What U.S. v. Skrmetti Did, What it Didn’t Do, and What It Can Never Do
There is going to be a lot of catastrophizing today. We lost U.S. v. Skrmetti, one of the biggest transgender civil rights cases of our time, there’s no getting around that. We also lost the dedicated 988 option for LGBTQ+ youth in mental health crisis, which could not be worse timing. And. This opinion could have set us back decades in a few key ways that it did not, especially on the question of whether trans people as a category constitute our own quasi-suspect class under the Equal Protection Clause. But those are details. Today, we get to grieve this as the loss it is, but we also can’t give in to catastrophizing.
Listen. We cannot predicate fighting on winning. We’re going to lose a lot in the days to come, and if we’re going to make it through the nights we need to find something to fuel us that runs deeper than hope. We’re past hope. We don’t fight because we think we’re going to win; we fight because it’s how we hold on to what makes us human. That instinct to take care of each other is the best of us. It’s also something we queers have spent millennia getting very, very good at.
I think it’s easy to forget how recently it is that we’ve located victory in halls of power — our advocates have secured such significant wins in government these past years that we’ve almost forgotten we were forged in loss. With few exceptions, the most important moments in our history have almost always been about a handful of friends trying to protect each other from the uniquely cruel brand of annihilation scored by laughter. Stonewall, Compton’s, Cooper Donuts. I’m not sure what formal legal equality would have meant to our ancestors who used their bodies as shields between lovers and police batons, or held hands in defiance as officers of the court burned them at the stake. I do suspect they knew what we could stand to remember: you can’t burn us all.
Even when we lose the battle — and we lose a whole lot more than we win — they have never, not even once, rid the world of us. They can make our lives hell. They can strip us of our rights, our dignity, our future. And if past is prologue, they will. But when they’re done, we will still be here. Because our existence isn’t predicated on our rights or our dignity or our future. We live not on hope that things get better, but (because Tony Kushner always puts it better than I can) past hope. We live because, in a way not quite replicable in any other community, we are defined by how we love each other. We’ve spent centuries fighting to keep the people we love alive another night, knowing full well a night will come when we can’t.
I actually think what we’re up against is the terror run amok of people without the courage to face that kind of mortality. The kind of hubris that’s taken hold of our country on a much larger scale than one Supreme Court decision is so deeply rooted in the fear of temporariness. Maybe the only response left to us is the kind of humility that requires reckoning with death. It’s a kind of reckoning queer people have spent generations practicing. We know there’s no such thing as winning, not even for the people in the Tennessee state government who think they’ve just won their case. It’s all temporary. I think America keeps trying to cling to this idea that loss is an anomaly and death is an aberration, but it’s the one thing we have in common. It’s part of what it means to be human.
Maybe part of the legacy we inherit as queer people is that, as soon as we know who we are, we know loss. What those who came before us did in the face of that kind of temporariness was take each borrowed day and distill as much beautiful, heartbreaking, fabulous life from it as possible. I think that’s why we’re so good at live theatre — and maybe also why we’re so insistent on covering everything in glitter. “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag,” as RuPaul would say. I think we could probably take a lesson or two from those forbears in the difficult days ahead of us. If we only fight because we think we’ll win, we aren’t going to last as long as we’re needed.
And honestly, looking around at our country, I don’t have a lot in common with the people winning right now. I don’t want to. I don’t think you do either. I think that’s a good thing.
Our ancestors weren’t winners, they were freaks and weirdos. I say this with great pride. Queer people are and have always been losers. And we’re really, really good at it. The truth is, winners are no good in a fight. Hope is too fragile a muscle. It relies too much on glimpses of proof, and withers when too few are forthcoming. When push comes to shove, I pick the losers every time. We live past hope. We fight because we love each other too much to listen to reason. And we’re still here — not because we won, but because we’re part of what it means to be human.
We don’t follow hope. Hope follows us.
