getting railed, maybe even creampied: look, they have kids. Gross.

Reducing a heterosexual marriage to sex is absurd, of course; it completely ignores the emotional and spiritual aspects of human connection and the lives they live outside of sexual pleasure. And yet this is how Walsh & Co view visible queerness: a sick fetish paired with exhibitionism. People who are gay or trans in public are actively getting off on it. You cannot be queer and celibate. Queerness is a thing you do.

When LGBTQ+ advocates say that the purpose of drag queen story hours or family-friendly drag shows is to help queer kids feel secure in their identity, what Walsh & Co hear is “we want to turn your children queer.” Which, because queerness is an action and not a state of being, means “we want to molest your children.” Because the only way children can be queer is if they’re fucking. Does that make sense?

Most children have schoolyard crushes long before they have any interest in sex. They fantasize about holding hands or hugging. Queer kids are no different. Most people in relationships, gay or straight, spend the vast majority of their time not fucking. As with heterosexuality, queerness is not a thing you do. It is a thing you are.

Not for Walsh, not for Pool, not for Marjorie Taylor Greene or Chaya Raichik or any of the other ghouls dancing in a cackling circle around a burning pile of the masks they all took off. If trans people want to stop getting shot all they have to do is stop grooming children, by which they mean existing. Your choice, they say: the closet or the grave.

I am not surprised that Colorado Springs is a trailblazer in the up-and-coming far right art form of murdering LGBT+ people. I grew up in there.

My family is Objectivist — they follow the teachings of Ayn Rand. Like Rand herself, we were firmly atheist. Like most children, I believed what my parents believed, just as my classmates believed what they were taught at church.

When I was nine years old my mother pulled me out of public school, where I was bored out of my mind, and enrolled me in Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy. Today they call themselves the Vanguard School, which should tell you everything you need to know. As far as I can tell, every single person in that school — students, teachers, and administrators — were members of the New Life Church, one of many enormous evangelical outlets in a highly evangelical town.

Children’s troubles often sound trite to adults because children’s worlds are small. What happened at CMCA was not made-for-TV abuse. So many people have endured so much worse in this world. Still, my year CMCA taught me to hate myself and everyone else. The effects have lingered.

My classmates at CMCA beat me up regularly, which meant that I was constantly in detention, because according to the adults at the school it was always my fault. After a year of escalation my mother withdrew me from the school because a classmate shoved me into a desk so hard it left enormous bruises on my hip and leg and because the teacher’s response to the assault was to send me (and only me) to the principal’s office. Again.

I did myself no favors, to be clear. As an adult I am loud, abrasive, argumentative, and arrogant. As a child I was worse. I have never learned how to shut the fuck up despite many concerted efforts to teach me. As an adult it makes things difficult. As a child it made life hell.

When my classmates found out I was an atheist, my teacher gave them permission to use the classroom during lunch so they could play me the Adventures in Odyssey tape about a girl who was an atheist and then converted to Christianity. I say “the” tape because people in Colorado Springs had forced me to listen to this tape before. The tape makes it sound very easy to convert people. When it did not work out that way in real life the consensus seemed to be that I was in league with the great enemy and had to be stopped.

Aside from my mother, every adult I encountered on a day-to-day basis despised me; not a passive hatred but an active one. At nine years old I was fundamentally loathsome. A problem to be solved. Conversion was the preferable solution, of course: that and shutting the fuck up once in a while. Withdrawal from the school worked too, though only because there was a secular world beyond their grasp to withdraw to.

One way or another, I needed to disappear.

CMCA occupied an old office building in one of the worst areas of town, surrounded by pawn shops and adult bookstores: a small Christian island in a sea of sin.

Perhaps that’s where the person in the pink dress came from.

We were in class and someone saw them out the window and yelled for everyone to come over and we crowded to the glass to stare at the ghastly spectacle. Their unwashed face bristled with stubble, their hair was matted and filthy. Their dress was pink and sparkly and scandalous. They were clearly drunk and possibly high, staggering, muttering to themselves. An archtype ripped from the TERFiet nightmares, but worse.

I remember very clearly that I asked someone to move so I could see and the class was so preoccupied by the spectacle that no one told me to shut up, and I remember how weird that felt.

That creature of nightmare, that shambling grotesque, was my idea of transness for years. I had an idea in high school that I might not be entirely straight, and I had no issue with the few out gay people at my school, but transness…was repulsive. To me.

Twelve years later I found myself in a gay bar in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I planned to dance all night and pretend to be a civilian for a while. They had a drag show at the same club that night and I thought hey, why not.

I spent so much of my childhood longing for things I had no words for. As an adult I discovered them one by one. This was one of those things. A revolution on a Saturday night.

The drag queens were beautiful.

They were the most beautiful women I had ever seen. They took up so much space. They wore those extravagant dresses with such unshakable confidence, such absolute conviction in their own beauty, broad-shoudered and brassy and in-your-face and perfect.

I watched them dance and perform and for the first time I thought maybe there were some upsides to being a woman. If they could enjoy femininity as men, maybe I could enjoy it too.

Drag queens are, for the most part, not trans. But drag queens helped me think about gender in a way that opened my mind to transness. When I finally moved to Portland, a place where out trans people existed in 2010, I was equipped to learn about the issue and make friends.

I am cisgender. My relationship with that gender, however, is…tenuous. Not so long ago I thought I might be trans. I don’t think that’s what’s happening any longer. I just don’t think that gender fits me very well.

I think the thing that made me tear up in a gay bar in Raleigh, North Carolina circa 2008 was that these gorgeous women who were actually men were telling me it’s not that serious, man. Gender does not have to be a straitjacket. Gender can be fun too.

And if that’s what Matt Walsh means by making kids queer — and it is exactly what he means — then yeah, I guess it made me queer at 21.

Drag queen story hour might help some kid realize gender doesn’t fit them very well either. Or that some other gender fits them better. Gives them words to describe the thing they always were, always needed. Those words do not make that child queer. That child was always queer — an identity and not an action, a noun and not a verb. Now that child has a framework for it. Now they can find a place to be.

Meanwhile, the other kids get to enjoy people dressed up in extravagant costumes telling a cool story or lip synching to a song which, as far as I can tell, describes 90% of kid’s entertainment anyway. Every traditional princess-centric fairy tale ends with the princess getting railed offscreen: that’s the way the wedding ends, the happily ever after. But describing The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast that way way is sick because those stories are not about sex at all. They are about love and adventure and lessons learned along the way, just like real life.

When I was 11 my mother got remarried and we moved forty minutes north to a town just outside Castle Rock and I have avoided Colorado Springs as much as possible ever since. I have spent my entire life running from the Colorado Springs of my childhood but that Colorado Springs has metastasized; it is everyone’s problem now. They are trying to take over the secular world, cut off all escape routes. They have wanted me gone for years, though they are willing to put that agenda on hold to deal with people they find even more disgusting. Trans people to the front of the line. We’ll get to the rest of you degenerates soon enough.

If you do not conform to rigid gender stereotypes both inside and outside of the bedroom this is your fight too. Trans rights are human rights in the most literal way, they are coming for the trans people first. There’s a whole poem about this. Do not make the German mistake.

The person in the pink dress outside my elementary school — my introduction to visible queerness — is not proof that the anti-trans right is correct about trans people being mentally ill. That person is likely the product of the far right’s own sick ideology. They are what happens when you tell your child they’re a disgusting freak, beat them for acting feminine or dressing up, refuse to let those groomers queer your son. And when they end up queer anyway you kick them out and leave them to suffer alone at the hands of a world that hates them as much as you do. Nothing on offer for them but filth and degradation and substances to numb the pain.

The person in the pink dress is what happens when you teach someone to despise themselves and the lesson sticks.

The fate of that person in the pink dress is not the future leftists want. They are the future Matt Walsh and Tim Pool and Chaya Raichik want. A world where queer means disgusting. Where gender means conformity. Where trans children only have three options: the closet, the gutter, or the grave.