I Voted!

Listen to this story.

LAST NIGHT, I voted. It’s nice to live in a liberal place where in some places on the ballot, I had to choose between two liberals, though I also had to vote “No” on a ballot initiative, bankrolled by a fucking hedge-fund manager, that would force schoolgirls who want to play sports to have their genitals examined/documented by physicians as a prerequisite to participation.

Annually.

That sentence, it’s the stuff of my ’80s childhood nightmares.

Lately, I’ve been watching Alaskan political ads. For some reason, that’s where my Paramount+ account thinks I live, and they’re bold, there, about anti-transness. I’ve seen ads calling trans health care “nonsense,” and ads saying that trans rights are ridiculous. There’s an ad where a man repeatedly calls trans girls who play sports “men.”

I wonder if you can fathom this outside the rhetorical, the theoretical: Having your ballot, and your television, tell you over and over that you’re not a person. “Proposition [your name],” your ballot would read. “An initiative to take away health care from [your name]. Vote yes if you agree that [your name] shouldn’t be allowed to have health care.” “Measure [you again]. This legislation would require [you] to have your anus inspected and affirmed by a doctor once a year before being allowed to participate in society.”

I cried later that night. It snuck up on me; I’m cool, man, not at all naive about the world, and I was listening to cool, bass-heavy music and drinkin’ a hard kombucha while I marked my ballot. Does half the population of this state think trans people aren’t people, I did think, slightly panicked, as I encountered Washington Initiative 638. Its supporters raised almost $10 million. Its opponents, a fifth of that. I know actual children—well—who would be affected by it. One of them has a dry, clever sense of humor, and confidently informed me when she was ten years old that her working rate was $6 an hour if I needed labor.

God forbid she develops an interest in soccer.

I cried again this morning. Not the part-rageful, part-sorrowful tears of indignity I cried last night, but a more defeated kind. I canceled my plans to go outside, thinking, reasonably but pitifully, Why would go I into this terrible world? That is, Washington Initiative 638 worked: Even if it doesn’t pass, it crippled me. Today, the hundreds of people I would have passed saw one less trans person. The several I would have talked to, at the deli counter or CVS checkout, interacted with one less genderqueer in their day, in their life, and most important, I had my ability to do that boldly and proudly, so hard fought, stripped.