The 2020 Election: The Anxious Rambling of an Enby More Stressed Than Steve Kornacki’s Tie
As I begin writing this post, it is Election Day in America. As a public school teacher, I am off today to doom scroll and wallow in my existential dread. Of course, I’m supposed to be writing my novel for National Novel Writing Month, but who can focus on a day like this? It’s all I can do to masturbate to the imaginings of living in an America headed by Josiah Bartlet or something.
No, I can’t even do that. Things are too scary. I am too angry and too fearful for myself and my community to even dream of greener pastures.
For anyone not indoctrinated into a theology of American Exceptionalism is aware, the rights and freedoms allegedly afforded to all Americans have been borne through both bouts of pure, benevolent idealism and ugly, malevolent hatred. Racism, misogyny, cissexism, nativism, and homophobia are parts of the lifeblood and fabric of the American experience. To claim otherwise is insulting to the victims of an attempted forced caste system as well as to the generations of activists who have fought and died to bring about a better, more perfect union.
Many people in this country have had the luxury of pretending that the country is more or less on the same page. The negative -isms mentioned above, for many, had faded into a bygone era — something that twenty-first-century Americans could never have to reckon with. This misguided view became increasingly more difficult after the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008.
White liberals who had had the privilege to believe that racism ended with the Civil Rights movement turned a blind eye to the reawakening of violent, racist domestic terrorism. The country feigned shock in 2010 when the Tea Party swept through state houses and the very Halls of Congress and then summarily and with haste returned their heads to the depths of the sand of inattention. When Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, many were quick to dismiss the Tea Party as a temporary aberration, that the country had indeed moved past the very foundation of white supremacy on which the country had been built.
In the boonies and backwaters, though, racial terror and aggression had been brewing unabated. The Klan re-emerged to an extent that had not been seen since the 1960s. Even those who would vehemently distance themselves from the Klan — while holding similar views of racial superiority, of course — came out in droves to elect Donald Trump as President in 2016. For everyone living in more liberal bastions like New York City like I was, it came as an utter and complete shock. As a native of the backwater, my shock was tempered by the number of high school classmates I was forced to remove from my feed because of the more vehement and aggressive racism that began appearing.
Trump campaigned directly to those people. The day he announced his candidacy and rode down that golden escalator in his former home in New York City, he pretty immediately began slandering whole sections of our population. Liberal elites in big cities and on the coasts reacted with horror at the substance of his speech and laughed at his braggadocio. They saw him as a carnival sideshow, an individual fitting for the footnotes of history. They did not anticipate the wide swaths of the American electorate to whom his vitriol would appeal. They had been too busy burying their head in the sand during the Obama years to notice the rumblings in the depths of rural America.
The Obama years brought about a lot of promising progressive changes for this country. Racism and white supremacy were brought tothe fore and white people were forced to reckon with their legacies of torture and oppression for the first time in a real way. It was no Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but it was a baby step. For the first time in the history of policing in this country, attention was being paid to the rampant nature of brutality. Not everything was sunshine and rainbows. Obama dropped bombs on Middle Eastern children at rates not seen since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. More immigrants were deported (and more ICE raids carried out) under Obama than under George W. Bush or Donald Trump’s administrations.
One community that thrived during the Obama years was my own community. The Obama years saw the passing of the Affordable Care Act that began the process of removing exclusion clauses from health plans for gender-affirming care. More and more people gained essential health insurance. Coverage for birth control and other family planning medications was mandated for all health plans. HIV-prevention care was more accessible than it had ever been. Gay marriage became legal in all fifty states.
Gay adoption and workplace protections for LGBTQ individuals passed around the country. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed. Transgender soldiers were welcomed into the military for the first time ever. We hit our “Transgender Tipping Point” with Laverne Cox and Janet Mock rising to superstardom in ways that no trans person ever had in the early 2010s. Their acceptance stood in shock relief to the contempt faced by Chaz Bono, trans pioneer who has fought to be himself since just a few years earlier.
The election of Donald Trump proved to be catastrophic, particularly for the trans community. He banned transgender service members from enlisting or continuing their service in the armed forces. His administration has stripped protections for trans healthcare and protections trans students in public schools. He has had the luxury of appointing three Justices to the Supreme Court in his first term alone, bringing conservatives Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the bench. All have displayed an anti-LGBTQ bias in their judicial rulings and writings across their careers.
Supreme Court vestiges like Samuel Alito and the should-always-be-silent (not-just-in-oral-arguments) Clarence Thomas released a letter last week saying the quiet part out loud. Both men signed on to a letter stating that they were not the biggest fan of this whole gay marriage thing and really didn’t believe in the precedent handed down in 2015 granting marriage equality. They don’t see queer people as a class worthy of legal protection given the laws that already exist. I hope I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that if there were new federal statute explicitly protecting LGBTQ individuals in this country they’d be any more likely to support such a measure. What the letter did make clear was that the Court, with its 6–3 Conservative majority, was standing back and standing by waiting for the right case or word from the President to engage in some judicial activism to cut off trans and queer citizen rights in this country at the knees.
In light of the current sociopolitical climate, I picked a really strange time, considering all of the danger, to come out as transgender. I came out at a time equally distanced between my twenty-seventh birthday and National Coming Out Day. I changed my name and pronouns after many months of soul searching and a lifetime of gender fuckery. It’s easier now than ever to be transgender, and the reactions my own coming out elicited were overwhelmingly — even artificially — positive. People have reacted with support. My decision to live as myself has been called “beautiful” more times than I am even willing to count. I think I might even hate that word at this point. There are app-based subscription services for hormone replacement therapy. I don’t need any pre-authorization for top surgery vis-a-vis my employer-funded insurance plan.
I get “sir’d” when I go out into the world, despite my mezzo-soprano speaking voice that often breaks into Julie Andrews-inspired sing-song. My students have adapted to using the honorific Mx. or no honorific at all. My work email has changed, and I have filed a petition to change my legal name. Regardless of the outcome of this election, I am confident that I will be able to live my life as myself for as long as I have left on this planet.
It is now the day after election day, November 4th. It is, incidentally, my father’s sixty-seventh birthday, and he will not receive the gift he most desperately wanted this year: a result for the winner of office of the President in the country he so loves. The fate of the nation, the fate most specifically of minorities of all kinds, rests in the hands of ballot counters in a handful of states: Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. States that had always been blue except for a brief Trump circle jerk in 2016, Wisconsin and Michigan, went back to Biden this go around and showed me just how different the northern Midwest is from the Southern reaches of the region. We may not know the results of Pennsylvania’s election until next Thursday, when all the votes are mandated to be counted. Donald Trump has initiated lawsuits in several of the outstanding states in an effort to stop ballot counting and to make outcomes more favorable to him.
While Election Day is often more reminiscent of an orgasm than a lifelong love — a quick and intense release of pent up anxiety and frustration about the status quo and existentialism inherent in a polarized “democracy” — this Election Day feels a lot like blue balls. Trans, Black, poor, and immigrant communities around the country wait with bated breath for any result, cautiously hopeful that the result might just actually be the least worst option for them.
The ramifications of this election cannot be understated. Say what you want about Biden’s progressive bona fides, and I’ll probably agree. However, he’s promised to pass the Equality Act in the first one hundred days of his term. If Democrats can take the Senate (unlikely as of this writing,) maybe trans people could have one less thing to worry about. Maybe gender-affirming medical care will be covered by all types of insurance plans (public, private, group and/or employer funded). Maybe trans people will be able to go to work every day without fear of being harassed or fired for their existence. Maybe trans people will be able to live with a modicum of dignity they didn’t have to fight tooth and nail for every day. I’m not particularly optimistic that the Equality Act will pass even if Biden wins the Presidency, but I cannot give up hope. The moment I do, the moment the pit of despair overtakes me and I’ll lose the will to go on.
It’s now two days after the election. There hasn’t been a wait this long to determine the winner of the presidency since the very first election I remember ever going into a voting booth for: Bush v. Gore. My dad actually let me pull the lever to vote for Al Gore, something that I’d never get to do in my own adult voting life. His near religious certainty of Gore’s path to victory has stood as a cautionary tale against polling and punditry that makes everything sound a little too rosy in the midst of this kind of chaos.
We still do not know anything about control of the federal government. Depending on what news source you rely on for election coverage, Biden leads Trump in electoral votes either 254 or 264 to Trump’s 214. We are still waiting at this hour for results from the great states of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona (which accounts for the discrepancy between news carriers). We do not know who will ultimately keep control of either house of Congress. The Senate stands at essentially 48–48 (when counting the Independents that caucus with Democrats as Democrats) and the House of Representatives stands at 208–190 in the blue.
It’s Friday, but it was not a day for celebration. No one knows any more than they knew yesterday about the future of the United States political landscape. A handful of more niche political outfits have called the election for Joe Biden as his still very narrow lead across the last few States continues to grow slowly. The Associated Press and my dearest Steve Kornacki at MSNBC have not yet called anything.
(I’m so pleased that Steve Kornacki has gone mainstream. The stan accounts that have popped up across the internet are wholesome and so validating for queer nerds everywhere.) The last state either of them called was Michigan on Wednesday morning. What we have learned at this hour is that both Senate elections in the state of Georgia will be decided in a January 5th runoff election. Imagine Georgia flipping blue! It’s been something as taken for granted as pigs remaining firmly gravity-bonded to the earth.
I think this election is making clear more than any year before the skewing power of the Electoral College. At this hour, Joe Biden leads Trump in the popular vote by over four million. Four million. And yet the Electoral College map is still up in the air, and Trump still has a couple (albeit shrinking) paths to 270. Imagine the Electoral College math ends in a tie even as Trump loses the popular vote by five million. Something just feels wrong.
Of course, the Electoral College was intended to and has had the effect of giving more political power to smaller, flyover states with far fewer and more rural populations than the urban centers of the coasts. The State of Wyoming has three electors with only 500,000, where the growing state of Arizona is represented by only six Electors for their 7.3 million residents. Obviously, the Electoral College was borne out of the belief of our revered “founding fathers” that the American populace would be too stupid to decide for themselves something as important as the leaders of their government. Growing up, I found this assertion extremely offensive. I, as all Millennials, am a product of both the twenty-four hour news cycle and the Internet, after all. Ostensibly, we have access to all the information we could ever need in making good decisions. Boy, was I wrong. It took the internet all of five minutes to become a hateful propaganda machine.
That being said, there is no justification for a smattering of rural voters to outpunch the mass population centers on the coasts. That’s not the purpose of Democracy, nor does it do any favors to those rural populations. It is unfair for rural Americans to believe that the heterosexual, White, Protestantism that has been the cultural norm for so many years should continue in perpetuity because a few people with guns vehemently believe that it should. If America really wants to be the Democracy it has promised to be for the last two hundred forty-four years, it will abolish the Electoral College and move to a popular vote system. It is insulting for our government to assume that the American public must remain ignorant about political issues at this point, but regulating tech companies to combat misinformation and propaganda and encouraging civil discourse that values people over the almighty dollar are steep challenges to overcome.
This morning, Saturday, November 7, 2020 was the day. I rolled out of bed around 8:30 a.m., a leisurely weekend morning. I turned on MSNBC to continue pumping my brain with a mainline IV of election data. Most of the data delivered with usual gusto by our lord and savior Steve Kornacki was much the same information we’ve been hearing for the last few days. Around 10:00 this morning (CST), just before MSNBC cut to a commercial break, they teased a small update from the state of Pennsylvania.
I got up to use the restroom. I hadn’t taken a shit since at least the election, choosing instead to enact my anxiety through bloat and painful constipation. As the contents of my bowel let loose for the first time in four days, I heard the cheer ring out from the dining room. “Steve called it for Biden!” My partner called jubilantly. “You’re missing it.”
Perhaps missing the moment of the call in favor of caring for my body is an irony I would do better to heed than to ignore. After being glued to election results for the greater part of seventy-two hours, there is something profound in that I was performing such a dirty quotidian task. The calling of the election is both. It is understood that while Trump’s reign in the White House may now be at a close, the rest of the federal government is divided, severely curtailling any efforts to enact legislation to actually help people in the midst of this global pandemic and economic collapse. It was an election that had to be won, but that will not, in effect change much about the reality of the American political landscape in this hell year. What will come of our nation? What will the state of trans rights at this point next year? I hope your crystal ball works better than mine.
