Immobilization: By Panic or Denial

A Measured Response to Barr and Davis

Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso

This is a response to Sebastian Barr’s¹ (he/him) recent article “This (Trans) Therapist Is Begging You to Divest From the ‘Trans Panic Clickbait Economy’”, and by proxy, a response to Garrison Davis’ (they/he) article “The Trans Panic Clickbait Economy”. I want to begin by saying that I respect Barr’s work and believe his article to have been well intentioned. I would go as far to say that the article is even likely quite useful for a certain portion of the trans internet. It is true that there are many trans doomers who spend several hours a day on the worst parts of the internet. I’ve interacted with many such people over the years both in my private life and as Auto_Anon. Louise Weird’s Castration Movie (both part one and two) is a spectacular and deeply earnest approach to discussing the maladaptive, self destructive, and deeply irony poisoned personalities that those spaces create. These people are undeniably “immobilized by fear” (to use Barr’s phrase). However, Barr seems to implicitly divide the entire trans community into two groups of people, those “immobilized by fear” and those who do not believe that the trans community is facing “Nazi Germany-esque level of potential danger facing trans people” (Davis’ words, quoted by Barr). As someone who is very on record for believing that trans people face Nazi Germany levels of potential danger from the Trump regime, I feel caught in a false dilemma. Either I am asked to deny the very real possibility of a trans genocide happening in the United States (and Britian) and thus receive my sane-person award, or I am labeled a doomer.

My goal today is to offer a non-alarmist, reasonable, and charitable response to Barr’s work that breaks down this false dichotomy. This is because I believe Barr deserves just such a response. In terms of the negative responses, I am sure that he is currently inundated with loud hostility. These hostile responses are rarely effective tools of communication, and will likely only result in further entrenchment. Afterall, no one is very receptive to feedback when their body is telling them that they are in danger. Likewise, I am sure that there are a group of readers very receptive to Barr’s message and tone. I also wish to reach them. To me, they are also immobilized. However, they are immobilized by denial, and they too are addicted to a certain type of media. They’re addicted to a form of media that will tell them that it will be okay, that everyone around them is overreacting, that they do not need to act. For the most part, I do not think Barr’s article meets the criteria for inclusion in this type of media. But I believe that those already prone to that way of thinking will use Barr’s article to that ends.

I want to begin by pointing out something Barr is correct about. It is a bad idea to be reading trans news or talking about trans news for multiple hours a day unless that is your job. Barr criticizes the fact that the “Trans people retreating from needed contributions to resistance efforts and people who are under more threat” are not the trans people who should be retreating. Barr is correct that if you are a wealthy, professional trans person, now is not the time to engage in “resource-hoarding”. Either use your resources to leave the USA, and then use them to help others still there, or help someone who is more at risk to leave. Throughout the article Barr makes reference to his own sense of panic, his own sleepless nights, his own terror. Because he is a therapist with a professional income, and because he is a trans man (a group under far less scrutiny than trans women), he should not be resource-hoarding and should be taking the strategies he encourages to calm down to a functional level of engagement with the world. I worry that Barr is imagining that other trans people are like him. He quotes a remarkably transmisogynistic sentence from Davis’ article “Lilith[²] in Seattle with a 150k dollar tech job is not at high risk being detained by ICE.” This quote asks us to imagine that the average trans woman is a wealthy tech urbanite with a frankly massive salary. While it is true that there is a subset of trans women have jobs in STEM fields that pay well (although this industry in the last few years has gone under extreme levels of layoffs), the majority of trans people are not wealthy or even middle class. A Canadian 2020 report found that “Despite high level of education, half of respondents over the age of 25 had a personal income less than $30,000/year, and 40% were living in a low-income household”. Twenty-four percent made under $15,000 last year. Only forty-three percent had a full-time job. Now, these numbers are old, and Canadian. However, they were produced during an economic boom in Canada. Canada also has substantially more legal protections for trans people than in the USA. I highly doubt that thing have improved or look peachier across the boarder. This Lilith figure seems more an imagined rhetorical stand-in than anything actually true about trans women. I, for one, made about $13,000 last year.

Yes. It is important to take class into account when discussing these issues. It is also important to take one’s profession (for instance sex workers, who make up an alarming amount of the trans femme population are at greater risk and have additional new punitive laws to navigate). It is also important to take into account that trans women are both less economically stable and at greater risk of physical violence and negative political and media attention. This will no doubt effect one’s view of the whole situation. However, I do wish to note, unlike Davis and myself (a fellow Canadian), Barr is living in the United States and is far more at risk from his government than either Davis or I are at risk from our own. So, while there are mitigating factors for Barr. He is still at risk. I am also at risk, but that risk is different. I am poor. I am a sex worker. I am a trans woman. I am suicidal. But I am not an American. And, for what it is worth, I spend very little time each day following trans news. Following Barr, I’ve felt the need to detach. It is too miserable. I do my best to stay abreast of the major developments. But for instance, I will not be reading the story that came in as I was writing this, about the DOJ launching an investigation into Illinois Schools’ bathrooms and books as part of an anti-trans purge. If you do want to keep an eye on your home state without having to keep a close eye on the horrible headlines, I suggest frequently checking the Anti-Trans Bill Tracker instead.

I believe that there is an ongoing trans genocide in the United States and in Britian. So do many leading scholars and genocide organizations. Susan Styker, the most famous trans woman professor has called the new American anti-trans policies a genocide. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has put out a “Red Flag Alert” regarding anti-trans policies and legislation in the United Kingdom. The same Institute has put out three Red Flag Alerts for trans people in the United States. Shannon Fyfe has argued in the Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice that calling the current policies a genocide is worthwhile. The University of Michigan School of Social Work recently organized a “Community Conversation” entitled “Whether we are experiencing the beginnings of a transgender genocide in the US”. Dr. Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, has said that the United States is beginning to show signs of a trans genocide, as has Lori Shepard, the executive director of the Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center. Davis is perhaps while meaning then they decide to focus on the more predatory news networks like “like “NewsWire,” “PopBase,” and the Polymarket powered “RawsAlerts”. However, these are hardly the places most trans people I know go to for there news. Most trans people are smart enough not to trust something with the name of a competing newspaper from the Spider-Man universe. It is true that trans people often have to resort to non-mainstream news reporters to understand what is happening, because of the bias against us throughout UK and American news media. However, most of us do not unquestioningly absorb what we see. Most of us ask for sources. When in the recent past hoaxes have arose, the trans community has been remarkably active successfully vetting them.

I believe that trans people should try and leave the United States. I believe the increased loss of our drivers licences and interference with our passports is a dangerous potence of restricting our collective ability to travel into and out of the USA. I believe now is a good time to begin planning to do so if you are wealthy and white. If you are not both of those, I think it would have been best to start that planning six months to a year ago. What I am recommending here is active planning. That is something very different than becoming “immobilized by fear”. If you find yourself immobilized, I do very much recommend taking the steps Barr encourages. I also recommend beginning practical planning once you are in the headspace to do so, once you can actually do something. It is worth mentioning that of the people who I personally I know who have fled the USA, they have had good reason to do so before anyone else. Thalia Vacha (whose work I highly recommend) was both a sex worker and a foreigner surviving on a visa. Her pieces “Eat, Pray, Flee” and “Elsewhere’s Homecoming” are a great explanation of why and how she decided to leave Los Angeles. Likewise, Mia Thorne and their wife left because of their dual status as trans and as sex workers. I’ve yet to encounter trans people who fled America on a whim or who were particularly well off in the United States.

Each time, people who’ve fled the USA have given me reasonable grounds for leaving, and clearly put research and preparation into their exit strategy. Positioning them as hysterics delegitimizes their feelings, suggests that their current struggles as stateless individuals is their own fault, and is frankly transmisogyny at work. Yes, some people are frozen with fear. But some people are taking careful and measured action to ensure their ongoing safety. I have my own exit-backpack that was made when Trump was actively talking about invading Canada. Afterwards I felt silly for it. A few weeks ago, we found out that the main reason Trump did not invade was because he became friends with our King. I feel a lot less silly now. I still have the bag. Why disassemble a good emergency pack?

Lastly, I want to talk about both Davis’ and Barr’s diversionary language, that seems to want to ‘one issue’ us. Both authors seem to suggest that the real threat is to the immigrant community. It is true that ICE is threatening racialized immigrants throughout the United States. Trump has essentially created his own gestapo-like secrete police with detention centers and the like. We do not currently know the amount of transgender people targeted by ICE, as they are breaking the law and refusing to provide data on it. However, it is true that currently ICE is primarily targeting immigrants, and not looking for trans non-immigrants. Yet, ICE is hardly the only evil thing happening in the USA right now. Unfortunately, both Davis and Barr use it as a bit of a strawman. While Barr is open that “the Trump administration and many state and local governments are also doing actual bad things to the trans community”, the childish language of “bad things” is hardly appropriate. It underplays the severity to an extreme degree. Later, Barr tells us that, “If you are not an immigrant, I recommend you get involved in efforts to support local immigrant communities (particularly our undocumented neighbors) and/or to resist anti-immigrant policies and actions.” This is good advice, but parred with the rest of the article, it drives home the message, “we are not the real victims here, those are the real victims,” as if there can only be one set. Davis is far more egregious. Their passage about ‘Lilith” is actually part of one-true-victim narrative, “This whole discourse takes the focus away from the people most at risk of ICE which are undocumented immigrant workers. Lilith in Seattle with a 150k dollar tech job is not at high risk being detained by ICE.” A fascist regime does not choose one victim. It often doesn’t even choose one at a time. Immigrants are being targeted right now. Trans people are being targeted right now. Sex workers are being targeted right now. Racialized people are being targeted right now.

Lastly, I want to talk about what therapy is and does. From its inception in Freud, therapy has a had a rather depressing and realist aim. Therapy’s goal is to bring the individual psyche in line with what is expected of them by society. In my opinion Berger and Luckmann put it best, “Therapy entails the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definition of reality, or in other words, to prevent the “inhabitants” of a given universe from “emigrating”. It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual ‘cases’.” They argue that therapy’s role is to prevent deviations from ‘normal’ society. For instance, they imagine a society like Sparta’s where homosexuality was socially necessary and how a stubbornly heterosexual man might be treated since “the deviant’s conduct challenges the societal reality as such, putting in question its taken-for-granted cognitive (‘virile men by nature love one another’) and normative (‘virile men should love one another’) operating procedures. Likewise, if society encounters a “little boy […who] knows he is not supposed to live in the women’s world” but “nevertheless [he does] identify with it” then “a society will supply therapeutic mechanisms”.³[ii] Now, obviously, these are extreme and nefarious examples. Most therapy isn’t trying to make you gay or not trans. Most therapy is trying to make you withstand the brutality of capitalism, the unfairness of birth status, the horrors of government, and the petty annoyances of family. Most therapy, is trying to make you happy enough to keep you where you are. That’s actually a really good thing. I have a therapist and I trust her to keep me where I am (alive). But it is worth remembering that therapy is not a system designed to provoke one to action.

Therapy is an essentially stoic system designed to make you more amenable to your lot in life. Because of this the way a therapist thinks will be prone to how to make one’s emotions more pleasant, one’s current life more bearable, and to essentially limit or stop any major “reckless” changes to one’s life. We often need that. We need people to prevent spousal abuse, sudden impromptu divorces, financially devastating career changes, and thoughtless break-ups. Therapy can also be really great at doing exactly what Barr is attempting to do, to pull you out of depression and out of panic, to make you more functional. What it is not great at is evaluating political trends and doing risk assessment when we are in the middle of something highly abnormal (because its goal is to make you adjust to normal). Thus, Barr’s advice (of which most of the last half the article is devoted to) is genuinely really great advice if you are the person Barr assumes the reader is: a white trans American citizen with a middle-class salary who has gotten really paranoid that ICE is about to beat down their door.

But what about the rest of us? It is my advice, that if you are not middle class, not a citizen, or not white, that you seriously consider a plan to leave the United States. If you cannot leave, I think you should focus on organizing where you can, getting involved with local trans organizations that are doing materially good work. Barr is right that posting online is not the answer. Neither is reading every worrying article and becoming frozen with paranoia. Yes, trans drivers’ licenses are being taken away in some states. Yes, the FBI is showing up at the door of some trans people (but largely due to MAGA neighbours reporting them). Yes, some shifty stuff is happening with passports and biometrics and facial recognition. Yes, ICE probably has some trans immigrants in custody, and we do not know how many. Yes, genocide experts are calling what is happening in the United States today signs of an oncoming genocide. The best thing for you to do is not to panic or doom scroll. But it is also not to use the fact that panic and doom scrolling are bad coping mechanisms as an excuse to do nothing. Ultimately it is up to you, not the media you consume, to limit your reactions to practical ones, to make informed decisions, to decide when and if to leave.

1. I am aware that Mr. Barr follows me, and because I am aware he might read this, I want to express that this is meant in good faith, and that the speed at which it came out should not be mistaken for a lack of caring. I cancelled my plans for the day because I thought your article was good, but also that it required a response. I hope that you do not take this insultingly. It was not meant as such. I think you were attempting to do something really nice and considerate here.

2. I would also like to mention that the choice of Lilith as a name, whether intentional or not, feels rather antisemitic, since it is a name widely adopted by Jewish trans women (due to the biblical Lilith) and she is positioned as rich, neurotic, and needlessly panicking. Lilith is often a name writers use when they want to make a Jewish woman seem evil (for instance, Frasier’s ex wife on the hit sitcom Frasier).

3. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality p.112, 168