I've spent this hot Texas weekend indoors reading, and thinking about hate. I had Congressman Stearns's hatred for Sabrina--and for all of us by extension--in the back of my mind. What I read ranged really widely. I read a new academic book on transgender, for a round-up review that I'm planning here. Like Janice Raymond's notorious TRANSSEXUAL EMPIRE, its argument is that we really ought not to exist, at least on the terms that we've worked out. I read some essays by a non-TG friend who has asked me for a reference. He's a Native American scholar, and he has written with controlled rage about how bureaucrats have defined whole groups of American Indians right out of existence for census and legal purposes. And I read Andrew Mcdonald's vile little novel THE TURNER DIARIES. That's not the sort of thing that makes its way onto my bookshelves. But a colleague who studies the violent right asked me if I'd like to look it through.

At first glance any comparison among these seems crazy. There cannot be a literate American who does not know that THE TURNER DIARIES was Timothy McVeigh's favorite reading, and that it gives a detailed description of how to make the sort of bomb he used in Oklahoma City. I won't dignify it by describing it any further. I would not for a moment put Congressman Cliff Stearns or an academic who doesn't like the transgender phenomenon in the same league. Their intentions are not murderous.

Yet all of them, together with the bureaucrats who have angered my Indian friend do have one thing in common. That is looking at another sort of person and saying "you ought not to be." Academics being mostly harmless drudges, that is as far as the book about us can go (and I should add that the author's hostility is to the phenomenon of changing sex, not at all toward the individuals who do it). The others all have done more. Cliff Stearns took it upon himself to ruin Sabrina Robb's life, because she chooses to live it as a woman. Faceless officials have decreed that people of undoubted Indian ancestry have no claim to modern-day Indian identity, whatever their own choice in the matter. Readers of THE TURNER DIARIES are taught that it is right and necessary to destroy anybody who is not Aryan, in the bloodiest terms. It's the same message every time: "you ought not to exist."

It's just coincidence that I happened to be reading all these at once, the weekend after we rallied to Sabrina's support. But the coincidence says something. There are plenty of people who hate us more than Congressman Cliff Stearns does, for being what we are. They are not going to go away. Where we can simply argue our case, we should. That's what discourse and law are for. But we're going to have to rally again, for sure.