The Weight of America: Transgender People Under Siege

American society is like the inside of this monstrous mall, where people move like “sentient corpses". Photo: estherpoon

America has truly lost its soul, Kai McKenzie argues. Trans people find themselves under siege.

Guest article by Kai McKenzie 

As I sit in my Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada rental home, looking out at the quiet and cold snow-covered porch and yard outside, the ice crystals on the window glowing magically in the morning sunlight, and the little flecks of snow drifting upward on the breeze outside and catching the light like fireflies, I feel the weight of America. 

It’s inescapable. It follows and haunts me. I feel a fierce anger at the country where I was born, at the citizens who have thrown me and my children away, who barely bat an eye as our fellow trans citizens are erased from monuments, histories, medical records, and public life. America has truly lost its soul. 

The faces of the US

Born in Boulder, Colorado in 1964, growing up in Berkeley, California during the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, living in Boulder again for three decades before moving to Saskatchewan, Canada in 2018 for school, I’ve seen the many faces of the US: the liberal college town of Berkeley with its diversity and pride, colourful protests and street performers, passionate desire to stand up for human rights and fairness; the sleepy town of 29 Palms, California in the Mojave Desert, near the 29 Palms Marine Corp Base, where being American means being faithful and proud, ready to invade and stand strong at the behest of a Commander in Chief; Nashville, Tennessee, where my parents moved for a distinguished professorship in mathematics, a mix of southern tradition and new immigrants. 

The US has many faces, but what, in my mind, seems to characterize Americans is their ability to carry the weight of pretence, of imagining themselves to represent freedom and democracy while spearheading coups, undermining democratically-elected governments, supporting dictators for their oil and wealth, while at the same time supporting scientific research and medical and social aid throughout the world. 

These enormous contradictions mean that living in the US leads to a form of numbness, of pretence, of ignorance, of self-righteousness. 

Comfortably numb

As my fellow Two-Spirit and transgender Americans lose health care, access to identity documents, the right to safety, employment, education, representation, access to their histories, agency, are Americans at large concerned? Some are, obviously, but most slide comfortably further into the numbness that characterizes American life. 

David Guterson, in his 1993 essay “Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured. The Mall of America,” likened American society to the inside of this monstrous mall, where people move like “sentient corpses” in a landscape that confuses and distorts reality like an “M. C. Escher Drawing,” “outside of time and space . . . a potent dreamscape” with addictive and hallucinatory properties (166, 165, 172). 

This well describes Trump’s America, where American propensities of the past, toward pretence and imaginative self-righteousness, are now blatant, unrepentant, and undisguised. 

As King Trump makes wild proclamations about what is real and what is not, renames geographical features, and demands that Gaza, Canada, and Greenland offer themselves up on the altar of American greatness, the American bloated lack of regard for other perspectives is merely more obvious than it was in the past. 

Under siege

My trans friends in Colorado, those with whom I and my children campaigned and lobbied for inclusion and respect from 2014-2018, now find themselves under siege, threatened by sinister, infiltrating federal “executive orders” received as law. 

What I’m witnessing frightens me: the University of Colorado’s Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics going along with Trump’s dictates to remove references to diversity and trans issues, the National Park Service scrubbing trans people from the Stonewall Monument to the uprising which trans people played the biggest role in, people right and left in the US going along with these orders and commands, like zombies sleepwalking into fascism. 

Imploding from within

My hope is that, as Trump and his sidekick Musk plunder American agencies, destroying the ability of the United States to respond to disease and disaster, that it will all implode from within, that the American greed to be great will finally undermine itself. 

Meanwhile, I hope we can try to help the people most affected by Trump’s policies, low-income communities at risk of the impacts of global warming; Two-Spirit and trans people losing health care, identity documents and safety; scientists and policymakers targeted for standing up for science and sanity. Hold onto the shreds and fragments of the destruction and perhaps we can rebuild relationships, policies, and practices, just as little flecks of drifting snow continue to rise toward the light. 

Work Cited: Guterson, David. “Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured. The Mall of America.” The Norton Anthology of Nonfiction, thirteenth edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012, pp. 161-173.