It's difficult to know what to say when confronted with The Latest Bad Shit. My voice doesn't affect The Latest Bad Shit. If nothing else, I live in Australia, where - like everywhere - there is constant Bad Shit, but it's not as relentless, as all-encompassing, as in the UK and especially the USA. (Which is not to say it's not relentless and all-encompassing. I get to live a pretty privileged life away from the worst.)

But while I'd love to just say that it makes no goddamn sense for a game to have both a Luck stat and a Crit Chance stat, how much is each of them doing, wacky fun times with ludonarrative, it feels like not only is there an elephant in the room, but the elephant is goring people I love and smashing their things with its giant elephant trunk, and to avoid mentioning the elephant while it's stomping on people's heads seems, at the very least, disrespectful. So, the elephant. The elephant is currently transphobia. Once it's got enough of its kicks through transphobia it's going to come after the rest of you, though.

Kansas is of course the big moment. I believe it was Adam Serwer who coined the phrase "the cruelty is the point", and Kansas makes it pretty clear. If you haven't heard, Kansas cancelled all trans people's driver's licences and made them get new ones, which is pointless other than cruelty, which is another way of saying that the cruelty... yes. But the thing that makes it really clear that they just want to put the boot in is that there is no grace period. There isn't "get a new licence over the next two weeks". It's just, there, no more licence. Go to the DMV and get a new one. How do you get there? Well, if the USA didn't have the finest public transportation system in the world, that would be extremely difficult, and would hinder people's lives and almost force them to break the law - after all, without that sterling public transit, they would need to drive to get to work while the paperwork went through, among other things - possibly leading to imprisonment where they would be forcibly detransitioned. And I am being told, as if this wasn't clumsily set up earlier, that the USA does not, in fact, have the finest public transportation system in the world, and has a serious cars-or-nothing culture.

Yes, by the way, the US has also decided that they will not provide incarcerated trans people with the hormone treatments they need to... well, yes, "continue to exist as their gender", but also, importantly, "not die".

And this could all be said to be happening to other people, over there, to a small part of the population, if you don't look at what the Fox News host who runs the Department of WARRRRR told Scouting America recently. There would, he informed them, be no more merit badges for recognising diversity, there would be no more trans Scouts, but that they could keep allowing girls in the Scouts... for now.

For now.

I want you to look at that because... I've said it before. The most important reason to stop them brutalising trans people is because it is bad for them to brutalise trans people. The second most important reason is because there is absolutely no way they stop at trans people. (Indeed, the other elephant in the room is when ICE abandoned a blind refugee outside a closed cafe and he died of exposure.) I'm white, straight, male, and cis - and, of course, not in America. So they'll probably come for me last, or towards the end of the list. But I'm also not always, one hundred percent, telling them how much I love them, so they're going to come for me eventually, and that makes it very likely that they're going to come for you, too.

I don't know how we stop this particular outgrowth of hate. As I keep reminding myself, last time it took two world wars and the murder of a significant amount of Europe. Ideally that doesn't happen this time. I think it's possible that we just have to outlast them, wait for the major figures to get old and die, and make it clear that this particular crusade will be long, difficult, and boring, and then they'll go back into their egg sacs to wait for the next cycle. But we don't get that without hard work to make sure their crusade will be long, difficult, and boring; and we don't get that if we comply in advance; and we don't get that at all without too many good people being hurt, disenfranchised, brutalised, and killed. Because that much has already happened, and is still happening, and is happening right now.

If we get that ideal moment, where their movement falls apart because it's not lol epic any more, I hope, very much, that we remember what these people did, and we do not let the public consciousness forget it and brush it under the rug the way they would so dearly like to.