As I write this, the House of Representatives has just elected a new Speaker - an ultra conservative lunatic. Why do I call him a lunatic? Anyone who opposes late term abortions to preserve the life of the mother has to be crazy. His policies, such as a total late term abortion ban, if enacted, will put the lives of many cisgender women at risk. Even though I am transgender, and never will directly have anything at risk with this policy, I have to fight for those that do - else, I will have no excuse to ask cisgender women for help when these lunatics attack us transgender people.
The previous speaker was elected after 15 votes. Before the election was over, no actions could be taken by the house. Due to an action from a radical from the far right, the first speaker was removed from his position, and it took 3 weeks for a new speaker to be elected. Since they didn't change the rule which allowed the former speaker to be removed, I fully expect that we will see someone invoke it to remove this speaker when the current spending bill expires. (Will we have a government shutdown or not? A House without a speaker when the spending bill expires will be a disaster. But I don't put it past the far right....)
So, where am I going with this?
Right now, the "right" is busy fighting amongst its allies. Moderate "conservatives" are being coerced to give their votes to the radicals. (Look at how Jim Jordan's allies allegedly gave death threats to people who didn't support him for examples of this coercion.) My congressional representative voted for the current speaker of the house. This cemented my resolution to be part of the bloc that (hopefully) votes him out next year.
Given that transgender people will continue to be a target of the far right, I expect that attacks against us will resume soon. This means that we must continue our efforts to get more trans people into positions of power, so that we (and our allies) to check and balance the power of the lunatic right until sanity (hopefully) can be restored to the GOP.
Most of us are not ready to "out" ourselves and be targets for the lunatics on the right. But we can vote for our allies. So, it's time to register to vote, and participate in local politics when possible. As they say, all politics are local. That's where we can make our first stand against lunacy. And I intend to do just that....
