When anti-trans legislation is passed I know what’s going on. It’s the old “compulsory normatively” complex with its enforced heterosexuality, able bodied-ness, whiteness, all of it suffocatingly narrow. The rest of us are not meant to breathe.
As a cis-het white blind guy I’m not fooled. These efforts to legislate diversity out of the public square are nothing short of Hitler-ism.
I was venting in this manner with an Uber driver, a black man, who said to me—that’s the way of America. It wasn’t that he was resigned to it, he just didn’t see a scale of worsened politics. And he was right of course. America has always been violent and ugly. We’ve always been “about” eliminating certain people. Or locking them up. I know. And you know if you dare to proclaim that you’re woke. White, heteronormative fascism wants to make the earth entirely clean of all who trouble it. This morning, early, I don’t know what to do with my head. I love diversity. Like hanging with people who don’t look like me. Who can tell me of their own strangeness and dreams. Woke-ness means believing in culture.
My friend Sanni Purhonen, a disabled poet in Finland writes poems in which she fantasizes about removing parts of herself. Like her I want to remove my head, like I’m a Ken Doll, and put that head in the freezer. I can always get it later when its fully numb. That’s the kind of head you’ll need in a Ron DeSanntis world. A small frosty plastic head.
If you’ve a disability you know or might know how Hitler rounded up the disabled and gassed them as a warmup to the holocaust. Yeah, we’re not there yet, but put your moistened finger in the air.
DeSantis and the GOP want everyone to have a tiny ice cooled Barbie or Ken head and it should be white and hetero. And that mouse has to go.
Planet of the Blind 