Don't Resign. Hold the Line.

You're just following orders right?

Now I understand how they get people to serve a regime before they even realize it.

You tell yourself that you’re going to outlast them, that if you leave they’ll just replace you with a toady that will do their bidding. You tell yourself that you’ll stand up when it matters.

But you’re not the only one. There’s dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of you still toiling away. And while it’s business as usual for you, things start to change. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s not. But it doesn’t directly impact you or what you’re doing so you keep at it.

Why should you care about being told to pull pronouns from your email signature? You didn’t even have an email signature.

But then it’ll end up in front of you. You’ll realize exactly what they want you to do. What they expect you to do. No one else stood up. Why would you?

You may not have done anything you personally found objectionable but you contributed to making this machine function. You helped bring this machine to the place it is right now.

You are complicit in this.

All those things you thought believed in, all of those principles you thought you had, you threw them away without even realizing it. You prostituted yourself for $25 an hour and convinced yourself it was in service of the republic.

Your boss tells you that you should ignore what all the other people are saying, they don’t know what we do here. You’re here to serve the American people and you should be proud of that.

You should be proud of how the department you’re part of, the department you make function on a day to day basis, is dedicated to using the full force of the US government to humiliate trans people and they expect you to help them do it. They expect you to send them letters saying they can’t be who they are because it “promotes an extremist ideology.” They expect you to be a cold and ruthless bureaucrat who says to their face that the person they are is an affront to nature.

If you have any kind of shame how do you look your friends and family in the eye after this? The people who trusted you. The people who thought they knew you.

They were wrong. They never should have been so foolish to trust you.

You told yourself you’d throw your body on the gears to make it stop but all you did was ensure the machine kept running.

You’re nothing better than a collaborator.