When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognizes you. Other times, you realize that you no longer recognize your country. People leave; families rupture along political lines; friendships shatter; people and institutions that used to be widely admired are vilified, and yesterday’s villains are sainted; familiar faces disappear from the public sphere; an aggressive conformity takes hold; the material conditions of life change.
The indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show signaled just such a shift in landscape. The news tells us that we are moving from one country to a different, autocratic one. The television shows us: This country looks different, sounds different and feels different. A familiar face and a familiar voice vanish. Some people turned on their televisions on Friday night to see a memorial to Charlie Kirk when they expected to see a comedian welcoming his next guest.
What unites the many actions of the Trump administration, from the sledgehammer it has taken to government programs to the demonstrative cruelty it has built into immigration raids, is that they transform the daily physical, economic and psychic experience of life. President Trump is remaking the country in his image: crude, harsh, gratuitously mean. The ongoing attack on civil society, which his administration plans to intensify in the name of Charlie Kirk, is a part of this program. Civil society makes life more livable. The administration’s message is that the work of civil society no longer belongs in this country.
And neither do trans people. The government’s official policy is that we do not exist — and yet, somehow, we constitute a danger to the country. The fact that Kirk was killed while he was answering a question about the purported prevalence of trans mass shooters (a fiction he had helped promulgate) and the news that the suspect in Kirk’s killing apparently has a romantic partner who is trans have hypercharged this process of disowning.
On Monday morning, before returning from a weekend away, I entered the following words into the search bar on my phone: “famous trans people.” Then I tried “transgender journalists,” “transgender professors” and a few similar queries. My name did not come up. This was my inexact way of measuring the risk that someone would target me. It appeared to be low, even after a weekend of Donald Trump and his prominent allies blaming the left in general and trans people in particular for Kirk’s assassination. OK, I thought, I could go home, for now.
The feeling that I am on borrowed time in my own home is a familiar one. Twelve years ago, I was forced to leave Russia to protect my family from a campaign to take children away from L.G.B.T. parents. In the years since, Russia has been adding L.G.B.T. people to a list of “terrorists and extremists.” Other lists — of “foreign agents,” “undesirable organizations” — are for journalists, academics, media outlets and universities. For a while after Russia issued the arrest warrant that resulted in my being sentenced in absentia to prison, I had a recurrent nightmare: I am on a plane to Moscow, which is exciting, until I remember that I will be arrested as soon as I land.
Ece Temelkuran, the prominent Turkish political columnist, who now lives in exile, described a moment of realization: “I was standing at a gate in Tunis airport after talking to my lawyer, who had said: ‘They’re arresting journalists by the dozen today. Take a vacation or something. I don’t know, go away somewhere.’ I looked at the passengers boarding the plane to Istanbul, then down at my boarding pass. While trying to change my ticket from home to somewhere else, it was the first time I felt that Turkey was hardly my country.” This quote is from a book called “How to Lose a Country.”
The price of admission to Trump’s America is aggressive compliance, the sort demonstrated by more and more universities. Columbia and Williams College, for example, have been voluntarily flying flags at half-staff in honor of Kirk. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley, has notified about 160 students, faculty members and staff that it has given their names to the federal government in connection with “alleged antisemitic incidents.” The philosopher Judith Butler and the Middle East historian Ussama Makdisi are perhaps the only two notified people who have spoken publicly about the email they received. Butler sees the silence of the others as a sign of fear.
These people have good reasons to be frightened. Over the last eight months, we have all learned how such lists are used: to exile students and professors from the university or from the country — and to put others on notice that they are living or working on borrowed time. That they are, to borrow a term from a previous era of lists, un-American.
A friend of mine is in the cross hairs of the administration. I asked her if her world had gotten smaller. Not exactly, she said. “It’s like what happens when somebody dies. There will always be people who will disappoint you. And other people show themselves, having been through what you’ve been through.”
Something is dying: the sense that we know our country. Butler told me that when they got the email notification from U.C. Berkeley, they had trouble believing the university would so badly violate its own procedure and fail in its obligation to protect academic freedom. They had trouble believing it even though they have studied autocracies. Even though they are currently writing a book on Franz Kafka and the law. In Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” the protagonist is arrested but never learns what his crime was. The letter Butler received from the university counsel did not specify for what offense, if any, they might be investigated.
I have been thinking of historical, rather than fictional, antecedents, in particular the assassination in 1938 of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a Polish-German Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s an assassination; because, like most public violence, it was committed by a young man; and because it was an act of despair. Grynszpan’s family, rejected by both Germany and Poland, was stuck in borderland hell between those two countries, along with some 12,000 other people. Staying with an uncle in Paris, Grynszpan was unable to help them. He decided to kill someone he saw as a representative of the force that was immiserating his loved ones. If the information released by the Utah investigators so far proves accurate, Tyler Robinson might have felt a similar desperate fury.
Grynszpan’s action served as a pretext for Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” a two-day state-sponsored pogrom in Nazi Germany. During the course of it, authorities rounded up nearly 30,000 Jews, marking the first time the regime conducted mass arrests and put people in concentration camps because of who they were and not what they had ostensibly done.
But what makes this parallel feel most apt is how nervous I am about drawing it. The comparison seems straightforward: The person who was murdered was a representative of a hateful ideology, the person thought to have killed him was a deluded young man who may have tried to oppose that hatred in the most destructive manner imaginable. And yet something in the transformed landscape of this country tells me I’m not supposed to say so.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.