When The Nothing Came for Me

Having one's work on transgender history and gender diverse cultures erased in a time of genocide

Our Nothing has come for me.

In the film The Neverending Story, there’s an ominous force destroying the world, slowly. It’s called “The Nothing.” The Nothing steadily moves through the land of Fantasia, and everything it touches turns to nothing.

In the America of Project 2025, there’s an ominous force erasing all mention of LGBTQIA+ people from government websites and even monuments, quickly. This force, Our Nothing, steadily moves through the United States and everything it touches turns to nothing.

Today, I woke up, and while having my coffee, and discovered that, yes, as I had been expecting, the PBS Map of Gender Diverse Cultures, a map and page I re-authored in 2023, removing a lot of low-quality information, updating the language, and vetting the information that remains, was gone, “extinct” in the parlance of PBS’ cheeky 404 error page.

A few days ago, a friend in Denver messaged me on Instagram. This was our exchange:

Since this conversation, I have been periodically checking the page, presuming it would be scrubbed, but not thinking too much about it. I have other things to do besides wait for the axe to fall. There is so much to be done, now.

There’s a full backup of my work - I’ll publish it in full, here, shortly, no doubt.

The PBS Map of Gender Diverse Cultures is gone.

Our Nothing has taken a piece of me, a piece of my voice. It is a small piece, but an important one. So…this is what censorship feels like in the body. I won’t feign shock.

As an Indigenous 3rd gender transfemme, I want non-colonial models of gender diversity and Indigenous voices to be present and well-represented in every conversation about transgender culture, transgender rights, and gender diversity. This erasure touches me in deep places, as an Indigenous person in a country built on the genocide of Indigenous people, as a Jew who has run their fingers over the rough tattoos of Holocaust survivors, and as a transgender person in 2025, living through the attempted genocide of my kin.

The erasure of this information cannot shock someone like me, and it should not shock you, either.

This work was critical, because for whatever reasons, this page was the primary page being referenced globally on gender diversity, and, before I cleaned it up, it was a poor resource. I did the job for peanuts, because it needed to be done. A resource routinely quickly used by organizations, educators, and students due to its high rank in search engine results became a better resource. This work led to other work - opportunities to bring one more Indigenous transgender voice to the table.

That work has become passion-work. I will not be deterred from that work

We will not be deterred from our work. We will not be silenced.

The map will return in some form, our stories will still be told, and we will not be rendered “extinct.”

Our Nothing has come. It is here and it is destroying everything it touches.

It is now up to us to defend our culture, our history, and our kin with our lives.