David Davis 43, part 6
what does an emergency feel like?
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5
The first Trump election traumatized people, including the dyke I was dating at the time. Anticipating Clinton’s victory that Tuesday night, she and I turned down friends’ invitations to go drinking, opting instead to stay in for backgammon and MSNBC.
I remember the moment, if not the electoral details, when it became clear that Hillary was going to lose. In shock, I began laughing. My ex, whose preferred method of managing fear was to scapegoat me, picked a fight—how dare I make light of something so serious? That night, she didn’t sleep, and was angry that I could.
The following week, I talked it over in therapy: the funereal vibes of post-Obama Oakland, the spontaneous combustion of my straight coworkers’ romantic relationships1, the killing of what would have been my first piece in The Atlantic because the news cycle had completely shit the bed2. I didn’t feel traumatized by Trump’s win, like some seemed or claimed to be, but I was distressed. When I brought this up with my therapist, however, her response surprised me.
Though I liked my therapist, when I first began seeing her I felt our sessions were sometimes more difficult than necessary. While she was queer, she had only ever been in relationships with cis men, and it showed. She sometimes misgendered me3. Her approach to my experiences with sex work could be unintentionally stigmatizing or alienating. But over the years together, her willingness to be direct with me about my own micro-aggressions, fed by my racism or anti-fat bias, taught me that I could be direct with her in return. To use some more therapy-speak, she facilitated a safe space for difference, error, and repair, maintaining her own boundaries while supporting the slow rewiring of my modus operandi: codependency, passive-aggression, and self-harm as regulation. Instead of crushing my feelings like an empty Lacroix can, I began speaking up when she upset or angered me. Instead of ghosting when her perspective and experiences as a fat black cis woman made me uncomfortable—or even revealed things about me that I didn’t want to think about—I kept coming back4.
I walked into my session that day assuming my therapist would feel like I did, if not worse. Because if I, as a white person, was this shaken by the Trump election, then she, as a black person, must be even more so, right? She laughed at me.
I wish I’d written down what she said so I wouldn’t have to paraphrase 2.5 presidencies later, but the gist was that while white people were freaking out, none of our fears were new for black people. While Trump’s win (powered in part by the votes of white women—my cohort, give or take a pronoun circle) was not in any way good news for her or those she cared about, her feelings of anger, frustration, and fear predated the system of which Trump was merely the most recent, and controversial, figurehead. These feelings weren’t the result of resignation or fatalism. They came from a deeper familiarity with the crisis that me, my girlfriend, and the weeping white women at my work were encountering in a very different way.
Much of the hysteria over Trump came from liberals for whom a Clinton win would have been the preferred outcome, instead of the lesser (or at least, less effectual) of two evils. I knew he was a feature, not a bug, but I had not before felt—in my body, at this intensity—the proximity of the political attachments he represented and empowered. The election was another reminder that the institutions of debt, austerity, policing, and incarceration that threatened me, some from further afield than others, had had other neighborhoods, cities, camps, and countries for their first proving ground.
One of my therapist’s goals for me was to learn how to differentiate between dysregulation and emergency; to internalize that discomfort, obsession, even a panic attack, are not intolerable, much less mortal perils; to understand that fear is not the same thing as danger (and that danger does not always evoke a proportionate fear response).
This difference matters for me, as a person, because the stress caused by chronic dysregulation is awful for your health and feels like total shit. And it matters for me, as someone in community, because it is on this basis of this difference that we build solidarity. Government policies designed to eliminate trans people from public life affect me, but they affect trans people who are women, children, living in a red state, of color, poor, or incarcerated more acutely and seriously. To be aware of one’s own risk, in this schema, is not privilege-checking, which is a mostly useless exercise, but reality-checking. I am exposed to this danger; I can access that power. What am I going to do with that information?
Like Trump’s election, that conversation with my therapist was another sporadic lesson in the long education that, for me, began with the Occupy movement: if I feel emergency incoming, that means it’s already in its afterlife.
My second novel, X, was born in a fantasy, but probably not the one you’d expect if you’ve read it. Around the time of the Trump election, the beginning of my medical transition, and my belated first foray into Christopher Isherwood, I began to think about leaving this country, despite knowing that this desire could never be fulfilled. I’m not unique in this—most of us can’t leave, as if the best-case scenario of emigration is a guarantee, anyway5. I took the resulting fear, frustration, and sense of encroaching danger that this fantasy produced (or expressed?) and shared it with my protagonist, Lee.
Both X and my other novel, the earthquake room, are often described as speculative or dystopian fiction. If you go to a bookstore that stocks them, you might find them in the sci-fi or fantasy sections, if they haven’t been relegated to the gay corner6. This makes sense. They both radiate bad vibes—anxiety, dissociation, misanthropy, compulsion—and take place “five minutes in the future” (despite the chronological generality of the adjective and its distinction from post-apocalyptic, dystopian fiction often seems to be set in certain stylized notions of future), while being preoccupied with themes like the 24-hour news cycle, being chronically online, body horror, surveillance culture, and fascistic political violence.
While I understand why this happens, my blanket response to these categorizations has been to insist that I’m not attempting to predict anything. My novels are closer to portraits than extrapolations: almost everything that can be found inside them has already happened, or is already happening, to somebody somewhere. I’m not creative enough to come up with new horrors myself, or maybe I would be writing fantasy or sci-fi, instead of the little-F fantasy you often find in this newsletter.
The fantasy of leaving the States (or merely one’s state) isn’t just about escape from political persecution. It’s also about knowing the right thing to do at the right time; about knowing when to stay and fight, and when you’re licked; about being able to distinguish between dysregulation and emergency. Being transsexual, here and now, is frightening. Like being out in public—when you can’t know you’re in danger until it’s too late—every succeeding news article about the state-down punishment of our most vulnerable, especially our children, forces you to ask yourself if the emergency is happening yet. The answer, which doesn’t do much to clarify things, is yes and no.
Sometimes bad news just washes over me. Sometimes it makes me delete Twitter. Sometimes it sends me to bed, or someone else’s bed. Sometimes I do something. I started writing this newsletter after the Associated Press announced Stylebook updates regarding the use of the term TERF. For some reason, the AP’s timing, framing, and focus on TERFs among the many updates to its Transgender Topical Guide (click through the epic ratio to learn more) made me feel more angry and afraid than it probably should have. This item is no tipping point, but it is another ill bodement for sleepless nights.
When is the line crossed? For other people, for me? I don’t know.
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Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of this series. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
If you were familiar with any hetero liberals at the time, you knew at least one man who slept on the couch for a week or two—straight people were going through it!
With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that the film review that never was wasn’t very good, and nor is The Atlantic, so in this sense Donny did me a favor.
At this point in my life, it would take only one single incident of misgendering for me to fire a therapist. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again, lol. In 2016, however, misgendering was more normalized and my self-esteem was shit. I was also paying a mere $20/session for a well-meaning, more-or-less trans-informed mental healthcare provider who didn’t think kink or prostitution disqualified me from compassionate support. Was I going to walk away from that?
Years later, when my insurance company tried to deny my corrective top surgery mere days before my date (my surgeon’s office admin told me they’d never had to fight so hard for a covered transgender procedure), this therapist overnighted one of the letters I needed to get approval.
And many will arrive here under desperate circumstances only to be victimized by the mechanisms that some Americans are seeking to flee.
I will be cunty about being a token but I will not be cunty about the magnificent kindliness of booksellers, especially the queer and trans ones, who have helped people find my books. I love them!
This feels so familiar, both from the Brexit experience (all those articles about it causing relationship break-ups and ideologically divied family Christmases...) and the onset of the pandemic. While most people seemed traumatised to some degree, there was a huge distinction in how disabled and non-disabled people reacted.
Non-disabled people faced an abrupt and unprecedented isolation and lost their autonomy, plus aspects of their identity deriving from in-person work. Chronically ill people were also deeply shaken, and many more of us were even more isolated and had a higher risk of death, but we had coping mechanisms to share now that other people were experiencing marginalisation that echoed ours.
But it was the political reaction that really showed the difference in lived experience: healthy people realised for the first time that their government was wilfully building policy that could kill them. And we, the disabled survivors of Welfare Reform and Tory austerity, said: "We've been telling you."
As to therapy, it's honestly encouraging to hear someone else say they're managing to alter a chronically dysregulated nervous system over time. I've also been lucky in finding a therapy situation where we can discuss problems that come up, and find the lesson in them, but the nervous system stuff is some real slow going.