A lot of fear in this country is directly caused by guns. According to the CDC, there were over 48,000 firearm-related deaths in the U.S. in 2022, and the specific way in which a gun can kill you—without warning, painfully, at any age, in basically any place—only multiplies the dread. I grew up inundated with stories of mass murder: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook. The worst nightmares come when it hits home—when the people shot are from your community (Pulse), your roots (Oxford, Michigan), or a critical part of your everyday life (the NYC subway). But gun violence is no less devastating when it doesn't make national news: a child shot on the street in your neighborhood, a friend's older brother's suicide, domestic violence taken to lethal extremes. The capacity to destroy bestowed by a gun on whoever holds it—a cop, a kid, a hunter—is a power that should be regarded with horror.
Over the past several months, another fear has increased in prevalence among trans people in particular: the fear of a government that is not just ignorant or apathetic about our existence but is actively working to eradicate us from public life. It is the position of the Trump administration that trans people do not exist, and therefore do not have rights. Confronted with the inconvenient fact of our ongoing lives, the president, Elon Musk, and their cronies are fighting to block our access to healthcare, fire us from our jobs, threaten our safety, and limit our ability to leave the country.
My own life—currently insulated by the relative tolerance of New York City, the independence of the company I co-own, and the fact that I got a passport while Biden was in office—has been fine so far. I see my friends, and I go to my clinic, and I do the things I want to do. But the viciousness of these policies has forced me and my peers to think about the future, and specifically, What will you do if your back is completely against the wall? If a mob is empowered to come for you, if you're being legally or physically forced to detransition, if they're going to push you into a men's prison, if they otherwise restrict your ability to work or move freely, how do you respond? It's enough to make a girl feel defenseless. Powerless. That's where the gun comes in.
Last week, Hallie Lieberman wrote a Washington Post feature inexplicably published in the "Style" section. It's titled "The trans Americans turning to guns for protection." The centerpiece of her reporting is a 21-year-old trans woman who changed her view on guns after Trump's most recent election, then bought one and started posting on social media about it. From the story:
“Trans people have every reason to be afraid because we are being attacked,” Rodriguez said. “Every single day, another right is lost.”
She believed Republicans were playing on fear to stoke transphobia, so she thought trans people should play the game back. “They’re going to fear us no matter what,” she said. “So let the fear come from a place of reality.”
It's an intoxicating fantasy—a continuation of a longer-running sales pitch directed at women victimized by male abuse. Even I, someone who didn't grow up around guns, found myself falling for a version of it recently. My overarching position remained that guns shouldn't exist at all, and the might of the U.S. should be used to make manufacturing and selling them untenable. But given the reality that there's almost no legislative momentum for those changes, it felt rational to learn how to use one myself. After all, the bad guys have them and use them. Kyle Rittenhouse was allowed to fire a gun in pursuit of his politics; why shouldn't we?
It was Katherine Cross's 2024 book Log Off that distanced me from this notion, I think for good. She's got plenty of arguments, all of them strong: The state has historically given far more freedom to gun-users on the right than on the left; having a gun in your home makes you more likely to be shot dead, not less; becoming the kind of person who can safely fire a gun is a massively more difficult task than becoming a gun owner; there are plenty of roles in any anti-fascist resistance movement that don't require marksmanship.
And then there's this, an argument I ultimately found to be the most compelling because it's instantly recognizable: The push to purchase guns is just another form of marketing. It's the best antidote to the glam of the Post profile:
I've known many people on the left whom I would trust with a gun—and those people could, in a pinch, save a life under the right conditions. Becoming one of them is potentially a worthwhile endeavor, but it's not memeable, and it's not what's really being encouraged by "ARM [INSERT MINORITY GROUP HERE]" rhetoric. Not for nothing, but such people also tend to keep a low profile on social media.
Indeed, I've started to feel that those memes are the "carbon footprint" of the far left. BP gave us the idea of an individual carbon footprint, all the better for getting you to fret about taking an airplane instead of pressuring them to stop their destruction of the planet. Arms merchants didn't invent "ARM [INSERT MINORITY GROUP HERE]" but they may as well have. They certainly benefit from it. Even as their corporate boards fund the politicians and movements that make everyone from queers, to Jews, to Muslims, to women afraid, they then get to reap the financial rewards of those same communities buying their products in response to that very fear.
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All the while, those companies depend on your virtuous authenticity to make gun ownership seem decent, respectable, and, above all, emotionally satisfying and desirable. Despite the resolute political conservatism of arms merchants, I'm quite certain they don't give a good goddamn if a pink-haired catgirl communist is buying up their hunting rifles and tacti-cool handguns. Her money spends just as well. And she can be an unwitting influencer for a whole new market segment.
Let's be extraordinarily generous and say a gun, a permit, and enough practice time to get comfortable shooting runs you $500. That money goes to people who have a vested interest in upholding the climate of fear that got you to buy the gun in the first place. What are some other uses for that money? Shelter, dinner, a makeover, mutual aid, internet service, art supplies, clothing, medication, musical instruments, electrolysis, movie tickets, pet toys, diapers, candles, books, video games, shampoo, furniture, sports equipment, tattoos ... the list is endless. When you’re already in a precarious spot, spend your precious money on something that will make your life happier and safer than a gun will.
I'm not even saying trans people need to achieve some high-minded sort of peace with our persecutors. If anyone reading this hopes to disappear my community, know that I in return want you to suffer mentally and physically in proportion to your actions. But the process of retribution and of clawing back our rights won't come through patronizing the most evil companies in existence. Gun makers are actively antagonistic to humanity, and doing business with them won't help me assert my own. I'd make a deal with the devil himself before I'd make one with Smith & Wesson.
