Alright, it's almost been 24 hours since I posted a simple thread about why I personally am not voting for Biden. I've lost almost 30 followers because of that and so I want to talk about something.

I'm gonna be real vulnerable.

Let's talk about voting, the US, and trans lives.

Ever since I could vote, I have. In every election, not just the big federal ones but the in between ones too. Washington makes it easy to vote with absentee ballots.

But I've always voted only after spending a good chunk of time learning about each of the things I'm voting for.

For instance, in 2008 I was pretty sure I would vote for Obama in the primaries, but I still went ahead & did research on all the other candidates first. I compared policies & platforms, took tests about who I'd line up best with, asked my family their thoughts, read articles.

Because voting is important. I was taught that & shown it growing up. And so I've always taken it seriously.

And from 2008 to 2016 my voting pattern was unperturbed. But 4 things have changed in the last 3 years that have greatly affected my politics, affected how I see things.

The first two were becoming more acquainted with the anarchist & Indigenous portions of Twitter which was a result of me generally being more on Twitter in 2018. Since 2010 I had sort of quantified myself as an anarchist & by 2012 I considered that my political affiliation fully.

But seeing these two communities - oftentimes with some overlap - gave me a new perspective. Particularly from the Indigenous folks on here.

I remember someone talking about voting as an Indigenous person & how that felt wrong to them. How it was giving legitimacy to colonizers.

And I remember the conversations had around Indigenous sovereignty, about the difficulties & differing opinions on whether to interact with US politics or not.

There was by no means a universal agreement about the issue, but that line resonated with me on a fundamental level.

Because if we are to agree that this land, this country, was stolen & founded with violence... how can we go along with it? How can we abide its systems? Engage with its apparatus?

Or to put it plainly: how can vote & legitimize this when this country itself is illegitimate?

And I hear your reply, because it was said then & it's always been said:

Harm reduction.

The idea is that since we have this system & it's not immediately going away, the best thing to do is vote for the least harmful choices.

But that begs the question: how do calculate that?

Whose harm takes precedence? How do we weigh deportations against mass hysterectomies? How do we weigh pipelines through Native land against foreign drone strikes? What about sexual violence? Mass incarceration? Substance use?

And it's here that I'll bring up my third point.

I've spent the last two years working homeless services. For some bosses that have prioritized just speaking to bigger numbers of kids rather than actually helping them. In a system which ignores families that are doubled up in favor of white single men.

It has radicalized me.

Radicalized me in a way I didn't know was possible.

I've had a 20 year old tell me that he had to bury his wife of 18 because she died of pneumonia.

Read that sentence again.

They lived in a lean two in the woods behind a Rite Aid. And she died of pneumonia in winter for it.

Just this year I lost two clients, one of whom I found.

Their brother didn't care what we did with their belongings. The second client's son hadn't spoken with them in years.

The is the stark & barren truth of this country that I have had to deal with every day for 2 years now.

A country with millions of empty homes, empty malls, empty apartments, empty hotels... and thousands upon thousands of people dying in the streets.

I have learned a simple truth: people don't want to fix homelessness, they just don't want to see it.

This is what America is.

The housing crisis in Seattle boomed under Obama. It didn't matter we had a Democrat governor, Democrat city council, Democrat this that & what have you.

It didn't matter.

An 18 year old girl still passed away from pneumonia during winter.

My vote did nothing to prevent that.

And these 3 things - anarchist political theory, Indigenous survival, the crisis homelessness - have all indirectly affected me. I'm not Indigenous, but I listened. I practice my politics as best I can. And I'm not homeless but I've done as much as I can.

But this last point...

...this last, 4th point was really the one that changed things for me.

Because I'm trans. I'm a trans woman.

And that's made politics very, very personal for me in a way that I've never really had before.

As a white person, I've been privileged to not be affected by the US.

But as I step into the world now considering surgery, estrogen, voice training, clothing styles, coming out in public, I see violence not aimed at others.

But aimed directly at me & people like me.

I've read the statistics & the data. Violence against trans folks is rising.

And I think of Tony McDade, whose name most of you have forgotten. Who, because he was a trans man, was name was no longer said by week two of this summer's protests.

And I think about the overwhelming majority of black trans women who experience this violence most often.

And I think about the suicide rates. I think about the Supreme Court. I think about the harassment I already experienced last month online for simply being who I am.

I think about the VP debate last night where queer rights weren't even touched upon.

And I think about 2004.

In 2003, Joe Biden signed the Human Rights Campaign pledge to not discriminate against gay people in his office's employment decisions. In 2004, the HRC added "gender identity and expression" to that pledge.

And suddenly, Joe Biden didn't sign it.

Don't worry; he wasn't alone.

You see, in 2003 there were 68 senators who signed that same pledge, which meant that 68% of the Senate was on board.

That next year? Only 26 did.

And yeah, I know Biden's talked about how trans rights are the civil rights of this time.

But his actions speak louder than words.

And even his words haven't been encouraging. At least in 2008 it felt like Obama actually wanted to earn votes. Biden's spouted off multiple times during his campaign about how if you don't like this about him, you shouldn't vote for him.

And it's hard to not take heed of that.

Tara Reade accused him of sexual assault. His climate policies won't do enough to improve things. His foreign policy is still imperialistic. Biden's plans for homelessness are more of the same Obama policy.

And in case you forgot, the Standing Rock protests happened under Obama.

And so this, among many, many other reasons is why I felt yesterday that I should speak about my decision to not vote for Biden.

And yet... it feels like that's not what some people read.

It feels like some people took it as me saying "don't vote."

I never said that once.

And if you thought the previous two dozen tweets have been me being vulnerable, well get ready, because this is actually the part I wanted to talk about all along.

For all of my life, I've had people say I'm smart. Educated. Informed. Wise.

And for all my life, I've lost folks.

I've lost folks when what I say doesn't exactly line up with their conceptualization of me.

Because for all of my life, a lot of folks have put me up on this pedestal. Hell, in high school I was voted as "Most Likely to Succeed."

My question is:

What the fuck does that mean?

You all come here & stay here for my wisdom & witticisms. You all listen. And y'all love me when I'm saying what you want to hear.

But every god damn time I express something vulnerable, something about mental health, something about my personal politics?

I see the walk away.

And I cannot tell you how much that has weighed on me my entire life. It isn't just here. It isn't just Twitter.

Every fucking facet of my life has seen retractions like this.

And sure, maybe that's just the nature of human relationships, but it's felt really personal for me.

My last relationship ended with my partner saying she wanted time apart & hoped we could get together in the future.

Two weeks later she was dating one of my closest friends who both swore they never had feelings for one another.

Do you know what the fucking does to a person?

None of you understand how many times this has occurred for me. This cycle of people meeting me, being interested in who I am & what I have to say, seeing minor things they don't like, and walking away.

I am so deeply tired of it in a way I can't express with any possible words.

And it's minor, in the grand scheme. 30 followers out of 5,500, oh boo hoo Riley, grow up and get over it.

But it's just like... sometimes people don't give me the same affordance they had the day prior.

One day there's clapping & appreciating expertise. The next, I'm a dunce.

It's like there's this collective amnesia everyone has, where you have to keep proving to people, constantly, over and over not only your commitments to what you know you're committed to, but also reexplaining why you're speaking & acting from an informed place you've thought of.

It's like having to take a driver's license test every week just to prove yes, I can still drive a fucking car.

And in the middle of all of this, of this personal crisis of feeling respected one day & viewed a fool the next, there looms the United States of America. That devil.

I have donated literally thousands of dollars to causes & marginalized creators this year. To the point I couldn't make rent one month. To the point where I have no savings. I have given my everything to trying to combat what this fucking country is.

And I'm done trying for it.

Because it's about my personal safety now. Because I know I can still donate from afar, that I'm in no shape to protest or be in person.

And I've had so many people say they care about me & then walk away.

So I have to do the best thing for myself, which is to leave the US.

And even that decision, even me speaking solely about my personal choice to not vote for Biden - not not vote in general just for that one election - lost me over 2 dozen people. A half dozen of which were mutuals.

And there's folks who have reached out to me & it's meant a lot.

But it's just the net sum. It's the fact that in this year, we are so quick to judge, so fragile, so on a knife's edge, that we can't even afford the benefit of the doubt, can't even engage in a dialogue, just unfriend, unfollow, & walk away, that really has begun to weigh on me.

I don't speak about a lot of what I do for this community or for elsewhere in life because I'm not a braggart & for me it isn't about the brownie points. That's why I don't talk about my charity work. That's why I don't discuss how I've tried to reach out & help people be better.

I don't talk about any of that because that's not the point of doing it.

But consequently, nobody sees it.

And seeing is believing in this day & age.

I don't have a takeaway from this thread. I don't have some grand fuckin' moral of the story.

I'm just so tired at this point.