“Double dysphoria.”

That’s all I could think as I walked out of the post office today after the clerk “ma’am”’d and “merry Christmas”’d me in quick succession—too quick, especially with a long line of customers behind me, to come up with a remotely coherent, incisive yet kind retort.

So I scurried out of the post office, doubly grouchy at this time of year—the “season” when the dominance of xtian hegemony rings as loud and clear as Salvation Army bells; when it’s somehow socially acceptable to assume that everyone celebrates xmas and jesus and bio-families and capitalist excess.

Never mind that “merry” or the equivalently exasperating “happy” Christmas greetings, mouthed routinely in place of “have a good day,” feel so utterly tasteless against the repast of genocide and authoritarianism being served up this year. That should surely be bad enough. (It is!)

But on the more micro level of me—a “they,” a godless Jewish anarchist—it sticks in the craw. Every micro interaction in the course of my day feels like being jabbed by pine needles—each a reminder of 530+ years of the christofascist theft of calendars and rituals, communities and languages, foods and cultures, genders and lifeways. Anything and everything at odds with a landscape of white male Santa Clauses supposedly gifting us the world while we passively slumber—but only if we’re good at fitting into the supremacy of cheerful obedience and conformity.

Usually I’m “merely” enraged during December, wishing the Grinch would change their mind and #AbolishXmas after all. Maybe it’s because I’m in a part of this imperiled world where people find it “polite” (in that shutdown, rote sort of WASPy way) to presume and add 1-of-2 genders to every sentence (“yes, sir” or “thank you, miss”), but this “season” I’m equally eager to #AbolishGender. And it’s hitting me how xtian hegemony at xmas is wrapped up neatly with a binary bow in ho(ho)mophobia and transphobia.

So I’m feeling doubly dysphoric toward the “holidays” that aren’t mine, grumpy about being labeled “xtian” and “female” when I’m neither, doubly filled with wrath at this homogeneously oppressive social order that must be abolished.

(Photo: cheerful stickers seen last autumn in the queerly beautiful space of @roomofonesownbooks 💗🖤)