How is fascism going for you? Here’s how it’s going for me.
Honestly? Like war.
Now that I’ve found my rhythm of resistance, I’m starting to have capacity to write about what’s happening. Not for sympathy or support—I am far from the most negatively impacted—but for clarity, to help myself and others understand the precise impacts of this administration’s actions. After all, the only way to resist them is to collectively reject them, loudly and daily, and that requires shared knowledge of what is happening.
The point of this post, then, is to catalog the administration’s destruction in my life. I’ll couple it with the many layers of context behind these impacts, to show the direct impacts on me and their relationship to the broader systems and communities that the administration is destroying. I’ll organize them into different areas of material harm, with the President’s attack on gender, education, and health as the primary fronts. The point of this is precision, not catastrophizing, so we can work with the current impacts, while also projecting the future impacts, and their likelihood. If you’re not as impacted as me, I’m hoping this gives you a sense of what might soon happen to you, and if you are more impacted, I hope this can help us see that we are all in the same fight.
Research
I am a researcher. That means many things, but fundamentally, it means I use the patronage of public and private funding to answer life’s big questions for the benefit of humanity, now and into the future. My primary focus for the past decade has been on learning and teaching, specifically how we can best help people understand and create computer software. I always viewed this focus as both a moral imperative — if we’re going to live in a computational world, we all deserve to understand how it works and what implications that has on our lives. But I’ve also viewed it as a pragmatic goal, because such literacy helps people get the jobs that build and maintain our computational world.
For the entirety of my 25 year research career, the federal government has agreed, and in a consistent bipartisan basis. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Defense funded my tuition, stipend, and benefits as a doctoral student for six years. Since I began as faculty in 2008, I’ve raised more than $20 million from NSF, and with this money, invented faster ways of fixing bugs, new ways of teaching computer programming, created teacher education pathways to grow the nation’s K-12 computer science (CS) teacher workforce, trained more than 40 doctoral students who work as professors in academia and researchers in industry, and of course, published more than 200 peer reviewed articles that serve as a foundation of our knowledge about why computer programming is hard and what we can do to make it easier. This funding has also enabled me to write numerous essays that have been read more than 1 million times by people all around the world.
One aspect of this research became a target of the administration in the past three months: the fact that I want everyone, including girls, rural kids, and everyone that comes to the U.S. to pursue their dreams, to be able to create the software that runs our world. This means accounting for the diversity of people and their needs, including them in learning contexts, and engaging in targeted efforts to address their specific needs (otherwise known as “equity”). The administration says that such efforts are “racist” and “ideological”, and so they terminated my latest $1.4 million grant, which was in year 2 of 4 of building sustainable programs, practices, and communities for K-12 CS teachers for our nation’s public schools. Terminating this grant means:
- The funding for my postdoc, two PhD students, one masters student, and four undergraduates is suddenly gone, short circuiting the education and job prospects of all of them.
- Our travel funding to collaborate and learn with researchers nationwide and globally is gone, so we will not be able to attend conferences or visit other institutions to share our knowledge.
- The collaborations we have with colleges and universities across the Pacific Northwest to build this ecosystem will cease.
- I lose 3 months of summer salary and benefits.
- All of the above put our teacher education pathways at direct risk of shutting down, cutting off the nation from the computer science teachers it needs to help the nation remain globally competitive. (Despite the fact that NSF’s new priorities are to “support research with the goal of understanding or addressing participation in STEM, with the core goal of creating opportunities for all Americans.”
Of course, it’s not just the terminated grant that has impacts. The administration is randomly doing this to other grants, and so I don’t know if I can spend grant money I have, halting all of my research. And the lack of certainty about funding has meant that I have had to suddenly seek emergency funding from private sources, which cannot match the scale of the federal government. This has been often wasting considerable time on opportunities that don’t pan out, or pan out for very small short term amounts, and ultimately distract me from focusing on research and education. My grant, amongst many, may be listed on a lawsuit against the administration for the illegal termination of a contract. If that happens, I expect I’ll also waste a bunch of time dealing with hate speech or worse from the MAGA extremists, creating an even greater climate of fear for researchers across the country.
The impacts on my own research career, and the students I serve, are just one part of a much larger collective impact on science, engineering, and research in the United States. With massive cuts coming to the NIH and NSF, colleagues are taking positions in other countries, hiring freezes are preventing the renewal of our colleges and universities experts, and the doctoral students who often go into industry and government to bring the leading expertise into our nation’s practices, are watching programs halt admissions. If this destruction of research continues in the U.S., we will quickly become a backwater of discovery and progress, after having led it for a century. And it will take a decade or more to rebuild it.
Higher education
While this section stems from my experiences as an administrator, these are my opinions and fears and not that of the University of Washington. They are also not administrative decisions or plans: we cannot know the future, and so we cannot make plans.
In addition to being a researcher and educator in my role as a professor, I am also an administrator, serving part time as our Associate Dean for Academics in The Information School. This job has many responsibilities, including teaching assignments, budgets, oversight over 35 staff, conflict resolution, academic conduct, admissions, and more. Because this administration seeks to strangle higher education, and I help lead our higher education institution, my work is the front lines of this suffocation.
One attack the administration has waged is to reduce overhead rates for grants. You might wonder, what do grants have to do with education? Overhead essentially pays for keeping the lights on at a university. For example, of the $20 million in grants I raised in the past 17 years, about $10 million of this funding was not spent directly on research, but on a relatively low ~50% overhead charged by the University of Washington, to pay for electricity, water, maintenance, staff, and other expenses necessary for sustaining the building and human infrastructure of a vibrant institution of research and learning. Without this, the University could not educate the roughly 1 million students we’ve educated in the 17 years I have been faculty. The executive branch is now proposing that rate be 15%, meaning that my University will have hundreds of millions less in funding to pay to keep the lights on.
The second major attack, of course, is on supporting all of our students and their diverse needs (otherwise known as diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts). The administration says that if we try to support all of our students, then they will withhold not only grants, but student aid and other forms of federal assistance. Because we cannot educate our students without offering them differentiated support — students with disabilities, Black students, Hispanic students, immigrant and refugee students all have distinct needs, requiring differentiation — we are facing major financial cuts in federal support.
The threat of these cuts has meant many things for my role:
- Cutting 10% of our academics budget so far and probably more in the coming months, greatly reducing student services and reducing our ability to meet student demand for computing and information education.
- Planning a major restructuring of how we fund doctoral education, and exploring the worst case scenario of not admitting doctoral students for the foreseeable future, reducing our teaching assistant support.
- Counseling and supporting hundreds of students who fear having to drop out of college due to threats of reduced tuition support, termination of funding for diversity initiatives, deportation, and loss of career prospects due to the administration’s destabilizing tariff regime.
- Managing the low morale of 35 staff and more than 2,000 students, which has led to conflict, disengagement, stress, and anxiety, reducing our ability to continue our educational mission.
And of course, all of this changes constantly, with worse news every day, creating new disruptions, new crises, and yet more late nights trying to manage a shifting fiscal future. If these cuts come to pass next year, the University of Washington will likely face historic declines in its ability to educate future generations, on top of devastating loss to its ability to further human progress through research. It is, in essence, disinvesting in the future of our country, so that one man may consolidate power.
Civil rights
The key impacts here stem from the government’s use of sex, gender, and identification to policy my ability to move freely within and beyond this country. The impacts really boil down to one executive order (EO), which defines the “biological reality” of gender around historical potential reproductive capacity. The EO goes to great strains to try to define a binary that doesn’t exist. This is necessary to the Christian nationalists in our country, because if they accepted actual biological reality — that neither sex or gender is binary — it would dismantle the patriarchal systems at the foundation of their moral and cultural worldview.
The implication of this EO is that I am no longer considered a woman or female by the federal government. That guideline has been rolled out across the federal government, with many implications. So far, it has meant:
- I am not allowed to renew my passport with a correct gender marker of female. Moreover, I may not be able to even with an incorrect marker, because I have changed my birth certificate, and the revised birth certificate does retain a trail of what was changed, so I cannot prove whether I was assigned male or female at birth, a key requirement now for obtaining a passport.
- I am not allowed in restrooms on federal property (or in any state that has passed a similar law). By “allowed”, I mean that if I enter a women’s room, as I always do, I am either breaking a law or can be removed by security. If I enter a men’s room, as required by law, I may also be removed by security, because they will see me as a woman (and I am!).
- It is not clear if I will be detained or delayed when reentering the country. The state department says that I won’t be, and that my passport is still valid until it expires, but I know I am on a list. All it would take is Trump declaring that my passport be confiscated for being invalid, because I previously had a passport with the sex marker “M’.
The material consequence of the above has been minimal so far. My passport expires in 2032, so that is far off. I have only been removed from one restroom (a men’s room at the Utah airport which I decided to use because I was required to by state law, but a security guard told me I was in the wrong one). Returning from Japan, I was afraid about reentry, securing my devices, but it was a non-event. So while I do live in some fear of violence in public spaces, and some fear in not being able to seamlessly re-enter to my country, it is thus far mostly fear, and not physical harm or restraint, just the daily anxiety of uncertainty. None of this, of course, says anything about the future, because the future is unknown. All it would take is the President’s decree at this point, and my rights to move about the country would swiftly be lost, along with millions of other trans peoples’ rights.
The impacts on others, of course, are even greater. Trans people have been ruled “unfit” to serve in the military due to this executive order, further reducing our capacity for defense and abruptly ending the careers of tens of thousands of public servants. Cis women, particularly butch ones, are being policed by civilians in public restrooms, even those that aren’t federal. And trans youth across the country are being banned from sports, despite no evidence of competitive advantage. These are all steps backwards for trans people’s ability to participate in public and private life.
Health and wellbeing
All of the above attacks on higher education, as well as other anti-trans executive orders, have had many negative effects on my health and wellbeing. I have been working 70 hours a week to continue doing my normal job, but also manage the added chaos of daily attacks on higher education and my civil rights. I go to sleep every night a bundle of stress and anxiety, often experiencing insomnia, trying to get by on 4–5 hours of sleep each night. I stress eat, and have been gaining weight. I am by my nature, and due to my life experiences, a resilient, calm person, and so even though everyone around me probably sees a highly productive, competent person holding up okay, I reach my breaking point daily. My therapist, my wife, some exercise, and the bits of community I’ve managed to build post pandemic, help me keep it together.
Long term, several executive orders have banned research on trans health, threatening to erode the nascent knowledge on how to manage my trans body and physiology. When I go to the doctor, and have a question, they generally have few answers, because much of the medical knowledge we have does not apply to my particular hormonal composition or post-surgical body. Things were looking up in medical research on trans folks as meaningful, trans-led research has ramped up in the past ten years; now all of that momentum is gone, and probably won’t be resumed for a decade or more, due to both bans and budget cuts.
It is not clear how much longer I will have access to hormone replacement therapy. It is legal and accessible now, and Washington state has passed bills allowing me to fill a 12 month prescription in the event that supply chains are disrupted. Two emerging threats, one to the general civil rights of trans people, and two the general threats to the economy, mean that I could easily lose reliable access to estradiol. If I do, it will mean lower energy and bone density loss, threatening my work and long term health.
Finally, this is the least free I’ve ever felt in this country. Because of the immense uncertainty and daily assaults on my profession, my identity, my livelihood, and my communities, I live in a near constant state of anxiety, and cannot plan for the future. How can one have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a state that actively seeks to destroy everything I am and live for?
Family and community
The people in my life are of course affected, but each in their own unique ways. My wife, for example, took a break from working as a nurse to attend to family matters in California, and is now back looking for a job in primary care nursing job market. While there are still jobs, many opportunities have been cut, either due to concerns about looming Medicaid cuts, or due to unprecedented cuts in federal funding for community health, reducing the scope of her options and increasing competition for the jobs that remain.
My daughter is a new primary special education teacher in El Cajon, California. We’ve looked into the source of funding for her role in her district, and it is nearly all Department of Education money. If the Department closes, the district likely loses the funding for her position, and even though her district is required to provide special education services, there is high risk that they either greatly increase the size of her class, or more likely increase the size of other more senior teachers and lay her off, as she is the new hire. If that happens, it’s not like any other districts in the country will be better off. It would probably mean she leaves California, and may has to move back in with her Mom or I, as she explores other careers.
People all around me are losing their jobs in research, health care, small businesses, and enterprises. Students cannot find internships, cannot find jobs, and come to be desperate for advice on how to navigate the slow collapse of the economy. One of my former undergrads, a doctoral student now, had verbally accepted an offer as a professor, but had it canceled at the last minute due to a hiring freeze due to the federal attacks on higher education. Another student had an offer in big tech that was rescinded because they needed sponsorship for a work visa. As the tariffs work their way through the economy and ICE scares off immigrants at all levels of the economy, and the bolstering effects of social safety nets and newcomers to our economy will destabilize schools, colleges, hospitals, and health care, and we will see more.
I also spend a lot of time in community with other trans people, particularly trans youth. Much of my volunteer time in the past three months has been consumed by trying to keep the hundreds of youth at Lambert House safe, mostly from themselves. Many have suicidal thoughts, as the nation strips away their access to health care, encourages bullying at school, bans them from sports, careers, and public service, and validates their unsupportive parents’ resistance to gender affirming care. In the youth groups I help facilitate, many teens talk regularly about feeling worthless, and not seeing any reason to keep on living. I’m glad I can be there with their peers to help youth see another path. But I fear the day we lose one to suicide, despite our best efforts, and they become another statistic.
Meanwhile, solidarity with the trans and LGBTQ+ folks in my broader community is strong and growing. Things have been bad before and they’re getting bad again. But we know that the way to survive it, and resist it, is together. I’ve attended protests and rallies, lobbied at our state legislature, organized brunches with other youth group facilitators. We do this, even as a trans woman next to my campus was violently assaulted by a roving group of transphobic men a block from where I work, saved by running into a restaurant, where strangers defended her. We live despite this, in growing fear of the physical violence the President encourages through his words and actions.
While all of the above is scary, frustrating, and absurd, I do feel lucky. I still have a relatively secure job, I make enough money to weather economic instability, and with the luck of genetics, I pass. Most of the actual threat I face right now is simply being out, as a trans person, as someone who studies diversity, equity, and inclusion, and as someone with some cultural and institutional power. And so while I am a target, and could easily fall into a bad news cycle if I were to be noticed by the wrong people, I am not facing daily active threats.
And yet, the threat is real. Every single person that is facing material threats is proof. People are being fired, kicked out of the military, detailed for having the wrong tattoo, dragged off the streets in front of their citizen children, kicked out of sports, forced to detransition, forced to give birth, taxed out of business by tariffs, silenced by fear, policed in bathrooms and the border. These fascist actions by this President are happening now, and they will continue to get worse until we are all ensnared.
That is, until we stand up. That means writing fleeting essays like this one, going to protests, resisting compliance, joining lawsuits, testifying in courts, speaking at city council meetings, calling your representatives, giving money to the resistance, finding whatever spare time you can to build a coalition for whatever cause is impacting your life. That is the project of this moment, for better or worse, and it is not going to get better until every one of you reading this finds your place in it.
I may not write again for a while. I am busy trying to keep the institutions that keep us smart, healthy, and informed alive, to keep trans kids alive, and to keep myself and my family alive. That is my place in this fight, and I can’t wait to hear about yours.
