Garrison Davis

Obviously, trans immigrants have an overlapping threat vector.

As such, migrant support should remain focused on things like ICE Watch, rapid response networks, and providing immigrants legal resources, including to trans immigrants who may need assistance navigating the visa process and working to get people out of ICE detention.

The latter is especially important considering Trump's executive order forcing trans women in federal custody to be detained with men and the Trump administration's plan to end federal prison rape protections for trans people.

But most people engaged in this discourse genuinely don't understand how State Department policy on visa applications will actually affect trans immigrants and what we can then do to support trans immigrants.

But this whole discourse takes the focus away from the people most at risk of ICE, which are still undocumented immigrant workers.

Lillith in Seattle with a $150,000 a year tech job is not at high risk of being detained by ICE.

Believing otherwise prohibits people who are actually safe and secure from using their wealth and status to support others who do not have the same safety provided by wealth or status, whether they're transgender, an immigrant, or both.

Misleading articles in the larger panic-driven information economy encourages people with financial or legal security to be scared into paralysis because they believe that any amount of opposition to the government will result in being disappeared to a concentration camp.

This justifies a retreat from the world by framing it as safety, allowing one to focus on maximizing their own power and wealth to achieve security.

retreating solely into the role of the victim, achieves a sort of emotional catharsis, but this also alienates you from the world and ends up doing propaganda for the enemy.

In this discourse, there's a tendency to make the enemy out to be an unstoppable monster, which further justifies inaction because it doesn't allow you to understand the limits of the enemy, whether logistical or ideological, and resigns us to cower before an omnipotent, all-powerful evil.

Ice operations are an expensive, unpopular, destabilizing thing, and we must keep an eye on the fragility of power as that informs us on how to fight it.

When removed from action in the real world, people have no way to confront truth.

It is a frightening time to be transgender.

On top of what feels like never-ending attacks on healthcare and our ability to exist in public life, you now see news stories about a U.S.

state invalidating people's IDs at the same time as viral social media posts claim ICE has been given new authority to detain trans people and deport immigrants for having the wrong gender marker.

Various attacks on trans rights, separated through time, could be viewed as a coherent, centralized strategy towards a singular horrific end.

But they also may be in fact disparate, often petty attempts at cruelty, intending to demoralize trans people and make trans life prohibitively difficult.

The way red states and the Trump admin are trying to eliminate transgenderism, as Michael Knowles would say, is to simply make it incredibly difficult to socially and medically transition, like by not recognizing gender on government documents, being excluded from public bathrooms, and continuing efforts to restrict healthcare.

We'll do one more break and return for a final segment.