Future

I’ve been seeing this series in my feed called The Love Notes Project: a curation of messages people have sent in support of the trans community. They’re beautiful. I suppose I haven’t been in an emotional place where I could engage with what sometimes seem like hollow affirmations of positivity.

But I finally did crack one open. And this particular quote broke me.

A future. That’s all any trans person wants. A boring ass ordinary future. We want to be able to plan ahead our 30-60-90 day plans at our jobs. We want to not feel a sense of dread if we scroll too far ahead in the 2026 calendar. We want to not have to think about uprooting ourselves and moving across state lines to chase our equal rights or safety in whatever places where those things remain, leaving behind communities we have built - although having geographic contingency plans has long been a part of LGBTQ culture. We want to be able to envision the next year and what it will look like, whether we’ll be able to stay in our jobs and homes and relationships and whether we’ll have to sacrifice our medications and our legal documents and ability to use public restrooms in order to do so.

Thousands of trans Americans (and parents of trans kids) have already moved across state or country borders, most with no illusions that they will ever be able to go back. I was resigned to hopping the border to New Mexico in 2022 if the gubernatorial election here went to MAGA darling Kari Lake. Miraculously, that didn’t happen, and Arizona elected its first Democratic governor and staunch LGBTQ ally in almost 20 years.

While Arizona has trended more purple since the Trump era, it’s still as fickle as ever, due in part to our large population of “independent” voters, most of whom are politically illiterate, disengaged, and only show up at the polls every four years to express their misdirected exhaustion at late stage capitalism as rage towards whomever the current White House occupant happens to be or whatever the current price of gasoline and eggs happen to be. Many are middle class surburban cishet white people whose sociopolitical moral compasses don’t point in any particular direction, as they’re largely unaffected by the ideological winds regardless of where they’re blowing. They’re the demographic of legalizing weed but also opposing trans rights; thinking corporations are greedy and wanting billionaires to pay higher taxes but also thinking that driving an electric vehicle would make them look gay. Unfortunately, they are the deciding factor in whether minorities in our state have rights.

The governor is up for re-election this coming year, and knowing how the pendulum swings here and how narrowly Arizona went blue in 2020 and 2022 while returning to its big white lifted pickup truck roots in 2024, I’m not optimistic. Andy Biggs, the Republican candidate, speaks all the right red meat language about opposing “wokeism” and protecting kids from being trans’ed, rhetoric which has had a decade-long chokehold on the white cishet male psyche.

I’m a little apprehensive about the first year of this nightmare having had no material impact on me, yet. The vast majority of the persecution of trans people is still happening on the state level. And I have only ever been a man under the Hobbs administration. I have that pit of dread in my stomach knowing that 2027 could be even more traumatic than 2025 was, because a potential Republican governor of my state will have much more power to go after me directly than an orange buffoon 2,000 miles away. The legislature will be even more emboldened to go full Texas-Florida on us with Biggs as a willing rubber stamp, frothing at the mouth to win his culture war brownie points.

I look to my “future”. What a simple thing to want. Nobody’s future is certain, but most Americans are able to reliably depend on having choice over it. They build careers and friendships and relationships and families without wondering if they’re foolish for doing so because it could all be taken away. They don’t face the same gun to their head tradeoffs; forced to choose between their safety and the communities they have built, forced to consider whether conformity and resignation is worth keeping their home. As a Minnesotan, this culture of “not everyone belongs here or deserves to call themselves an Arizonan” baffles me. That is not the culture I grew up in or understand. Minnesotans aren’t perfect, but they are better at understanding how to welcome and care for neighbors different than them as though they weren’t different, how to practice collective responsibility, knowing that we don’t all have to be best friends but being enemies would poison our cultural soul.

And yet it’s Arizona that actually forced me to have neighbors different than me. Phoenix is a microcosmic melting pot of the entire world; you could probably find at least one person from 85% of countries on earth in this city. A place so politically obsessed with cultural conformity and repression of diversity is ironically one of the most diverse places in the country. And while we made unfortunate headlines with SB1070 and Sheriff Arpaio’s tent city, long before Trump sicced ICE on the nation, I’ve watched countless extreme right bills die in committee or even get vetoed by Republican governors.

But the environment is… different, now. This is Stephen Miller’s Nazi wet dream America. Anything goes next year. And the rhetoric of trans dehumanization has so thoroughly infected 40% of the country that they will not view anything they do to us as an atrocity or a broach of human rights. They will view it as “common sense” and “saving their children”.

I suppose I will be extremely lucky if being forced to flee to New Mexico or Minnesota is the worst thing that happens to me.