I Received the Fake Transgender Mailer, and It Was Actually … Nice?

As has been reported in The New Republic and elsewhere, households across Texas were recently treated to a slick, full-color mailer from the “Texas Transgender Student Union.” In reality, the sender is a Wyoming-registered LLC with undisclosed owners that first sprang into existence about a month ago. I received my trans brochure last Tuesday, just in time for early voting.

The uninitiated should be aware that these mailings aren’t targeted toward people seeking LGBTQ+ information or support. They instead appear to be a deceptive ploy to incite the ire of socially conservative recipients who might otherwise be insufficiently motivated to vote for a scandal-plagued GOP Senate candidate and an incumbent party that has utterly failed to benefit most Texans’ lives. Very broadly distributed in the state and stamped with a phony return address, the mailings have been traced to a printing company with conservative ties and have already incited a criminal forgery investigation to determine the real identity of the sender. (A judge recently ordered that the people behind the mailer be revealed, but the state Supreme Court reversed that.)

The mailer is embellished with attractive queer-coded images and addressed to “Students of the ___ Family” (inserting the family’s surname). It includes brief sections on “what to do if your parents don’t support you” and “what if I want to be emancipated,” as well as announcing a “Trans Texas Takeover Fall Tour.” In other words, it appears to be carefully tailored rage-bait for those who worry that the Dems are gearing up to abduct and transgender your kids.

The most intriguing, or damning, aspect of the flyer is that it largely mirrors the kind of schmaltzy and encouraging literature that one might actually find at a campus support center. “You don’t need to have everything figured out,” it reassures the reader. “You don’t have to know whether you’re definitely trans. You don’t have to decide about hormones or surgery right now.… Your job right now is to stay safe, find people who will listen to you, and give yourself time to figure out who you really are.”

It then goes on to tell the reader that it’s possible to find help and support “even if your family doesn’t accept you as you are.” The “scandalous” elements don’t extend much beyond that. It provides the names and websites of various real human rights organizations, including the ACLU of Texas, Lambda Legal, and most prominently the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT, (which has denied any involvement with the mailer).

“You are not alone,” the brochure emphasizes in large type. “You don’t have to figure everything out by yourself.” Another section mentions (probably accurately) that TENT can provide Texans with information on handling issues such as bathroom use, bullying, and harassment, and “connecting trans kids and families with resources.”

This is the part where I suspect some TNR readers who reside in more bucolic environs might be asking themselves, What on earth is wrong with that? And even more confusingly, why would right-wingers, by all appearances, be spending millions of dollars to provide this rather anodyne consciousness-raising service for us?

I’d invite such readers to close your eyes and imagine the tense stillness that falls over a cluttered dinner table as a father lifts the brightly colored pink and blue flyer, his jaw tight with anger, his voice rising as his hand punctuates each word: “What. In. The. Ever-living. Hell. Is. THIS?! Would someone like to tell me why we’re getting this? Anyone? Hello?” I invite you to consider the acid in the pit of the stomach, the paralysis that seizes your arms, the lowered eyes, perhaps the quick stammered denial, “Dad, I have no idea; I didn’t …” Then perhaps the tentative maternal intervention: “Honey, I’m sure it’s nothing. Can we just eat dinner? Please?” Or perhaps you can envision the manager’s smirk as he tosses a copy at your feet as you clock in: “Hey bud, looks like we got something for ya.” (Har har.) Or worse—the interlocutor who says nothing at all, who simply looks at the flyer coldly, then at you, and makes a silent decision. There’s nothing nice at all about the scenes that are likely playing out around this small colorful pamphlet across the state.

Because you know, most people in this country do not live in a world where everything turns out OK in the end. Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what exactly your gender or sexuality might be—many Texans who seem different in some way, who might be regarded as suspicious in a vaguely gendered fashion, just had their profile raised. Not by their choice, not in their desired time and context. And for many people that can be dangerous.

Continue with this leap of the sociological imagination, considering an environment that I hope may be very different from your own. Perhaps it becomes easier to intuit the smirking aims of our mysterious pamphlet-maker. Sure, this kind of bizarre double-dealing stunt to manipulate the electorate is par for the course for Republicans: One might trace its lineage to other queer-tinged debacles of years past, including the notorious “inoculate the herd” incident (for which you’ll just have to click the link; you wouldn’t believe me if I tried to tell you). Proceeding with an impressive degree of sociopathic creativity, and an odd fixation on other people’s sexuality and gender, the fake mailer stunt is part of a Machiavellian pattern that might lead one to suspect a bemused contempt for voters and a deep-seated lack of integrity among certain political circles.

Sending out this type of flyer does more than rile up the conservative voters, however. It also crystallizes and exacerbates issues of difference within people’s personal lives in a way that can provide both an impetus and a justification for inhumanity. Someone who doesn’t have a lot of material resources and needs to navigate issues of queerness or other personal differences in a hostile environment has to move carefully. There are ways to handle it, to manage relationships, and to work toward a better situation. Getting an unrequested, brightly colored “TRANS & LGBTQ+ STUDENT RESOURCE GUIDE” dropped on your family’s doorstep is not one of those ways. For this reason and many others, such personalized outreach has seldom been a part of real LGBTQ+ advocacy.

But let me return to the fact that a presumably right-wing agent has been spending serious cash to widely distribute information that is nearly identical to actual LGBTQ+ support literature. Why are they doing this? It seems they think it will benefit them politically and socially. This is where would-be allies who are not living in small-town Texas might want to take notice. Because the context in which such material is encountered matters tremendously, and the politics of representation and visibility and identity may not play out the same way in every community. Advocacy that focuses on visible representation and social encouragement might not always have positive outcomes—in fact, it can be ephemeral, alienating, easily co-opted, and at times more beneficial to organizers than to those who must live in its long shadow.

Observers more knowledgeable than myself have noted that since the 1980s, organized LGBTQ+ advocacy and organized right-wing intolerance have gathered strength in tandem, functioning as “perfect enemies,” while not affecting all regions or individuals evenly. A great deal of such advocacy is well intentioned and deeply felt, under the theory that outspokenness and/or visibility will generate a kind of trickle-down acceptance. But the reality is that greater familiarity often breeds contempt—or in this case, more rigorously ideological hatred and downstream backlash that can pose a tremendous danger to those who don’t have a healthy 401(k). And sometimes it can be much too easy for advocates who have been able to build secure lives to forget this, especially if they are not LGBTQ+ themselves.

The fake flyer tells us something further: It clarifies what the opponents of human rights actually fear. They don’t fear the conversations, the advocacy, the confrontation, the corporate tokenism, the smarmy messages of support, the slick magazines, or the visibility. Probably not even the gay cruise ships. That is all just grist for the mill. What they do fear is stated right there in the scary pamphlet: emancipation. What they fear is that everyone could gain the practical freedom and stability to live our lives in accordance with our own desires and aspirations. In this case, the particular boogeyman is 17-year-olds who may seek to be emancipated from their parents’ control (a situation that is vanishingly rare and requires a court order along with demonstrated financial self-sufficiency; good luck getting that as a trans/queer youth in Texas). More broadly speaking, they fear the emancipation of low-wage workers, of wives, of heirs, of everyone who is staying in a harmful and unhappy situation because they perceive no feasible alternative.

It is the fear that people may gain the ability to build relations based on consent and respect rather than on desperation and domination. The fear that people may become stable and independent enough to tell abusive relatives, partners, or bosses to go fuck themselves.

Many conservatives can’t help but perceive such prospective emancipation, chimerical as it may be, as a threat carried by outside influences. That isn’t just rhetoric for them; it’s the fundamental logic behind this mailer. It is why they readily expect that a pamphlet describing “community,” “support,” “acceptance,” and “information” will be read as coercive intervention. It’s because coercive control is all they know; the only kind of relationship or community they can imagine. The prospect that a serf may become an autonomous human being with rights, desires, and security is not merely loathsome, it is inconceivable. Serfs cannot make choices; they can only be stolen. Perhaps deep down, many conservatives suspect that if everyone were to gain the genuine ability to live independently, then exploitative and toxic relationships would become unsustainable.

So if screaming nonbinary paeans from the rooftops is not always the most effective answer, what can well-meaning friends do to help? What can Democrats do to help? What do LGBTQ+ folks really need to live a life that is satisfying and secure? Well, it’s the same thing that everyone else needs and should be guaranteed for that purpose—in a word, money. Combined with a robust rights regime, of course; but despite our ongoing challenges in the area of rights, in the U.S. today it is still primarily the money that keeps people trapped in harmful situations and that most prevents freedom, rights, and flourishing from being realized. It’s about the basics: ownership of one’s abode, food on the table, access to reasonably good-quality medical care. Knowing that whatever else happens, you can count on having a bit in the bank account each month; enough to move forward.

It’s the predictable financial stability that allows a person to live free as their conscience dictates, to escape abusive circumstances and toxic jobs, to have genuine leverage when dealing with those who seek to mistreat us. With that, everything else becomes possible. Without it, advocacy can start to feel a lot like an incitement of pointless, loud, self-serving conflicts in which us peons just become casualties on the field, taunted with everything we can never have.