What would you do if the Nazis came back?

This is cross-posted from Patreon. Consider subscribing!

Every time I look too long at the rabid hysteria surrounding trans people, the extreme escalation of threats, eliminationist legislation, I can’t help but think back to 2021. Most of the focus in the U.S. was on the far right flooding antivax spaces, developing a new and much larger cohort of conspiracy theorists. Across the pond, the U.K. was being consumed by anti-trans propaganda. Rabid swarms of self-proclaimed TERFs flooded U.K. social media spaces. U.K. media breathlessly and relentlessly banged a transphobic drum.

It wasn’t a matter of if, but when, that hysteria would consume the U.S. And sure enough, as vaccine mandates eased, the far right lost an energizing boogeyman and began looking for the next thing to make people go totally insane. They very quickly found it in a hate campaign that had already been churning away in the U.K. and by a select few transphobes, like Matt Walsh, in the U.S.

By May of 2022, Proud Boys began mobilizing to target Drag Story Hour venues. I waited, nauseated, for that campaign to reach New York. In June 2022, I visited a library out by Coney Island that in 2019 had been targeted by a protest organized by one man, using much of the same rhetoric we see today: Drag queens are “grooming kids into the transgender lifestyle.” The…