I was in middle school, just gaining political awareness at the time of the nato intervention in yugoslavia. I was in the US for that experience. The difference between what was said about the bombing campaign inside the US vs what I heard from my family outside made it clear to me that there’s always two narratives at play. When 9/11 happened I was made extremely uncomfortable by the open jingoism, then with Iraq I was primed to distrust the WMD line. I got involved in anti-war protests, then I quickly became aware that democrats were not faithful opposition when it came to war. The Kerry campaign pitch was essentially just to run the war better than bush was. When I wrote my democratic senator/reps expressing opposition to the war I got boilerplate responses.

I pretty much only hung out with the punks and theater kids through high school because being opposed to the war would get most anyone else to respond with ‘what are you a terrorist?’ I was reading political theory at this point, but legitimately found it hard to engage with marx or lenin at the time because it was the end of history and all I could really see was that avenue being closed off entirely. I’d get lots of exposure to that sort of politics from listening to my grandfather rant though. While I wasn’t really drawn to organizing at the time I was perfectly happy to go onto conservative forums and rile up/dunk on the fox news watchers.

What I did develop at a young age was a really critical eye for the media, it was jarring whenever I would travel to visit family, leaving America really felt like leaving a bubble. Not just leaving the rat race, but for example when not visiting touristy areas, if I was speaking in English I’d get people being like “oh you’re American? why are so many people in prison there?”. I still remember as a kid trying to wrap my head around just why so many people were in jail, the result was a deep disappointment in the US, and any politician upholding ‘norms’.

At the same time as being totally disenchanted with the US I realized that I still needed to survive somehow, and living in the US gave me better options than anywhere else so I opted to stay. I knew I was trans at this point, not that I really had the words to properly describe the feeling, though I also felt that pretty much everyone I would interact with would be hostile to me if I expressed them, which made me avoid discussing it at all. I did know that I couldn’t afford a prolonged encounter with the American medical system. I also hated the prospect of having to be the sickest patient in the mental ward just to be able to get medical support. I concluded that it just wasn’t to be and instead I opted to repress and went to college. My degree selection based on a cold calculation of what degree that I could stand would make good money and graduated in time for '08 financial collapse. Putting off transition felt like a wise move as I then needed to move back in with my parents while looking for work.

I remember being actually hopeful that something might change after that and the occupy protests, only to be monumentally disappointed by Obama.

I was actually hopeful for Bernie too, it was nice to see what looked like the pendulum swinging left for a change. To then have whatever youthful energy there was so callously shut down to prop up the old guard democrat fossils really made it clear to me what side they were on. COVID also got me to to re-evaluate my life and political commitments. Organizing with my local anarchists was great for connecting with other trans people who were also COVID-concious, many of whom would probably also be considered tankies by lemmy users at this point. It also motivated me to read more theory, anarchist and marxist. Parenti was actually a great entrypoint for me on the marxist side, while Graeber was my original favorite on the anarchist side. I opted to start transitioning late in life when I finally had both financial independence and the social supports.

COVID also made it really clear to me that I couldn’t count on the democrats being honest about something if they saw a political advantage in lying, that they would tolerate the final solution if it was on a long enough timescale. Gaza confirmed that realization. I could talk your ear off about that in greater detail, but this isn’t the place for that.

I went on reddit for easy dopamine hits pretty much since the digg migration, but after october 7 I just kept getting banned repeatedly and that motivated me to finally move over to lemmy.ml and I’ve been here since.