14,000 Nonbinary Kids Will Die

And it's all connected

Time-stamped: 96 hours later

I am a misinformation hawk. If it ain’t headlined by the BBC, the UN, or Al Jazeera, I don’t trust it. This week it was repeated that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza in the next 48 hours. Several days later those babies have transcended counting while according to The New York Times the motive for the deaths of two Zionists in Washington, DC remains a mystery. World leaders who want to ban trade with Israel are devastated.

I however am not buying the backtracking on the 14,000 prediction. If these babies are still alive, where exactly have they gone? Hamas’ integrity in food distribution can only go so far. Now more than ever we need to stand firm in the realm of selective facts and remain as unflinching as Ta-Nehisi Coates in our commitment to emotional reasoning. The Holocaust that the world’s 15.8 million Jews are inflicting on 2 billion Muslims and their allies is the worst in history. The only person misusing the term genocide is Donald Trump, while unaliving people at a Jewish Museum isn’t antisemitic if you shout “Free Palestine”. The sheer skullduggery it takes to call acts of resistance terrorism!

So today I don’t want to hear about Turkey bombing Kurds or Syrians killing Christians or what I am sure must be a social justice revolution taking place in Sudan. I know nothing about Yemen either but can confirm it is probably Islamophobic to compare death counts and displacement numbers in such places to what’s happening in Gaza—or to expect me to protest any of these things. My name is Taqiyya and a famine’s a famine if I say it’s a famine.

When you are educated like me, you understand the interconnectedness of all righteous causes. One reason for the tunnels under Gaza, for instance, is climate awareness. They combine passive cooling systems with opportunities to better martyr citizens in the spaces above. Likewise, we still wear Covid masks at our demonstrations due to the relationship between disability justice and anti-imperialism. Remember that the Israeli government handed vaccine distribution over to the Palestinian Authority in case people didn’t trust it coming directly from them. This is Settler Colonialism 101, so we will never show our faces. Ever.

These matters naturally relate to the oppression of the gender binary. It will be obvious to most how drag is a form of liberation masking, a kind of late-night or reading-time keffiyeh encloakment enacted to disrupt the hegemony of, well, everything—and to better prepare children for life-saving hormones and vaginoplasties. It boggles the mind how the necessity of drag artists in kindergartens has dropped out of public consciousness. How else are they meant to feel included? To continue in the direction a wise lady on Triggernometry recently took, what is it that makes the naysayers so upset? What issue do they have with themselves that causes them to reject the ability of queerness to help children distrust their parents? Why is no one reporting on the evidence-based, peer-reviewed studies that surely confirm that the answers to these psychological questions are clownphobia and a lack of self-love?

I have done a ton of research and can confirm that 14,000 nonbinary, self-identifying toddlers will die in the next 48 hours if we do not bring back Drag Queen Story Hour and bomb more fertility clinics in places like Palm Springs. Think about it: nonbinary kids cannot escape the violence of he/she pronouns, making their existence a psychic Darfur.

But it is more material than that. More visceral, more trenchant, more coterminously interconnected within the interstices of liminality and trauma. This is because of all the things we have to ban so that we “don’t buy apartheid”, as some of Britain’s sharpest celebrities have phrased it. I still think the most meaningful action might be creating a mysteriously motivated museum incident or setting yourself on fire, but refusing to buy Israeli-grown herbs and dates is a close second. Boycotting Coca Cola provides a further way to show solidarity. And never forget: a zombie-eyed, straight-to-camera delivery helps evoke the Soviet milieu that labeled Israel an apartheid state in the first place. Viewers will be impressed to know you really mean it. You’re not acting, you’re just brainwashed.

The point is that there are so many things you can no longer buy if you want to stop the Jews from killing babies. Someone said there’s a lot of tech and medicine that should be off limits as well, but you are the customer and you have a right to choose what works for you.

Except when it comes to Starbucks. Imagine trying to force a dress code on your employees. Who on earth owns a black t-shirt, a pair of khakis, or black or blue jeans? This level of restriction is as bad as anything South Africa tried to pull off under Verwoerd, Vorster, or Botha, so in addition to not buying apartheid we must say no to Frappuccino.

And this is why so many nonbinary people are about to die. Between BDS, the Starbucks strike, RFKJ’s war on processed foods, and so many of us 2S+ people being vegan, there is simply nothing left for us to eat.

I am therefore here to tell the truth before I breathe my last and to fire up the glow in “globalize the intifada”. The kids on hunger strikes at our favorite Qatari-funded universities have raised the lantern. Fully masked, marginalized communities in every continent look to them. Our friends in the Muslim Brotherhood open their arms.

So don’t let anyone tell you that intifada means anything other than peace. The lives of 14,000 exceptionally gendered justice warriors are counting on it.