In Ella Minnow Pea, a charming yet darkly satirical epistolary novella by Mark Dunn first published in 2001, Nollop, a remote island nation off the East Coast of the United States, finds itself plunged into chaos when a letter tile from a historical plaque falls off. The plaque displays the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which famously contains each letter of the alphabet at least once, and Nollopians attribute the sentence to the long-dead Nevin Nollop, christening the island in honor of his pangrammatic feat.
It’s widely believed in Nollop that no one else could craft an equally concise sentence containing every letter. As a result, some citizens—and, crucially, the governing body—go so far as to deify Nollop, imagining him capable of sending messages from the grave, much as someone might imagine Jesus occasionally displays his face in burnt toast. For the most part, this view of Nevin seems anodyne—until that letter tile, a “z,” falls, and Nollop’s High Council interprets it as a divine sign. (Never mind that the plaque’s titles are old, and their adhesive is wearing thin.)
After closed-door discussion, the council releases a remarkable proclamation to the public: use of the fallen letter in speech or writing is now banned, with penalties ranging from censure to public torture—or even permanent expulsion from Nollop. “Z” no longer appears in official documents; citizens, bemused but trusting in their leaders’ wisdom, stop using words containing it. At first it just seems like a minor inconvenience, a novelty, even, a fluke that will doubtless be corrected when the council realizes the tile likely just slipped off due to weakening glue.
But nothing gets corrected. Other letters soon begin dropping, and their use is likewise outlawed, the government swiftly transforming into a repressive theocracy in which even accidentally using certain words or letters is a criminal offense. Citizens flee or simply disappear, reported by other Nollopians for using prohibited letters and rounded up by pugilistic government enforcers. The council changes certain basic words, like the names of days, to accommodate the shifts, but as more letters vanish, these changes become more and more ridiculous, until Nollopian English has become nigh unreadable, a government-sanctioned jabberwocky.
By the end of the novel, few letters—or islanders—remain. The Nollopians still there live in a dystopian police state, unable to utter most words without brutal reprise. When the “I” tile drops, Nollopians realize, in a reductio ad absurdum, they will no longer even be able to refer to themselves.
The tension in these days is palpable even through Dunn’s increasingly nonsensical language. If all the tiles fall, Nollop will likewise fall silent, will slip into the Lethean oblivion of the erased, something like the “dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows” Ishmael describes the terrifying nothingness-yet-something of whiteness as in my favorite chapter of Moby-Dick. Nollop will still be off the Carolina coast, yes, but it will also cease to exist, a phantasmal island unable to even display a sign reading its own name.
I am living in a time when letters and words that symbolize me, as a trans woman, are vanishing under government mandates, there one day and gone the next.Around this time, a foreigner interested in Nollopian life proves to a sympathetic councilman—the only one willing to entertain, in secret, that the island might be destroying itself for no reason—that other, even shorter sentences containing every letter can be composed (including an accidental pangram), toppling Nevin’s achievement and posthumous authority. Once the council realizes anyone can write such a sentence, they finally end Nollop’s letter edicts. Life returns to normal, or as normal as it can be.
When I first read Ella Minnow Pea, I was struck by how quickly many of Nollop’s citizens accepted the absurd dictates of the councilmembers, as well as how simple it was to unravel a society by shrinking its language. How easily a nation could be broken by an otherwise unremarkable event when the fanatically ignorant were in charge, a destruction ex nihilo. How easy it was for fascism to bloom in a place that had never imagined its rough flowers, until it was everywhere, unavoidable.
I was struck, too, by the power of language to transform one’s perception of the world, a transfiguration akin to a magic spell. The lost letters, after all, reshape not only language, but people and possibility. The Nollopians must change how they speak in ways that alter not just the words they use, but the very sentiments they can express.
But I’m most struck by how prescient the novel is, in its roundabout ways. I am living in a time when letters and words that symbolize me, as a trans woman, are vanishing under government mandates, there one day and gone the next, like Rossetti’s goblin market, and, with them, stories, lives, livelihoods. I am living in a time when I am being told that I should not live as myself in this country at all—and wondering what it means when a tragicomic book about erasure starts to feel a little too real.
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It’s difficult not to think of Dunn’s novella in the wake of news earlier this month that the official page for the Stonewall Monument, a small federal park dedicated to a significant moment in LGBTQ history, had removed the “T” and “Q” in “LGBTQ.” Wherever “LGBTQ” had appeared now simply reads “LGB,” and all instances of “transgender” or “queer” have likewise vanished. The page that describes the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, in which queer people—including trans folks—fought off anti-LGBTQ police raids and thus set the tone for a new era of in-your-face queer resistance, now reads, in moments, like some Nollopian missive in the first days of its own alphabetic censorship, “LGB” looking like some odd typo.
But this was no editing error. In the wake of Donald Trump’s executive orders barring federal recognition of transgender people, DEI initiatives, and any “promotion” of “woke gender ideology,” federal officials began taking down and editing any page or record that contained certain now-forbidden words, and institutions reliant on federal funding began rolling back initiatives or rules vaguely related to those. Trans Americans can no longer update their gender markers on federal documents, even if they satisfy all the previous legal requirements to do so. References to trans people have been purged across many federal documents, part of a larger MAGA campaign to pretend people like me do not exist by erasing our records, our language, our letters—and now this purge has come for our history.
It is an America where LGBTQ Americans are being told more and more that we do not belong—trans folks most of all.It is a purge far more extreme than any cancel-culture cancellation, followed, remarkably, by JD Vance recently arguing at a disastrous European summit that censoring “alternative viewpoint[s]” was one of Europe’s greatest threats, seemingly unaware, in his faux-folksy ignorance, of the irony that his own administration is censoring and canceling language, ideas, and even media organizations it does not like, creating its own race and “gender ideology” that all must now follow, doing exactly, in other words, what its declared enemy, “wokeness,” is supposedly infamous for. (Not that they understand what it means to be woke beyond caricatures.)
The Trump administration claims that these purges of letters and words are helping America return to normalcy. In reality, these expurgations are attempts, as if by some desperate spell, to transmogrify America into a specific paradigm of conservative Christianity—exemplified by another absurd and unconstitutional executive order that promises to prosecute “anti-Christian bias,” the latter phrase often code for Christians requesting the right to discriminate against anyone the Bible’s narcissistic murderous god dislikes, which invariably ends up including queer people.
It is an America where LGBTQ Americans are being told more and more that we do not belong—trans folks most of all.
What makes the Stonewall page incident especially egregious, though, was that it crossed a line into historical fabrication. Stonewall’s very history, you see, is inextricably intertwined with transgender people and queer folks who defied gender conventions, like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. The soft pinks and blues of the trans flag adorn the real-life monument along other Pride flags, a testament to our connection to Stonewall’s catalytic riots. Trans women and gender-expansive people not only participated in the many days of brawls with the police to protect a queer haven; they were at the forefront of some of those brawls.
Rivera, for instance—who was only seventeen when she participated in the Stonewall Inn uprisings and who viewed the slightly older Marsha as a queer “mother” to her, as Johnson was well-known for supporting homeless and struggling LGBTQ youth—famously threw the second Molotov cocktail of the 1969 battle. She refused, like many of the queer patrons, to leave the site for six sleepless nights. “I’m not missing a minute of this—it’s the revolution!” she declared.
To only refer to “LGB” history, then, isn’t just a petty linguistic choice. It erases history, creating a new, bowdlerized version of that history instead, a revisionist past in which people like me were not present.Johnson likewise famously threw a brick at a police car—though not the first brick, as legend declares—and scuffled with the cops, resisting arrest and making a scene that was impossible for the wider public to ignore. The following year, energized by revolt, Johnson and Rivera formed STAR, a notable grassroots effort to provide housing and support for LGBTQ youth. That same year, the first Pride Parades happened on the anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings, cementing Pride’s connection to Stonewall and the LGBTQ people who defied an anti-queer regime—including, inexorably, trans and queer folks.
I’ve always felt, well, proud knowing that people like me aren’t just broadly part of Pride, but part of its very foundation.
To only refer to “LGB” history, then, isn’t just a petty linguistic choice. It erases history, creating a new, bowdlerized version of that history instead, a revisionist past in which people like me were not present.
Nuance is essential in history. Altering how we speak about figures of the past can profoundly alter how we understand their lives and contexts alike. For instance, the cartoonist George Herriman—famed for his Modernist strip Krazy Kat, which fluidly plays with gender, language, color, and narrative convention—was often described as white during his life, yet, as Michael Tisserand’s excellent biography, Krazy, reveals, Herriman was actually a light-skinned Black man passing as white in his professional life.
Updating our understanding of Herriman’s ethnic background situates him in a new history, the history of the countless Black and brown Americans who attempted to pass as white in an era when many socioeconomic opportunities were available only to whites, the history of Nella Larsen’s Passing, and the literature of passing more broadly.
But it also updates our understanding of his comic. As I wrote here, and as Tisserand expands on, the fluidity of identity in Krazy Kat takes on new meaning in light of Herriman’s own long-hidden identity. Lose this nuance, and you lose an entire way of viewing Herriman’s life and work.
The same is true for Stonewall. Describe Marsha, Sylvia, or other trans and queer folks from these pivotal moments in simplistic ways, or not at all, and you lose a crucial piece of a crucial story, a story we are still living through.
After all, Stonewall’s riots never really ended, even once the protesters were all gone, the flames extinguished. Francis Fukuyama infamously claimed in 1989 that the end of history was here, that Western liberal democracy would be humanity’s “final” form of government; instead, we find ourselves between illiberal religious and political wars—for we still, indeed, live in an era of warring religions and imperialism and fascistic dictatorship—in an America too often still skeptical that such wars are being waged, including on our soil, including wars, like Stonewall, all too many people had naively convinced themselves were in the past. The history of today is still being written with a quill dipped in blood.
*
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Trump’s attempt to erase trans people is how few trans people there are in the first place. In 2024, we made up less than one percent of the population. After an executive order banning trans women from competing in women’s sports, the NCAA instated a similar ban, despite the NCAA’s president having claimed as recently as December of 2024 that there were “less than ten” trans athletes in the NCAA, and how many of those were trans women—trans men are almost always left out of these conversations—he did not say. The way Republicans talk about us, you’d think we were half the country.
But this overreaction is neither new nor surprising. It’s a reaction that, in many ways, defines conservativism itself. It’s a fear reaction, the kind of fear a conservative reader immediately smiles and scoffs at to seem tough, for it is a deep fear, an existential terror akin to Kurtz’s horror in Conrad that brown and black people might be humans in the same way he is, the fear that some essential paradigm is about to shift. It is the primal fear of change, a fear that feels like a threat.
Let us say the verboten words, use them like bricks and Molotov cocktails and magic spells in a still-unfolding riot against censorship: Transgender. Queer. Transgender. Queer.This was exemplified by a recent statement from Kentucky state Rep. Josh Calloway when asked about a recent bill to end gender-affirming care not just for minors, but for adults. His statement, which reads like a parody of Republicans but is all too real, is worth examining in full:
This is what is best: men, women, having a family, having babies, procreating. Those aspects of our society are under attack through many different avenues. This is just one of those avenues—promote confusion. Cause kids to be confused. They become unstable. They become adults, and before you know it, our society is totally disrupted.
Calloway, like many in Trump’s administration, feels “under attack” by any idea that deviates from some 1950s image of America, with its rigidly divided images of and roles for men and women and its nuclear families. These ideas, to them, are “normal”; anything else is “confusion,” is destabilizing. Far from normalcy, though, Calloway’s vision of “what is best” is instead a straitjacket on creative and personal freedom, the ranting of someone who cannot imagine a world different from the one they grew up in, a landlocked person condemning the ocean without ever having seen it.
All of this means something remarkable: that LGBTQ people, and trans people in particular, wield astonishing power—not in our rights, but in that primal place of conservative fear.
There would be no such overreaction if we posed no threat in their minds, after all, especially for such a tiny minority group. No. We represent change, uncertainty, expanding universes of the self. We are like witches to the Puritans, Copernicus to a clergy terrified of the idea that their worldview might not be right.
When a government attacks you to this degree, it means they, at some level, fear you, suspect that you are powerful beyond all imagination and thus that you must be stopped at all costs. You are told you are weak, pathetic, weird, yet you hold the power to expand a too-narrow world. You are wondrous, weird indeed in the best of ways, and, never forget, powerful, for you are feared deep down with the urgency one fears Baba Yaga or those women who run with wolves.
You are quietly atomic, a deadly beauty like stellar death or volcano goddesses or Keats’ belle dame sans merci. You are an explosion waiting to happen, an explosion they sense will happen. You are the outside of Plato’s cave, bright and terrible to those who prefer the safety of living in the dark.
You are the truth that nature operates in spectrums and exceptions and marvels, not the easy binaries we have been taught to see everywhere. You are the inexplicable Other, attacked with laughs but unable to be forgotten, a witch in an age that claims it no longer believes in witches. You represent a chance to simply be rather than following the dogma of some old faith, queerness in the sense of radical freedom to look and love and form families of all shapes and sizes, and freedom is what fascism fears most.
Even in the face of horror, then, let us be like Scheherazade, telling stories to live.
Let us tell our stories no matter how many letters fall or words vanish. Let us live the questions, as Rilke said to the young poet he famously corresponded with, let us live the questions our very binary-dissolving existence asks. Let us grow the world by growing our language again. Let us say the verboten words, use them like bricks and Molotov cocktails and magic spells in a still-unfolding riot against censorship: Transgender. Queer. Transgender. Queer. Transgender. Queer.
I know. It’s silly. It’s cringe. But it’s also powerful. Here are words that can now get someone fired from the federal government, words that can still make someone react and recoil as if by witchery. That’s the thing, you see. There is magic indeed in the words we get to use, as Stonewall’s rioters and Dunn’s islanders knew in their own ways. And there is grandeur, always, in the groups those in power desperately try to eradicate, for they would never try to erase us if they did not so desperately fear what we represent.
Remember this power. It is that, above all, they are trying to erase like children trying to erase the monster they believe is under their bed by closing their eyes and saying aloud it doesn’t exist.
And yet we exist. We have always, unlike the mythic world Republicans imagine is “normal.” We shall shatter that too-small world with its tidy binaries. The cracks are already there, much as fascists try to tape them over.
What a freer, more fascinating, more unabashedly human world waits underneath them, for those who dare to look and live.
