Don't you think I know which door and what it's for?

I had no idea there were Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in attendance at the rally to support trans youth tonight. I think that's fabulous.

At first I didn't see anyone I knew in the crowd. I had mistakenly gotten off the Orange Line at State Street rather than Downtown Crossing, so I was approaching Post Office Square from an unfamiliar and partly conjectural angle and knew I was in the right place mostly because I was suddenly surrounded by signs like "I Stand with Trans Students," "Trans Rights Are Human Rights," "Let My People Go to the Bathroom," and "Donny Knows Dick." There were people wrapped in trans flags and waving them; there were people of every gender presentation, including non-binary and totally indeterminate; the age range spanned queer elders who had evidently been doing this shit for years to parents of school-aged trans children (and trans parents of school-aged children) to toddlers with scribbly, glittery signs. The trees of Post Office Square were lit up purple and there were blue and pink lights in the windows of a building on Pearl Street. I took a blue-and-pink-and-white-striped poster reading "Protect Trans Youth" from a man with a sheaf of them and carried it for the rest of the night. I had a nice exchange with the young trans man next to me and his cis boyfriend who had just bought him some H.G. Wells, as a good boyfriend should; during the portion of the rally when we were encouraged to introduce ourselves to strangers and meet our community, a pink-haired activist from Athens, Georgia and I bonded over our sudden mutual flashback to college orientation. I complimented one protester on his pride flag kippah and another on her trans flag bowtie. (I got compliments on my bisexual unicorn T-shirt.) The executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition expressed his heartfelt appreciation for the couple of hundred people who had shown up on practically no notice to tell the trans youth of Boston and elsewhere that they are not alone; he pointed out the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education on the other side of Congress Street and spoke passionately about intersectionality—making the cogent point that this administration has not just now begun to hurt trans people; trans people who are Black, Muslim, Latinx, and immigrants have already been hurt—and then threw the megaphone open to trans students and teachers, of whom I think my favorite was the tenth-grade trans boy who talked about equality: "We're all human! We're all skeletons!" And then the formal part of the rally broke up into networking and people with signs going off to line both sidewalks of Congress Street, at which point a woman I had met last month at Jewish Voice for Peace came up and greeted me and skygiants, genarti, sandrylene, and teenybuffalo all wandered by at once. I could not participate very loudly in the communal call-and-response, but it was important for me to say the words: When trans youth are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back. When trans rights are being denied, resistance is justified. We're here, we're trans, no walls and no bans. People honked in support as they drove by, smiled out the window, gave thumbs-up, Doppler-cheered. I was told later that one man shouted "Trump! Trump! Trump!" as he drove past, but since I didn't even hear him over the activist chanting, I don't think he won.

I did not expect the rally to turn into a march. I'm not sure the rally was expecting it. But first there were protesters with signs on either side of the street, then there were protesters with signs in the street, then there were protesters with signs walking down the street with the trans flag out front, and by the time we turned the corner on Franklin Street we were definitely a march. The call-and-response widened to include Whose streets? Our streets! Whose city? Our city! and We all got to pee, so let's get free, which I had not heard before. There was a brief logjam at Downtown Crossing which occasioned the only violence I saw all night—a bunch of kids on the sidewalk who didn't care about trans rights but were happy to shout "Fuck Trump!" got into some kind of altercation with one of the older protesters; he got slapped or otherwise physically infringed on, but I saw people taking care of him after the kids ran off—but on the whole bystanders were either visibly supportive or took out their phones in a neutral to approving fashion. We marched up Winter Street; one of the loudest voices in the chants near me belonged to a woman with a white cane. A number of protesters including the Sandry contingent peeled off at Park Street, but I guessed the core of the march was heading for the Massachusetts State House and followed them, which is why there may yet surface some footage of me standing outside the locked front gates of our state house and talking about Bill H.97, although since I couldn't remember the number I just said it was co-sponsored by Christine Barber and designed to protect minors from so-called conversion therapies and had been sitting in committee for over a year and could our state representatives just agree that torturing children is bad and pass the damn thing already? Other people spoke before me, more angrily, more lovingly, and more eloquently: a non-binary trans femme MIT professor who had to leave to grade papers, but first reminded the audience that trans people have always existed, that gender has never been binary (it's so true); a working-class male-presenting trans person with a kerchief over their face because they did not feel safe revealing their identity, talking about class and safety and the need for networks in Boston to help homeless trans people like they had been last summer; the H.G. Wells-buying boyfriend I had met first, doing a much less awkward job than he thought expressing love and support for his boyfriend who had been kicked out of his parents' house for coming out as trans when he was sixteen. People talked about statistics, suicides, bashings, murders. People said things to each other like "I love you; you're beautiful." People chanted hey, hey, ho, ho, white supremacy has got to go. For a while there was a police car spinning its lights over the crowd, but it left without arresting anyone. (I hadn't been confident it would.) There were local news crews at Post Office Square and the State House, which I managed to miss completely. There are some nice photographs here. Around eight o'clock everything broke up quietly and I took the Red Line to Davis and met derspatchel for a very late dinner when he got out of work. My knee is hurting again and I think I spoke more than I have in a week, but it was worth it.

Oh, and I met a trans woman in the bathroom at Walgreen's on my way over to the rally. The worst thing that happened was we were both in a Walgreen's bathroom.

I don't want to be a fascist, I'm not Aryan

In general I don't think that I have experienced a lot of anti-Semitism in my life. There was the famous time in high school when a student asked me if my family celebrated Christmas or Hanukkah and I started to give her a serious answer about my parents' concept of both-ways children before it turned out that she just hadn't wanted to sound racist by saying that she thought I was Jewish because of my nose (I got to tell her that the nose was from my father's Welsh-Irish Catholic side of the family) and the awkward time at Yale where I found myself being consulted as an authority on Judaism despite coming from a minimally observant family and having absolutely no ability to explain the decision-making process behind Israel's foreign and domestic policies (yes, technically I could apply for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, but I certainly don't have it now and anyway it wouldn't make me an automatic member of the Knesset) and the intermittent, unsurprising displeasure of encountering stereotypes in various media (never do things like a Nazi Assyriologist, E. Nesbit!). I've had slurs applied to me, of course, but never by anyone who had power over me or whose opinion I valued. I've never found swastikas drawn on my door. No one ever dropped by my office hours to see if I had horns.

And yet somewhere I seem to have picked up the idea that to talk about anti-Semitism as a Jew is somehow in bad taste. It is tacky. It is greedy. It is in some essential way false. It is taking attention away from people who are really marginalized and making the conversation all about my people and their special pleading. Seriously, why do Jews always need to make themselves out as the victims? There hasn't been a Holocaust for more than seventy years. The world said never again. You've had all the privilege ever since. Can't you let it go? But Israel! And so despite all the recent and blatant fuckery like the White House's soft-pedaled Holocaust denial (Deborah Lipstadt literally wrote the book on that) or the vandalization of the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in St. Louis (Linda Sarsour and Tarek El-Messidi have raised $115,000 and counting in repair money) or Sean Spicer scolding the Anne Frank Center for not being impressed by 45's quarter-assed admission that anti-Semitism is bad (the Anne Frank Center drilled him a new one), I realized that every time I post publicly about some manifestation of anti-Semitism in America, I am waiting to check my comments and find someone deploring me for characteristically calling out only Jewish causes and ignoring all the other, more pressing forms of racism in the world. I am waiting for friends to write me off and feel a little sorry that I turned out not to be capable of intersectional social justice after all. derspatchel listened to me and said, "You're afraid they're going to All Lives Matter you."

Which I think means that I have actually experienced quite a lot of anti-Semitism in my life. Just in a sort of sideways, impersonal, radioactive way, where nobody said any one thing and I still got sleeted through with this sense that being a responsible Jew in a majority non-Jewish society means behaving as though anti-Semitism is not a living problem or exists only in parenthesis of the many ways people can be horrible to one another. It's all right to agree if a non-Jew draws attention to it; it's letting the side down if you say something yourself. On no account suggest that anything is uniquely experienced by Jews. Nobody wants to hear that Chosen shtick. I am pretty sure this is pernicious bullshit. (Now that I write it out, it is pernicious bullshit that reminds me strikingly of the Obama-era figment of a post-racial America, where God forbid anyone should suggest that the presence of a Black man in our highest elected office was not in fact a magical panacea for ongoing centuries of institutional racism.) It's just pernicious bullshit that kicks up my blood pressure on a basis that is more frequent than it should be and I am annoyed that it's in my head. I don't even know that I can blame it on Tiny Wittgenstein. Real-life Wittgenstein went around Cambridge one night after the institution of the Nuremberg Laws apologizing to his colleagues for not having told them that he was Jewish (according to the Nazis, anyway: he had three Jewish grandparents, but since the non-Jewish one was his mother's mother, the rule of matrilineal descent put him out of the running as far as halakhah was concerned), but I've always had the sense that confused them more than anything else.

Nota bene: this post is not in any way informed by my experiences at the trans youth support rally last night. Everyone there was awesome. I started noticing the anxiety shortly after the election when swastikas started flying like wild blueberry muffins, but it took until a few days ago for the specific issue to articulate itself. I spent a couple of days wondering if I should put up a post at all or if that would only let me in for exactly the kind of criticism I've been afraid of—who died and left you a persecution complex? I finally decided that my friendlist is not composed of terrible human beings.