It’s OK to Opt Out of Holiday Time With Your MAGA Family

The holidays are supposed to be a fun, family-oriented time. For many LGBTQ Americans, however, it can be anything but, especially now. Transgender people are often told they’re not welcome unless they effectively detransition. Spending the holidays around conservative family members can be hurtful when someone inevitably uses the wrong name and/or wrong pronoun. Not to mention attempts at encouraging, or even inducing the trans family member into conversion therapy, with the underlying message being there is something fundamentally wrong with them as a person. People in queer relationships are often told not to bring their partners or spouses, or that they will have to sleep in separate rooms.

Unsurprisingly, this leads to many queer people deciding it’s not worth visiting family over the holidays. Some even cut off their family altogether.

Conservatives are quick to point out that liberals are more likely to cut off family members than conservatives, and crow, “So much for the tolerant left!” They argue that by cutting off conservative relatives, liberals may unintentionally reinforce the notion that political differences are insurmountable. Open communication between individuals with differing viewpoints can help bridge ideological divides, they claim. Cutting off conservative relatives can lead to feelings of isolation, loss, and regret for all parties involved. By maintaining these connections, liberals can continue to foster empathy and compassion, even when disagreements arise.

None of this is true when it comes to LGBTQ people, and trans folks in particular. Nothing a transgender person can say or do will change the minds of MAGA family members, other than to perhaps convince them that their queer family member is “one of the good ones.” Women and minorities throughout history have experienced this form of intensely unpleasant soft bigotry. It’s similar to “I have a Black friend,” and implies that they tolerate you when they otherwise wouldn’t because you are an exception to “those people.”

Some believe that giving up on communication is a form of failure, because they think that both sides can be moved to meet in the middle. When an LGBTQ person decides to cut off contact with family, it typically happens after years of attempts to “bridge the gap” in this way as they try to reach a place where they can bear being around their own family.

But, when one side of the argument is, “You people shouldn’t exist,” and the other is, “I should be allowed to exist and go about my life,” you cannot meet in some middle ground of “only half of you should exist, but you’re the exception.”

Then there’s the matter of emotional pain. Every LGBTQ person has weighed the pros and cons of being around family, and decided that as much as being apart from them hurts, the mental harm they will suffer if they continue the relationship is worse. For those with partners, spouses, and kids, a quiet holiday spent at home and with chosen family is a far safer, more relaxing, and enjoyable experience. Queer people consistently choose the more pleasant option when dealing with family members hostile to LGBTQ people, or who are supportive of policies that treat them as damaged, inferior, second-class citizens … or even worse.

For trans folks, being around conservative family members in the age of Trump is HIGHLY unpleasant. The conservative movement in the U.S. has openly declared that trans people should not exist, and the government is working to make that happen. We — including myself and a lot of my longtime friends — are fleeing the U.S. like it’s 1933. Asking us to interact with conservative family members is like asking a Jewish person to spend time around Nazis.

When asking whether trans people are wrong for cutting family members out of their lives, imagine the following scenario: It’s Germany, in 1933. You are either a convert to Judaism, or have married a Jewish person. Many of your family members are supporters of Hitler and the Nazis, and they were warned of what would happen to you and your family if he was elected.

Now all those predictions are coming to pass, and you are fleeing to the United States with your spouse and children. Your family members express sympathy for your plight, and are sad they will not see you or your children again, but continue to support Hitler. They believe that what is happening is what is best for Germany and the world. When confronted with the fact that the policies they support harm you, they respond with “you people did a lot of bad things, and what is coming to pass is only a natural consequence of your decisions. Your suffering is your own fault.”

This is almost word for word the conversation I had with my father this past April. It  shook me to my core, because I had heard his exact talking points in books I had read while writing American Fascism.

The view that Jews had done something to deserve the misery and horror inflicted on them by the Third Reich was pervasive in the U.S., Europe, and Germany, both before and after the war. In In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson’s biography of American ambassador William Dodd’s time in Hitler’s Germany, Colonel Edward M. House expressed the common American sentiment in 1933 that Jews should not be allowed to “dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin.” After the war, journalist Milton Mayer interviewed regular Germans, the herrenvolk, who supported the Nazis. One of them, under the pseudonym Karl-Heinz Schwenke, told Mayer: “They [Jews] had it [The Holocaust] coming. You see what their ‘democracies’ did to us.”

Comparing modern American conservatives to Nazis is often dismissed as hyperbolic, or unfair. However, from the perspective of transgender people in the U.S., it is a very accurate analogy. The dehumanizing language used to describe transgender people is very similar, including open talk of “eradicating transgenderism” and the use of involuntary institutionalization (camps) as a solution to “treat” the transgender population. MAGA’s blaming of transgender people for national woes and moral rot is identical to Nazis blaming Jews for the same thing. The Trump campaign hung transgender people around the neck of VP Kamala Harris the exact same way that the Nazis associated Jews with then-German president Paul von Hindenburg, whom Hitler was running against in 1932. The Trump policies targeting transgender people in the U.S. track closely with the policies meant to push Jews out of Germany, and transgender people are fleeing the U.S. just as people fled Germany.

I’ve had family members lecture me on how it is socially unacceptable to be angry at someone for how they voted. But with the U.S. in the throes of a fascist takeover by a government targeting transgender people and immigrants for literal concentration camps, you absolutely have a right to be angry at the people who voted them into power. Especially if you’re directly affected, and especially if the person who voted to destroy the lives of their own family members is completely unrepentant for the harm they have caused.

The expectation that anyone should suffer socializing with people who voted for their exile from public life and possible eradication is laughable. When parents are told directly, “If Trump wins we will be forced to leave the country and you will never see me or your grandchildren again,” and they do it anyway, they have forfeited any claims to familial loyalty or bonds. This is especially true when all the dire predictions come to pass, their family leaves, and they still have no regrets about their decision.

Everything that is being done to transgender people is complete, gratuitous, performative cruelty. To continue the metaphor, it’s like paying a bully to verbally abuse, humiliate, and beat shit out of your kid while you, the parent, cheer the tormentor on. It takes epic levels of chutzpah to pearl clutch when your child wants nothing to do with you ever again after such betrayal.

Conservative relatives may point out that when you voted for a democratic president, they didn’t cut you off. But when Obama and Biden were president, no one fired the military for being conservative, took away your dad’s erectile dysfunction medication and your mom’s HRT, made your uncle wear dresses, or threatened to put them in mental institutions for being left-handed. No one banned their religion or took away their ability to go out in public forever. No one revoked their driver’s licenses or passports. No one made them go to a same-sex wedding. Their lives went on exactly the same as before.

When Trump became president, hundreds of thousands of transgender people — myself included — had our lives as we knew them come to a sudden, horrific end under a wave of policies that did to us in three months what Hitler did in three years.

Many of us cut off family members, especially around the holidays and especially this year, to preserve our sanity. Standing up to people who think you owe them for merely tolerating your presence is fundamentally an act of dignity and self-respect. Who would subject themselves to breaking bread with people who tell them that they are an anathema to a nation, and their suffering is a public good they’ve brought on themselves? How do we maintain an ounce of dignity and self-respect by pretending that “eradicating transgenderism” and “I just want to live” are two equally valid and acceptable points of view?

Some transgender people feel they have to grit their teeth and power through a week of self-degradation, humiliation and appeasement because they’re still reliant on family for financial support. Some just find it easier to humor fascists who tolerate them as “one of the good ones” because they can spend a week zonked on Klonopin and lean into disassociation for all it’s worth. Needless to say, this isn’t healthy.

A lot of Conservative cisgender people aren’t going to like what I have to say, but get used to it, you asked for this. You have spent the better part of a decade bemoaning how your queer kids don’t want to spend the holidays with you. It’s going to be even worse this year.

So, to my LGBTQ siblings, this is my Christmas present to you: When your family demands to know why you’re not spending the holidays with them, you can send them this article. And then you can explain in no uncertain terms why there isn’t enough Klonopin on Earth to make you willingly spend one more minute with their condescending, hypocritical, fascist apologist keisters. You can then put your phone on mute and be safely with your chosen family, with a clear conscience. You can bask in the comforting knowledge that somewhere far away the family who voted you off the island is staying warm and cozy with their incandescent, and impotent, rage directed at someone who no longer gives a **** what they think after they made it clear through their words and actions that you, and even their grandchildren, mean nothing to them compared with their love of their sexually abusive orange savior.