I have a Facebook friend I've known for many years. Well, known on Facebook. We've never actually met in person. He's a gay man from the Midwest, Ohio, I think, and we've been having something resembling a political argument for the better part of a week.
I say resembling because an argument generally involves two people discussing the same fucking subject.
My position is pretty simple. I believe in liberty. You know, that radical notion that we should all be free to live our fucking lives without the almighty Eye of Washington staring through our living room windows, checking to make sure we're behaving according to whatever political ideology happens to be fashionable this week.
Apparently, this position is somehow an affront to his belief that the queer community should be treated equally and fairly under the law.
Which is interesting, because I don't think those two positions are mutually exclusive.
In fact, I know they're fucking not.
But here's the neat thing about ideological circles: they demand conformity. Because that's what freedom is, right? Freedom means you get to live your life however you want, provided you believe exactly what I believe, vote exactly how I vote, and express the appropriate level of outrage whenever I tell you to.
I think I read that somewhere in American history.
Four score and a couple of years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in ideological conformity and dedicated to the proposition that everybody must agree with me or they're a fucking idiot.
Or something like that.
You know that was sarcasm, right?
Now, in my friend's defense, when he first knew me, I was a liberal.
Not a little liberal. Not some wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road Democrat who occasionally crossed party lines.
I was a hardcore, card-carrying, fucking Democrat.
When I first came out as transgender, I was attending college and finding my place in the LGBT community. And quite frankly, I was desperate for acceptance. After spending so much of my life trying to figure out who I was, here was a community that welcomed me, understood me, and offered me something I'd been missing for a very long time.
Belonging.
And along with that belonging came a political ideology.
I swallowed it whole.
Hook, line, and fucking sinker.
I adopted the talking points. I defended the party. I repeated the arguments. And because I was going to college, studying political science, and paying attention to current affairs, I convinced myself that I was intellectually superior to the people on the other side of the political aisle.
I knew things, goddammit.
I understood politics.
Those conservatives? A bunch of ignorant, backwards-thinking fools who couldn't possibly understand the complexities of modern society.
Yeah.
I was that fucking person.
And here's the thing. At the time, I genuinely believed everything I was saying. I wasn't knowingly being dishonest. I had simply confused belonging to a political community with thinking independently.
I had replaced one set of expectations about who I was supposed to be with another.
For years, I defended the Democratic Party. When conservative friends warned me that Democrats were coming for their guns, I'd roll my eyes.
Really? Because I've been alive for a while, and nobody has shown up at my door demanding my firearms. Nobody has confiscated my guns. Nobody has told me I have to surrender the weapons I've owned for years.
What the fuck are you people so afraid of?
And for a long time, Democratic politicians would insist they weren't interested in taking away people's guns.
But during the Obama years, something changed in the political conversation. Democratic politicians became increasingly open about advocating bans on certain classes of firearms, particularly weapons they labeled assault weapons.
And that pissed me the fuck off.
Because I grew up around firearms.
I grew up with a pistol on my side and a shotgun or rifle in the car. Hell, when I was younger, there were hunting rifles sitting in vehicles in the school fucking parking lot. We used to bring deer rifles into school for show and tell.
Imagine that happening today.
But firearms weren't some mysterious, terrifying objects in my world. They were tools. They were part of everyday life. They came with responsibilities, and we were expected to understand those responsibilities.
And suddenly, the political party I believed stood for working people, equality, and individual rights was advocating restrictions on a right explicitly protected by the Constitution.
I couldn't reconcile that.
Now, you can argue about which firearms should be regulated and how. People have been doing that for decades. But I found myself confronting a much more fundamental question.
If I believed government shouldn't interfere with my right to live as a transgender woman, how could I simultaneously support government interfering with somebody else's constitutionally protected liberties simply because those liberties made people in my political circle uncomfortable?
Where exactly was the principle?
Was liberty something I believed in?
Or was it something I believed in only when it benefited people like me?
That question started bothering the absolute fuck out of me.
And once I started asking it, I couldn't stop.
I began stepping away from the political circles I'd surrounded myself with and doing some serious soul-searching.
What did I actually believe?
Not what my friends believed. Not what the Democratic Party believed. Not what the LGBT community expected me to believe.
What did I believe?
And I kept coming back to the same fucking conclusion.
Liberty.
That was it.
That was the principle I'd been looking for.
Our founding fathers certainly weren't perfect. They wrote about liberty while allowing slavery to exist. Women weren't treated as political equals. The country spent generations failing to live up to its own founding ideals.
But the principle itself?
The idea that individuals possess rights that government doesn't get to arbitrarily take away?
That government exists to protect those rights rather than grant them as privileges?
That's some pretty fucking powerful stuff.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that many of the political arguments tearing this country apart become considerably less complicated when you start with individual liberty instead of partisan loyalty.
Women's rights?
Liberty.
Gay rights? Transgender rights? Equality under the law?
Liberty.
Abortion?
That's between a woman and her doctor. Government has no fucking business inserting itself into that relationship.
Transgender medical care?
Same fucking answer.
Freedom of speech?
Absolutely. Even when somebody says something I find offensive, stupid, or downright reprehensible.
The right to own firearms?
Also protected. And no, I don't suddenly stop believing in constitutional rights because somebody in my political circle doesn't like guns.
Property rights? Personal responsibility? Freedom of association?
Liberty, liberty, and more fucking liberty.
And here's the beautiful part.
I don't have to twist myself into ideological knots trying to explain why government should stay out of my bedroom but somehow belongs in somebody else's gun safe.
I don't have to pretend that government overreach is tyranny when Republicans do it but compassionate public policy when Democrats do it.
I can simply apply the same principle.
To everybody.
Even people I don't particularly fucking like.
And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't a Democrat anymore.
I was a libertarian.
Not because somebody handed me a new collection of talking points. Not because I found another political tribe to join.
Because I'd finally started examining the principles behind my beliefs instead of accepting the conclusions somebody else had already reached.
Around that same period of my life, I got tired of Facebook and all the political grandstanding, the performative outrage, and the endless arguments that accomplished absolutely fucking nothing.
So I left.
And while I was gone, life happened.
A whole fucking lot of life.
There was a pandemic.
I worked. A lot.
Oh, and somewhere in there, I fucking died three times.
That'll give a person something to think about.
Then, just when I might have thought life was settling down, I got mowed down by a fucking car while riding my motorcycle and spent the better part of a year trying to put myself back together.
There were hospitals, surgeries, recovery, and the rather unpleasant business of confronting my own mortality yet again.
And through all of it, I kept thinking.
About life. About freedom. About what matters. About how much of our existence we waste trying to satisfy other people's expectations.
Eventually, I started writing.
Books. Blogs. Personal essays. All the things that had been rattling around in my head for years, demanding to get out.
And because I'm now trying to build a career as an author, I reluctantly returned to Facebook.
New account. New chapter of my life.
Same fucking circus.
Except something interesting happened.
Some of the people who knew me years ago apparently expected me to come back as exactly the same person who'd left.
The same beliefs. The same politics. The same ideological loyalties.
As though I'd spent all those years sitting in a dark room, patiently waiting for Facebook to become relevant to my life again.
No growth. No evolution. No reconsideration of my beliefs.
Just the same card-carrying liberal transgender woman they remembered.
And when they discovered that wasn't who I was anymore?
Well, apparently, that's a fucking problem.
Which brings me back to my Facebook friend.
We've been going back and forth over my recent writing about government, corruption, political parties, and the erosion of individual liberty.
My argument has been that both major political parties participate in a system that increasingly serves political power, financial interests, and institutional self-preservation rather than the American people.
His responses have focused largely on Donald Trump, recent election results, and the importance of Democratic victories.
And that's fine.
He's entitled to his opinions.
But here's where things get interesting.
Yesterday, I was at the Sage & Ink Book Festival, trying to sell my books, meet readers, and get my fledgling author career off the fucking ground.
You know.
Working.
On a Saturday.
And while I was doing that, my Facebook friend was apparently busy tagging me in political posts.
First, a post about people leaving MAGA, asking whether I'd read their stories and suggesting I should have an open mind.
Then he returned to an earlier argument about election results, despite previously announcing that continuing the conversation was pointless.
And finally, he tagged me in a story about Trump supposedly offering UFC president Dana White a job as White House press secretary.
His question?
“Do you condone this?! Yes or no question.”
Followed by another comment.
“No complications. No extraneous bullshit. Yes or no.”
Oh, for fuck's sake.
I was selling books.
I wasn't sitting at home waiting for somebody to administer a fucking political loyalty examination.
And here's the thing that really gets me.
I have never claimed to be a Trump supporter.
I have never claimed to be MAGA.
I have never suggested that Donald Trump should be immune from criticism.
In fact, I've spent a considerable amount of time writing about why I distrust the political establishment, regardless of which party happens to be running the show.
But somehow, because I refuse to embrace the Democratic Party as the solution to every political problem in America, I'm apparently expected to answer for Donald Trump's every move.
As though there are only two possible positions in American politics.
You're either with us or you're with them.
Pick a fucking side.
No complications. No extraneous bullshit.
Well, here's my answer: Fuck that.
I'm not interested in being assigned a political identity based on somebody else's inability to imagine a world beyond the two-party system.
And I'm especially not interested in being told what I must believe because I'm transgender.
I spent too many years trying to become comfortable with who I am to start allowing other people to dictate what goes on inside my fucking head.
Which brings me to another fascinating bit of hypocrisy.
I've encountered plenty of politically engaged people who love to invoke education as evidence of intellectual superiority.
They'll dismiss opposing viewpoints as ignorant, uninformed, or the product of people who simply don't understand how the world works.
But when I mention that I have a degree in political science and came within three courses of completing a nuclear engineering degree, those credentials suddenly don't seem to matter very much.
Interesting how that works.
Apparently, education is evidence of intelligence when it produces the conclusions you agree with.
When it doesn't?
Well, clearly, the educated person must have gotten something wrong.
And don't misunderstand me. A degree doesn't make somebody right. I've met plenty of educated idiots, and I've met plenty of brilliant people who never set foot inside a university classroom.
But shouldn't an education in political science suggest that I might occasionally think about political systems?
That I might examine the relationship between government power and individual rights?
That I might question political institutions, study competing philosophies, and arrive at conclusions that don't neatly fit into somebody else's preferred ideological box?
Isn't that what education is supposed to encourage?
Independent thought?
Or is education simply a process of learning the approved answers and repeating them loudly enough that everybody else eventually shuts the fuck up?
Because if that's what we're doing, we've confused education with indoctrination.
And I know a little something about that.
I participated in it.
I spent years mistaking political agreement for intellectual enlightenment.
I thought I had all the answers because I belonged to the right political crowd.
And eventually, I had to confront the uncomfortable possibility that I hadn't been thinking nearly as independently as I believed.
That wasn't an easy realization.
It required admitting that I'd been wrong about some things.
It required questioning people I respected.
It required accepting that some of my friends might not particularly appreciate the conclusions I was reaching.
But I did it anyway.
Because what the fuck is the point of having a brain if you're not willing to use it?
And here's where I think the real hypocrisy lives.
We spend an enormous amount of time talking about tolerance, acceptance, diversity, and the freedom to be ourselves.
Beautiful concepts.
I'm rather fond of them, actually.
But apparently, for some people, diversity ends at the edge of political ideology.
You can be gay. You can be transgender. You can be whatever you want to be
Just don't you fucking dare disagree with the political beliefs we've decided you're supposed to have.
Because then you're a problem.
Then you need to be challenged, corrected, interrogated, and dragged back into the ideological fold.
And I'm sorry, but that's not fucking freedom.
That's conformity wearing a rainbow flag.
Now, I don't expect my friend to agree with me.
I don't expect him to abandon his beliefs because mine have changed. I don't expect him to stop criticizing Trump, or to suddenly embrace libertarianism, or to decide that everything I've written is brilliant.
Hell, I don't even expect him to like my political opinions.
But I do expect to be allowed to have them.
And I reserve the right to explain them in my own words, with all the complications and extraneous bullshit that actual independent thought sometimes requires.
Because politics isn't a fucking football game.
There isn't a scoreboard that determines which political philosophy is correct based on how many seats one party won in the latest election.
These are questions about how we live, how we govern ourselves, and how much authority we're willing to surrender over our own lives.
That's serious shit.
And it deserves more than partisan cheerleading and demands for yes-or-no answers.
I'm not the woman I was twenty years ago.
Thank fucking God.
I've lived. I've learned. I've loved. I've made mistakes. I've changed my mind. I've survived things I wouldn't wish on anybody, and I've had more than a few opportunities to contemplate just how short this whole fucking experience called life can be.
And through all of that, I've become increasingly convinced that the most important thing any of us can do is figure out who we actually are.
Not who our political party wants us to be.
Not who our friends expect us to be.
Not who the people who claim to speak for our communities insist we must be.
Who we are.
I didn't come out as transgender, fight to live authentically, and survive everything life has thrown at me just to crawl into another fucking closet because somebody doesn't approve of my political beliefs.
I didn't fight this hard to become myself just to let somebody else tell me who the fuck I'm supposed to be.
And if my political evolution makes some of my old friends uncomfortable?
Well.
I guess they'll just have to fucking evolve, too.
