Clocked

Visibility can mean passing disapproval or point-blank death.

Jan 17, 2026

photos©joshua gershick

Walking across a sprawling, manicured medical campus on the outskirts of LA, my pal Rina and I chatted.

We’d just given a trans healthcare talk to a roomful of eager, open doctors. Just as we’d reached the parking structure, an attendant whizzed past us in an electric cart. Forty-something and heavy-set with a flattop, he looked at me and smiled.

His eyes shifted to Rina, a slender, six-foot, Italian American trans girl whose style suggests a badass Eighties female rocker: Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, Ann & Nancy Wilson all rolled into one. With her red shag haircut and skin-tight rock ‘n’ roll tights and boots, she is missing only the ’82 Les Paul Custom.

She is righteous. And terrifically sweet. A lovely person.

In a split-second, the attendant’s eyes narrowed. Bam! His disapproval leapt off his face. He frowned and shot past us.

Alone, I would have gone un-noticed, a short Jewish guy on a medical campus teeming with diminutive Jewish men in white coats. But I’d received that look in all its hostility a million times as a gender-transgressing butch lesbian, and I remembered how it felt. I remembered in an instant how I’d seen and absorbed everything, even when I pretended not to – every dyspeptic glance, every flash of disgust. I remembered the ferocity of every arrow, every stone cast, even as they bounced with a “plink” off my armor.

Rina didn’t notice, or pretended not to.

She is not a girl who walks unnoticed.

But I’m a guy who does.

That man speeding by in the cart would have sent me the same non-verbal nastygram had he seen me.

Or, if he’d been an ICE goon, he may have shot me in the face.

Being seen can be a wonderful thing or a horrible thing.

It can also be fatal.

It depends on who is doing the seeing.

Seeing in eyewitness footage the faces of Renee Nicole Good – the Minneapolis mother shot point blank by an ICE goon Jan. 7 – and her wife Rebecca, I clearly recognized them as Queer.

It was the first thing I thought: Two confident women, one on the masc end of the genderverse, taking up space, offering no apology, daring nonviolently to challenge power: Queer.

And I wonder if Jonathan Ross, the lawless ICE thug who shot Good in the face, didn’t recognize them, too.

“Fucking b*tch,” he is heard to say off-camera, as a coda to the killing.

He might as well have said “DYKE!” Dyke in our lexicon doubles down and includes “fucking” and “bitch.” “DYKE!” is shorthand for any woman who dares to question authority.

Take that! Bam. Bam. Bam.

“Fucking bitch!”

Days later a Marine veteran, identified only as “Skye” in an interview on the platform formerly known as Twitter, reported being dragged by the neck through the window of their car – smashed by ICE goons – then beaten, handcuffed and called “it.”

Their crime: Following and observing an ICE vehicle “at a safe distance,” along Minnesota State Highway 62 in the Twin Cities region.

“Have you not learned?” screamed the ICE thug who beat them. “This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!”

And there it was.

“[As a Marine] I took an oath,” said Skye. “This is the oath they’re spitting on and stomping on. They’re Nazis. They’re Gestapo. They think they are above the law.”

Later, in suburban St. Cloud, MN, Alice Valentine and her girlfriend Sofia, trans women who are part of a local ICE watch group, drove to a nearby mall to observe an ICE raid on Somali businesses there. ICE agents pushed, pepper-sprayed and handcuffed the pair, American citizens, and hauled them off to ICE HQ, the Whipple Building in Minneapolis.

Eyes burning and fear filled, the women received no medical attention, but were questioned about their bits and whether they’d had a “sex change.”

“When I was in the cell, I overheard a woman asking to call her girlfriend, and I started crying because I just thought of Renee, and I thought of my girlfriend and this girl,” Valentine told a reporter. “And I was like, ‘Why are so many lesbians being fucked up by ICE right now?’”

My friend Laura, a Nice Jewish Girl who knows from Nazis, and I were talking today about the ICE thugs among us, terrorizing our friends, neighbors and fellow Americans, documented and undocumented.

Because terror is the point.

And the stifling of dissent.

“They’re not American,” said Laura.

“But they are,” I said. “There’s nothing more American than white supremacy and misogyny. They just aren’t our America.”

ICE is all too American. It’s the unfinished business of Reconstruction. It’s the monster in the basement we trusted slow and steady progress to keep at bay. But now it’s out and rampaging through the whole house.

ICE are the Americans who brought a picnic lunch to lynchings – to make a real day of it! – and smiled casually in souvenir photo postcards sent proudly to friends with the notation, “Wish you were here!”

They are the violent white mobs who attacked black communities in cities across the U.S during the Red Summer of 1919, killing hundreds and destroying black-owned homes and businesses.

They’re the Americans who rampaged through the Greenwood district of Tulsa Oklahoma, aka “Black Wall Street,” during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, dragging people out of homes and shops and shooting men, women and children dead in the street. At berserker’s end, 35 blocks had been burned to the ground, 190 businesses destroyed and 10, 000 people left homeless.

They’re the Americans who, under the auspices of Executive Order 9066, forcibly removed 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast in the summer of 1942, and the Americans who cheered as their neighbors were sent to internment camps.

Or the Americans who, over three days in June of 1943, poured into downtown LA, indiscriminately attacking “with sadistic frenzy” any Mexican American they found.

They are Dan White, who in 1978, calmly entered San Francisco’s City Hall and murdered the city’s first openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk and Milk’s ally, Mayor George Moscone.

They are Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin calmly kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, until Floyd stopped breathing.

And they are the medieval horde that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, beating police officers, smashing windows and defecating in hallways and offices in an effort to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

No, it was fully American, the way that ICE thug discharged three rounds into Renee Good’s face and chest, with her wife and dog beside her, in a car overflowing with stuffed animals and granola bar wrappers and the detritus of motherhood, then coolly walked away as though it were just another day at the office.

This is who Donald Trump and his enablers, opportunists and toadies have unleashed: An army of immoral people with no limits and a seething hatred of color, queerness and the feminine.

Reporting on the late Renee Nicole Good, a Fox presenter could only sneer, “She was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio ... and a lesbian partner.”

To Fox, these things mean “domestic terrorist.”

To me, “poet” means artist, thinker, empath; “pronouns” mean conscientiousness, open-mindedness, inclusion; and “lesbian” means diversity, variety, family.

And Minneapolis - kind and resilient, protecting the most marginalized and rising nonviolently in opposition to a brutal, lawless foe, is my America.

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