Since Trump’s second inauguration, I’ve been in an anxious and depressive spiral. Trump’s executive orders, and many yet-to-be-enacted proposals outlined in Project 2025, personally affect me and my family. As the child of immigrants from China, I am not sure which I’m more afraid of: the ending of birthright citizenship, or the increase in Sinophobic rhetoric across the political landscape resulting in violence or death.
As a married gay man with adopted children, I’m worried about the proposed Parents’ Bill of Rights and how it aims to delegitimize my union, parental status, and family structure. It is, unequivocally, a bad time to be queer, a person of color, a Muslim, an immigrant, a woman, a disabled person, a trans person, or any other minoritized group in America.
Three weeks before the election, I got my first tattoo. It’s a chibi version of the X-Man Nightcrawler, teleporting from my right calf to my left forearm. He’s very cute, and I am very proud to wear him on my body. As a 90’s kid, the X-Men are an outsize cultural touchstone for me. The metaphor of mutants being hated and feared for who they were born as (or who they manifested as as they became adults), resonated with me as an immigrant boy who found himself attracted to other boys.
Nightcrawler (aka Kurt Wagner) was a special favorite of mine. He was a teleporter (always my favorite power), whose X-gene manifested at birth, making him blue and furry, with three fingers and toes, a devilish tail, fangs, and bright yellow eyes with no discernible irises. The best part about him, though, was that he always celebrated his demonic appearance, and let it play into his personality as the team’s jokester and moral compass. He was a swashbuckler, a philosopher, and an insanely horny dude all rolled into one fuzzy elf. Overall, Kurt was who I aspired to be: proud of my identity, and a joyful warrior for those I cared about.
As the Trump Administration floods the zone with ever more devastating policy, I’ve found Nightcrawler’s presence on my body to be a source of comfort and encouragement, reminding me of what the story of the X-Men has meant to me over the years.
The mutant metaphor is a clear analogue to the struggle for civil and human rights in the US. Central to that struggle has been the conflict between two core leaders of mutantdom, Professor Charles Xavier (‘Professor X’) and Magneto. Professor X’s vision is one of respectability politics – mutants will gain broad acceptance by proving their value to society and using their gifts to protect humans (even bigots) from destructive forces (often other mutants). Magneto’s philosophy, on the other hand, started off as mutant terrorism and evolved into a more nuanced, but still radical approach: that humans will never love mutants, so mutants must embrace solidarity and mutual defense when necessary.
Over the decades, the X-Men discourse has largely been weighted toward Charles’ point of view, favoring a very Clinton-era version of respectability politics. However, since MAGA’s nascency, ‘Magneto was right’ has become the more valid and urgent take on the subject. On the Magneto episode of the encyclopedic X-Men podcast Cerebro, host Connor Goldsmith and national security reporter Spencer Ackerman discuss how ‘As long as you are willing to concede that the Marvel universe is a place where mutants are vivisected, hunted, subject to extermination… Magneto is right.’
While Ackerman and Goldsmith primarily frame Magneto’s philosophy from the lens of anti-semitism, and Israel and Palestine, they also acknowledge that any struggle for liberation and sovereignty is applicable to the idea that Magneto is right. Liberation, whether for queers, people of color, gender non-conformists, etc., has never been about assimilating, because hiding who we are won’t make the hate go away. Nor will joining the haters, (just ask the sobbing woman who never thought the leopards would eat her face, or the Asian Americans who supported an end to Affirmative Action.)
This feeling can be summed up in a line from Episode 7 of the Disney+’s excellent reboot of X-Men ‘97, where a genocide has just been perpetrated against the mutant nation of Genosha. “Perhaps the Professor’s vision for the future was too nearsighted and begging for your tolerance was our first mistake.”
My Nightcrawler tattoo has more salience now. It means that I, as an out gay man, who cannot hide his family, nor his parents’ immigration status, nor his political leanings, have no choice but to wear my identity on my sleeve, and say to the public that I am not going anywhere. And if the administration tries to take my rights away, tries to take my kids away, or tries to take my life, I will not stand quietly by while it happens. There is no liberation down that path.
So here’s my plea to my fellow mutants of all shapes and sizes. We know we are hated and feared. We know that our oppression is a tool of the regime to extend its control. We must not get into a defensive crouch. Keeping our heads down and waiting for it to pass will not help us. We must fight for what is right and speak loudly about the injustices being done to us in the name of America, and not go quietly back into the closet, into marginalization, or succumb to genocide. We must all wear our X-Genes on our sleeves.
I had my next tattoo appointment scheduled for three days after Trump’s second inauguration. It’s another X-Men reference: the Red Triangle Defense. A tool created by Charles Xavier, taught to those he cared about most, to protect them from psychic incursion in case Xavier were ever to be corrupted. It states, simply, in the strongest geometric shape, ‘RESIST’.
