I need to buy a gun. I can’t state it any simpler than that. It’s something I’ve needed for sometime and I seem to feel like I need it a little more each day. The gun doesn’t have to be fancy or high tech. I don’t need some AR hunting rifle in drag or one of those phallic three digit magnum monstrosities. I need something basic and reliable. Maybe a .38 or .45 wheel gun. Something just powerful enough to put an irate cis-male down in two shots or less. I’ve always wanted a gun but I never felt like I really needed one until recently, about four years ago to be exact, right around the time I came out as a trans person. Now, as my fluctuating gender continues to veer further and further towards the feminine end of the spectrum, I’ve come to understand the stone-cold necessity for the Second Amendment more clearly than I ever have before. So I’ll say it once more with feeling, dearest motherfuckers, to really drive the point home, I need a fucking gun.
Those are the thoughts that swing through my dizzy skull every time I hear another horror story about some trans or gender-bending individual being slaughtered for the high crime of living outside the closet. I’ve been having these thoughts a lot lately, 22 times in the last year to be exact. That’s how many trans murders occurred in 2019 that we know of and that doesn’t even include the girls killed in police custody. I wish I could say that this is an anomaly, but it’s not. According to the American Medical Association, it’s a goddamn epidemic. At least 157 of my people have been slaughtered since 2013, right around the time the Christian White, I mean Right, switched gears from the now dated practice of fag-bashing to that new national pastime of tranny-stomping, and I say ‘at least’ before that staggering headcount because most transgender murder victims still go unreported or misgendered. The police can’t seem to help themselves, even in death they spit on us.
And this is why gun control is a steaming sack of elitist bullshit. When you tell people to give up their guns, you’re really telling them to trust the cops. This might work smashingly for billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and the bougie brats in March For Our Lives, but for marginalized people like myself, it’s a fucking slap in the face. As I mentioned above, pigs kill trannies. Just ask Layleen Polanco, who was found dead in her cell at Rikers this year. Or Johana Medina, who was only released from one of ICE’s fine concentration camps just in time to die in the ER from untreated medical problems.
Trans people are nearly four times as likely to experience police violence as cis people. We’re regularly targeted for harassment just for presenting in public, because so many of our sisters have had to seek refuge from economic persecution in the form of victimless sex work. So yes, suburban liberals, I need a fucking gun. I’m what your bodyguards in the police are overpaid to prevent. Our liberty threatens your property value, so we are disposable people. But one gun is not enough, and enough is exactly what I’ve had my fill of over the last five years. Enough dead sisters. We all need to get armed and we need to get fucking organized.
This was the conclusion Huey Newton and Bobby Seale came to in 1966, when they formed the first chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. A couple of inner-city Oakland round-the-block boys who met at Merrit Community College, Huey and Bobby bonded over a shared passion for the Black Power Movement, particularly bombastic thinkers like Robert F. Williams (author of Negroes with Guns) and organizations like the Deacons of Defense, who took up arms to defend their rural communities from the scourge of the Klan. Much like today, shooting black kids in the back without repercussion was like a goddamn competitive sport for the Oakland PD in the Sixties. Huey and Bobby decided that their communities needed to be defended from the police by well armed and well trained civilian militias. And thus America’s most dangerous civil rights enterprise was born. I can’t help but to see parallels with my own community’s existential struggle for survival.
What genderqueer people like me need is our own Black Panther Party, Trannies with Guns, because enough is enough. I’m sick and tired of having to ask myself, ‘Am I going to get raped by the police tonight?’ every time I leave the house after dark in lipstick. And I’m sick, physically sick, of seeing my sisters get cut to fucking pieces just for using their own goddamn bodies to make a living. Huey once said that the point of the Black Panthers was to appeal to “the brothers on the block.” Well, we need some motherfucking Purple Panthers to appeal to our sisters on the stroll. We need to set up our own civilian militias to defend sex workers from both the cops and the twisted johns who prey on them without repercussion. We need to create autonomous safe spaces from the barrel of the gun, so our kids don’t have to look over their shoulder every time they use a public restroom not approved by the state that seeks to erase them.
We need to take care of our own, dearest motherfuckers, from the state and the streets, because if we don’t, who will? I’m done with being scared. So I need a fucking gun, and ten thousand armed sisters and brothers to have my back. As Huey said, All power to all the people. My people too. Lock and load, bitches, we got work to do.