I wrote an entire piece last night that I was going to publish about how much joy I felt in the moment about what we did, stopping a far-right wannabe dictator, and how much that made me feel better as a queer person in this nation.
That’s not going to happen at all. We now live in a nation where queer lives are going to become so much worse because of Donald Trump.
The last couple of years as a queer person in the United States, let alone a young queer person, have been difficult. I have mentioned before that Republicans have made queer lives hell, especially as it applies to young queer people. They have banned books, stopped us from using the bathrooms of the gender we identify as, and made it hard for us to adopt children and use IVF. They have also spent over 215 million dollars on anti-trans ads federally, spending almost $135 for every trans person in the US. If they think we are worth this much money, it would be nice for them to give it to us and then spend it to make our lives better.
Our lives are going to become hell because they have a mandate to govern, just simply because we don’t fit their model of a patriarchal society where straight men make all the decisions for a nation.
They also ran on Project 2025, a sweeping platform to ruin the lives of not just queer Americans, but every American. On the LGBTQ+ side, it is going to prevent trans students from using their preferred names and pronouns in classroom settings, ban all HIV medications, and prevent queer people from serving their country in the armed forces.
Our nation is going to descend into fascism, a nation shaped in the image of not what our founding fathers envisioned when they said that all men were created equal and created with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Queer lives are at sake.
The liberty to marry and raise a family with whoever they want to.
And trust us: we are not happy. We won’t be for the next four years under this regime. It will take us a long time to finally begin pursuing the happiness that the founding fathers wanted us to do now that we have this in charge.
Last night was not all bad though. We have trans representation in the halls of Congress. A ballot measure to codify sexual orientation and gender identity made it into the New York State Constitution. And queer people continued to win seats in legislatures everywhere.
I don’t know where I’m going to take this blog now, to be honest. Part of me wants to discuss why and how it went wrong and how Democrats can improve, but that’s a long story that I am not qualified for right now.
But if I have one takeaway, queer rights need to be championed by the Democrats starting today. If they want to remain to have any credibility and support for the communities they want to represent, a full-throated response to protect LGBTQ+ freedoms from every elected Democrat needs to happen, because on day one the administration in charge is going to attack it.
It felt like part of why Democrats fell flat this cycle was with the barrage of homophobic and transphobic sentiment from the right, nobody was willing to stand up for queer people besides us. We are a far way from President Biden saying that he has the back of trans youth during his first State of the Union. We need that back now.
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