The Revolutionary Conatus
Recently, I have been considering buying a gun.
This isn’t normal for me. For most of my life I have lived in very safe areas. For most of my life past 13, I have been ardently anti-gun ownership. For most of the same period of time, I have also been mentally unwell enough to make owning a firearm a very poor idea.
But things change. Acquaintances of mine have been assaulted and mugged in recent weeks, and I’ve been physically threatened more than once in the past. My mental health is stable. And recent events have me seeing the appeal of groups like the Pink Pistols. If the state won’t provide me security, maybe I should do it myself.
The main consideration is my mental health. I’m familiar enough with guns to know how to use them well — I grew up around them and was taught proper gun safety — and I make enough money to plausibly afford a concealed carry permit, a decent gun, ammunition, and regular training to make sure I could actually hit a target if needed. And while I appreciate the arguments about how there are only a few situations where a gun could feasibly make me safer, those few situations still feel worth it to me. But if my mental health doesn’t remain stable, having access to a firearm is the worst possible scenario. Owning a handgun makes you a way bigger risk for successful suicide. Most suicides are impulsive, done during transient lows. As it turns out, it’s actually really hard to kill a person on-demand, especially if the goal is to make it relatively quick and painless. A gun is much more likely to successfully end someone’s life relatively quickly and painlessly. (For those who aren’t aware, though: Even suicide by firearm is not a given. It’s really hard to kill people.) Giving someone with a history of suicidality (say, myself) a handgun on the assumption that they won’t become suicidal again seems like a bit of a gamble.
This is also the most persuasive argument against arming transgender people in general. Well-meaning gun-toting leftists respond to oppression with a call to arms with fun slogans like “armed gays bash back.” I like the idea of being able to bash back if that’s what it takes to defend myself and the people around me. But arming a populace with as high a risk for suicide as transgender people do seems like a policy specifically designed to end lives, not save them.
Policies designed to end lives are more the purview of our oppressors than our allies. For example: if I were asked to design a law to kill trans kids that could potentially pass judicial scrutiny, I couldn’t do much better than Alabama’s recently enacted SB184. Not only does this law run against every bit of good evidence and consensus expert opinion by banning anyone younger than 19 from having access to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones; it also requires school officials to out transgender youth to their guardians, regardless of the risk it would pose to their safety. Over a quarter of LGBTQ youth have experienced homelessness or housing instability at some point in their lives, and 40% of homeless youth are LGBT. Those of us in the LGBT community often trade stories of varying levels of unsupportive families. Many of us were kicked out of our homes or ran away for our own safety. In the 2015 United States Trans Survey, 10% of respondents who came out to their family reported that they were physically violent to them because of it. Requiring school officials to out trans youth to their guardians is a recipe for disaster.
This is just one example. I could bore (or sicken) you with details about other laws and policies and sentiments which indicate a distaste for the continued existence of transgender people. In the most charitable reading possible, there is a vocal, powerful segment of society which simply does not care whether I and people like me live or die. If the options were for me to die in exchange for them receiving a mediocre sandwich, or me living, I’m certain a lot of people would choose the former. It’s a depressing fact of political life.
Left-wing revolutionaries would like to see this met with a violent zeal for life. But before one’s desire to live becomes violently self-defensive, one has to have a desire to live. This is the one thing which our oppressors would really rather us not have. It’s so much easier and cleaner to have us do the dirty work for them; have us run away and die of hypothermia on the streets, have us pushed into the underground economy and die of starvation, have us pushed into despair and just end it ourselves. I think, whether people would like to admit it or not, it’s certainly more tolerable to most to put that degree of separation between oneself and their victim. Why order a genocide if it’s not necessary to crush a population?
Having a will to live is simultaneously the most basic thing we can have, and at the same time is fundamentally revolutionary. It doesn’t get enough attention. In philosophy, the term conatus typically refers to the idea that a thing likes to continue being what it already is. It has a particular association with Spinoza, who used it to describe the inertia of being. (Conatus was used in physics, too, until inertia became the favored term.) Things like to be what they are, and they will continue being what they are until the course of their being is modified by something else. The imagery of inertia might lead one to feel like it is merely passive, but the opposite is true. It requires a powerful will to continue to be in the face of a world hostile to your continued existence. It is passive to cede to your detractors’ vitriol and value your own life as not worth living.
And in the process of insisting on existing, one exerts a force back on everyone else. To use the metaphor of physical inertia: An avalanche doesn’t much care for the inertia of a tree sitting on the mountainside. If society wants to stand in the path of us living full lives, then we must be like avalanches.
When the trans community celebrates a life, they do so with the understanding that it took radical self-love to live that life. When they mourn a life, they know that it likely would’ve gone a lot farther had it not been for the weight of bigotry. Most of us understand that to exist is not passive, but takes will. It shouldn’t have to, but it does, and we honor that will.
If I buy a gun, it will be with safety rules so stringent that most gun-owners would groan with irritation. I probably won’t. Gun or no gun, my continued existence will remain revolutionary.