Take the Last Bite

It’s been 365 days (and counting) since Inauguration Day. In that time, queer and trans people’s lives have been disrupted through extensive federal orders mandating the end of life-saving research, disruptions to medical care access, sinister soundbites about our mental health and viability as humans, and the reinvention of reality according to the far-right.

This multi-episode overview of key moments over the last year provide somber reminders of what we’ve already been through and rally cries for queer and trans people to lean into lessons already learned to fight back against the faulty idea that you can executive order a community out of existence.

Part one covers January 2025 - March 2025, including the earliest swarm of executive orders, the impacts on education, and personal revelations about media, journalism, and storytelling.

Connect with Take the Last Bite on Instagram @take.the.last.bite and TikTok @take.the.last.bite 
For questions, comments and feedback: takethelastbite@gmail.com 

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Creators and Guests

Host
R.B. Brooks
Your Midwestie Bestie

What is Take the Last Bite?

Take the Last Bite is a direct counter to the Midwest Nice mentality— highlighting advocacy & activism by queer/trans communities in the Midwest region. Each episode unearths the often disregarded and unacknowledged contributions of queer & trans folks to social change through interviews, casual conversations and reflections on Midwest queer time, space, and place.

For questions, comments and feedback: takethelastbite@gmail.com

Host: R.B. Brooks, they/them

Cover Art: Adrienne McCormick

Heyhihello yall, this is R.B., your Midwestie-Doing-Their-Bestie to stay grounded and grace-giving in this current moment.

It’s been a minute. It’s been a loooong minute. It’s been a long year. In fact, it’s been exactly 365 days and counting since queer and trans people's lives were wholly disrupted by the signing of a few sinister executive orders.

It’s been 365 days plus, of following the Republican Party’s 2025 roadmap along treacherous pathways to defunding vital research efforts, constricting healthcare access, branding everything as a matter of national security, becoming AI’s biggest hype team, slowly delegitimizing the Dept. of Education, detaining and deporting lawful immigrants, defying any comprehension of constitutional law, all snowballing into our current moment.

It’s been 365 days since the federal government effectively executive ordered trans people out of existence. On what I refer to as Day 0, Inauguration Day, the President signed the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order. This was shortly after his inaugural address where he stated “it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female” which was met with raucous applause.

More than 365 days later, queer and trans people in the US are still reckoning with the ever-changing landscape of social services, legal protections, social attitudes, and material conditions. Our crisis hotlines are overwhelmed (or being defunded), queers are getting married in a hurry, unsure which new SCOTUS challenge could bring the Obergefell decision crumbling to the ground. Our travel is impeded, our medical records are being requested, the FBI has introduced a new term –”nihilistic violent extremists” – not to be confused with “leftist radical scum” or “literal YT women” – to classify a nebulous group of people who it deems in opposition to the administration.

For those 365 days we’ve heard Karoline Leavitt, aka the mouthpiece, courtesy of Vanity Fair, demonize gender-affirming care for trans people while donning a dozen lip injection site scars. RFK has waged a war on Tylenol and autism, but is ending the war on saturated fats, releasing a new and completely unsolicited Food Pyramid that centers red meats and leather boots.

The Midwest has been ravaged by Kristi Noem’s volatile instructions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, escalating numbers of deployed agents into Chicago and eventually Minnesota, where Renee Good was shot and killed by a trigger-happy masked man with untreated PTSD from a previous encounter with a moving vehicle. On this anniversary of the beginning of everything we now know to be the state of the union, we are in mourning, we are struggling, we are fighting back, we are figuring it out, we are fatigued, we are fumbling, we are frustrated, and we are just getting started.

So let’s play it back from the beginning. What have we learned? What have we missed or underestimated? Where have we innovated and strategised beyond our wildest imaginations? Where have we faltered – reminding ourselves of adrienne maree brown’s words “never a failure, always a lesson.” Let’s harvest those lessons.

How do you measure a year? In the archiving and documenting of queer and trans resistance in the face of a violent ideological uprising that views us as the threat.

It’s been more than 365 days since I’ve sat and recorded the important work of queer and trans people in the Midwest. I’ve missed it greatly, and nearly everyday I’ve wished for the energy, the will power, to continue. But a lot of life has happened, personally and professionally. A lot has happened and is still happening that has made it harder to reach out to people and ask them to comment on the chaos we are all enduring. Which makes this the best conceivable time to talk to people, to process it out, to make meaning of the messes, and to elevate the efforts of everyone who’s just trying their best to protect their neighbors, safety-plan with their loved ones, and live a life worth living.

A trans boy in Kansas once asked me “how am I supposed to live a fulfilling life?” and I did not have an answer. That was before Musk, Zuck, Bezos. Before Rogan, Kirk, and Owens. Our biggest antagonizers back then were Brownback, the Phelps Family, and small countries we weren’t likely to visit. Yet, the experiences of dread and defeat commonly felt by queer and trans people was palpable then, and is rampant now.

Our biggest antagonizers now hold different names, and some of the highest positions in the land. In the last 365 days, I imagine many of us have succumbed to negative feedback loops about impending doom; have sworn off news to sustain a sense of sanity; or retreated into less public versions of our queer selves. In fact, in a new study released by the Movement Advancement Project, 55% of trangender respondents have taken steps to be less visible in their communities.

We are faced with reverting back to analog tactics – meeting and organizing in-person, sending letters and written information, using Signal chats (hopefully more tactfully than Pete Hegseth), and other means of connection and communication offline. It is imperative that we – document document document– this moment. Our own reflections, our observations, our lessons, because there are queer and trans kin in the far off future who will rely on our archive as evidence of a truth the history books will not want to tell.

And so I submit this as my contribution, for the record. In the last 365 days, I’ve written more, I’ve read more, I’ve studied electoral systems more than I ever have and with the hope that I could look back to this time last year, and see the machinery for what it really is – and while there’s plenty to have missed, courtesy of a 24-hour media cycle that cannot keep up, what has continued to be true is trans voices are largely missing from the political and social analysis of this era.

There is a long list of voices I am giddily hopeful to get on the mic with as I dust off my on-air sign and engage with others who are simply trying to bring a little clarity and a lot of power to our question-asking, change-making, and world-building. Today though, I come to you as my humble self, to provide my own revelations, connection points, and big ass questions about the last year of being executive ordered out of existence.

So let’s get into it, and review the last 365 days on this episode… of Take the Last Bite.

Before the far-right fanfare even the founding fathers would have side-eyed on Inauguration Day, we have to remember the world, or at least a regional fraction of it, was already literally on fire. California wildfires were raging and ravaging the greater Los Angeles area, the kind of damaging, life-altering disasters that formed Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower trilogy. Pasadena and Altadena, both former homes to Butler, faced mass evacuations and devastating destruction of homes and businesses.

It’s around this same time that California Governor Gavin Newsom became a more nationally known official, especially after being photographed in a peacocking power stance when meeting newly sworn-in President Trump on the tarmac upon arriving in California in the midst of ongoing fire containment efforts. We’ll get back to Gavin a little bit later, cuz he makes a few notable appearances across 2025.

Against this backdrop, Meta announced some significant changes to their community guidelines. Key among them being the end of fact checking, and the introduction of community notes. As well as “remov[ing] restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

A looming TikTok ban was due to take effect on Jan. 19, with users being informed services would be temporarily unavailable. In less than 24 hours, the app was truly made unavailable to US users, and then a new message popped up welcoming us back and that “as a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” A new, governmentally influenced social media landscape was being ushered in before our very eyes.

Jimmy Carter had just passed, at age 100.
And Trump was already flagging interest in buying a large island called Greenland.
Oh, and Anita Bryant finally perished.

The patriot pageant walks… I mean, the confirmation hearings… began to vet some of Trump’s Secretary hopefuls. By now we have been introduced to a handful of the main characters of this administration, including Rubio, Noem (who I JUST learned’s whole government name is apparently Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem, KLAN…. Her initials spell KLAN yall!, Susie wideeyes Wiles, Stephen Miller, and Karoline Leavitt. The confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth was particularly cringeworthy. In an exchange with Montana Senator Tim Sheehy. This was a lil’ foreshadowing of his monologue in front of a room of top ranking military personnel where he said our enemies will “FAFO” and that there would be no more “dudes in dresses” in the armed forces.

As one of his last acts as president, Joe Biden commuted the prison sentence of political prisoner Leonard Peltier after nearly 50 years of imprisonment on shaky charges, just in time to reenter a world just as unjust as he left it.

Then finally, on January 20 2025, inclement weather forced the Inauguration inside, cramming onlookers to Donald Trump’s inaugural remarks inside the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Complete theatrics followed, staging Trump at a spotlit desk at Capitol One Arena where he ceremoniously signed 26 executive orders, for a grand total of 46 presidential actions, including memos and proclamations, on his first official day serving as President of the U.S.

With one signature, he reinvented our current reality on a range of topics including immigration, trade policy, the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency, sweeping bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion measures across the federal government, and undoing a variety of orders and actions from the Biden Administration through an order called “Initial Rescissions of of Harmful EOs and Actions” in which Trump moved to “restore common sense” and revoked a long list of existing orders referencing “racial equity,” “combatting COVID-19,” “preventing discrimination on the basis of gender or sex,” and so many other safeguards for marginalized communities and pursuing equitable treatment of all people at the federal level. In one sweeping move, these were all undone. In fact, it would become a noticeable trend in many of the 225 executive orders issued over the course of 2025 that Trump would take little jabs at Biden, perpetually insinuating failure and incompetence of his predecessor.

Notable language across the first batch of presidential actions include numerous uses of the term “accountability” “protecting” “unleashing” “securing” and everything seemingly being a grave matter of “national security.”

Another telling executive order issued right out the gate was the “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government” order which was ultimately used to justify dropping charges against all January 6 protesters. Which, if you’ve been following recent events, you may recognize one of the nearly 1,600 January 6ers granted clemency through this order. Jake Lang was in prison for four years on an 11-count indictment related to his actions on January 6, including charges for attacking Capitol police with a baseball bat. Since his pardoning, he has declared candidacy in the Republican U.S. senate special election race in Florida. And in recently, he became the laughing stock of Minnesota when he showed up with a skeleton crew of cronies staging an anti-Islam, anti-Somali and pro-ICE rally and was promptly ran out by local counterprotesters.

When I think about Day One of being executive ordered out of existence, honestly everything looked the same. There were still needlessly gendered bathrooms, sports were still sex-segregated, I still got ma’amed at the checkout. Things certainly felt more ominous, especially after reading the explicit language of the executive orders attempting to define sex as binary. But overall, things looked exactly as they had the day before yesterday.

In those first few days, it felt like a fever dream watching the cascade of headlines clarifying and distilling the immediate impacts of the stack of orders and actions put in place that week. The marathon of orders did not stop on inauguration day, and the signals of what was to come were starting to have material, literal, noticeable impacts. As often is the case when significant, anti-LGBTQ+ legislative actions take place, our crisis hotlines saw a huge surge in calls and texts.

The Trevor Project reported a 33% increase in the volume of calls and texts on January 20th alone. This, paired with the eventual decision to defund the LGBTQ+ focused services of the 988 Crisis Hotline due to federal anti-DEI mandates, emergency services addressing LGBTQ+ specific needs continue to take a hard hit as we try to find every possible tool to keep each other safe.

Shortly after the signing of anti-DEI executive orders, the quick work of scrubbing federal websites and shuttering federal programs, affinity groups, and other units took off. Within days, the administration removed White House websites honoring Nex Benedict and Matthew Shepard. It’s as though federal employees were directed to simply CTRL+F for a growing list of “bad words” related to DEI and social justice, and proceed to pull website content offline, with minimal precision. Such as when the Department of Defense was set to remove images of the “Enola Gay,” the aircraft used to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 purely because it referenced the word “gay” in the file. Or photos of Tuskegee airmen, the nation's first Black military pilots. In fact, an estimated 26,000 images were flagged for deletion from military databases after direction to remove content highlighting “DEI efforts.” Revisionist history, at its finest.

By Day Five, the U.S. State Department moved to suspend processing passport applications with an “X” gender marker or seeking to change the gender marker on their passport. Several stories appeared online of individuals who had recently applied for their passports receiving it in the mail with their incorrect gender marker.

This sudden change in a time when queer and trans people had already been weighing the possibility of needing to flee the country, or simply wanting to have their documentation all in order caused immense frenzy and panic among the trans community especially. It reached such a point of confusion and congestion that in a March policy briefing from Minnesota trans legal advocates, they essentially told the community that unless it was absolutely essential to change your documents, at that time it was best to wait, and keep the process pathways as clear as possible for those with urgent and time sensitive needs.

Within a week, two additional orders were signed – one declaring that trans folks are not deemed mentally or physically fit for the armed forces. And another, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which frames gender-affirming care as “maiming and sterilizing" and falsely speaks on “countless children who soon regret they have been mutilated.” Though, I think the term “countless” is used here because there literally aren’t enough to count. The little pocket of detransitioner-grifters certainty does not constitute a representative example.

Overall, this order sets up pathways for the federal government to litigate against healthcare professionals and medical facilities that provide gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy and surgical procedures to anyone under the age of 19.

Seemingly emboldened by the federal stance that trans people do not exist, organizers in Iowa sounded the alarm that a bill seeking to remove gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act would be introduced and that Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds was eager to sign it into law. Gender identity has only been included in Iowa’s civil rights act since 2007, and even in the face of citizen pushback and a massive display of civil disobedience at the Iowa capital building, the bill stripping gender identity from the act was signed and took effect on July 1 2025.

Leaving no sector untouched, an order was signed on Jan. 29 called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” which framed schools as sites of anti-American ideologies (such as “compelling children to adopt identities as victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color”).

Also on January 29, just ONE DAY after the appointment of Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation, a fatal crash between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter occurred near Washington D.C. Without missing a beat, right-wing propagandists like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson used a common page out of their pundit playbook and figured out a way to blame this collision on trans people. In fact, Jo Ellis, a Black Hawk pilot, member of the Virginia National Guard and a trans woman, was explicitly named as the helicopter pilot involved in the crash. The next day, Jo Ellis was compelled to put out a video confirming she was very much alive, and very much uninvolved with the incident. She has since gone on to file a defamation lawsuit against Walsh for false claims of her involvement.

Charlie Kirk would utilize this same propaganda tactic numerous times throughout 2025, more broadly blaming DEI as a contributing factor to the scale of the still raging California wildfires. As well as asserting his belief that less people may have died in the catastrophic floods in Central Texas if it weren’t for DEI hiring practices. This tired, overused talking point has been the catalyst for ongoing misplaced blame and ire toward queer and trans people and communities of color and once you track the pattern, it’s hard to unsee.

In a White House memo released the day after the fatal crash, Trump blames Obama and Biden era DEI tactics and alleges they resulted in “ recruiting individuals with severe intellectual disabilities in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)." He also harkened back to an order signed on January 21, titled “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation” which mandates any DEI hiring practices within the FAA be rescinded.

Lovers and scholars of Octavia Butler, such as YK Hong, brought attention again to the parallels between Butler’s Parable of the Sower and our current climates. In a February 1 social media post, Hong pointed out that in Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina’s journal entry, also on pseudofictional February 1 2025, said “we had a fire today” while in our canon timeline, the Eaton and Palisades fires were announced as finally 100% contained after a month of burning. Around this time too, poet and writer Hanif Abdurraqib (ahb-dure-ah-keeb) published an essay in the New Yorker titled “Lessons for the End of the World: On Octavia Butler, the L.A. fires, and the uses and misuses of the things that cannot be recovered.”

It is in this and many other parallels within Butler’s various science fiction realms, that we understand that her work was a commentary on the present, following the signs of despair and greed to their logical conclusions, and forecasting their impact decades out, to bring us Parable of the Sower and her other works. The power of science fiction, visionary fiction, and speculative fiction allow us to tease out our current troubles, and make educated, aspirational guesses about what else can be true if we made different choices.

Speaking of dystopias, the Grammys aired without a hitch. With some stars staking their own claim to some subtle defiance on music’s biggest night. For example, Cynthia Erivo brought along a Black ASL interpreter to the red carpet – a move some presumed to be a clapback to comments from Charlie Kirk about how ASL interpretation during emergency broadcasts on TV were “distracting.” And Chappel Roan, upon taking the stage as the winner of Best New Artist, took the opportunity to call on music labels to provide a living wage and health insurance to their artists. What was also telling about the Grammys is that when it comes to art and music created by queer and trans artists, we are well represented and lauded in this space, but compared to the social and political landscape – it looks very different. It’s almost like… the public wants what we make, but doesn’t want us.

Around this same time is when we start to see a smattering of executive orders aimed at addressing “the situation at the southern border” and actually, “the situation at the northern border” as well. These were early warning shots of the intentions to slam Canada and Mexico with increasing tariffs, as well as outlining the no holds barred resources channeling into the Department of Homeland Security. In a move probably totally wholly unrelated, Google updated its public AI ethics policy removing a previous promise that it wouldn’t use AI technology for weapons or surveillance.

Speaking of surveillance, February was also defined by a constellation of reporting and tip lines, requesting information for a DEI watchlist, which largely documented Black federal health workers involved in DEI initiatives. In the last year, we’ve seen a variety of tip lines and watchlists targeting individuals deemed in opposition to the administration, including a website that cropped up last September requesting info about individuals accused of celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. Watchlists like this are certainly not new, and many of us who’ve been active in organizing and social justice circles long enough know there is always potential that we are logged onto any number of lists for our public-facing activism and advocacy. However, this new era of public, user-generated tip lines targeting the “woke left” is newer terrain and leaves us all more vulnerable to doxxing and undue threats to our homes and workplaces.

Which, for DEI practitioners in higher education, has been a particularly tricky stretch of landmines to trek through. The tepidness and carefulness of public colleges and universities has been a case study in overcompliance. The quickness with which institutions of higher education were ready to throw off the cloak of caring about equity and inclusion, and give in to the Dear Colleague Letters from the Department of Education, which are not legally binding, and abruptly shutter key programs for marginalized populations, continues to be heartbreaking and alarming.

Decades of work, legacies of advocacy to carve out spaces for historically underrepresented populations, gone in milliseconds out of fear that federal funding could be pulled if we continued offering Lavender Graduations or BIPOC focused bridge programs. One iteration of such a reporting line posted by the US Dept. of Education, that was thankfully pulled shortly after when it was spammed, said “this form is an outlet for students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to report illegally discriminatory practices at institutions of learning. The Dept. will utilize community submissions to identify potential areas for investigation” and the website for this form? End-DEI-dot-ED-dot-GOV.

To this day, my home university still has not provided a statement that directly and explicitly addresses the harrowing attacks on queer and trans people via the federal government. But I did get a message about “attacks on research,” which is totally true, and has major implications for marginalized populations, but still speaks volumes about the consideration, or lack thereof, of queer and trans people as part of the fabric of our schools. Perhaps if we all changed our genders to "research," our institutions would defend us too.

Nancy Mace fell on the radar after proudly and repeatedly using the T-Slur in a house committee hearing, the latest move in what appeared to be her personal crusade to "champion women’s safety” right around the same time an order titled "Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” was issued. I believe this was the first order that actually used the term “trans” whereas previous orders defaulted to the charged and loaded language of “radical gender ideology” or “surgical mutilation.” As we know, the manufactured debate about trans participation in sports, especially the objection of trans women participating in women’s sports, has been the golden goose argument for the Republican party finally championing their egregious anti-trans policies nationwide.

After decades of poking and prodding the general public to see what would stick – it seems that sports and athletics was the higher value and most emotionally riling area of the average person’s life that they could frame as being threatened by predatory men dressed as women to really get an uproar from people who generally don’t care about women’s sports.

In fact, I just watched a video where two folks infiltrated a rally purporting to “Save Women’s Sports” on the steps of the Supreme Court, many attendees donning signs that said “Girl’s Sports for Girls Only” and “Truth. Fairness. Biological Reality.” and asked the demonstrators if they could name five professional athletes in women’s sports. As a surprise to no one, everyone they talked to either straight up said “no,” tried their darndest and ultimately could only come up with high profile or retired athletes like the Williams sisters. Or, in another case, someone decided to be wrong with their whole chest and said “Riley Gaines” to which the infiltrator quickly corrected “she’s not a professional athlete.”

At this point, we’re about three weeks in. Three weeks into the rollout of federal directives undoing decades of civil rights and DEI work. Three weeks of being executive ordered out of existence. Three weeks of figuring out what the heck is going on at any given time, when the trans community is hit with a devastating loss.

Sam Nordquist, a biracial trans man from Red Wing, MN, was reported missing, having last been seen around January 1 and was said to have traveled to New York state to see his online girlfriend. Investigations would reveal that Sam was brutally, maliciously tortured for weeks by the girlfriend, along with several others, until he ultimately died.

And remember, the federal government at this time was well into the process of scrubbing and erasing similar stories of violence against queer, trans and BIPOC folks in an effort to revise history. The stories of Matthew Shepard in the 90s, who was similarly beaten and brutalized until he died and Nex Benedict in 2024, who was jumped at school and later died. While these stories are hard to process, they are essential to keeping an accurate historical record, and erasing them signals that we should not remember them, that they are not relevant. That Matthew, Nex, Sam, and others, are not important. We know better, we know the truth.

I included photos of both Nex and Sam in my Transgender Day of Remembrance display this past November. It’s the least I can do to keep their lives, their names, and their stories from being totally erased. It’s in this same line of thinking that Judith Butler spoke out in an interview around this time saying, “if you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?”

Trans people, especially racialized trans people, have been the canaries in the coal mine for years. Back in 2015, Laverne Cox asserted that trans people are in a state of emergency, and things certainly haven’t improved since then.

By this point, the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, since apparently bodies of water and governmental offices can legally change their names, but trans people shouldn’t be able to. The National Park service removed the word “transgender” from the Stonewall Monument website. And a battle over the future of Medicaid is playing out in Congress, threatening the affordability and access to healthcare for millions of Americans.

February was an interesting time for me personally and professionally. I attended the annual ACPA conference, which is for college professionals. It was in sunny Long Beach, California which offered a nice little reprieve from the bitter Midwest winter. But what struck me was that I didn’t feel like I was necessarily surrounded by colleagues. There were pockets, I connected with lots of folks still in the brink of DEI and LGBTQ+ services work, but I largely felt like there was a tale of conferences. For folks who aren’t immersed in TQ Centered Diversity work on college campuses, it seemed like the talking points were subtle, missing, quiet. I was eagerly looking for the rally cry around the need for our Universities to fend off the disruptions to our work, and it wasn’t really there. I had an opportunity to present a workshop on one of my passion areas, which is the value of third spaces for queer and trans development. But overall, I felt like I’d flown across the country to spend time in the sun with my friends, and soak up a little bit of affirmation from others experiencing similar setbacks and uncertainties at our respective campuses. Overall, in a moment where I would think we could look to our academic professional associations for bold risks, the signs weren’t there.

So much opportunity, so much to discuss. Like the shuttering of Diversity and Inclusion offices at places like Ohio State, Iowa State, and the University of Kansas collapsing and consolidating their identity-based centers into one vaguely defined “student engagement center.” My heart broke hearing from a colleague about the residual glue still left outside her former center where the letters that once spelled out the office’s name had been pried off the wall. University of Cincinnati installed “Biological” bathroom signs, which were quickly reversed after pushback. Texas schools were attempting to put stoppers on student drag shows. So much to talk about as a field, as educators, and it was barely a whisper at this giant conference of college professionals.

And boy what a time to be flying while trans! This would actually be the last time my partner or I would choose to get on a plane and still have not flown again. Related– right around the time we were coming home, new guidance from the state department issued a permanent ban on transgender athletes looking to enter the U.S. for sports competitions, and that requests for passports with X markers or for gender markers that differs from the sex marker at one’s birth, would no longer be honored.

Mid-February also brought a series of orders and actions from the White House centered around making america healthy, establishing a commission, a bizarre obsession with autism seemingly steeped in concerns about increased healthcare costs and these individuals' inability to qualify for the armed forces. It also ended COVID-19 vaccine mandates in schools, stating that parents should be equipped with accurate data to make those decisions on their own for their children– which apparently only applies in this scenario, not when it comes to parents of trans kids.

March 2025 kinda felt like things were picking up, the headlines were harder to keep up with. Much of this is a byproduct of the many executive orders issued in January and February that included directives to implement elements of the orders within 30-60-90 days, and so the actualization of these orders was really starting to play out at this point.

Kicking us off, the Oscars aired. And although the controversial film “Emilia Perez” collected a few accolades for its depiction of a cartel member who undergoes gender-affirming surgery, none of the cast or crew who took the stage to accept awards for their work on the film even mentioned trans people, let alone used the platform opportunity to point out the increasing precarity of the world for trans people.

On the political stage, the continued battle over attempts to gut medicaid for millions of Americans was full of both performative and punitive actions. The Pink Pelosi Club showed up in droves to a Trump address, wearing their pussy-hat pigmented girlboss suits but otherwise sitting in silence, meanwhile Congressman Al Green was removed from chambers after interjecting his disdain for Trump’s actions during the remarks, and was later censured through an affirmative vote by Congress.

Ben Shapiro was leading a lil’ online petition calling on the President to issue a pardon to Derek Chauvin, the killer cop convicted of murdering George Floyd, though the logistics of this wouldn’t make much sense seeing as Chauvin is serving a 22-year prison sentence for STATE charges, not federal charges. Needless to say, Shapiro’s efforts were unsuccessful thus far.

A weird subplot seems to be playing out across executive orders around this time, in which a series of law firms are categorized as risks for conducting “unethical behavior” (i.e. having DEI hiring practices), though the real pattern seems to be that these law firms have litigated against the Trump administration in the past. This isn’t the only instance where it seems executive orders are being used to retaliate against law firms, government officials, and other individuals on Trump’s shit list.

By about mid-March, idk about you, but I could physically and mentally feel the drain and weight of the onslaught of everything that was playing out. There were some particularly bad days, I can see in my daily journal on March 14th I literally just wrote “BRUH. WTF.”

I started to approach this self-designated role of documenting and bearing witness to this mass mess as “fieldwork.”

It was clear that the spirit of TikTok had ultimately died when it re-emerged from its 24-hour shutdown, with many longstanding educators on social justice stepping away from the app for good, and the ego of Meta was simply growing in this new era of laxed regulations on social media platforms. Like the millennials’ Blockbuster that may have still stood as brick & mortar stores well into the advent of streaming services, the spirit of the original heyday of the video rental store never twinkled in the same way again, and we exist in a timeline where we’ve marveled over the last standing Blockbuster in the country. All that to say, the odd bait and switch stunt TikTok pulled at the beginning of the year ensured the SOCIAL component of the media platform would never be the same. Having lived through the fade-away of and the Yahoo buyout turned porn-scrub of Tumblr and witnessed the world of Vine wisp away – it was clear that when the full-screen announcement popped up that TikTok was – at least functionally – back, there was a choice to make. To either keep posting in the new era of an app that has seemingly sold itself out to American fascism, or be a continued voice in a sea of increasing bots, trolls, and sneaky advertisements. I stayed. With the coincidence of TikTok’s return taking place on Inauguration Day, it was a natural compulsion to simply start documenting my observations, daily videos, daily testimonies, always leading with “it’s day # whatever of being executive ordered out of existence.” And maaaan, did the trolls hate that. But now here I am, 365+ days later, with an archive, a record, a reminder, an artifact, both written and videorecorded of my thoughts and theories in real time. Which is how I’ve been able to curate everything I’ve talked about so far – you obviously can’t see my desk, but please know it’s covered in notebooks, and I’ve pulled up my phone’s camera roll full of headline screenshots, receipts before things truly vanished, and saved photos of resistance and art.

When I shifted my thoughts around documenting everything in real time as both personal writings, and fieldwork, it shaped my lens for what felt… important… to collect and to share. I often get feedback that not only do I have a way with words, but that I have a gift in finding the words that people were looking for, that they needed, that they were trying to get to but couldn’t quite find, and then they find the spirit of their thoughts in my shared words, and they’re grateful. Thinking of this as fieldwork, as being literally in the field witnessing this in current time, being impacted and sharing out what I see, also helped ward off the impact of those bots and trolls and their repetitious jabs about my weight, my gender, my intelligence, and my integrity.

All of this to say, social media changed drastically in the first few months of 2025. We are still grappling and learning its changes, we are still dealing with the infiltration of provocateurs and contrarians. We’re also dealing with a new age of citizen journalism that is more about being the first to break a headline, but the last to care about content. I’m looking at you, Aaron Parnas. Everything is fast, a far cry from the genre of investigative, thoughtful, and people-oriented journalism we need right now. And so thinking about my priorities in documenting the world through my eyes became more about slowing down, minding my energy, and capturing enough instead of trying to capture everything.

What also helps is that there are many incredible journalists, reporters, bloggers, and other documenters of this moment making sure that the commonly erased narratives in moments of major plight are not being fully eclipsed. I think of folks like Erin Reed and Parker Malloy, who are consistently churning out thorough and thoughtful work about major changes in public and political life for trans people. I think of folks like Portia Noir and Sunny Day Jones, who regularly provide critical commentary on current issues with links to history and rhetoric. I’d also like to highlight the Trans Journalist Association, a small but mighty and growing group of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and Two Spirit folks spanning a wide range of media and journalism sectors. This org, headed by Trevell Anderson, has been leading in keeping the integrity of journalism alive, crafting resources for fair and respectful reporting on queer and trans issues, and rallying folks around holding media companies like the New York Times to task for weak reporting and platforming anti-trans views.

Last year, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel with three trans and nonbinary published authors and what was clear from our discussion was how integral the varied and multifaceted stories of our communities are right now. These authors’ work ranges in genre, scope, and target audience. Some were sought after for their publications, others trudged forward into an industry that is often unkind to our stories and ideas. But overall, the message was the same – if you have a story to share, get writing.

This will be all the more important as censorship, cowardice, and overcompliance continue to ravage our media and entertainment. Laverne Cox recently shared that some people in Hollywood have told her they’ve been flat out told “we’re not doing queer stories right now. No queer stories at all.” And this isn’t news per se – we’ve seen the steady attempts to erase or suppress queer and trans narratives from film and movies – you can’t watch Heated Rivalry without a special subscription, just like you couldn’t watch The L Word or Queer as Folk in the 90s. And our schools continue to be battlegrounds where “Don’t Say Gay” style bills and book bans are trying to wedge any possible mention of LGBTQ+ experiences out of the classroom.

A theme I noticed especially as it pertained to orders and actions around education, was how much mental gymnastics the administration does to both claim that the violent legacy of racial discrimination and slavery in the U.S. should be left out of the classroom, while also using landmark policies to justify its crusade to undo DEI initiatives when it serves them. In a clarifying memo from the Department of Education, they had the audacity to invoke the 1954 Brown V. Board of Education ruling, in which the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to segregate based on race in U.S. public schools, an overturning of a previous ruling that deemed segregation acceptable as long as the facilities were separate but equal.

The Dept. of Ed. leveraged this ruling to frame school services and activities tailored to students based on racial identities as “legally indefensible.” In other words, the Dept. used a landmark ruling that chipped away at codified racial discrimination to say that modern-day school programs that acknowledge the inherited and intergenerational impacts of that racial discrimination, are unlawful. They make it seem like the Brown V. Board of education ruling happened in a vacuum, wholly unrelated to the ongoing effects of chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, the racialized war on drugs.

No, instead they manage to repurpose this ruling in their favour to say schools cannot address racial disparities by providing tailored support and intentional education to students about the histories and current impacts of racial discrimination.

Which makes it oh-so clear that they never understood the implementation and need for programs and activities that support, uplift, and center marginalized communities. Brown V. Board of Education was an anti-segregation law aimed at undoing the “separate but equal” charade, eliminating “whites-only and Blacks-only” bathrooms, drinking fountains, and seating areas. DEI programs and curriculum in schools TEACHES about and aims to undo the HARM of this history. It is SUPPLEMENTAL, not SEPARATE. Everything a student of color can obtain from school can already be obtained by a white student, but DEI programs and services provide an experience that says “we understand what has happened in the past, and we aim to address any residual impact that may get in the way of your education.” Because the known reality is that Brown V. Board of Education was ruled 71 years ago, but we are still in a society that does not dole out opportunities and experiences equitably to all.

Which makes it all the more asinine and contradictory– because we’re always counting the contradictions– that on March 27 we get an executive order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which basically frames anything speaking about America’s colonial history as anti-American, even going as far as to say there is a revisionist movement trying to characterize the U.S. as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

No, babes, I think the U.S. is doing that all on its own. This order also aims its sites on the Smithsonian and other nationally funded museums,, and naming an intention to restore memorials/statues/etc that may have been previously removed to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” I’ll drop a YouTube video in the show notes (that’s the description section of wherever you’re listening to this podcast episode) so you can check out a longform video from SunnyDaeJones who did a deep dive on this particular order, and explains how the administration knows everything they don’t want us to know, so please check out that video, it’ll be clearly marked in the episode description.

Speaking of podcasts, in March, California Governor Gavin Newsom – see I told ya we’d get back to him eventually – launched his namesake podcast “This is Gavin Newsom” which “aims to expand his national audience by participating in extended discussions with various political media personalities." You’re gonna hear me say this numerous times as I reflect on the last year, and I’m only half joking, but we gotta stop letting mediocre white men have microphones. Cuz this man could have come out swinging with an engaging discussion with damn near anyone and still meet the scope and intentions of his new show, but do you know who he chose for his very first episode? Charlie Kirk. Gavin has since hosted Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Newt Gingrich with a little bit of counterbalance by hosting Jasmine Crockett, Tim Walz and… Ryan Murphy? But it’s this first episode that really set a tone and called into question Newsom’s commitment to protecting trans people because he ends up conceding that trans women playing women’s sports is “deeply unfair.”

What’s unfair is we keep enabling cishet white men to provide their unsolicited opinion on trans experiences and where trans people should exist. It’s a right-wing win, honestly, that we’ve reached a place where discussion about trans people has become an intellectual or political debate rather than holding the line at trans people being the best equipped to talk about our experiences. Gavin Newsom could have sidestepped this trap with Charlie, but instead took the bait and revealed his lack of knowledge and accountability to trans people. And across more than 50 episodes, Gavin has not platformed a trans person or trans positive discussion…yet. Hey Gavin, my inbox is open.

The backdrop in March is rife with the diabolical work of the arbitrarily defined, and bizarrely led, Department of Government Efficiency, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in federally funded research pulled from colleges and universities as well as non-profits and social services, with a disproportionate impact on programs and organizations serving communities of color, queer and trans folks, and disabled people.

The Dept. of Ed. pursued investigations of dozens of institutions of higher education, threatening to withhold funding if those schools didn’t bend to new guidance on “combatting anti-Semitism” on campuses. Under this same guise, our campuses were terrorized as students were approached and abducted by federal agents for their participation in Free Gaza encampments and demonstrations the year before. International students in particular were targeted, with a growing number suddenly having their student visa status interrupted.

It all put a spotlight on what TQ centered diversity workers have already always known about the false promise of educational institutions, and the rumbling of its collapsing landscape – headline after headline of departmental closures, program mergers and name changes, restructures and other shutterings of DEI programming – our work has been sacrificed, amputated, the assumptions under and behind the need to overcomply faulty – signalling that these institutions think that if they cut away the demonized parts, the big bad government will leave them alone. Oh dearie– wait until the leopard gets a load of that naive, scrumptious looking face when *your* livelihood comes next.

They will find they’ve lost too much flesh, too much blood, too much lifeforce from so many self-inflicted flesh wounds to even be able to function, carried forward by a few final carriers through the nervous system, but the heart can only pump for so long when the circuitry, the main arteries and the appendages, have been severed. We learned long ago that institutions cannot love us.

The proverbial cherry on top of March was the order for “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” which defied the Democratic Governor of D.C’s assurance that federal aid was not necessary and took a broken-windows approach to a power play that upended the daily lives of the area’s unhoused population by “immediately removing encampments and cleaning up” the nation’s capitol. Pair that with a shocking video from thousands of miles beyond the southern border in which Kristi Noem speaks in front of a giant detainment cell full of staged prisoners at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.

And dear listener, that only takes us to the end of March. When I set out to draft this, the plan was to give it to ya all in one shot but looking at what all I’ve collected, this is gonna be a last bite best served in parts. So consider this part one, stay tuned and come back next week for part two as I reflect on the U.S. relationship with El Salavador, the mistreatment of asylum seeker Andry Hernandez Romero, the slow slide into summer, and the first 100 days of being executive ordered out of existence.