everything i know about genocide

content/trigger warnings: discussions of genocide, transphobia, poverty, segregation, settler colonialism, white supremacy, murder (lynching), Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Kurdism, homelessness, substance use, mental health, misogyny, suicidal ideation, police/state violence, illness (cancer), death, and grief

Early in the year, someone I know and care about tells me there’s a genocide being waged against trans people.

I almost burst out laughing.

Driving between Los Feliz and downtown L.A., I trade glances between the road and my phone as I type. If there’s a genocide on in America, I write, it’s against unhoused folks, substance users, people struggling with their mental health.

The person on the other end—quite literally on the opposite side of the world—tells me that U.S. politicians are explicitly calling for the murder and imprisonment of trans people.

I reply, glibly: 

They’ve been saying that about poor people forever. 

I say something to the effect of:

This whole thing is being blown way out of proportion.

The person on the other end challenges my misunderstanding, but I won’t be convinced. How do you argue with someone in denial about the truth?

Generous, they relent. They remind me that the most marginalized unhoused folks (substance users, etc.) are trans, anyways. This I can swallow, and we move on.

Later, I’ll apologize for being so wrong. 

Later, I’ll remember what it is to be a target.

*

At my alma mater, I am one of about twenty students enrolled in a student-led class that most people refer to as “the Palestine class.” Its official title includes a direct reference to settler colonialism. On the first day of class, our student-teacher is calmer than I would ever be in his position, explaining that the university is suspending the course for all sorts of made-up reasons. We don’t actually learn anything about Palestine that day, or maybe we learn the most important thing there is to know about it.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll organize, as a class. We flyer campus. We plan a protest. I think at one point my job was to rent a U-Haul and bring twenty desks from the community college a city over because we’re going to place them in one of the university’s most public spaces, and sit in them with tape over our mouths. We intend to stay there until we’re dragged away, or the class is reinstated.

We use that word a lot during this period: reinstatement. We all just want the course to be reinstated, we find ourselves saying, as though wanting anything more would be too much. We all just want to learn (though it goes far beyond that for many of us, particularly the student-teacher). 

When the head of the faculty senate comes to class one day, she says our course is the first in the university’s history to become an international incident. She’s referring to the fact that an Israeli foreign minister was interviewed in Israel about us. On live TV, he assured the journalist interviewing him that the problem was being taken care of. He insisted it would be an egregious act of antisemitism for the university to permit the course to continue. He declared that the Israeli government had reached out to the university to make this clear, which someone employed by the university eventually confirms for us. 

Some people call this “cultural genocide.” 

It is genocide all the same.

After the class is reinstated, the location of the class changes. This is in case we become a target. During class, I often look out the long row of windows on the northern wall for signs of something ill-intentioned. I have done this more or less in every classroom I’ve been in since eleventh grade, when I first began to fear being the target of a mass shooting.

Today, I have a folder I always keep near me with printouts of the most valuable readings I was assigned during my time in academia. Almost every reading from the Palestine class is in the folder. 

I learn more about how the world works in that class than in any other. To understand Palestine is to understand everything. To understand genocide is to understand everything.

*

A year or so after the Palestine class, I take a class on Kurdish, the language. It is filed on my transcript under Near Eastern Studies. There are no more than ten students in the class.

We learn the language, Kurdish, but also about Kurdish culture. We get to know the founder of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya. We celebrate Newroz, the Kurdish New Year. We watch Min Dît, a Kurdish film about two children and a baby whose parents are assassinated by what I think are supposed to be Turkish mercenaries. The kids spend the back half of the film homeless and broke. At one point, they come face-to-face with their parents’ murderer and are forced to consider killing him. “Min dît” is Kurdish for “I saw.”

My professor is a good one: devoted, committed. He pours himself into us. Since the class is mixed, so that some students have experience with the language and others don’t, I and another total beginner get private lessons outside class to catch us up in the professor’s office. Our professor is not paid more to offer this extra class time. Sometimes the other beginner isn’t available so it’s just me. 

I try really hard at first, but my interest in education is dwindling. I have the increasing sense that I am going to kill myself, and somewhere deep in the back of my head, I worry I am probably trans. These are excuses, of course. I am always aware of the gravity of our lessons, and my failure to adequately honor them.

In addition to Kurdish, the professor teaches Turkish. It is a far more popular language option, and also the language of his people’s oppressors. In Turkey, it is a risk, sometimes a lethal one, to speak Kurdish—to teach it, to celebrate Kurdish culture, its holidays. Our professor is told by the university that he cannot teach Kurdish unless he teaches Turkish too. In at least one way, this class is an outlet for him. Late in the semester, I apply for a grant with him to publish a formal textbook based on the excellent informal one he’s built up over the years. I am severely underqualified for this and we do not get the grant. 

By the end of the semester, I can barely speak or understand the language. I was better at it midway through, when all the objects in my room are labeled with Kurdish words and their genders on little white stickers. Most of them fall off or become worn, unreadable.

I feel relief when the class is over, the relief of leaving a foreign country of which you do not speak the language. There is no longer the anxiety of being put on the spot, of being asked questions multiple times without being able to answer, of seeing the look of disappointment on my kind professor’s face.

Years later, but long before I come out to him as trans, my biological father spots my coursework in a storage bin. I tell him about the class. Impressed, he asks me to speak a little. I stumble, then say “my name is” in Kurdish, and my deadname in English. It’s all I have. He looks disappointed too. I speak Spanish fluently, and a decent amount of French. I am good and capable with three very colonial languages. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what “my name is” in Kurdish is now unless I looked it up.

This is also genocide.

*

My stepfather dies and I consider his life and death a product of genocide. There’s a meme that goes something like, “Every queer and trans person who kills themselves is a victim of genocide.” My stepfather killed himself, slowly. He sat at a desk for decades on end in order to receive a hefty pension, which he does, right before he dies. 

A few years before that, he starts to refer to himself as Black. He is. 

Afro-Latinx/e, some would say. Indigenous may be more accurate.

There is more I wish I could say about this, but I do not have the right. Besides, I have not yet finished grieving. 

Don’t know if I ever will.

*

A few days ago, I participate in #DVPit. This is what people in the publishing industry call a pitch event. The “DV” in #DVPit stands for “diverse voices.” The event is intended to rectify inequities in publishing: like #PitBlack and #LatinxPit, it’s limited to marginalized authors whose books might otherwise be lost in the massive slush piles literary agents spend much of their time sifting through.

Right before the pitching event begins, someone in the “introduce-yourself” channel mentions that they’re concerned about pitching a book about Palestine. I don’t know whether the author is Palestinian. We’re told to use hashtags like #POC (People of Color), #BVM (Black Voices Matter), #NIV (Native Indigenous Voices), #ND (Neurodiverse), and #TV (Trans Voices) in our pitches to make our identities clear. For whatever reason, the author in question only uses #Palestine in their pitches. I think it’s fair to assume they are Palestinian, though in a world that has recognized the vacuity of #OwnVoices, if not yet pitch events, who the hell knows.

I have the sense no one really knows how to respond to their comment; it is never clear whether or not a space is safe until its facilitators make it clear. Even then, safety is always in question: an ongoing process, a constant negotiation. The rules of the server say hate speech and discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated. For people like me, this is a sign that a space is completely unsafe.

On Discord, you react to comments by selecting emojis (“reactions”), which people can then click so that a little counter beside the emoji increases, or they can select their own emoji as a reaction. I hold down the author’s comment and select the “hug” emoji. Over the next hour or so, a few more people click the reaction. Seven in total, eventually, including mine.

Nobody, including me, comments or replies. Later, a lively discussion about Jewish representation in literature will unfold in the “watercooler” channel. “I care about all children who suffer no matter who they are,” is what the person who starts the discussion says.

*

I was old enough to understand the aftermath of September 11, 2001, as it happened. My stepfather is deployed to Kuwait. We tie a yellow ribbon around the tree in the front yard. We go to a military base and get letter-writing kits along with the other military wives and their children. Everyone is obsessed with being good Americans. I am ten years old.

By the time I am twice that age, I have read the infamous “little Eichmanns” tirade and I know enough to know that he is right. It is not cold or glib to say this, though for a long time it is only ever in private that I admit I agree. Like everyone else, I mourn death selectively.

The Pentagon is a few miles from my elementary school. After one of the planes hits it, I watch smoke rise from the rubble against an otherwise clear blue sky. I will spend the rest of my life expecting this to happen again. I conclude that it is only a matter of time. Instead, for the next twenty years, I watch on the news as it happens everywhere else, all of the time, with increasing intensity. Most pundits explain these developments with the equivalent of “stop hitting yourself.” It’s what settlers have told colonized people for centuries.

Patriarchy breaks men; cisheterosexism destroys cis/straight people; white supremacy drives white people to kill themselves (and worse). Just the same, settler colonialism always ultimately kills settlers, too. 

It is only, ever, a matter of time.

*

“I got my start writing essays, op-eds, and long-form journalism, in which data and reporting could add up to tidy conclusions,” reads my artist’s statement for the 2024 Tin House Winter Workshop. “Now, older, I have more doubt—less faith in what I have to say.”

Echoing a poem I once wrote and then deleted, I write: “To my father, a former musician, I once described my position in life as that of a pianist who grew to view the keyboard as a colonial instrument, my task to work with others to dismantle and reinvent it.”

I continue by credentialing myself: “This year, I founded an online publication called Art, Strike!. We paid our collaborators (rather than contributors) what they asked for: up to 100% of a shared, replenishing fund-pool. Almost everyone asked for 100%. After three reading periods, including one open only to trans writers and artists, I ran out of money and we went on hiatus.”

Finally, the meat of the statement, what many call “the why.”

“My work, like Art, Strike!, is fleeting, provocative, and deeply concerned. I am deeply concerned by the norms in the publishing industry, and the trauma it generates in my fellow creatives. My background in STEM gives me insight into the future here: spoiler alert, it’s not pretty. Another word for concerned is afraid. I write fiction because I may doubt my own ideas, but I have more faith than ever in the ambiguity fiction demands.”

I close with a touch of melodrama: “In mathematics, a derivative defines the rate of change of a function; it is information about information, one degree removed from the data provided. To get the original function, one takes, intuitively, the antiderivative. Yet every function has infinite antiderivatives; some information always gets lost in the process of derivation. My fiction is the derivative of what I have to say; my readers, by reading, take the antiderivative.”

I say “fiction” in that last sentence, but what I really mean is all my writing. If I wanted to tell a reader how I really felt, I’d get to know them first. There’s no point in being yourself around someone you don’t trust.

I should probably clarify something: it’s not that I think silence will protect me. For God’s sake, I hardly pass. I am, as they say, “visibly trans.” In other words, I can be dead silent and still pose a threat from a mile away. I can make myself small, conceal myself like a hermit crab burrowing back into its precious shell, and I can still be stepped on and broken in two with ease. All someone has to do is want to. Our world encourages people to want to. Tells them it’s okay. Morally necessary. Desirable, even.

This is one underdiscussed aspect of genocide: pleasure. When people are slaughtered en masse, their murders aren’t cold. They are carried out with glee. For those doing the killing, it is a joy. Your death will bring them happiness, ecstasy. Look at photographs of the audiences at lynchings and you’ll know what I mean. Humans can’t do something so unnatural on so large a scale unless they’re given permission to smile through it.

*

ghettos are the refugee camps for the subjects of colonisation and neocolonisation: they are internal neocolonies. gentrification is the planned replacement of a population by another: it’s not just about rent; gentrification *is* genocide

This is what someone I know and care about says online. They are right. 

I show this quote to someone else I know and care about, whom I live with in an ethnic enclave inside of another ethnic enclave in the city of Los Angeles. It eloquently summarizes what we bitch about more brusquely every time we step outside our apartment. Even our dog displays all the trademark signs of PTSD.

Part of the stress the person I live with endures is about me. Every day, my gender presentation becomes more and more feminine. Every day, I become more and more of a target. On top of everything else, the rental agreement does not permit me to live in the apartment with them, so I often have to leave and spend time wandering the city in order to avoid being seen by the landlord, or worse, the building owner.

I protect myself as much as I can. I stop wearing makeup. I stop wearing skirts. I stop using my favorite purse (pink, blue, and white, the colors of the trans flag). I stop shaving. I paint my nails a neutral peach-pink instead of ruby red or matcha green. I spend most of my time in West Hollywood (“gay mecca”), where the discrimination I’ll face will be related to my economic stratum rather than my gender identity.

The life expectancy for trans women of color is, I hear recently, 35. 

This is partly why I go to the Social Services office this week—to get on food stamps, so we can eat healthier and not rely on the unpredictable junk the food bank offers. It’s partly why, the day before, I go to a free clinic specializing in trans care—not only for hormones, but also to get my health in order. 

Three years is not enough time to do all things that I need to do. I continue to assume each morning, as I have since starting my transition, that I will be dead by the end of the day.

At both the Social Services office and the free clinic, while I wait, I stare at my phone. I use a private, nameless Twitter account to look for paid writing opportunities. Mostly my feed this week is about Palestine. Writers and their representatives post wildly, desperately about it—sometimes in anguish, sometimes indignant. It reminds me of 2020, and 2017, and 2014: “why is no one talking about this” is a common refrain. Another is some formulation of “Silence = Death,” at least as old as HIV. The call is to speak up and speak out; to bear witness; to use our writerly voices.

There’s a letter circulating titled “WRITERS IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE” and I’ll probably sign it. It asks signees to commit to engage with BDS—the vanilla one, as someone I know and care about calls it, where the D stands for divest rather than destroy. It asks signees to decline professional invitations to and funding from Israel, which the letter puts in quotation marks (I’ve always felt preceding the name of settler colonial states with “so-called” communicates the sentiment better). The sixth and final ask is for signees to boycott Zionist literary institutions and publications.

Okay. I’m not really sure who on the list of signees was gunning to work with PEN America or Harper’s or whatever “Best American Poetry” is (“American poetry” sounds, to me, like an oxymoron). I’d hoped the letter would go a little further: pull a Sally Rooney, ask signees to refuse to have their works translated into Hebrew, or published in (so-called) Israel.

Or something much further than that.

Another commitment in the letter is to openly discuss the occupation in your workplace, at home, on social media, in your work. I don’t have a social media presence so that’s out. I’m unemployed so that’s out too. At home, we watch videos about the genocide and cry, as we’ve done with every genocide that’s played out live online in front of us since we met, including our own. 

In my work—well, that’s this essay.

I consider posting a link to the letter in the #DVPit Discord; in another world, it would be the ideal place to post it. The server is supposedly packed with marginalized people, but I know better than to trust people just because this world has made them targets. More often than not, that only makes them look for easier targets—to scapegoat, to use as human shields.

Plus, if I’m going to post it there, I’d like this essay to be available to read beforehand. I may end up having some difficult conversations with strangers. I want to be able to point them to this so that, as much as is possible, they know exactly who they’re talking to.

*

Long before the Palestine class, long before the one in Kurdish, I attend community college. I enroll in Political Theory, the class I’ve been looking forward to taking more than any other since deciding to go back to school. The professor is an old white man, who redeems himself by defining political theory extremely broadly: the first text we read is the Enūma Eliš, and he makes a convincing case for religious mythology and speculative fiction being integral to the process of politics.

Later in the semester, we read Eichmann in Jerusalem, which spawns heated discussions on the subject of complicity. I am steadfast in my belief that everyone is complicit when genocide occurs, except maybe children and/or others incapable of consent.

Our professor doesn’t seem to disagree, I think, but argues for the sake of pedagogy. “I fought in the Vietnam War,” he tells us, “not by choice, but because I was drafted. When I got back, I protested like everyone else. Does that make me complicit?” He’s looking at me as he talks. There’s something in his eyes that makes me wonder if he is not just arguing for the sake of pedagogy. I don’t remember if this is the case, but it feels like I’m alone on one side of the classroom as the discussion unfolds.

“Of course,” I reply, “everyone was. It happened. You allowed it to happen. You were unable to stop it. That makes you complicit. That doesn’t have to be so scary. It can be true, and you can still do the work of confronting it. We’re all complicit in something right now.” (This is about a decade ago, when I say the right things but still don’t understand their meaning.)

In his office, at the end of the semester, we discuss the future of politics. He’s as pessimistic as I am, but also holds out hope like I do. We both separately arrive at the same conclusion: the next great work of political theory will be a work of science fiction, of literature.

That work probably sits somewhere unread in a slush pile. Maybe a printout in a folder or a storage bin. Its writer, perhaps, has moved onto more important things. Nobody has much need for whatever we refer to as politics, let alone political theory, anymore. Nobody has much need for whatever we call writing either. This doesn’t have to be so scary. It can be true, and we can still do the difficult work of confronting it. 

We’re all complicit in something right now.

*

Before this essay ends, please know: I don’t say everything that’s on my mind. I honestly don’t know how anyone does. 

But then I know exactly how. Known is the natural condition of the human in a surveillance state. As someone I know and care about always says: in the future, we will all want 15 seconds of privacy.

I’ve left more than enough here and there for anyone like me to understand what I believe. There’s no reason for me to say any more than what I’ve already said. Besides, speaking in public—writing for an audience—is one of the least interesting things a person can do. 

Why do you think I’m a writer? 

Why, do you think I’m a writer?

*

There is a very small chance that the building owner or landlord may enter our apartment today, so I leave early and plan to stay out until at least the afternoon. No big deal; I need to finish this essay anyways. It’s been a while since I’ve written something this long or important to me so I consider it just as important to pick the right place to settle in and finish it.

I drive first to the Griffith Observatory; from there, I’ll be able to see the whole of the refugee camp that is Los Angeles. But I miss the entrance to the parking lot and am slingshotted by traffic cones and park police back down the slope towards the bottom. I consider it a sign. There’s no point in reflecting on the city from that high a vantage point; it makes everything look deceptively docile. Also, there is a painful memory I have of my stepfather that Griffith Park makes me think of, when he visited and wanted to see Dodger Stadium from that high up and I drove us there and refrained from telling him the story of the little genocide that made the stadium possible.

Instead, I drive back towards downtown—to Central Library, where I’ll have Wi-Fi and a quiet space in which to write. On my way there, I pass through Los Feliz, the same stretch of street on which I once tried to deny the genocide of people like myself.

Central Library is a microcosm of Los Angeles: it has a beautiful Octavia Lab, named after the sci-fi author I have to work not to worship, and filled with expensive equipment intended to both spark creativity and facilitate commerce. Outside the lab, it is mostly swarms of police officers and security personnel. A large contingent of patrons use the library as a resting place. Every once in a while, one of them makes just enough noise for the cops to feel like they have something to do.

On its social media accounts, the library celebrates the fact that everyone is welcome, including unhoused folks. I don’t know about that. I hardly feel welcome, and all I ever do here is read and type. In the bathroom, right before leaving, I am verbally harassed for my gender presentation for the first time. It’s an ugly rite of passage that, as many trans people will understand, is infuriatingly gender-affirming.

In an exhibit tucked away in a corner of the library that I’ve never seen anyone else in, there are photographs and videos that tell the story of how someone set fire to the library—twice—and how it was rebuilt from the ashes. A short story in the book I pitch during #DVPit is loosely based on this. I don’t make this connection until I move to L.A., and realize that the real fire must have influenced the fictional one, in my story.

To be honest, I don’t really like that I came here. I don’t really like this part of this essay. I don’t like the idea that my actions were influenced by my writing, even though I often feel the stories I write are warnings from myself to myself—parables of sorts, letting me in on the wisdom my subconscious has to offer—and that I would do well to allow my actions to be influenced by them. I suppose what I don’t like is the idea that my actions have been determined by something I haven’t written yet, that I come to the library in order to finish this essay in a place that is symbolic enough to merit inclusion in it.

In my opinion, actions should not follow from writing. Writing, if it happens, should follow from actions. When writing is worth reading, it’s the residue of actions worth doing.

I don’t know what Art, Strike! will become; we’ve been offered space on a cooperatively-owned platform called Comradery, something like a cross between Patreon and Kickstarter. In two weeks, I am scheduled for an onboarding call with two of their members to see if we are a good fit for the site. If all goes well, we’ll begin raising money so we can return from our months-long hiatus.

When I first devise Art, Strike!, I describe it using two definitions: strike, as in to walk out and stop working, and strike, as in to collide with other art. 

There’s another definition of the word that I like: a synonym for the verb “ignite,” as in the phrase “strike a match.”

If anything ever happens to the people I know and care about, I don’t know what I will do. 

I do know you can only light yourself on fire once.