Notes In Radiant Resilience: Reaching out IS doing the work

None of us can do this alone, so why we keep acting like it?

I admit it, I have something against people who think my kid’s rights are a political bargaining chip or her identity is a cute gotcha for Gavin Newsom’s social media roll. She isn’t a backboard on which they can bank an otherwise mediocre shot to win a couple of cheap points that won’t get us a win. How many electoral votes can you snap up by denying someone’s humanity these days? That’s gotta be worth at least 4, right?

The past week, I’ve noticed a lot of folks talking about 2028, reacting because they are finally feeling something. Good. About damn time.

The only problem I see is that, for many of them, they’re finally feeling something only because their privilege has insulated them from most of the impacts that came before this. They rested easy on pillows of theory, tossing out judgments because it got them likes and helped them fill the dopamine tank. They might have been coerced into donating to help fund the front lines of oppression before, but that’s because they could always afford to toss a penny over their shoulder as self-congratulations that the oppressive eye didn’t land on them first.

So…you must be new here.

No, that oppression landed on kids just trying to live their lives, like my trans daughter. It landed on immigrants, whether they did it the “right way” or not. It is coming for disabled people, happy LGBTQ+ marriages, people who rely on home health care, or need additional employment supports. It came for anyone who was perceived as anything less than “America First,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.

Yet, they forget that these threats have been present for a long time, some building over time, but others are ever-present and alive from generation to generation. The damage being done to families right here, right now, will last for decades, and it will stack on top of the other trauma that the generations before them endured. There is only so much pressure the human psyche can take…but please tell me more about how abandoning trans kids is an acceptable sacrifice for their future. And frankly, I just can’t trust comrades who would toss my kid in front of Trump’s regime and say, “Anyone but Trump is better,” as if the excuse justifies the harm?

And those same people who, a few months back, tossed a few coins at us to assuage their guilt are now VERY LOUDLY telling the world that unless you unconditionally support Gavin “The only one standing up” Newsom for President three years from now, then “you’re just as bad as Trump”. (literal quote from multiple threads - anyone smell a bot farm burning the midnight oil?) They will argue with trans people, telling them, “Why do you want it even worse?” as if trans folks alone have the collective power to stop what is happening one way or another.

A ton of “easy mode” types who have never had to worry seriously about their rights are getting panicky now that it’s getting a little hot in here for them, too. They frantically press the panic button, tossing anyone they can to the wolves just to make the fear and pressure stop. In so doing, they only ensure we land on the most convenient option, not the best one.

To say I’ve been disappointed to see many Democrats, especially those of the cis, straight, white influencer variety, have been more than happy to take the lead on crowing Gavin Newsom, Presidential Candidate #1, but there are a lot of us who are not only unimpressed with him but have been warning that this kind of blind obedience is just a parallel highway to a similar destination.

This is a tolerance test

What if…this is a test of our appetite for authoritarianism that Democrats are failing miserably?

How many have been disappeared who left behind loved ones, vulnerable dependents, and elders?🥺

How many organizations are holding together vital services with literal duct tape and daily appeals for donations?🪢

How many trans kids have had their sources for therapy, social development, and community support dry up overnight? How many have fled here to Colorado & other blue states?❤️‍🩹How many are still not finding the services they need?

People are a little too confident that we’ll have the electoral numbers for midterms, especially when voting is under threat from the White House itself😣

Marginalized communities were already under threat before this. It took decades to build those DEI offices & standards. It’s one thing to be able to pull people together, quite another to adequately repair & prioritize what’s been broken.

Leadership after Trump will require integrating broken systems, deferring to experts. Gavin Newsom’s homelessness policies that ignore trauma-informed/evidence-based solutions in his own state already made me distrustful of him, but leaving behind trans kids won’t get us the world that I want to live in. A leader who leaves behind marginalized voices for political expedience isn’t someone who sees the long-term impacts enough to gain my unconditional support.

I dunno, I have a funny thing about not leaving other people behind, and I’m going to have problems supporting someone for President who abandons trans kids. The costs of winning should be measured in the efforts we pour into strategy, collective care, legal repair, and psychological deprogramming, not in which groups we’ll toss out of the train to most expediently reach the victory we want.

Because nothing ever stops at just those kids, does it?

The war against…well, all of us.

Maybe someday Newsom will come along, maybe he won’t…but until then, we need a strong unified vision for the midterms. Because frankly, we won’t even know what kind of President we need until we know what kind of Congress we’ll have and how much more damage they’ll do/undo in the lead up to 2028. The next year can’t be about one man; it has to be about a message, a light that multiple people can easily carry, no matter where they are or how their personality plays.

It is foolish not to build out our bench.

🚨In Colorado, we have Michael Bennet running for governor and John Hickenlooper slow-poking his way into another snooze fest in the Senate. In 2024, our state benefitted from a fractured GOP, but they’re reorganizing, consolidating, looking less like messy-drunk Aunt Judy at Christmas and more like scary Skylar’s mom, who eats hopes and dreams as a snack to keep her trad wife figure intact. Frankly, I don’t want it left up to the guys who had to be told what to do; instead, I want the people most impacted to be the ones to represent and lead our state.

Gavin’s media campaign has knocked the GOP down a few notches, but their persistence comes from their ability to adapt a talking point to seem like that’s what they meant all along. It will take bigger swings from more than just one flashy smile to crack through the layers of protection to not only unseat Trump, but to win back the soul of our country.

Yet, I see Dems pressuring people (especially trans and queer folks) to declare loyalty to California’s governor. That looks awfully MAGA-y, don’t you think? Oh, I get why, but the excuses I was given were just so lopsided that it felt precisely like the same false dichotomy manipulations we’ve seen from MAGA. It’s this…OR ELSE!

Framing it as an all-or-nothing, David vs Goliath battle is desperation masquerading as advocacy. It means they have already decided we’re defeated and they’re willing to lay down their values for “anyone other than Trump”. Okay…but what happens when the beast pivots and this guy’s best moves can’t stop it? We keep acting like we’re the only ones who know what’s at stake, but refuse to reach out enough to find out if our actions are just making someone else’s oppression even worse.

What if…the big beast we’re fighting is the one inside ourselves that gives up so easily?

We can’t win without mirrors

I have had a few of these impossible battles - taking on school leaders, community titans, legislative legends. I’ve had a former Colorado governor say, “Who the fuck does this Janet Rose think she is?” Friends have abandoned me even when I was advocating for their safety. I know what it is to take those big, wild swings - how quickly everyone wants to be in your orb when you’re winning, and how poisonous they become when you’re losing.

But the one thing I did was stand by my values, even if I was wrong, even if I lost. And I know many in the liberal/leftist/whatever camp would call that weakness or “Taking the high road,” it’s more like Captain America not giving an inch because “I can do this all day”. Compromising your values just to win is the biggest loss.

Just because I haven’t plastered myself in Gavin merch, making videos urging that his balls be cast into brass and delivered to every Dem desk (yes, a real TikTok). I might not be tossing sick memes into my feed or dropping my panties to support him, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the power it’s providing to an undefined movement.

But that’s the problem…it’s an undefined movement. Gavin is part of the corner of the party that thinks that carving out sections of humanity for sacrifice is a worthy pursuit in the quest for righteous power. And while the gerrymandering game is only going to escalate, it is going to take far more than a showy California boy to woo the swing states and get disenchanted independents to the polls three years from now.

If we’re going to depend on the country looking in the mirror to see their complicity in fascism, then we'd best not be afraid to look it in ourselves to ask the same.

Bring down the scaffolding of protection at the local level

We can’t unwind the legal protections around the giant Trump ego (Goliath) without dismantling the political machinery enabling him to stand there as some impossible foe instead of the Trojan horse Hydra he is. It will take more than a few sick burns to eliminate the hatred propping him up. And the oracle in me is not optimistic that using the tools of the beast isn’t going to backfire. I hope I’m wrong, I hope we win, but will the cost of distrust and disenfranchisement give us the opening we need for actual healing?

There is still a cohesive lack of vision driving our strategy (if that’s what you want to call it). But with the problems of every state, the peculiarities of services from county to county, the battles are varied and hard to pull together. We have no national leader or voice that is offering that vision - only clapbacks and reactions. We have fractured progressives, lazy liberals and do-nothing Dems who each have a part of a plan if they’d ever consent to working together. Internally, there are wild swings not of bold action, but of sanitized capitulation. A lot of get-along-to-go-along with even our own governor throwing himself at RFK Jr.

This is why I say our greatest asset right now is our healing. Because healed people don’t capitulate to bullies. Healed people don’t succumb to the abuser’s patterns so easily. Healed people don’t wish-wash when people are scared and under threat. They stand the fuck up and say “never again”. And trust me, healed people don’t get to pick and choose who they serve with the power of their voice, because any injustice is felt as if it had been an injustice against them directly. Healed people know that our fates are intertwined; if you fall for the abuser, it impacts us too. The healed person recognizes the scaffolding of abuse before it’s ever completed and does all they can to tear down the illusions before the lies can grow roots.

Some of you know of the trauma I endured when the GOP outed me in 2006. Even though I don’t want that to be the only thing people know of me, I don’t want that ot be the only chapter in my political story; yet, I know I wouldn’t make a good candidate without a team around me to help me manage my PTSD. So instead, I mentor nonprofit & government leaders, emerging candidates for local office, so they can make a difference at the ground level, resisting GOP take-overs of city councils & school boards, county commissions, and advisory councils. The work is in knowing your neighbors and where all the resources live. Reaching out IS doing the work.

Stopping fascism starts with state, county & minimal governments, not arguing over Gavin’s clapbacks. My commitment is to get anyone with lived experience of systemic trauma into decision-making roles to ensure no one gets left behind. Get involved locally…we need your energy right here, right now. 🩵

Help us build out our bench

Here in Colorado, we have a long history of both disability activism with the gang of 18 and their activism with transportation that helped us win the Americans with Disabilities Act. As we know, the ADA, the IDEA, and SSI are all under attack from the Trump administration. I am convinced that if we had more people with lived experience not only running for office, but running campaigns, we’d be able to finally break through the greed and corruption to help actual people.

Well, meet my friend, Doug Wooley, who is trying to do just that. He has a dream that he is VERY close to making come true. Less than $200 to go on his GoFundMe to help him get to a training that would be challenging to do on his own, thanks to archaic federal disability rules and worsening economic supports here in Colorado.

Help him reach his $1200 goal to fund the care and accommodations he’ll need to participate. I can speak directly to his courage, tenacity, and heart, but he is one of the few I can count on to consistently show up for our shared communities, whether it be food justice or disability advocacy.

If each of you dropped a $10 donation, we could fund him today! Please consider donating or at least sharing with those who can!