Paperwork to the Left of Me, Project 2025 to the Right

A Procrastinator’s Plan for a Post-Freedom Future

I hate to stereotype, but middle-aged late-transitioning white trans women are an anxious little demographic. We can be stressy cocktails of fragility, nostalgia for our formerly easy lives, and self-pity over the years we spent hiding in safety.

It can be a lot. I’ve been insufferable many times with my sweaty, desperate attempts to tell friends how scary the world is for trans people. It all feels like a high-stakes sales pitch in the moment: If I can just get one cis person to see what we’re up against… And they tell two other cis people… And those two cis people each tell two other cis people… We can be safe!

But I know what I sound like. Less like a smoke detector, more like a Chihuahua. Agitated, annoying, and an unreliable indicator of true danger. It’s a tone that grates on me when I hear it from my peers and embarrasses me when I hear it from myself. I don’t want the cis world to see this dread. Because dread is uncomfortable and not particularly appealing. I want cis people to think that trans people are a cool, easy, fun group of people to hang out with. Woke mob? Pronoun Police? Not in these parts! I’m an easy-to-love transsexual. Did you misgender me? OMG, I’m way too chill to even notice! Chick-fil-A? Tasty! Do you think Joe Rogan has some interesting points about trans women athletes? I’m listening!

That’s the cis-acceptable me. With my community, it’s a different story. When I post about Project 2025 on Instagram, and a fellow Gen-X late-blooming trans woman DM’s me “Where will you go?” I’m so ready for that conversation:

Project 2025 is notorious as the Heritage Foundation’s game plan for Trump’s second (and third) terms. It’s bad for everybody. It will eliminate the EPA, freedom from religion, access to education, reproductive rights access, and install a MAGA-loyal executive and judiciary. Early into the plan, the military will be used as a federal police force to round up suspected undocumented immigrants.

But there’s another category of people shortlisted for the round-up: transgender people.

From The New Republic (I’m sure I’ve quoted this elsewhere in my Substack, sorry):

At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Michael Knowles took the main stage and called for the “eradication of transgenderism from public life” to a standing ovation. Not long after, Project 2025 (led by the Heritage Foundation) published the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-plus-page blueprint for the next Republican administration. The first legislative item in the executive summary declares that “transgender ideology” is a form of pornography, and that all pornography should be outlawed. It then goes on to call all trans people “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.” It further demands that anyone who is a “purveyor of transgender ideology” be put on sex offender lists and imprisoned.

“Transgender Ideology” is the wild idea that there are indeed trans people. I’m a low-ideology human, generally speaking. I’m a little Christian, a little Californian, a lot agnostic. I believe that my identity as a trans person is part of whatever sacred path I was called to walk by my creator. The best things about my life are in alignment with that belief. That belief is mine, nothing I would ever expect you to believe, nothing I would proselytize. The most I’d ever ask anyone to believe that trans people are people and, as such, worthy of respect. I believe that the binary notion of gender is an idea that humans superimposed on biological sex the way we imposed the idea of the “humors” of the body on our understanding of disease. I believe that when cis people put in the mental and spiritual effort to truly understand trans people*, they free themselves from this primitive notion of gender that causes harm not only to trans people but to everybody. Alok Vaid-Menon articulates all of this beautifully all over the place, especially in this interview with Justin Baldoni:

But despite Alok’s beauty and eloquence, their beliefs aren’t super enticing to the mainstream. They’ve got nothing on banger ideologies like “Jesus wants you to be rich.” Wave after wave of feminist ideology couldn’t save us from our post-Roe, second-Trump-campaign dark present. I don’t think “Hey, let’s stop defining people by their genitals” is going to catch on at Joel Olsteen's scale.

Also, and this is quibbling, but “transgender ideology is a form of pornography”? There are very sexy trans people of all genders. Trans porn performs well globally, best in deep red states. Associating trans people with sex work and pornography is a bit of a “duh” when the community has been kept out of mainstream employment for most of American history. If trans people turn you on, you are in good company. If you are turned on by “trans ideology,” my brother in Christ, you are a stone-cold freak, and I want to know what other JG Ballard abstract-concept-as-basis-for-erotica shit gets you off.

But this isn’t about pornography or protecting women or children; it’s a way to remove trans people from public existence. It’s a bummer thing to think about.

When I mention this to cis people in unguardedly sweaty, desperate moments of terror, they tend to reflexively say things to calm me down, speaking to me like a child who woke up from a nightmare. “But, Jude…” they coo, “the courts would never allow that.”  And I pretend I don’t know about the Dobbs decision, the overturn of the Chevron Ruling, or the decision on bump stocks. We go about our drinks or lunch or stroll pretending that RBG is still alive and that “the courts” are an entity that protects marginalized people in America in 2024.

Let’s be real. Cis people aren’t great at understanding trans people, much less caring about or protecting us. It’s no fun to think about who is next in line for this ideological erasure.

This sounds accusatory to cis readers, and I don’t mean for it to. I know exactly how ignorable we are. I used to be convinced I was a cis person, and back then I said things like: “Why do they have to call us ‘cis’? Why can’t they say ‘trans people and normal people’?” Or, confronted with an awful statistic about trans lives: “Wow, that sucks for .05% of the population, but the other 99.5% of us have bigger fish to fry.” Caring about trans rights is like caring about things that affect the Amish community or vegans - a favor granted to a group of people who are small, odd, and have a reputation for being judgy.

So I meditate, rollerblade, eat weed, and micro/macrodose mushrooms, trying to keep my head clear for work and parenting and maintaining normality until November. And I kind-of sort-of try to plan for the likely scenario that time-to-take-the-keys-away grandpa will lose to fascist grandpa.

Some of the fantasies of the purge are fun. I’ve already lived in France and can imagine life there in some small town, doing freelance design and eating regional cheeses. The closest I’ve come to Thailand was doing research into transition surgeries there. The dollar is strong there. They just recognized gay marriage. They have a long tradition of at least incorporating gender non-conforming people. I could maybe see myself there as a little old ladyboy?

In the right frame of mind, I can even spin all this future-fucking as an adventure like the ones my grandparents went on around WWII. Sneaking from house to house past curfew, slipping out on a cargo boat, charming my way around the anti-trans police units with my impeccably passable beauty and feminine wiles. Think of the substack posts! These fantasies don’t hold much of a charge when I remember how much harder these escapes will be for the trans people in hate states like Florida and Texas who are already struggling.

Like so many things, the reality is more of a drag, or at least a long to-do list. What social media accounts do I need to delete? Do I need to throw my iPhone in a toilet? Get my photos out of the cloud? When do you put an attorney on retainer to help with immigration issues and giving someone power of attorney? What do you do with your pets? Are my documents ready?

I’m stalled on my documents . In the trans community we call our old names “dead names” because in theory, they’re behind us, dead in the past. But they’re undead names in practice, zombies that pop up in unexpected places. Today, in an effort to get my 14 year old off of screens and into a book, I took him to the library. When they looked up his card with my number, the name that came up was David Harris. “Oh yeah, that’s who I used to be. Cool. I honestly didn’t know I had a library card.”

Transitioning makes you acutely aware of your paper trail. David pops up everywhere. I recently got an online prescription for oral minoxidil (to regrow hair), and was offered a chance to renew David’s years-old prescription for Viagra. Where else is he hiding? Anywhere dangerous if, you know, the shit hits the fan? Could my Ralph’s Club Card give me away? My Amazon Prime? My weed delivery service? I’ve been David and Jude in a lot of different places. Some of my government name change forms list “transition” as the reason for the petition. Two of my surgeries required me to sign documents to be kept on file with the state of California.

Nonetheless, I am playing whack-a-mole with the lurking Davids I know about. I’m working on my birth certificate, which is slightly trickier because I was born in Puerto Rico. After many, many false starts and $700 spent on a San Juan attorney who ghosted me, I was put in touch with Karina Torres, a community activist who runs The Euphoria Project. Karina has generously offered to help get my gender marker changed to reflect the birth of a beautiful little girl named David (AKA Jude Hope) in the mid-seventies. Is this a worthless thing to do? Could that little bit of confusion about what was between my newborn legs be the thing that saves my life in an Inglorious Basterds scenario?

All I have to do to make the change is get proof of a clean criminal record from the Puerto Rican Police Bureau, proof of a clean criminal record from my local municipality (The City of Los Angeles, the County Sheriff’s Department, The State of California? I don’t know), a negative debt certification from something called CRIM, a negative debt certification from the Department of the Treasury, proof of a clean bankruptcy record, and my last five years of tax returns.

I’m scared. But am I that scared? Not yet. I’ve been dangling the promise of a trip to Puerto Rico in front of myself as a way to make the prospect of all that paperwork less daunting. But so far, not even a vacation has made it appealing enough to take on. There are too many 2024 projects to do. I’m not ready to think about 2025.

* In my experience, most cis people’s allyship stops short of believing trans people when we declare our gender. It’s what’s given away when someone starts talking about how “He/She/They identify as _________…” Implied in this is “this person thinks he’s a lady and I’m being cool and going along with it.” This is nice. This is polite. There’s nothing wrong with it. But it doesn’t free anyone from the patriarchal assumption that you can look between a baby’s legs and see into its future. The liberating magic of engaging with trans people belongs to those rare few who listen to us and make the effort to attempt to believe the things we say about ourselves. That’s the light that illuminates the lies they believe about themselves.