Whiplash

I have a home. I have my meds sorted. I have to pick up my testosterone script every two weeks because I don’t know how to communicate that I need two bottles a month in the correct way but, at least it’s getting filled. I’m stable. My desk is set up in a way that no longer hurts me to sit at.

All of my base needs are met and I feel secure and at-ease for the first time in a long time.

I’m happy.

I’m also heartbroken.

Watching the fall of Roe and the rights of gun owners prioritized over people’s lives and right to decide what happens to their bodies from across the ocean hits in weird ways. The contrast is just so jarring.

I spend my day in a country, in a city-state, where I have not heard a single gun shot.

I spend my day in a place where I see children riding transit and bikes across town to see their friends without parental supervision; where crying toddlers are not threatened with being beaten into silence but redirected or allowed to cry it out, passers-by-be-damned, because the child has just as much right to take up space and make noise as the rest of us do.

The day Roe was overturned Germany reversed their nazi-era gag order that prohibited doctors from giving information about abortion providers and processes to people who needed it. Abortion is still taboo and difficult to access here, but it’s getting easier instead of harder.

It felt like whiplash. To be in two places at once. My feet solidly in Germany but my heart very much tied to the US.

I saw the flashing neon writing on the wall that Roe was going to be overturned and got a hysterectomy as soon as I could – just as much to relieve the dysphoria and pain as to make it impossible to carry a rapists’ seed. I was hoping the last half would wind up being a misgiving, that abortion would always be an option for everyone who needed it; That the decisions about ones own body would lie with the individual and in cases that call for it, their doctor.

I was right to trust my instincts and trust what I’ve seen. I’m so tired of being right.

I live across the river from where the Berlin wall once stood. I live in a country that has been trying very hard to learn from the mistake of fascism and ensure it doesn’t happen again.

I’m from a country where fascism is winning. I’m from a country that looked at the Nazis and went yeah, cool, let’s do that again. After all, the Nazis got their inspiration from Jim Crow laws and anyone who lived in the south knows the refrain. I grew up in that.

I’m from a country where the current sitting President is basically thoughts-and-prayers-ing his way through the greatest overt, court directed, assault on human rights in the US in decades.

Constitutionally enshrined human rights have been wholly revoked by the supreme court for the first time in generations because they weren’t codified into law.

The president and majority democratic congress have promised us every election that they would codify Roe and they have utterly failed. Now, the best they can do is have Nancy Pelosi send fundraising emails for the next election while handwringing about being fooled by the SCOTUS justices with long track records of being anti-choice, and planning to appoint anti-choice justices to lower courts.

My grandmother who was born in the 1930s died with more rights and agency than me and my friends and my family have today.

I knew it was coming, I warned everyone who would listen, I’m still gutted.