Hello Meteor readers—it perhaps goes without saying that it’s been a rough week in the world; as I write this, Russian troops have invaded Kyiv, and stories are pouring in about people fleeing Ukraine to Poland, having walked on foot for a full day. We’ve compiled a list of ways to help Ukrainians on our Instagram here.

In today’s newsletter, we’ve got four transgender writers reflecting on how Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s hateful decree—and the transphobic legislation being passed across the country—affects their lives. After that, read Shannon Melero’s interview with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, editor of a new book called The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System, which elevates Black expertise in areas where it’s rarely sought.

There is some good news, thank goodness. President Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court; he kept his promise that he would nominate the first Black woman to SCOTUS, but what’s most exciting is that he’s nominated the most progressive judge among the candidates he was reportedly considering. (Lawyer and writer Dahlia Lithwick predicted her nomination in a recent edition of our newsletter.) More on that below.

Hold the line, everybody. And drop us one, too: [email protected].

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHY IS IT ALWAYS TEXAS

 Our Existence Is a Crime 

TEXANS PROTESTING PROPOSED BANS OF TRANS ATHLETES IN TEXAS, 2021 (PHOTO TAMIR KALIFA VIA GETTY IMAGES)

On Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a decree that essentially criminalizes trans kids and their parents, demanding that the Department of Family and Protective Services investigate parents who support and affirm their kids' gender identity as child abuse. Abbott also ordered doctors and teachers—and deputized individual citizens—to report trans children receiving life-affirming care. This draconian, hateful step was the most recent measure in a right-wing war on trans people in multiple states, which includes 125 anti-trans bills currently on the table, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

So what does the Texas news mean to the people most affected? The Meteor founding member Jennifer Finney Boylan asked four writers to answer that question here.

Brynn Tannehill
Trans activist and essayist 

With all that’s happening, I have only two emotional states: anger and despair. However, it’s not just the latest attack on trans people in Texas—that would criminalize our loving, tight-knit LGBT family—making me feel like this. It’s not just the courts full of Trump appointees looking to allow bathroom bans on trans people. It’s not just the impending demise of Obergefell and Lawrence after Roe falls that would make my marriage not just null and void, but illegal. It’s not just the fact that the next GOP administration will ban my friends from the military again. It’s not that SCOTUS will likely carve out a giant religious exemption to 45 years’ worth of local laws passed to protect LGBT people. It’s not just that Democrats think that preserving the filibuster is more important than preventing all this. And it’s not just Republicans admiring Putin because he has brutalized a nation’s worth of LGBT people into the closet.

It is ALL of this, taken together, that has demoralized the next generation of trans people, who should be looking to make the world better. Our trans son didn’t apply to a single university in the U.S. He’s at McGill in Canada instead, because he could no longer envision a future for himself in a country whose guiding principle is, “The cruelty is the point.” People like Abbott have deliberately and systematically destroyed any pathway to improving the lives of trans people.

We plan on joining him there in 2025.

Dawn Ennis
Award-winning writer and the first network TV news journalist in the US to come out as transgender

The stars at night may be big and bright, but—hold your clapping, please—Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has shown me that hate is all he has room for in his deep red Republican heart.

What Abbott and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton have done by equating gender-affirming healthcare with “child abuse” is send the message that only so-called “normal” children are welcome in the Lone Star State. That bigoted perspective excludes my transgender child.

Abbott not only ordered child welfare agents to “investigate” anyone who supports their gender-nonconforming and transgender children, but also called on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to snitch on parents of trans kids, and turn them in, to state authorities, if they suspect gender-affirming medical care is being provided.

Texas is taking a page from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, from Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and perhaps also from the wild, wild west of the 19th century.

This week in 1836, defenders of the Alamo—who actually wanted to preserve their right to enslave laborers—wrote for help in their standoff with Mexican fighters. William B. Travis pleaded with “the people of Texas and all Americans in the world,” to come to their aid. “Victory or Death,” he wrote, would be the outcome.

We know how that ended. And I suspect I know how this will end: Victory at the ballot box for Texas Republicans, and death by suicide of untold transgender youth.

Let’s be clear: Expert researchers have identified the primary reason trans youth consider suicide is rejection, not because of their gender identity. In fact, if Gov. Abbott and others like him were to show acceptance, they could actually save lives!

If you or someone you know needs help, contact the Trans Lifeline at (877) 565-8860; The Trevor Project via chat, call, or text; or the LGBT Hotline at (888) 843-4564.

Gwen Smith
Columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, founder of the Transgender Day of Remembrance

With Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordering the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate trans youth—accusing supporting parents of being child abusers, and leaving them in fear of losing their own children to the state—people will die. This is not hyperbole.

When I was a child, I felt I could not come out. I felt like a monster, and felt alone, unable to utter what I knew was true: I was a trans girl. I considered suicide as a result.

In the many years since then, I have been pleased to see transgender kids gain acceptance and support—support that helps them make informed choices in their lives, under the care of their family and medical professionals.

I would love to think that his order comes from a place of ignorance. Yet I know better. This is not ignorance, but malevolence. This is pure cruelty, for cruelty’s sake.

What Abbott wants is for every trans person to experience that same pain I felt. No, it’s worse than that—he would be happy to see every transgender person in Texas simply drop dead.

Riley MacLeod
Trans writer and editor in Brooklyn 

Part of my old-in-trans-years psyche doesn’t totally believe the lives that are available to trans kids today: that often they can come out safely, that their parents and communities will support them, that doctors want to help them. Their experiences feel so different from mine that I can’t let my heart get too close to it all, because then I start thinking that I should have had a life like that too.

Sometimes I think trans kids and their supporters are naive to demand so much, but most times I’m awed by how brave they are to believe they deserve so much good. That they won’t accept the state not getting in line with the future they’re creating makes me feel bitter and small in comparison. They are, in so many ways, better than me, like all of our descendants are supposed to be.

What’s happening in Texas is deeply cruel, but trans people have always existed despite cruelty, and nothing a bunch of cis politicians do or say is going to change that. The kids are going to win, even if it’s really fucking hard. They’re going to grow into trans adults who think I’m as out of touch as I thought my elders were, and I’m so excited to find them as insufferable as my elders found me, and I’m so excited to love them for it.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON 

• One more time for the people in the back: Ketanji Brown Jackson is official! She was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2021, with bipartisan support that included Republican Senators Susan Collins, Lindsay Graham, and Lisa Murkowski. Judge Jackson, who is 51, graduated from Harvard Law, clerked for Justice Breyer (who she would be replacing), served as a federal defender and as the Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, among many other positions. On Twitter, Biden called her “one of our nation’s brightest legal minds.”

• The news was met with praise and celebration, including from Joy Ann Reid (“brilliant”), Rep. Cori Bush (“a career of standing up for those most in need”), Stacey Abrams (“a proud day for all Americans of good conscience”), Maya Wiley (“LET'S GO MAKE HISTORY!”), Bernice King (“our work continues, but this moment matters”), and Barack Obama.

• Relatedly: in 2016, Judge Jackson’s 11-year-old daughter Leila wrote a letter to President Obama recommending her mom as a replacement for Justice Scalia. “She’s determined, honest and never breaks a promise to anyone even if there are other things she’d rather do,” Leila wrote. “She can demonstrate commitment and is loyal and never brags. I think she would make a great Supreme Court justice.” I'm not crying, you’re crying. (Just kidding, I’m definitely crying.)
  

AND: 

• I don’t know if you’ve been following the Hollywood Unlocked/Queen is Dead saga, but this wild Buzzfeed post explains it all: basically, a tabloid news site erroneously reported that Queen Elizabeth had died, possibly because a source attending British Vogue editor Edward Enninful’s wedding misheard someone discussing the death of Mark Lanegan, a seminal grunge musician in the bands Screaming Trees and… Queens of the Stone Age. This is the kind of silly chaos I needed this week. RIP Mark.

• Niecy Nash and Jessica Betts are stunning on the first Essence cover to celebrate a same-sex couple.

• How Colombian Feminists Decriminalized Abortion: With Help From Their Neighbors

• NPR’s Weekend Edition has found a new host in Ayesha Rascoe, formerly their White House Correspondent. Congrats!

ASK BLACK EXPERTS

It Turns Out There Really Is a Black Agenda

And we all desperately need to get on board with it 

BY SHANNON MELERO

ANNA GIFTY (PHOTO BY KWAME ABRAH) 

“The glaring omission of Black experts is so commonplace across Western society that it has become normalized,” writes Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman in the opening pages of The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System. A graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School, Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, wants to raise her hand and ask one monumental question: “why public discourse about a global pandemic, which disproportionately impacted Black communities, was largely absent of Black perspectives.” The collection of she compiles each explore the “convergence of at least three pandemics: Covid-19, racism, and state-sanctioned police violence,” and how each of those things affects sectors like climate change, tech, and healthcare in Black communities. (In one expansive section about the climate crisis, Doctor Marshall Shepherd writes, “Ultimately...the weather-climate gap will not disappear until racial wealth inequality disappears.”)

So: what's on the Black agenda? Let's talk to the editor.

Shannon Melero: The Black Agenda kicks off by noting that historically, Black experts are only ever called upon for things specifically about the Black community—or when someone is trying to get their DEI initiative up and running. There was a slight shift in this during the summer of 2020, which you write about. Have you noticed any sort of change in the academic or research community moving in the direction of no longer pigeonholing Black experts two years into the pandemic?

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: No. No. (Laughing) And it’s really because at the end of the day, as Doctor Tressie McMillan Cottom said recently, institutions can’t love you. Right? They’re things. And it’s no surprise. What I always tell people to keep in mind, with academic institutions, in particular, is that they were never built with Black and Brown people in mind. Harvard was founded in the 1600s. Where were Black people in the 1600s? So the way I really look at it is that, yes, institutions can’t love me. They won’t serve me. But that being said, I’m still going to push these institutions to at least see me, to hear me. Because at the end of the day, even if they aren’t hearing me, someone is listening, right?

One thing I noticed as a thread joining all of the essays was the argument for reparations. But what would you say is that one thing that brings all these experts’ concepts together? 

Oh, reparations. I hadn’t even thought about it from that perspective, but you’re right, it does come up a lot. But I actually think the more salient or more obvious trend between the essays is criminal justice.

Just to be clear, nobody talked to each other before writing their essay. But as you see, criminal justice comes up again and again and again. Because at the end of the day, that is the root of a lot of the problems. If you already don't see Black life as life, we have a problem. We can’t talk about voting rights. We can't talk about health care reparations; we can’t talk about diversity in the workforce; we can’t talk about the future of work in the U.S. if you don’t think Black people are people.

And so the way that manifests is criminalizing Black people for existing. I can’t just be Black and exist because that is illegal. As I talk about this, I’m just thinking about what happened with Kim Potter recently. She basically got a slap on the wrist, and the judge cried!

The statistic that shook me, and it still shocks me, is that out of 17,500 police killings between 2005 and 2021, only 140 officers were indicted on murder or manslaughter charges. That’s less than one percent! That’s actually 0.8 percent, to be precise. And the question becomes, well, when it’s fundamentally criminal to be Black in America, how does that spill over into every other sector of society? It’s illegal to be Black in America, and for some reason, that’s not top of mind for everybody.

The group that is worse off should probably be leading the conversation around solutions because if a solution works for them, it’ll probably work for everyone else. 

So I guess the next logical question is, what’s the plan? It feels like this has been an ongoing battle for hundreds of years. How can we change this perspective, and is it even something that’s going to be accomplished in our lifetime? 

I think it can. And I think it will be led by young people; I think we are going to be the ones to push against this idea in a very real way. That’s why you’re seeing such a visceral reaction. There are a lot of people who are trying to get rid of Black voting rights—I mean, it’s a coordinated effort that is giving Battleship precision, right?

There are entire generations of people who are sick of it. You’re seeing this [anger] in millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, and all of the people coming up after them. This is why you have this entire fight around what’s going to be taught in schools, however, because people [in power] understand that once young people find the truth, it changes everything. We saw that with Gen Z.

And what does implementing that level of change look like according to The Black Agenda?

It looks like putting Black people at the helm of conversation and having them lead the way. And that’s not at the expense of any other group. I think a lot of times, people argue that if you’re centering one group of people, it means you don’t like anybody else. But who said that? What we’re saying is, what groups have it worse off? The group that is worse off should probably be leading the conversation around solutions because if a solution works for them, it’ll probably work for everyone else.

Now when we talk about agenda items in the book, what we’re saying is that with the way that things are going, Black lives have to be fully realized first and foremost. The fact that Black lives do matter is not something that should be up for debate, but right now, it is up for debate. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Like, what do you mean? This isn’t debatable. The Black Agenda basically feeds off of the idea that if we know that Black life matters, we can address how the climate crisis is affecting Black lives, we can address health inequities, we can address how climate crises are affecting Black lives.

But you have to agree that Black life matters first. If you can’t agree with that fact, then all of the other solutions proposed in the book are moot. The first step is you agreeing that Black people are people.

MUST LISTEN

The Generational Impact of Misinformation

BY SHANNON MELERO

I rarely, if ever, ruminate on how being Puerto Rican might color my understanding of the news or how I even go about absorbing it. But on UNDISTRACTED, one of this week’s guests, Sara Lomax-Reese, said something that hit me like a lizard falling out of a tree in my grandma’s backyard. “We as Black people have been taken advantage of,” she starts. “I mean, we are so ripe for disinformation. That's the real challenge. There is incredible noise and…we are being inundated and saturated with stuff all the time. And you marry that with an education system that does not teach critical thinking, that does not equip [people] with the ability to say, ‘Wait a minute, the government is giving out crack pipes? That doesn’t sound right.’” (There was literally an article in the Washington Free Beacon that falsely claimed the Biden administration was handing out crack pipes to drug addicts. It went viral.)

I had to stop the episode right there because I was so dumbstruck by the idea that my family history—a long line of tobacco and sugar farmers who’ve been in Puerto Rico since the early 1800s as far as I know—could play a role in my inherent mistrust of the "mainstream" media. But it made total sense once I sat with the thought for a moment: after all, misinformation is exactly how the United States acquired Puerto Rico as a colony (yes I said colony, don’t @ me) in 1898 when America promised freedom from Spanish colonization and a different way of life. Misinformation is still causing chasms between island Puerto Ricans and diasporic Puerto Ricans.

When you really think about it, it’s an incredible racket and of course, I thought about it for far too long and fell into a pit of despair about the state of the world. But then, I pressed play again on the podcast and listened to the insight and wonderful work being done by Lomax-Reese and Akoto Ofori-Atta, both of whom created Black- and Brown-led news organizations, URL Media and Capital B respectively, to combat the “mainstream media” (you absolutely must listen to their dissection of the word mainstream).

Get into it here—sorry for any existential dread that ensues.

UNDISTRACTED IS SPONSORED BY:

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