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Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.

Arendt once said that “the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated.” As a stateless person, she experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an enemy alien in France — before making it to the United States. She was lucky. Her friend Walter Benjamin committed suicide in his eighth year of exile, when the French authorities blocked him from crossing the border ahead of advancing German troops...

A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place...

The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation...

The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the past few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the past few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group — or groups — of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar. Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed...

Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. I was once detained in Russia after a routine road check because an officer thought I was a teenage boy using his mother’s driver’s license.

It’s not just American identity documents that are being scrambled. Like all things American, Trump’s denationalization campaign affects people far beyond the United States. In late February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued visa guidelines, ostensibly designed to keep foreign trans athletes from competing in the United States, that seem to direct consular officers to deny entry to anyone whose gender markers appear different from their sex assigned at birth.

The new regulations require visitors, when filling out the paperwork to cross the border into the United States, to indicate the sex they were assigned at birth. Lucien Lambertz, a German curator who is trans and was planning a professional trip to the United States, told me they worried that they would be denied entry if they complied, indicating a birth sex different from the gender marker in their passport, but also if they didn’t comply.

Lambertz emailed the Foreign Ministry in their country to ask for guidance. “The issue is the subject of tense discussions here at the ministry, and your concerns are absolutely understandable,” the response read, in part. Ordinarily, the Foreign Ministry would suggest asking the U.S. Embassy, but by doing so, as the letter noted, Lambertz “would then ‘out’ yourself to them.”

Trans and nonbinary Germans fear that their country’s incoming conservative government may take its cues from the Trump administration. Far-right parties, ascendant in Germany and other European countries, have made the specter of “gender ideology” a centerpiece of their politics.

“Something has changed,” Heinrich Horwitz, a German choreographer, told me. Horwitz, who is nonbinary, was recently assaulted at the main train station in Vienna. The attacker was demanding to know whether Horwitz was “a girl or a boy.” Before they could make out what the attacker was saying, Horwitz instinctively tucked the Star of David they wear around their neck inside their shirt. “I thought that would be safer.” Horwitz, who was born in Munich in 1984, is the child of a Holocaust survivor. “I grew up with this idea that I could always go to the U.S. if the Nazis came back,” they told me. That no longer seems like an option.

You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population, the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights, the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won’t stop here. If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you.

But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

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And darling, we will be fine; but what was yours and mine appears to me a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes.

...

So enough of this terror, we deserve to know light, and grow evermore lighter and lighter--

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How do we know something is developing? Well, sometimes a story will write itself out of the original expectations you had for it. When that happens there might be a feeling of “an open question” having appeared. It can be a feeling of being, suddenly, lost. The story has lost its overdetermined quality and is standing there, kind of simple and unadorned, asking something sincerely. It’s not necessarily a great feeling, for the writer – it’s the feeling of having to shed a bunch of expectations (about what the story is saying, what it’s about, what it’s taking on, where it’s headed, and so on. (And of course, this feeling that “something is developing” is going to manifest to each of us differently, and part of the long job of craft is to learn what, for us, it feels like, specifically.) ...The form is not some tiny hoop you are trying to leap through. The form is a record of people who….have leapt. Who have just leapt. In leaping, they found something new for the form to do, some new way for it to work. ...It could be that you are trying to finish them in ways that other stories you love have been finished; trying to finish them according to someone else’s model, let’s say. But your stories want to be “finished” in a new flavor (in your flavor) - to “learn to end” in ways that you (and only you) can find for them.

– George Saunders (x)

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Ingmar Bergman

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Ramadan in Gaza 2025

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I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life. . . . There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.

– Francis Weller

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Why this sudden at-homeness, all-out, all-in? I can, look, sink myself into you, glacierlike, you yourself slay your brothers: earlier than they I was with you, Snowed One. Throw your tropes in with the rest: Someone wants to know, why with God I was no different than with you, someone wants to drown in that, two books instead of lungs, someone who stabbed himself into you, bebreathes the cut, someone, he was the one closest to you, gets lost to himself, someone adorns your sex with your and his betrayal, maybe I was both

[Why this sudden at-homeness], Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris

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If you want to know where to find your contribution to the world, look at your wounds. When you learn how to heal them, teach others.

Emily Maroutian

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“What progress have I made? I have begun to be a friend to Myself.” — Seneca

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Q: How I can detach myself from someone?

Detaching from anything, be that a person, object, or circumstance, means coming back to yourself. 

Attachment isn’t a real experience; it is a product of confusion.

Generally it means someone has knowingly or unknowingly assumed something to be permanent that by nature cannot be so.

You aren’t physically bound to this person. The experience of attachment is an occurrence in the mind. It has to do with the mind’s thoughts and the body’s reaction to those thoughts. Or, conversely, the body’s emotions and the mind’s reaction/interpretation regarding those emotions. 

When attachment is a force in our life, it is because we have begun to use temporary phenomena as a way to orient and understand who we are and where our happiness resides. It is an indication that we have misattributed some sense of who we are and the joy of that Being to something derivative and external. When that phenomenon’s role in our life changes due to the impermanent nature of this shifting world, it can provoke confusion within us that results in suffering.

Most people “fix” this by going from one attachment to another. Perhaps finding a new boyfriend, pursuing sensory gratification in myriad forms, or fixating on worldly achievement. They play out the same old pattern of delusion but in different ways all while expecting a different result.

I suspect this is why so many of our elders make us sad rather than inspire hope and wisdom—their lives end more with regret than with transformation, peace, and insight. 

To discover real peace means loosening this tendency to grasp at the world for happiness and identity, instead turning within to uncover the real meaning of your aliveness when we talk about “life.”

Daily meditation is an essential part of altering your way of living such that you aren’t so much trying to fill a hole within you but rather you are allowing something to come through you into this world. Instead of trying to get happiness from life, you bring happiness to life.

When your way of life becomes an opportunity to express and share the peace and happiness you are finding within, everything changes. There is less fear, more love. Less attachment, more freedom. Less confusion, more peace. 

On a more immediate level, try this:

Notice the primary form your attachment takes. It could be thoughts, emotions, or both. 

When that attachment begins to express itself, shift your focus from the story you have built in your mind to the feeling of being in your body. 

This feeling of inhabiting the body includes both the sensations in the body but also the space in which those sensations occur. 

For example, when you feel your hand from the inside out, there is the sensation of the energy-consciousness in your hand but there is the internal spaceless space of awareness in which that sensation presents itself. 

By abiding with your attention filling your body in this way, you avoid getting swept up in mental loops of the thoughts that once acted to renew your feelings of pain. 

At the same time, it allows the feelings of pain to be there and to be fully experienced without being overcome or swept away by them.

Make this practice persistent so long as you are suffering from the experience of attachment, or really any form of mental anguish. It always subsides into peace, sooner or later. 

Lastly, a book I would highly recommend is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. 

Namaste :) Much love

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John Cassavetes said:

“We started working on Husbands as a natural extension of people wanting to continue their lives in work: use what you think you’ve learned and deepen it… From the very beginning we made a pact that we would try to find whatever truth was in ourselves and talk about that. Sometimes the scenes would reflect things that we didn’t like to find out: how idiotic we were, how little we had to do with ourselves, or how uptight we were. We felt that it was important to…have courage to put that out on the line for whatever it was, even if the picture itself would not be exciting… You have to have the courage to be bad and really express what you want to say.”

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The desire to follow a moving target.

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with my head in the clouds © 2024 Matteo M. Santoni website • instagram • La fine del Fiume

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Daniel Lin

Geese on Ice, Highland Park Preserve, Highland Park, IL