We are not your weapons.

Brown Trans Dyke
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

It seems a favorite pastime of the American liberal is ceding rhetorical ground to conservatives.

Yes, the ruling administration’s temerity to name and single out trans people is damaging. It is a declaration of intent, a broadcast of transantagonism, a hostile action that puts trans lives in danger. It sets dangerous precedent, casts trans lives as burdensome and unworthy and less-than and signals that the administration will be dangerous to trans individuals.

This is something we already knew.

And yet instead of focusing on these, the larger contexts of this hostile action, I see folks, cis and trans alike, zooming in on the specifics. Reducing the matter to one of simply employment and discrimination, echoing jingoistic right-wing rhetoric with a progressive flair and arguing for the right — the *right* — for trans people to continue participating in the institution that upholds, protects and enforces neocolonialist whyte supremacy worldwide.

Listen to me closely: Fuck joining the military.

To assert that this is damaging to trans people because the military is the largest employer of trans individuals in the States is to erase and ignore how predatory recruitment targets the young, the poor and the marginalized, and fail to ask what it is that drives so many trans individuals to participate in this abusive and queerantagonistic organization at such outsize rates. It’s to not question how scarce the employment opportunities for trans people are, how it is legal to deny trans people housing and livelihoods and force them into a position of joining an institution that denies their personhood, enforces the norms that oppress them and ignores or encourages assault on their bodies.

To fight this because “trans people have as much a right to join the military as anyone” when you have been silent otherwise is to speak up for the rights of trans people to be cannon fodder, to recognize their rights and personhood only when it serves the imperialist state and to say that trans people have a greater right to kill for the kyriarchy than to not die in peace in their homes.

To clamor for continued trans participation in American militarized violence worldwide is to put the lives of American trans soldiers over the lives of the trans people they kill, brutalize, impoverish and annihilate, all in the name of “freedom” for citizens that have never been at risk, so that American corporations can benefit from defense spending and new pipeline routes. It’s to vie and lobby for the right to participate in and enforce the very system that oppresses trans people and so many others.

When the Government puts trans lives at risk, those trans lives must be protected. Which is not at all equivalent to demanding that those trans people with the ability to assimilate and perpetuate American military terror should be able to do so, to further cement kyriarchal oppressions and become reduced to the armed bodies that capitalism wants them to be. Trans people have value beyond being your soldiers. The military will free no one, least of all trans individuals, and this is not the fight that trans people need you to be fighting.

Protect trans lives. Don’t exploit and weaponize them.

Brown Trans Dyke

Written by

Commentary on culture and politics from the perspective of a brown, trans dyke, and all that entails.

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