You might want to start with what’s going on in Texas right now, because it’s a nightmare. Parents being investigated for child abuse because teenagers might be accessing gender affirming therapy. Two of the biggest healthcare providers in the state cutting off gender affirming therapy for teenagers. All of this by executive fiat rather than legislation, because the legislation that might have achieved some of this failed to pass the state senate last year.

The abuse of transgender people going on in Texas today is actual dictatorship, real autocracy — much of it imposed by a highly right-wing populist governor, with much of the suffering going on in large liberal cities like Houston, Austin, and Dallas where conservatives are very scarce and queer people used to think they lived in a free society.

The effect is literally terrorizing.