Imagine: You’re down and out on the mean streets of San Francisco, circa 2022. You’ve been out of work for months. You managed to scrape by as an Uber driver, but now your car’s in the shop and you can’t afford to fix it. Your children are hungry. The landlord delivers an ultimatum.
You begin to hate yourself. Late at night you sit, wide awake, in a dark, empty tenement, trying to drown your despair in malt liquor. “I’m not a man,” you whisper to God, or to no one. “A man provides for his family.”
Wait! “Not a man.” That reminds you of something. You remember an ad you saw on the subway: “Guaranteed Income for Transgender People (G.I.F.T.) will provide economically marginalized transgender people with unrestricted, monthly guaranteed income.” $1,200 a month, just for being trans. That would really keep the wolf from the door.
You’re white, straight, cis. You can die for all San Francisco cares. Make sure to check your privilege while you do it. But put on a dress and prance around like Dylan Mulvaney, and suddenly you’re a first-class passenger on the government gravy train. You have nothing to lose but your dignity (and maybe your dick). You failed as a father, but you could still make it as a mom.
You head to your local library, find a computer terminal next to a masturbating homeless man and look up the application for G.I.F.T., a new pilot program that will give 55 San Franciscan trannies $1,200 a month for 18 months. You won’t even have to report your spending. Blow it all on hookers and crack if you want. (RELATED: POLL: 49% Of Registered Voters Are In Favor Of Universal Basic Income)
“The program will prioritize enrollment of Transgender, Non-Binary, Gender Non-Conforming, and Intersex (TGI) people who are also Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC)…” you read in the program description. Damn. This’ll be harder than you thought. You already reconciled yourself to cross-dressing. Why not add blackface?
You keep reading. Other prioritized groups include, “monolingual Spanish-speakers” (but not Tagalog or Dutch, for some reason) “and those who are … undocumented, engaging in survival sex trades, or are formerly incarcerated.” Ok. There’s still a chance. You just have to put on a dress, cover yourself in shoe polish, pretend to speak Spanish and blow some dudes in a parking lot. Then maybe the City of San Francisco will deign to rescue you from penury.
With this plan in mind, you proceed to the application itself. Name, date of birth, proof of income (or lack thereof). Pretty basic stuff. Then comes “Trans Status (Check all that apply).” The options are ” Transgender,” “Non-Binary,” “Gender Non-Conforming,” “Intersex” and “None of the above.” Ok. Pretty straightforward. You mark “Transgender” and keep going.
Now for pronouns. There are 18 options, including “It/it/its,” “Ve/ver/vis” and “Co/co/cos” (for devotees of country music legend David Allen Coe, no doubt). Mystified, you pick one at random and move on.
Then comes gender identity and DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN. 97 options. You begin to go crosseyed. What, exactly, is the difference between “Transgender woman,” “Woman of Trans experience” and “Woman with a history of gender transition”? How is “Stud” a gender identity? What the hell is a “Brotherboy” and what the fuck is “Genderfuck”? Thank God they included “Xenogender,” for people whose gender involves bursting out of chest cavities and trying to eat Sigourney Weaver.
By the end, it seems like whoever made the section just gave up and started mashing the keyboard. “Khanith/Xanith,” “Fa’afafine,” “Ashtime,” “Tida wena,” “Ninauposkitzipxpe.” It’s like George Lucas, J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert did a shit-ton of Adderall before an all-night brainstorming session. The list ends with “Travesti,” which is quite fitting.
You check off all 97. Couldn’t hurt, right?
You’re almost out of the woods now. You notice that “Faggot” is an option for sexual orientation, but you can’t pick the N-word as your race. Curious. You also notice that “Latine” has replaced “Latinx,” though for some reason Manny Pacquiao’s countrymen are still stuck with “Filipinx.” (RELATED: San Francisco Is Giving Free Money To Transgender People)
The room’s spinning. The homeless man next to you — who, unfortunately for him, appears to be cisgender — is approaching climax. You quickly fill out the remaining boxes, indicating that you’re an undocumented combat veteran prostitute who lives in a van down by the river.
Ok, done. It’s not too hard once you learn how the game works. A sane society would look at need, not skin color, and would work to incentivize socially beneficial behaviors like marriage, childrearing and hard work. Instead, your rulers have decided that mental illness, racial resentment, prostitution and made-up bullshit from Tumblr are worthy of state support.
You leave the library, crumple the application and hurl it to the ground in disgust. In your imagination, 500 years elapse. An archeologist pulls your miraculously preserved printout from the ruins of a once-great city. “My God,” he thinks. “They did it to themselves.”
Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.