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Shoved back in the closet
In the long forgotten days of 2024 I wrote a piece exploring coming out and the desire to abandon closets because the world was a safer space for LGBTQI+ people. Oh how naive I was, or rather, how willing I was to ignore every red flag we all could see coming on the horizon. Trump’s executive orders and state level anti-trans legislation has been pared with renewed calls to walk back gay marriage and women’s voting rights, which the rest of the world has keenly picked up on. Rather than the closet being an anachronistic concept I am increasingly feeling that it may be the only safe space left for trans people should the current trajectory continue.
One of the problems with comparing historic periods in that texture and analysis often get left out during the comparisons, such as comparing the National Socialist’s 54 day dismantling of Germany democracy and the Trump regime’s speed run attempting to do the same. Germany institutionally had centralised all levers of power in Berlin and Prussia, with the outlying states having little to no ability to resist centralised control. Added to this was the widespread desire to overcome the intractable split between radical communists and radical fascists, with industrialist money used to tip the balance in favour of the fascists. This sounds familiar, except in Germany the entire apparatus of the State was turned on all shades of left within days of the…
