To the “friends” who are telling us that we’re overreacting and “Trump voters are actually good, kind people with real concerns” let me give you some fucking context before I say something directly that will start a pile on…and since this applies to more than one of my followers, friends & family, I’ve consolidated my rage and distilled it into this piece.

If you think this post is about you, it probably is…

But you aren’t special enough for it to be ONLY about you

If your vanity says “this post is about me” let’s reframe that before we move on:

Trust me, you aren’t so special of a snowflake to get a whole post about you, but rather you’re just a small part of a bigger statement that crystallizes my anger into activism.

Playing stupid games of power, control & avoidance

My daughter’s life is under direct threat by Trump. Communities I serve are under threat by Trump. My Black & Indigenous friends are being harassed because of Trump. Women are being threatened with rape because of Trump. Humanity itself is under threat by Trump. Other countries are praying for us, because they know what this means for their stability as well.

You claim Trumpers are kind. Yet, they knew these threats and voted for him anyway. They rubber stamped lawlessness, violence and mockery. They filled in the circle to back tribalism, fascism and strong man authoritarianism. They saw what he was and said “Yep, that’s my savior”.

Good thing your privilege doesn’t have any persuasive power over me otherwise I might take your excuses seriously. My memory isn’t nearly as compromised as yours seems to be. Don’t you remember when he made my work harder last time? When the orgs I was working for faced financial problems because of his bravado-generating policies? Save your redemption narratives for those so steeped in their privilege or so new to politics, that they’ll see you as a reluctant ally instead of a friendly betrayer. In the end you get to preserve & enjoy your social status while I have to curate & control mine.

Just another way you show me that you think we are not the same.

Because if we were you would see that the people who voted for Trump aren’t kind or compassionate, but cruel, vindictive and selfishly, comically scared. Every single last one of them thought this man would save them…them….people who look like them…not me, not my family, not our global community. They truly do NOT give a shit about anyone other than their manufactured relationship to an equally vengeful God who also happens to look like them. Coinidence? No, but you cater to them anyway without ever throwing one stone at that make-believe bubble of faith that we have discussed is as false as it is performative.

But thanks to your post, I now know I can’t depend on you if we need to find resources for women, same sex couples or trans kids to get them to Colorado. I know we can’t count on you to prioritize us over the comfort of your recklessly cruel, spiritual cowards you call family.

You chose this, now own it.

You are no friend to me if you aren’t going to protect my kid or community.

They spent the past four years trying to burrow the idea into our heads that trans kids are the biggest threat to society instead of the objective fact that climate change is. Their small minded addictions to capitalism & patriarchy make them choose the leopard who will eat their face.

Their colonized brains, already mushy from wounded, narcissistic self-importance crave dominance to confirm their identity…and what better group to gain dominance over but those “weird” kids who transition to authenticity? Empowering the people trying to exterminate the butterflies in the coal mine instead of giving those kids the space to show us how freeing authenticity can be…friend, that is NOT the way.

Even though gender affirming care has a LONG history in Colorado (that doc in Trinidad also served my mom’s family when they lived there) they act like this is something new and dangerous. Babe, we’ve been doing this for decades and if you don’t see this for the scapegoat it is, then I’m sorry, but we are not the same. If you can’t pick out abusive dynamics like that from a mile away, then you are not safe for me or my kid.

Yes, I’m sure those Trump voters are kind to you…you have the benefit of looking like them, the privilege of being white, male and objectively cool (I give credit where credit is due). Superficial relationships are commonly mistaken for kindness, especially among white folk with no other ethnic traditions or rooted ties to the land. They can possess all the stolen land you want, protecting that with “make my day” laws but the truth is those people you claim as kind didn’t hesitate to define us as the enemy for asking them to to wear a mask to protect others.

Nothing satisfies quite as deeply as connecting with folks who truly see you…and when they see you they protect you. Yet these folks threw whole populations under the bus because they couldn’t be bothered to recognize an experience outside their norm. I lost how many family members because of COVID and the health care delays? …but sure, tell me how performatively kind they are…that is about as persuasively hollow as your friendship.

If you’re not protecting me or mine, but instead, declaring us to be the ones devoid of compassion then I’m not sure you’re the right one to judge what kindness truly is. I’m sorry, but after 3 rounds of this I can no longer give Trumpers the benefit of the doubt. I am fucking done making excuses for people who won’t do their own inner work to understand why they crave such dangerous levels of dominance and proximity to violence. I’ve been victimized enough times to know the cognitive dissonance of bystander bypassing when I see it…and your excuses are even worse because I thought you saw it too.

See, like you, they don’t want to be seen as the bad guy. It would hurt the fragile ego they use to power through life – I thought you identified that as problematic too. Yet, here you are boosting their unearned confidence by blowing even more smoke up their asses in an effort to what? Heal the nation?

Since I’ve demonstrably guided more people through healing than you have, let me remind you that healing requires truth and accountability delivered through empathy and trust. Yet, the words coming out of your mealy mouth seems far more like bootlicking escapism than service to humanity’s healed goodness.

Your lack of empathy has lost my trust. Healing is not possible until they step forward with the truth of accountability for the harm they enabled. Just because you haven’t been directly abusive doesn’t mean you haven’t just enabled the worst actors to visit abuse on us. You just stopped caring it seems.

I guess your genius is no match for apathy.

Their compulsive avoidance may not be fatal to you…But what about the rest of us? Are they kind to my Mexican mom? Stalking her in parking lots over her Biden sticker? (3x in one week!) or how about the kindness to my Mexican grandfather while he was still alive, screaming at him to go back where he came from?

Or how about the men threatening to rape women online right now? “Your body, my choice” is spreading to school yards. How long until some boy tells your daughter that? It’s so nice that those abusive hearts show you their best, but the rest of us won’t ever see it…and it isn’t because of an echo chamber or whatever whiny white man excuse you are giving today, but because of true threats that have endangered actual lives.

This isn’t about disagreement or debate, it’s about dominance.

I see you…have always seen you. This avoidance of accountability might have been deemed endearingly rebellious before, but it is just empty acquiescence now.

I am capable of having policy debates – it’s what I was trained to do – but that involves data analysis, examining legal precedent, and looking at unintended consequences. Let’s debate basic income or universal health care – it’s what I’m doing every day. But I refuse to debate whether my beautiful miracle child is allowed to exist as a woman…but sure, give those MFers more excuses to harass her, me, and everyone you left behind.

What a fucking great friend you are.

You say “We need to secure our borders”. Yet, how much of the immigration “debate” has been manipulated by the GOP since 9/11 to shake out this result? This is the kind of stuff we were warning about with the Patriot Act when I was on the board of the ACLU of Colorado. Even back in 2003, the GOP and the Tea Party (remember those fucking guys?!) were cooking the numbers, labeling people who go back and forth legally (many brown folk) while excluding those who overstay their visas illegally (mostly white folk). How fucking convenient.

Yet, funny enough, we did have an immigration plan (admittedly not all of what I wanted) that they tanked just so they could use this talking point – obviously it worked on you, didn’t it? Notice you don’t mention how much of the talking points were manufactured to stoke false, anti-immigrant stigma?

You also failed to mention the double standard of an undocumented immigrant (Musk) rising to such power that he can bribe voters, push disinformation and throttle Twitter accts for a man who won’t ever deport him. I’m sure the mother of 3 cleaning up your office will feel the “kindness” you speak of when ICE comes for her.

What a good Christian you must be.

Christianity is a cringy excuse

While I could go on about how Christ loved the vulnerable and taught us to care for them, if you aren’t preaching that gospel already, I will be unable to persuade you to see it now.

But let’s just say my Christianity was fostered in a liberation theology household. My dad, Unitarian/Quaker turned agnostic, my mom a Jesuit-trained Catholic, I was trained that LOVE means putting myself on the line for injustice. LOVE means preserving individual autonomy even if I don’t agree with their choices. LOVE means loving my neighbor as if we are all connected.

LOVE arrives in many forms, but in each and every version it looks like: what happens to you happens to me too.

This is how I’ve lived my life AND my vote. THAT is kindness. I fight for your kid as much as I fight for mine. Yet, that reciprocity doesn’t seem to be a priority as you sit and lecture liberals even though you benefit from the freedoms we have secured for you, particularly those aligned with sexual freedom. You’re not some wise uncle giving us feedback with warm empathy; you’re a manager trying to keep your fragile peace with the distant superiority of your privilege.

Any movement that cheers for the death of autonomy is not one that Christ created, but one that men manipulated to preserve patriarchy. So when your “loving family” tells me with their vote that I’m not worth loving fully, nor is my child, then I’m going to see your “love” as suspiciously superficial, and your friendship as merely transactional.

If I can’t trust you to stand up to your own family to defend my basic rights, you don’t get to revise the rules of the friendship game to favor your cowardice. You just lose the friendship.

That’s it. Bye, Felicia.

My vote, to the best of my knowledge, has never threatened someone’s life or put anyone so squarely in the crosshairs like my kid’s life is now. Even in voting to enshrine abortion access in our Constitution – I did so with the awareness I am saving mothers’ lives, not the theoretical life of Schrodinger’s baby, which both does and doesn’t exist depending on how much you see & value that life once it exists outside the womb.

Yesterday, my mom told me a chilling story – her prior miscarriages almost resulted in her death more than once, which I already knew. But what I didn’t know is that the procedure they used when was hemorrhaging so bad that she was going to die was an abortion procedure that was illegal before Roe. I wouldn’t be here today if that procedure hadn’t saved her life…and now she has to watch women die of the same thing. It’s horrifying and traumatic.

That isn’t kindness or compassion, that is cruelty, using God’s name in vain to push an agenda of forced births (and discarded deaths). Never I have ever been so happy to not have a uterus, because at least now I can’t be conscripted into the nonconsensual baby factory. Yet, that life wasn’t precious enough to Trump to avoid a government shut down, resulting in enormous interruptions in public benefits, putting several of my clients at risk of starvation & homelessness.

If you call voting for that “kindness”, then my friend, we aren’t at all the same.

Your Dem critiques aren’t new, but your betrayal is.

I’m not saying there aren’t some terrible Dems out there, I know their stinging dismissal better than most. I’m fighting them too…and have been my whole career, longer than some of you have been been voting. I have been a progressive who has been ousted by my own party, abandoned, utterly demonized by it. I know their problems better than you do because unlike you I’ve actually worked in campaigns, actually knocked doors, licked envelopes, been a precinct chair and been in the room when decisions are made. Miss me with your armchair superiority, friend, you’re out of your depth here.

I’m not here to save the Dems (if, indeed they can be saved)…I am literally trying to figure out how to protect my trans kid’s life…worried for my Mexican-American mother, resourcing like mad for my vulnerable clients, fighting like hell to provide the infrastructure of collective care we will need with the absence of the Chevron Doctrine and the presence of immunity. I spent a whole night worrying about whether I will still be allowed to travel to an event in January…what kind of hostility will those kinky event producers face? When will I be arrested for having an OnlyFans?

Do you even care? All of this is shit you personally don’t have to worry about, but sure, lecture me some more on how I’m overreacting and making it harder for Trump voters to live consequence-free.

I’m fucking exhausted…and now you, my friend, put a post up basically telling me and every marginalized person that we’re overreacting, while victim blaming us when we know people will die. How can I know people will die? They died on my caseload the last time…and that was with dedicated civil servants willing to resist his evil. There will be no such layer of protection this time.

And in the words of Battlestar Galactica “All this has happened before; all this will happen again.”

You are not immune to these cycles of violence, just less in the immediate risk zone. Yet, I still would have taken a bullet for you and your family, but you can’t offer any empathy to mine? You want us to move on and hold hands with the people who want to see us dead. Cool. Got it.

We really, really just aren’t the same, are we?

Or rather, you have stopped seeing yourself in me, which means that this is about dominance, superiority and avoidance, not solidarity, companionship or service. We could have been building on our commonalities, but you chose to defend violence and inequality instead. No, my former friend, we aren’t the same.

Appealing to my humanity out of some displaced concern for tribalism is secondary right now. They started this attack on my kid and all others like her…they chose to kick her out of the tribe, to treat her as less human, but somehow we’re the ones who are choosing sides? Make it make sense.

They are the ones who defined this fight while she was just living her best, already too-anxious life. I read today about a friend who has lost 3 of her trans & queer friends to suicide in the past 48 hours. Meanwhile Black people are getting racist anonymous text messages. How many struggled with suicidal ideation before, but now she and others will know they can’t count on you either…someone we thought was chosen family. You created new barriers & isolation when you could have been ministering and holding space for her instead.

You chose this, not me. Yet I will be the one who can’t sleep at night, checking in with my daughter everyday…and if I lose her because of Trump there will be nothing that your pretty little rhetoric or paradox of tolerance can do to stop my quest for justice.

No solidarity, no socializing. Them’s the new rules of Trump’s “new world order”.

When Trump gets rid of term limits, cuts off Medicaid services, increases the price of literally everything because his followers couldn’t be bothered to know what tariffs actually are, then maybe…maybe I will accept your apology. But until then, I’m a little too busy locking arms with people who are more vulnerable than you. I’m not available to to hold your hand through this guilt-avoidance apologism phase of colonized complicity.

If you aren’t here for the resistance, then you chose to make yourself unsafe which gives me the freedom to make myself scarce. I don’t wish ill on you, I never have and never will. I wanted the best for all of us, even the ones I disagreed with, but instead, you stand with those who think controlling women’s bodies is godly.

If that sounds harsh, then you obviously haven’t spent enough time empathizing with my experience. You decided we aren’t the same…that my viewpoint is so easily to discard. All I’m doing is simply confirming that you chose separation over solidarity. Your choice. Not mine. Just the way white men wanted it.