How Does It Feel When Your Government Wants to Eradicate You? Read On. ^⁠51%

6/28/2026, 9:00:00 AM

Topics: Transgender Rights, Government Policy, Discrimination, Personal Experience

Keywords: Transgender, Military, Politics, Donald Trump, Canada, Wrong Life, Adorno, Holocaust, Nazi Germany

BS Summary: This article contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, False Dilemma, and Pessimism Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 23.9% saturation with 351 hits. Analysis detected 2,982 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,469 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 42.7% and a BS Rank of ⁠51% (15,063 of 30,190 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 50.10% of the article peer group.

Confidence50%

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1,469 words

Every once a while I encounter a

quote that brings me up short and helps reframe how I see the world.

Such was

the case when I came across this quote by Theodor Adorno as I researched the

rise of Nazi Germany and the origins of the Holocaust: “A wrong life cannot be

lived rightly.”

Adorno meant it as a critique of life under capitalism, but out of context, I interpreted it</span> to

mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (Jewish, Sinti, disabled),

nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good

ones,” or being life worthy of life.

No matter their character, achievements, or

capability, a “wrong life” can have only a negative value to society.

The only

way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum

to zero on both sides.

This thought stopped me in my

tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it

explained everything I was both feeling and seeing over the past year.

It was

the grand unification theorem of my inner world and explained what I was seeing

that was external to me.

I am wrong life in the United

States.

And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter.

Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication.

Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger.

I genuinely tried to be a

good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others.

I’m angry at the

breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the

content of our character and not by government fiat that people like me are

incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives.

I’m furious at the

hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that

ultimately decided I must be destroyed.

I’m being kicked out of the National

Guard.

I can’t legally use a public bathroom on federal property or at most

airports.

As a veteran, I have a free pass onto national parks that I effectively

can never use because I’m wrong life.

I will never be able to work in my field

again because I am wrong life.

At the VA, the only treatments I can receive are

essentially reeducation—namely, unwanted therapy and medical treatment aimed at

detransition.

I spent decades of my life as a

service member, and in my final years I chose to be a MEDEVAC pilot to save

people rather than kill them.

I volunteered as a superhero cosplayer to raise

money for desperately ill children and their families.

I spent my summer flying

as a firefighter, saving ranches owned by Trump donors, properties owned by the

Mormon Church, and Bible camps run by people who would never let people like me

attend.

I went on to fly air ambulance

helicopters in one of the reddest parts of the country while awaiting my

Canadian permanent residency paperwork.

When I was flying people around who

needed urgent medical care quickly, I could take a pretty good guess that they were

likely the sort of people who voted for Trump and would happily support

“putting all those transgenders in mental institutions where they belong.”

But

they couldn’t because they were intubated, and I was busy flying them to a better

hospital, regardless of what they might think of me.

But none of it matters.

government, and the people who voted it into office, have declared me wrong

life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.

Indeed, the president

explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life; it was a feature and not a

bug.

His campaign spent hundreds

of millions of dollars

promoting the idea that anyone who doesn’t want

wrong life eliminated is against the <i>Herrenvolk</i>.

It was messaging

straight out of the

Nazi

playbook, just targeting a different group.

At the same time, this sentence

helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust

than other civil rights atrocities in American history.

At the end of the day

in that history, for most other marginalized groups, it was still possible to

be one of “the good ones.”

For Black people, there was room for acceptance of

those who “knew their place.”

Whites needed them for their labor.

Indeed, the

South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy.

Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater

of Operations.

Hispanics and Latinos were long used for their labor or valued

as reliable Republican voters in Florida.

Their lives had less value than other

Americans’, but it wasn’t a negative number.

Mine is.

And that’s the fundamental

difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today

and the civil rights issues of the past.

It’s also why the policies being

enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to

push

Jews and LGBT people

out of Germany as noncitizens of the Reich than

previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place”

as second-class citizens.

The Adorno quote snapped into place

why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of

German history than within that of the United States.

It’s also the most useful

framework for understanding why Republicans around the country are targeting

transgender people with literally over 1,000 bills per year designed to make

life impossible enough that they either emigrate, detransition, or

live in a country (this one) where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses

for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.

They see us as wrong life.

And even

those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is

the dark side of politics: It looks like the quick and easy path to power to

take this position in public.

Any Republican who does not behave as if

transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party,

and away from the levers of power.

Democrats and hospital administrators in

blue states aren’t generally willing to enforce their own civil rights laws for

fear of the federal government and the belief that transgender people aren’t

worth the effort of protecting.

I have expressed some of these

frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of, “Well,

I don’t think of you that way.”

While I am appreciative of such support, people

saying this simply doesn’t matter since they have no institutional power.

own sense of self-worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes

nothing in practice.

Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is

meaningless if I’m spending my last moments holding my breath and trying to

claw my way through concrete with my fingernails while taking a “shower” with

100 strangers.  All it provides is a

further sense that the situation is unjust.

It does nothing to keep me alive in

the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared

us to be “wrong life.”

If this seems like exaggeration: It’s

not.

One of the cruelest ironies is that my friends and I constantly receive

messages that are some variation of “Kill yourself, tranny faggot,” sent by the

same sorts of people who five years ago smugly informed us that “all lives

matter.”

The world’s first trillionaire routinely brags about “killing the woke

mind virus” on his own social media platform.

Only the government’s opinion

matters.

And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in

their eyes.

That incumbent party has made it clear it intends to remain in

power in perpetuity at any cost, no matter how people vote.

I would always be

wrong life if I remained in the United States.

The only way to change the

equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the

same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can

have some value greater than zero.

I want my life to have a positive

value again as seen by the people who matter.

I cannot express how much of a

relief it was when I did not have to spend every waking moment aware of being

wrong life.

If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, it’s being

in a constant state of sadness, betrayal, and futility at the possibility of

leading a life that matters. 

1469 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker1.2%attributed speech1,452writer words

17 attributed words100% of attributed speech82% writer coverage

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

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How Does It Feel When Your Government Wants to Eradicate You? Read On. ^⁠51%

Speakers

Theodor Adorno

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

How Does It Feel When Your Government Wants to Eradicate You? Read On. ⁠51%

Speakers

Theodor Adorno

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

How Does It Feel When Your Government Wants to Eradicate You? Read On. ^⁠51%