Burn Your Birth Certificate

What limits are there to cis willingness to tolerate anti-trans hostility without rioting, and why isn't one of them the terrorism targeting children jumping on a playing field?

NYC draft card burning in Sheep’s Meadow, Central Park, 1967. Source.

This past week a trans student in California named A.B. Hernandez competed in track and field events. She has - compliant with state law - competed as a girl for three seasons now. But right wing voices this year have attacked her and outed her, harassed her and threatened her. Two years ago two trans athletes qualified for the state finals but withdrew because the threats were so severe. Now Trump is threatening to withhold federal money from the state, with some people predictably blaming Hernandez.

But, why? The why is simple: activists who loathe trans people so much that they are willing to step on us with jackbooted feet to reach their goals — and damn our injuries sustained in the process — complain that the existence of trans people threatens cis women and girls. The rationale has been used to deny respectful and accurate passports and state ID cards, make voting and running for office unnecessarily difficult, bar bathroom access, and to generally threaten, intimidate, harass, assault and kill.

The victims, of course, are not always trans people. The campaign to “protect” cis women and girls is so deranged that cis heroes are exiled and cis teenagers subjected to outrageous gang assaults (which, predictably, take place in “a welcoming community”). But trans people are outrageously victimized. I’ve spoken in the past about the death threats that originally caused me to create a separate online alias — Crip Dyke — and continue its use independently of my legal name for more than two decades. I’ve been beaten in a bathroom, briefly assaulted in another, chased out of several more, and in one terrifying incident surrounded on a sidewalk by men who mobbed me, constantly touching, pinching, poking, pushing and, eventually punching me. None of those assaults inflicted injury more serious than a bruise, but the experience of being alone in a circle of ten or a dozen men attacking me unpredictably from every direction was as frightening as I can imagine, and I have been strangled and stabbed.

That mob attacked me in the open, partly on the sidewalk, though the group was too large and spilled onto the street. Over roughly 10 minutes I remember trying to get the attention of a number of different cars. No one stopped. No one rolled down a window. No one offered help.

This is the vision of a safer America held by Trump and the GOP and the gender crits: a nation where trans people are harassed out of visible existence and no one cares enough to slow roll on their way by and ask if they should call 911. The bigots seek to impose laws and social norms where the policing of definitive categories falls heavily and hard on those who dare to cross boundaries. And they do this for the safety of cis women with uncharacteristically understated racism that nonetheless evokes the shades of Mary J. Cox, Lucille Cameron, and Carolyn Bryant Donham.

While some women have been early volunteers in this war against trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people, the government has now spoken: all cis women and girls have been drafted into a national campaign to end transness. While the more naive frame this as a non-violent war that need cost no lives, there has never been a time in history with no out trans persons. Many of us have been scared into hiding, but never all. To eradicate transness thus inevitably becomes an effort to eradicate trans lives.

As with men and the Vietnam War 60 years ago, the women of today largely did not want, did not request, and do not morally condone this war. The young men of the 60s were deeply divided by the war and the draft. Some volunteered for service and would have had no draft existent. Others did so to preempt the draft, hoping for safer service in the Navy or Air Force than would likely be assigned through the draft. Still others were drafted and served, were drafted and died, were drafted and killed. A few were drafted and fled.

But a very special group, very small in number, rose up publicly to condemn the war and to condemn the government’s efforts to draft them. They burned the cards issued to them by the euphemistically named “Selective Service.” They burned these draft cards to announce publicly that the government had no right to use their lives to prosecute an unjust war.

I have been wondering for weeks now what it would take to see a series of events across the country with cis women burning their birth certificates, announcing publicly that the government has no right to use their lives in this war.

To be clear, the circumstances are different. There is no risk of dying or even being sent far away from one’s family for years. While the consequences for Kady Grass were significant, most cis women don’t face risks anywhere near parallel with those of young men drafted to fight and kill and die in Vietnam. Nor are cis women today likely to have to look in the eyes of trans people killed in this war. It will never occur to most to confide in a friend or ask for help from a therapist to deal with the guilt of the trans lives ruined in their names. They will simply never feel the guilt in the first place as the damage and death happen mostly at some remove.

This is not, of course, true for every cis woman. Parents of trans children, partners of trans loves, very real, very powerful relationships exist across the cis/trans divide. This, too, is unlike the War on Vietnam from the American perspective, but shows a surprising similarity to the war from the Vietnamese perspective. That was a civil war, that sometimes split families into supporters of different sides.

Thus the metaphor is, as metaphors will be, imperfect.

Still, the question remains: in a war where cis women’s lives, cis girls’ lives, even cis feminine existence have been drafted to serve the state in eradicating transness, why have we seen no formal declarations of cis women refusing to be categorized by that state in the manner required to justify and prosecute its war? To be clear, cis men have been drafted as well, but they have been drafted to fight, to injure, to kill, and can decline their role in the war by simply choosing not to do so. Cis men burning birth certificates would be welcome, but is not equally meaningful. On the other hand, cis girls’ and women’s mere existence is recruited into service. Why then do we not see at least some public renouncements of cis women’s legal categorization, so useful to the government which would end trans lives?

This would seem to be a moral question equal in significance to the moral questions raised by those opposing the Vietnam War generally and the draft for it specifically.

To be clear: this is not a tactic for everyone. Just as not all young men in 1967 burned their draft cards, burning birth certificates or passports or otherwise refusing governmental classification can be neither morally mandated nor practically mandated. No person who values trans lives should use the failure to burn a birth certificate as an excuse to judge any individual cis person. Single mothers, people trying to finish school, children of immigrants whose own safety and citizenship under this regime are face constant threat: these and others have good reason to avoid burning their birth certificates even if they oppose anti-trans violence.

But I submit that — given enough time, which I don’t believe has passed yet — if the trans community sees zero people openly refusing the categorization that is fundamental to the war on our lives, that makes possible the drafting of cis girls and women in service to the anti-trans troops, then trans people would have good reason to judge the cis community as a whole.

It is a measure of commitment, a measure of values, and a measure of relative priorities. As mentioned above, there will always be people with compelling personal priorities that outweigh this form of protest, just as there were large numbers of young men in the 60s whose compelling personal interests made it impossible for them to choose to burn their draft cards. And as not yet mentioned, other forms of protest and resistance are valuable. Educating yourself, sharing links online to educate others, writing, speaking, hugging your trans friends, literally standing between a bully and a trans, non-binary, or gender non-conforming person the bully seeks to assault, all of these have value. Yet all but the last can be accomplished without risk or sacrifice.

There are reasons why the pussy-hat women’s march is fondly remembered but draft-card burnings have taken a legendary place in our history. Burning a draft card was a risk and a sacrifice. Burning that card was a felony, marching for a day is not. For that matter, neither is burning a birth certificate. Even so, burning one means spending money to replace it, especially if one doesn’t already have a passport. You’ll fill out forms; you’ll lose some cash; you’ll have to do some out of the spotlight work to recover your original level of security. And starting a fire, even a contained one, in a public space as part of your protest could very well put you at risk of arrest. Minor charges, to be sure. Not felonies. But being arrested under Trump is no trivial matter.

These risks and sacrifices are not directly comparable to the risks faced by draft card burners. They certainly seem to be somewhat less. Yet the additional motivation of fear of death overseas would surely have been instrumental in overcoming some of the protesters’ fear of uncertainty and loss.

So I suggest that perhaps the willingness or un- of the cis community to burn birth certificates, to announce formally that they will not permit their genders to be used to destroy the lives of others, allows a rough sort of comparison between the intent and the strength of the cis community’s resistance to the government’s efforts to deploy them in its efforts to ruin and ultimately to erase trans life within the territory of the United States of America.

I suggest that by docking points from the draft card burners for their potential self-interest in avoiding death, maiming, and the trauma of being forced to kill other human beings and docking points from birth certificate burners for the lesser punishments our society threatens for that act, it is possible to say that the cis community does not now oppose causing harm to and killing trans people with the same clarity and strength that the cis community opposed harming and killing Vietnamese people in the 60s and 70s.

And that, of course, is terrifying, given that the USA killed at least tens of thousands and most probably hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese persons even with a level of resistance that at the extreme end generated protesters willing to flee their home country or to burn a card and face felony charges. I wonder: how many trans people will cis people allow to be snuffed out when there seems to be no commensurate outrage?

At the outset I mentioned A.B. Hernandez. I want to be clear about something that, as far as I can tell, has not been reported in this way in any professional media outlet: by doxxing her and demonizing her, by portraying her as a constant threat to cis girls’ and women’s lives, and then, finally, by morally condemning her from the California governor’s office to the White House Oval Office, it cannot be doubted that Hernandez has been threatened with stochastic violence. She has yet to be injured or killed and I hope she never faces that, but the people who have savaged her verbally know exactly what they’re doing. They know that Brianna Ghey was murdered. They know that Kady Grass was assaulted. And they know these things are being done because of the hatred they spread.

They know that there is no way to know if or when Hernandez will suffer a similar fate. They know that if she does, it will be because they focussed the eyes of the violent and hateful upon her. And they do not care.

But what is more concerning than this, is that the Democratic Party seems to care just as little. It has no representative of the party itself calling this stochastic terrorism. There is no bill before congress purporting to deal with this as a crisis. There is no press conference at the DNC offices. There is no statement from Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries that they will shut down the government if they must to protect trans children.

No one can look me in the eye and tell me that there's a movement of cis allies for trans lives when the naturalization of cis gender and sex have been weaponized and not a single cis person stands up to say, "You cannot use my body for your war," and burns that which naturalizes them.

No one can tell me that there's a movement of cis allies for trans lives when the stories of trans children are stolen from them to be used as weapons of alienization and artificialization, which is to say dehumanization, and not one cis person abandons the documents that normalize and privilege them.

There can be a movement of cis allies for trans lives, but not when the cis community universally consents to the normalization and naturalization of their own genders, their own sexes, their own lives.

Where is the left edge of resistance? For now it appears that reading and writing without sacrifice define that edge. There is hope of change, of course. The growing capacity to spontaneously resist racist and violent immigration enforcement by secret police shows a marked development just over the last few weeks. But in this moment, there is no left edge of protest that shows a willingness to risk or to sacrifice.

There is no defeating the war against trans lives without such risk and sacrifice. It has gone too far. Stochastic terrorism is now aimed at children, and the terrorists do so unafraid because experience has shown them that even the cis people with the most to lose, the parents and lovers and friends, even they have defined a limit that precludes real risk, real sacrifice. A fire openly consuming the moral justification for the bigots’ war would, at the least, tell them that some people are willing to oppose them even if it comes at a cost. It would warn them that they can go to far and to expect a fight when they do.

I am looking not for all cis people to renounce citizenship in their sex to escape this war. But I am looking for a sign that a core of resistance exists, hard and unyielding, moral and compassionate, principled and confident. If I see that, I will breathe easier. I can tell myself that the opposition to this war is comparable to those past that were eventually defeated — after too much time and too many dead, it’s true, but the wars were put to an end. If I see that core, I can tell myself that there will be an end to this war against trans lives other than our eradication. More importantly, I might believe my own whisper.

But today there is no compelling evidence of that core. Today I cannot believe that the cis community will not trade our lives for Trump’s ouster, or for an end to arms shipments to Israel, or for new arms shipments to Ukraine, or for zeroing out Trump’s tariffs, or even for cheaper eggs. There are, almost certainly, limits to the willingness of the cis community to tolerate attacks on trans lives, but we have not seen them yet. Will we reach them tomorrow? Next month? Next year? Never?

We cannot know, for we have seen no sign.

Today I have individual allies, but the cis community as a whole is not one. Still, I shall look again tomorrow for the flames that kindle hope.

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Postscript: The Star Tribune quoted Minnesota Governor Tim Walz saying,

“I’m just going to say it, shame on any of us who throws a trans child under the bus for thinking they’re going to get elected. That child deserves our support. Don’t worry about the pollsters calling it distractions, because we need to be the party of human dignity.”

This is a wonderful sentiment, and it was good to read today, even if the above had already been written and was just waiting for an edit. Even so, this is, at best, calling for a left edge of resistance to form, not enacting it. I’ll continue to track Walz’ words and efforts in the future, but I think it’s worth noting he’s neither a powerless ordinary citizen who would risk arrest if he burned his birth certificate nor powerful enough in the Democratic Party to cause them to act.

Do his words matter? Yes. Are they enough to tell me that either the Democratic Party or the cis community writ large have limits to the victimization of trans children they're willing to enforce at risk of their own homes and wealth and freedom? Unfortunately not.

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