Harm Cox is Going to Survive the Apocalypse

Introducing Our Protagonist

Harm Cox is a transmasculine dude/nonbinary dyke from Chicago. They rent an apartment with their partner in a lakeside gayborhood (not the one you're thinking of, but the one for old broke queers that can't hang anymore). Harm uses they/he pronouns, but they also don’t care that much about pronouns because they have always been who they are regardless of the vowels and consonants people attach to identity. They are five years sober, three-ish years in Chicago, and one year on T. Harm jokes that they're a freelance mad scientist and that their body is the only graveyard they need. Harm thinks this is funny, but their therapist does not.

Unfortunately, Harm needs a lot of therapy. If you needed to briefly describe Harm's background for narrative purposes, you could say that they were born into a body that was presumed to be female and an environment we can confidently call traumatic. They spent a decade with a therapist chipping their soul out of the calcified shell that held it safe until the coast was clear. The creature that crawled out of the cocoon has been trying to figure itself out ever since.

Because childhood trauma ate their brain, Harm had to start over from scratch at an age where most of their peers were buying houses and planning for retirement. Harm didn't know they were queer until they hit their mid-thirties, at which time they were already married to a very straight man. The unhappy couple divorced, and Harm started over as a single dyke. Harm came out of the closet and began to meet their community. Eventually Harm got a prescription for testosterone and grew a beard and a dick. It's been a long couple of years for our protagonist, and that's not even counting the apocalypse.

Speaking of the end of the world, Harm finds themself in an awkward position these days. Harm has found immeasurable freedom in abandoning the gender binary, and now when they look in the mirror, they feel a sense of serene love and relief for the body they see. After years of ambivalence about their continued existence, they have discovered a new will to live. Unfortunately, the thing that makes them grateful to be alive is also the thing that puts them in the most danger. Harm only remembers that they have failed to uphold the white supremacist construction of a gender binary when someone yells at them in a bathroom or when a truck full of frat boys confuses them by winging a beer can at them and calling them a faggot.

This, combined with their late blooming understanding of gender and sexuality, has made Harm's life confusing. Harm feels like a gawky teenager lurching around in a 40-year-old body, scrambling to make plans for an uncertain future and hoping that the midlife crisis they’re experiencing is a sign they might make it to 80. This sensation passes for optimism in Harm’s brain during these end times. They can’t go on, they can’t go on, they’ll go on.  

Harm's life is a purposefully quiet and soft one these days, but you would not know that from their browser history. For the past two years, Harm has been writing a book about queer monstrosity and cultural identity. They moved to Chicago to escape the haunted house of their past and finish the manuscript. They thought there would be more time to get a book contract before the apocalypse. Now they have more a more pressing priority: to consume, to archive, and to understand the ways that their ancestors survived these times before they were born.

As Harm has continued to learn about trans and queer history, they have come to see the echoes of persecution and genocide rippling through that timeline. The idea of the gender binary is a modern invention, but trans people who fall outside of that binary are as old as humanity itself. People in power have always been frightened by people like Harm and have sought to destroy them as a result.

It hasn't worked. Trans people were in this world long before the people who learned to persecute them for public gain took power, and they will be here long after those empires fade away. Harm knows who they are now, and that seems to be worth living for, even if some people think they deserve to die for it. Harm is not the only person who feels that way. Trans people will continue to find each other, and love each other, and get each other through the coming darkness as they always have. This is why, in a cosmic sense, the fascist push for queer and trans genocide will always fail.

Even so, right now, trans people are currently in serious danger. The same historical facts that reassure Harm of the continued existence of queer people are warning them that there will soon be something that requires survival. Harm would like to survive whatever is coming. They want their trans friends and family to survive, too. So, they read books, watch movies, and consider their options.

In Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg describes the process of learning about the world you inhabit as a queer and trans person as such: "It felt as though I was rushing into a burning building to discover the ideas I needed for my own life."

Harm did not anticipate that they would be pointed towards a burning library while trying to research their survival. Harm doesn't feel qualified for this delicate rescue mission. Surely someone with a PhD, an archivist with a taste for leather, should step in? But the fire is starving​ for queer histories, queer bodies, queer lives. There's no time to get credentialed. We'll just have to figure it out together, alright?​

The smoke is rising. Let's go.