#i'm being restrained in adding useful tags to this b/c i'm sure it will turn into a cesspool if it goes viral

[nonstandardrepertoire]

as a Jewish transsexual, the Jewish ethno-nationalist¹ sales pitch has always left me cold.² over and over again, i've heard people plugging the State of Israel offer some form of the following: "history teaches that we can never fully trust non-Jews with political power to protect Jews; the only way to make sure Jewish people are always safe is to create and maintain a state where Jewish people have the political power, so we can look out for ourselves"

but the thing is, the worst transphobic harassment i've experienced in my life has come from Jews. i don't think this says anything about the relative transphobia of Jews vs non-Jews, anymore than the fact that most of my birthday presents come from New Yorkers says anything about the relative generosity of Californians, but still. the people who followed me out of the subway filming me while yelling transphobic abuse were Jewish. two of the most relentless boosters of the current wave of transphobia in the US — Ben Shapiro and Chaya Raichik — are Jewish. i should be safe in a state run by such people?

and the obvious response is to say that, well, this is about keeping me safe as a Jew, not necessarily as an anything else. it's a bulwark against anti-Jewish violence, not every other -ism under the sun.³ but the thing is, i'm not a potato-head person. you can't just snap off the trans part of me and the Jewish part of me and say the latter part is safe even when the first isn't. i'm 100% Jewish and 100% trans; if i'm not safe as a transsexual, i'm not safe as a Jew. and if i'm going to be having to fight transphobia anyway, what difference does it make if the people passing bills stripping my rights are Jews or not?⁴

if you really lean into the logic at play here — "no one outside a vulnerable demographic can be trusted to care about people in that demographic" — it's easy to wind up in absurdity. because if i can't trust goyim to have my back as a Jew and also can't trust cis people to have my back as a transsexual, perhaps i need a state run by and for Jewish transsexuals. but wait! white Jewish transsexuals are certainly regularly horrible to, eg, Black Jewish transsexuals, so we probably shouldn't be in the same state together, to say nothing of separating out the poor, the disabled, those without college degrees . . . and before you know it, you're committed to the idea that the only just world is one where we're each a state unto ourselves, perfectly safe in absolute isolation from one another — no society, no coming together across difference to lighten the burden of living, just infinite atomization, the perfect unending unwinnable war of all against all

and this, i think, reveals the fundamental futility of the project. as a transsexual, i don't think my safety will ultimately come from removing myself from people not like me. safety, i think, comes not from cutting ties, but from building them. i will only really be safe in a society that accepts difference, multiplicity, strangeness, variety. i will only be truly safe in a society where we come together — across the gulfs that separate us — to take care of one another

i think there are illuminating parallels with feminist/lesbian separatism here. in its most extreme versions, such separatism abandons the demand that women be safe around men and instead attempts the task of building a space without men for women to inhabit. similarly, it seems to me that Jewish ethno-nationalism abandons the demand that Jewish people be safe around goyim and instead attempts to build a space without goyim for Jewish people to inhabit.⁵ i think Jews can and must be safe among goyim. i think women can and must be safe among men. i think trans people can and must be safe among cis people. that is the kind of world i am committed to fighting for, not one where we give in to fear and retreat into gardens walled by suspicion and hostility⁶

i'm not going to pretend that that's an easy world to build.⁷ i'm not going to pretend i can point to a bunch of stable, just, pluralistic societies and go "eh, just do what they did!" (altho there's no shortage of societies i can point to that went the "this place is for us and only us" route and wound up producing dystopian nightmares⁸). i'm not even going to pretend that i think building a just world from where we are now is inevitable, or even that i always think it is possible. there are days it is very hard to believe. but i always think it's worth striving for. if a just world that guarantees a good life to all isn't worth striving for, what is? if we are to suffer defeat, let it be a slow defeat, a long defeat, a fighting defeat. i am not willing to give up on my neighbors. i am not willing to abandon the charge of seeking the good for those not like me. i am not willing to abandon the hope that will seek the good for me despite my strangeness to them. and i reject any philosophy or politics that asks me to do so

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¹i'm using "Jewish ethno-nationalist" here because i think it's been subject to less semantic dilution than "Zionist", and i want to avoid semantic arguments here as much as possible. whatever prescriptivist arguments you want to marshal that this or that term should mean X, i think it's clear that the descriptivist ship has long since set sail when it comes to "Zionism". (when pushed for specifics, i've seen self-professed Zionists and anti-Zionists outline essentially identical political programs, which certainly makes it seem to me that these terms are of minimal utility at best)

²obviously, what's happening on the ground is very bad. but critiquing what's happening on the ground often runs into severe questions of evidential reliability and can also leave the impression that Jewish ethno-nationalism is a good idea implemented badly, which is why i want to take aim at this level here

³given the European origins of this movement in its modern incarnation, i think it's unsurprising who gets imagined as "just a Jew" and not any other marked category. and from there, i think it's also unsurprising (if depressing) how various Jews who do exist in other marked categories have been and are treated by the "Jewish State" — the promised safety turns out to be predicated on all the usual axes of whiteness, wealth, ability, and so on

⁴indeed, i have often found that groups predicated on the idea that "we're all in alignment here" are often much more resistant to acknowledging members' various bigotries than groups not predicated on that assumption

⁵and, similarly, this attempt to cleave the world along one axis of hierarchy invariably reveals the inadequacy of one-identity-only frameworks for tackling the full complexity of the world. among other things, feminist/lesbian separatism has come under sustained critique from Black feminists like Barbara Smith for sundering ties of solidarity that are critical for fighting racism. victimhood and oppression are not fixed, ontological states, but fluid, shifting, contextual relationships. we cannot undo the snarlingly intertwined systems of oppression by replicating them in miniature

⁶the fear is certainly a real emotion; it is one i have felt at times myself. sometimes it is even based on an accurate perception of the world! but also: sometimes not. my fear of kitchen knives spontaneously levitating and flying around the room certainly feels real to me, but it's not a thing that can actually happen. one of the really hard things to do in the world, i've found, is parsing out the fears that are just feelings i'm having from the fears that tell me actual actionable information about the world and then striking a livable balance between reasonable precaution and paranoia. precautions against danger often come with their own set of risks: locking a door to keep out potential thieves ups the odds of being trapped in a building fire; using a different complex password for every site raises the risk of forgetting one and having a critical account shut down; the medications that drastically cut the frequency of debilitating migraines can raise the likelihood of other adverse health effects. more broadly, viewing neighbors with suspicion, fear, and distrust has a corrosive effect on the social fabric, and makes it harder to structure society to make sure everyone has food, clothes, housing, healthcare — all the things a society is supposed to do. (it's hard to convince people to take care of people they're afraid of, especially if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that they will have to give up something they care about (usually money, but also convenience, prestige, power) for that to happen.) and that corrosive effect can get very extreme — when fascism wants to recruit you to its cause, the sales pitch is usually less "hey, do you want to unleash horrific violence against those folks over there?" and more "hey, aren't you tired of being ~afraid~? don't you want to feel ~safe~? isn't it about time you had all the wealth, respect, and power that's rightfully yours and that's been kept from you for so long?". fear isn't the only way that horrors get unleashed, but it's a very potent one. (i don't think there's a formula for striking the right balance here. as with so many balancing acts, too much comes down to context and the specifics of all those involved, not least because the scale and nature of threats can vary so wildly. i believe that everyone deserves to be safe (insofar as any of us mostly hairless apes clinging to a thin crust of dirt on an iron ball whirling thru the cosmic void around a sphere of nuclear fire can be safe from loss, grief, accident, disaster, or misfortune...), but being and feeling are different matters, and pursuing the feeling of safety without limit can easily lead to logics of annihilation.) (and indeed, i am not the first to be struck by the fact that in many ways it is in the interests of the State of Israel, as a state, if Jews feel unsafe in the rest of the world, because that feeling of unsafety is so easily leveraged to both increase political support for the State of Israel and encourage Jewish people to leave the Diaspora and move to the State of Israel. which, unnervingly, is where you sometimes find the State of Israel and its agents taking the position that Jews don't belong anywhere that isn't the immediate environs of Jerusalem, a position that is ultimately indistinguishable from any number of dime-store Judeophobias)

⁷indeed, i think this is one of many places where it's easier to identify the problem than it is to solve it. many middle schoolers can explain the problem of Fermat's Last Theorem; barely a handful of professional mathematicians in the world could explain the proof. my cat can figure out how to break a vase even tho he can't reliably find a toy he's just been playing with when he's sitting directly on top of it (it's fine, he doesn't follow me on here, i can say that about him); in some cases, a skilled artisan can repair the vase so it functions again; no one in the world can turn back time so that the vase was never broken to begin with. it's easy to invent chessboard solutions to entrenched societal conflicts — move this border here, enact this constitution there, change this societal attitude for all involved, and hey presto!, utopia. but the world is not a game of chess. education, advocacy, activism, political organization, even wildcat direct action — these are all slow, effortful, uncertain processes, and everyone with a different vision of the future is also exercising their agency to change the course of events. i think societies are easy to break and hard to repair. in many cases, i don't really know how we go from here, the real world as it actually is with all its shattered bones and aching wounds and long-festering resentments, to there, a world of true justice. but i think it's worth trying. i think it's worth imagining. i hope you do too

⁸like, idk what even to say if "Germany for the Germans" doesn't set off alarm bells. even if they raised up a brand new continent from the ocean floor, i still think i'd be wary of the political project of building a ~Jewish state for the Jews~. i don't trust nationalism of any flavor. i think the Diasporic notion of feeling kinship with and responsibility for people all around the world regardless of borders, flags, kings, bureaucracies is beautiful and worth cherishing and protecting. i don't dream of finally being on top of the hierarchy; i dream of there not being a hierarchy to begin with