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I know you have already read the news.

They are blaming us for killing Charlie Kirk. It doesn't matter that the suspected shooter is cis. It doesn't matter that even his indictment describes the allegedly trans roommate as a person who was completely unaware of the plan and helped the government indict his killer.

And liberal gentry and conservatives alike mourn Kirk, a man whose last words were tinged with the kind of racist and transphobic propaganda he built his career on. They even team up to censor queer and Black people who dare not to whitewash his hateful legacy.

And the same bipartisan group of politicians lying to us about Kirk’s life quickly narrow their eyes towards threatening our lives by revoking our rights to healthcare and bathrooms in Congress, as Democrats stonewall our increasingly desperate cries for help.

And the most extreme fascists have even escalated their rhetoric to threatening to label us as terrorists and open calls for genocide of trans people through mass institutionalization or other means, including some in Congress.

And we know they won't stop until we are dead—or they lose all semblance of political power. The genocidal drive behind the Christofascist MAGA movement has absorbed the tactics of Nazi Germany with the full intention of repeating the Holocaust’s victimization of trans people.

And yet, we will survive. That much is an inconsolable fact of the universe, a truth that proves itself further every day.

Consider that, despite dozens of states banning trans care for minors in the last several years, as well as bans on literature or teachers talking about trans people in schools, the number of trans youth keeps increasing every year, across the United States.

The increasing escalation from the far-right in their attacks on us reflects the primal desperation the fascists feel knowing they are continuously losing their fight to commit genocide. As Karis Nemik writes in his manifesto in Andor, oppression is the mask of fear.

Despite wielding nearly every measure of political power, they continue to lose the war against us every single day that each of us continues to breathe. Even if they kill some of us, they will never convince us we aren't who we are. They can never kill our truth.

Ultimately, fascism is a hateful, suicidal ideology,³ an idea which, for all the damage it can do in the short-term, can never truly win.

And trans existence is a fact of human existence powered by love, impermeable to hate, a fact that can never truly lose.

Every single day, a newly reborn trans child wakes up remembering a future she never could have imagined, seeing her true self in the mirror. We must protect her, and all other children and future children of all genders, by surviving.

Whatever happens, you must survive, thrive, and zealously fight for the day after they lose their unjust war, so that people like her and you can live the lives you deserve, with those you deserve to love.

Like many of you, I have spent much of the last few weeks oscillating between stages of despair, loneliness, grief, fear, gloom, and despondency.

I can't promise you an end date for the never-ending storm of trauma we find ourselves in. And I can't pretend like they aren't trying to kill me, you, or the people we love. Because they are.

But I can promise to you that they will lose. Because to eliminate transness is to eliminate humanity. The ongoing attempted trans genocide is an autogenocide in the truest of sense—our enemies can only destroy us if they are willing to destroy themselves as well.

For as long as humans exist, trans people exist.

We survived the Holocaust. We survived the AIDS genocides. We survived hundreds of years of settler-colonialist legal repression that erased thousands of years of indigenous trans and Two-Spirit history.¹ We will survive this genocide too.

The legacy of trans resilience goes well past surviving panic attacks caused by fearmongering tweets or stockpiling medication. During AIDS, it was not common for queer people to attend hundreds of funerals a year during the peak of its ravage, forcing psychologists to develop a new diagnosis to describe and treat the severe mental impacts that genocide had on queer communities. And through all of it, queer people preserved in their hearts the memories of lives lived to their fullest, however short they may have been.

And despite enduring the cruelest conditions imaginable, AIDS activists successfully channeled their collective grief and anger towards efforts to save tens of millions of lives through mutual aid and direct action. It’s not an exaggeration to say your very existence is due to the suffering and direct action of queer activists from the 1980’s and 1990’s. And the next generation of trans people similarly owe us their lives, as we return from shallow corporate pride to indomitable community solidarity.

I can't tell you that awful events and laws won't continue to materialize, that no one you love will unjustly suffer, that you won't continue to feel that escalating guttural fear watching the situation escalate.

But I can offer you a map to keep with you, so you always know how to find your hope again. That no matter how far you fall down that pit of despair, you know where to find the rope you left for yourself to climb out of that barren well back into our reality of our truth.

Take out a notebook and a pen with your favorite color. If you don't have that with you, bookmark this link and come back when you are ready.

Open the notebook to the last page, and title it “I Survived."

Now think back on your past, through your favorite and most cherished memories and search for the one that resonates with you the most.

Was it that impossible high from that one too-short-yet-incredibly-toxic t4t situationship that you can’t stop thinking about? What about that singular glimpse you had of your parent’s loving heart through a childhood of abuse? Or maybe the soothing cacophony of that one underground rave you only found out about four hours ago? Perhaps it was the rare peace you found in yourself while exploring nature?

Whatever it is for you, cling onto that authentic human feeling you had in that one moment, in that one memory.

And, grasping that feeling firmly in your mind’s grip, write yourself a short story on the last page of that notebook, of the past you yearn to relive, as it will happen in the future. The messy yet satisfying future where you will find the lasting, secure, permanence you never believed you could have.

It might be tomorrow, or it might be next year, it might be 10 years from now, but it will happen some day. And you must fight to survive with all your heart so that you reach that future, no matter how bleak things seem, or how much they lie about us.

And once you have this notebook, keep it close. That way, the next time you feel sad, despondent, and hopeless, take your notebook out and remind yourself of that joyful past you still hope to find in your future. Remind yourself that it's okay to feel sad and scared during a genocide, but that you must not forget what you are fighting for.

We are fighting for the day, after the worst of the storm has passed, when we will come together and show each other the stories we wrote in our notebooks today, so that we can relish and laugh and cry and marvel together at how our yearning to relive a happier past brought us to the imperfect, human future we truly deserve.²

Here’s my future. What’s yours?

—Edited by David Forbes

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