We Now Return You to Your Regularly Scheduleed Bugbear Dispatch
My fellow bugbears, I need to start this post off by apologizing for the unannounced and unscheduled absence of new dispatches over the past couple of weeks. I will offer some words here by way of explanation, though not excuse, as well as share a few thoughts and links to things I’ve been reading and thinking about.
“April is the cruelest month” is how T.S. Eliot opened “The Waste Land,” one of his most enduring (and in my view best) poems. Disillusioned with the desolation of World War I, Eliot—an antisemite, to be sure—had not yet completed his final transformation into an insufferable reactionary Christian—the man who would pen the authoritarian Christian treatise The Idea of a Christian Society, arguing that liberalism was dead and unsustainable due to its lack of positive content, and the only “third way” between communism and fascism was religious ideology.
This way of thinking was actually pioneered in the late 1910s and early 1920s, in the aftermath of Russia’s experience of the First World War, revolution, and civil war, by the cranky Russian Orthodox Christian intellectuals I’ve spent far too much time studying for my dissertation and some of my post-dissertation peer-reviewed work. One can understand, under the circumstances, how some thinkers would conclude that liberalism was a failure, but that doesn’t excuse proffering what amounts to a coercive Christian alternative.
All that aside, this past April was certainly a cruel one. I spent the early part of the month reflecting on how in only a little more than a decade, the full acceptance and civil rights for transgender Americans that seemed to be just around the corner in 2014 has drifted further and further out of reach as the result of extreme right-wing backlash that has been aided and abetted by supposed “moderates,” “centrists,” and even liberals in the legacy media. Not only is trans acceptance further away than ever; trans Americans are now facing real political repressions that, if not reversed, could end in genocide.
I had to organize my thoughts on this topic for a virtual talk that I gave for the religion department at Montclair State University as part of their “Angry Religion” series. They told me the talk would be given in honor of the transgender son of a faculty member who died by suicide. By all accounts, Ashton Clatterbuck was a great kid with a heart for justice, and a bright student. Learning about him and hearing his father talk about him before my talk was heavy. I was glad we could honor his memory, of course. Still, the prep, the April 12 talk, and the encounter with trans youth suicide left me drained and in need of recovery. My allergies acted up, and eventually I developed a cold.
All the while, I worked hard on a reported piece for The Flytrap on the American secular movement that will be released this coming Tuesday. Apart from that, I more or less had nothing to give. I was fatigued. I couldn’t sleep well because of high anxiety. I was having tummy troubles, probably as a result of the anxiety. “And so it goes,” in the words of the immortal Kurt Vonnegut, my fellow Hoosier. (Hooray for our team.)
With the time I took to rest and recover, however, I can return to bringing you the Bugbear Dispatch content you’ve been promised on a regular basis. It’s going to be a hard few years (at the very least), but I am going to continue to be a transgender voice on the internet unless and until they shut me down—not that I’ve ever only wanted to focus on things related to being trans. How I wish that part of my identity was just something “normal” so that I didn’t have to constantly talk about it.
Anyway, I intend to write something more cohesive next week, but in the meantime here are a couple links to some things I’ve been reading and thinking about:
My Flytrap colleague Tina Vasquez on how the Trump regime’s brutal crackdown on immigrants is harming Latinos’ educational prospects in North Carolina.
From earlier in April, I found this commentary on the Trump regime’s extremely inappropriate Christian Holy Week statement particularly good. In general, I recommend Kat Grant and their blog Transing Boundaries.
Thanks for sticking with me here, and I’ll catch you next week!
Here to support you and your work. Which means you get to put your health and wellbeing ahead of me reading a new article. Always.
Look after yourself💜