I’m going to tell a very personal #nonbinary story for the young people. TW dysphoria, etc. Because it’s nonbinary people’s day and as a person in my forties I wish there had been someone there when I was a teen or preteen to tell me.

Being a preteen is tough for everyone. It’s tough changing roles in the world and growing up suddenly. Peers are cruel. I was definitely no exception.

There weren’t terms in suburbia for the LGBTQIA spectrum when I was a kid. There was like one out gay guy in my high school class. He ran a theater troupe. I dated a closeted one. Anyway.

When I hit puberty it was a freight train I did not want to happen. I was living my best life playing with legos and had zero interest in anyone romantically, even in a silly kid way. I had no concept that the adventure fairy tales I read actually said only boys could have the adventures. The distinction didn’t exist in my head.

It was rough. I loved music and dance, and all of a sudden I started looking different and the uniforms got more revealing and form fitting. I was 90 pounds and couldn’t look at my own body. I quit every hobby, one after another because I wasn’t allowed to wear the boys uniform.

Puberty blockers would have been the world.🌎

When my period started I shut down. It was my worst nightmare. Guys on the street were already catcalling me and making comments - but I had no romantic attraction to anyone and didn’t even think of myself as a girl. So for three years I hid it to not talk to my family or teachers. I’d stitch rags into pads. They wouldn’t stay in place so I’d have to adjust them and be yelled at for unladylike gestures. Because I was using unsanitary cloth to try to go to school, without any knowledge of what to do. Eventually I had to give it up when my mom dragged me to the doctor.

I started binding my chest at 14. I didn’t have any direction or help about how to do it. I ended up warping my chest by doing it wrong and not always removing it at night.

Just having one queer person to talk to would have changed everything.

This is the world conservatives want back. They want queer people silent and invisible, without the resources we need for understand there are lots of people like us and we can have happy, successful, fulfilling lives. I have three degrees, a military retirement certificate, a house, a car, lots of great friends, three black belts, and albums full of places traveled. In the end, I was fine, but so much time was wasted second guessing who I was because other people hate.

I haven’t “gotten over it”, it wasn’t a phase. I’m a nonbinary, asexual human being and having the words and community is huge.

Nobody else should have to live that.

It's alarming to me just how many of my relatives are voting for Trump without even thinking about it.

They know I'm gay, but they're also single issue voters. They believe Trump is anti-abortion. They instantly believe that there's a war at the border, and our safety is at risk. They're Catholic, and they believe that Vance being Catholic is a "good thing" even though they don't really read what he says, just what Faux News tells them.

The right and their media extensions have done a great job convincing swaths of middle America that we're under attack at our borders, and only the Republicans can save them, and the message has been so clear without much to counter that spin, that it is simply accepted fact in a lot of middle and rural America. Relatives on @VictorKoopa 's side have even asked us if Texas's border is being overrun. (No, it's not. Except by plenty of gun worshipers pretending to be enforcing laws with dreams of 'justified' murder of 'illegals'.)

On top of that, a lot of the older generation is very much used to a "Do this or else" institution with Christianity and now-draconian laws from their youth. I feel there's a lot of, "I had to, so you have to" going on, in addition to a need/desire for artificial constructs imposed by some authority necessary for these people to function.

My fear is that their need for these constructs, and the pervasive nature of the misinformation they're being fed so regularly is going to just lead to a fascist state that they're all too happy about.

We're at the point where the right will blame violence against them from people who support them and leverage laws they've put in place, against their opponents, and their followers eat up the messages unflinching because it is consistent with the lies-as-truth they've been fed.

There are people I know who are law-abiding folks, who sincerely think that all of the criminal cases against Trump were politically-motivated, and that he isn't a rapist, contrary to all fact.

With asshats like Musk pumping more money into the lie machine, and the Republicans making laws to place more weight on rural counties they control (see https://newrepublic.com/article/182204/texas-republicans-platform-one-party-rule) I'm not sure I see any way this ends well unless two things happen.

1) Votes in population centers count just as much as rural votes. We so need to fucking fix this. It's unjust that a county of 3,000 people can have equal stature to a county of 4M people when it comes to voting, and that's just what the Texas leadership is doing. They need to, because if you just go by pure majority, Texas is a blue state. (Don't give me BS about 'leave Texas' - This is happening in every state to a greater or lesser degree)

2) Find ways to counter the idiotic narratives in rural and middle America. I was in Ohio and only heard about how Biden is giving hotel rooms and money to "illegals" and hurting Ohioans by raising the cost of their food and gas. It didn't provide a link to these seemingly unrelated things, but it didn't need to. To quote Idiocracy, "Brawndo: It's got what plants crave!" - It's so burned into their heads that Biden is the source of all of their grief, that it's virtually boilerplate. The message is received loudly and clearly, "Biden and the left care about other countries and people than they do us. That, and all of these weird trans and gay people annoy me, and they seem to hate them as well. It's a win-win for me and my own biases and hate." - There is zero counter-message I've seen in rural areas. None.

Just crap I had in my head that I wanted to get out there. It's such a fucking chore to have to explain to relatives how they're voting my happiness and rights away, and even more difficult when I'll have to tell them I'm severing ties because their mythology and biases are more important than my real well-being. "I remember back when you would've never voted for a serial liar, rapist and convicted criminal, but somehow you've been taken for a ride that aligns with your own biases." Hrrf.