Every once a while I encounter a quote that brings me up short and helps reframe how I see the world. Such was the case when I came across this quote by Theodor Adorno as I researched the rise of Nazi Germany and the origins of the Holocaust: “A wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”
Adorno meant it as a critique of life under capitalism, but out of context, I interpreted it to mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (Jewish, Sinti, disabled), nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good ones,” or being life worthy of life. No matter their character, achievements, or capability, a “wrong life” can have only a negative value to society. The only way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum to zero on both sides.
This thought stopped me in my tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it explained everything I was both feeling and seeing over the past year. It was the grand unification theorem of my inner world and explained what I was seeing that was external to me.
I am wrong life in the United States. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter. Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication. Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the content of our character and not by government fiat that people like me are incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that ultimately decided I must be destroyed.
I’m being kicked out of the National Guard. I can’t legally use a public bathroom on federal property or at most airports. As a veteran, I have a free pass onto national parks that I effectively can never use because I’m wrong life. I will never be able to work in my field again because I am wrong life. At the VA, the only treatments I can receive are essentially reeducation—namely, unwanted therapy and medical treatment aimed at detransition.
I spent decades of my life as a service member, and in my final years I chose to be a MEDEVAC pilot to save people rather than kill them. I volunteered as a superhero cosplayer to raise money for desperately ill children and their families. I spent my summer flying as a firefighter, saving ranches owned by Trump donors, properties owned by the Mormon Church, and Bible camps run by people who would never let people like me attend.
I went on to fly air ambulance helicopters in one of the reddest parts of the country while awaiting my Canadian permanent residency paperwork. When I was flying people around who needed urgent medical care quickly, I could take a pretty good guess that they were likely the sort of people who voted for Trump and would happily support “putting all those transgenders in mental institutions where they belong.” But they couldn’t because they were intubated, and I was busy flying them to a better hospital, regardless of what they might think of me.
But none of it matters. My government, and the people who voted it into office, have declared me wrong life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the president explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life; it was a feature and not a bug. His campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting the idea that anyone who doesn’t want wrong life eliminated is against the Herrenvolk. It was messaging straight out of the Nazi playbook, just targeting a different group.
At the same time, this sentence helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust than other civil rights atrocities in American history. At the end of the day in that history, for most other marginalized groups, it was still possible to be one of “the good ones.” For Black people, there was room for acceptance of those who “knew their place.” Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy. Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater of Operations. Hispanics and Latinos were long used for their labor or valued as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other Americans’, but it wasn’t a negative number.
Mine is.
And that’s the fundamental difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as noncitizens of the Reich than previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place” as second-class citizens.
The Adorno quote snapped into place why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of German history than within that of the United States. It’s also the most useful framework for understanding why Republicans around the country are targeting transgender people with literally over 1,000 bills per year designed to make life impossible enough that they either emigrate, detransition, or live in a country (this one) where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.
They see us as wrong life. And even those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is the dark side of politics: It looks like the quick and easy path to power to take this position in public. Any Republican who does not behave as if transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party, and away from the levers of power. Democrats and hospital administrators in blue states aren’t generally willing to enforce their own civil rights laws for fear of the federal government and the belief that transgender people aren’t worth the effort of protecting.
I have expressed some of these frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of, “Well, I don’t think of you that way.” While I am appreciative of such support, people saying this simply doesn’t matter since they have no institutional power. My own sense of self-worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.
Not to put too fine a point on it, my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is meaningless if I’m spending my last moments holding my breath and trying to claw my way through concrete with my fingernails while taking a “shower” with 100 strangers. All it provides is a further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared us to be “wrong life.”
If this seems like exaggeration: It’s not. One of the cruelest ironies is that my friends and I constantly receive messages that are some variation of “Kill yourself, tranny faggot,” sent by the same sorts of people who five years ago smugly informed us that “all lives matter.” The world’s first trillionaire routinely brags about “killing the woke mind virus” on his own social media platform.
Only the government’s opinion matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in their eyes. That incumbent party has made it clear it intends to remain in power in perpetuity at any cost, no matter how people vote. I would always be wrong life if I remained in the United States. The only way to change the equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can have some value greater than zero.
I want my life to have a positive value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a relief it was when I did not have to spend every waking moment aware of being wrong life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, it’s being in a constant state of sadness, betrayal, and futility at the possibility of leading a life that matters.
