Baal was once known as the king of gods. The ancient Canaanites called him the “Lord of Rain and Dew.” The Phoenicians, the “Lord of the Heavens.” The Israelites named him “He Who Rides the Clouds.” It was only after the Hebrew queen Jezebel tried to replace the official worship of the Hebrew God with the worship of Baal in the ninth century BCE that Baal became the emblem for a false god, a fallen angel, and later, the prince of demons himself: Satan.
But in the supernatural thriller Hail Mary, directed by Rosemary Rodriguez and written by Knate Lee, Baal (Jack Huston) arrives in Central America as the devil’s servant incarnate. While all powerful, he lacks autonomy. And he’s on his master’s mission to hunt down Maria (Natalia del Riego) before she makes her way from Belize to the United States to give birth to an infant who will someday save the world.
Audiences will recognize the plot when Maria suddenly experiences immaculate conception. But the Herod virus, which has killed all newborns in Central America, forces her to make her way north to the United States, the only safe place to give birth. To make things worse, the United States has closed its borders to pregnant women fleeing the crisis, terrorizing and separating families who attempt to cross the border. It’s only with the angel Gabrielle’s (Angela Sarafyn) intervention and carpenter Jose’s (Benny Emmanuel) help that Maria stands a chance to escape Baal and make it through the tunnels under the Rio Grande.
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On the trek north, the vibrant green sugarcane fields of Belize turn into the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City, and then the mountains of Nuevo Laredo. Crosses dot the landscape, but God is hard to find. Baal acts as a reverse Jesus in a land desperate for deliverance from cartels and corruption. Whereas Jesus laid his hands on the sick to heal, Baal’s touch takes away the lives of those he meets. Whereas Jesus gave sight to the blind, Baal makes blind those with sight.
At first, Baal scoffs at the limitations of human mortality and our proclivity toward pain and disease. But then Baal’s curiosity leads him to question what it is like to be human. In doing so, he seems more human than the other characters in the film, who seem like static tropes by comparison—like Maria who follows divine providence to serve as a vessel for her baby savior or the fair-skinned, blue-eyed white angel Gabrielle who aids migrants through prayer from her gated mansion in Texas’ Hill Country.
In what turns out to be a parallel quest to comprehend what it means to be human, Baal tastes his own blood, tries tacos al pastor, and snacks on Slim Jims. He kisses a woman he meets for the first time, asking her, “Is that love?” to which she replies, “No lo creo [I don’t think so].” He tries to imagine Jose’s love for Maria and expresses disappointment when Jose vacillates between self-preservation and self-sacrifice for the virgin madonna.
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Along the way, Baal becomes the moral lens through which the audience sees the heinous acts of U.S. immigration authorities. While Baal hunts down Maria and child on the devil’s command, he reminds the border agents that they “hunt humans” of their own volition.
“I am what I am,” Baal says, apologizing. But to those he meets, he says, “You were given free will and self-determination.” Free will, as the angel Gabrielle reminds Maria, to choose between “on one side the devil, and on the other your child.”
So in this pointed and sometimes belabored challenge to Americans, Hail Mary asks us which we will choose—to accept our neighbors or turn them away in a time of crisis. What we choose may either save or damn this country’s soul.
It strikes me, and may strike you, as a bit crazy to come out as transgender in an essay like this. I’m publicly revealing myself to be a member of a marginalized community in the midst of a moral panic targeting our very existence. Ascribe it to my defiant streak, if you will.
If you’re not aware that there is a moral panic about trans lives, then you need to pay attention. As of now, according to the list maintained by activists Alejandra Caraballo, Erin Reed, and Allison Chapman, over 400 bills targeting trans people have been filed with legislatures nationwide this year—more than in the past several years combined. Texas is at the vanguard with about 30 bills and counting. If the frenzy continues, it won’t end there, as former President Donald Trump’s recent speech and Michael Knowles’ rhetoric at CPAC on eradicating transgenderism make clear.
I’m hardly an ideal spokesperson. I’m 43, and I’ve lived my entire life up to this point (with fleeting exceptions) in the gender assigned to me at birth, which is male. Think of my biography as a cautionary tale. It’s painful and messy, and I’m going to tell you some of it. You may find this unpleasant, but I have no other way to say what I need to say. Only bear in mind that my experiences, though common, are not normative. I don’t speak for anyone but myself.
Growing up at the edge of San Antonio’s south side in the 1980s, I learned the usual things about gender and sexuality: Boys are boys and girls are girls and all that. My dad was a biology teacher. I knew the differences. But something seemed to be awry in me for, as far back as I can remember, I felt that I ought to have been a girl, or that in some strange way, I really was a girl, even though everyone treated me as a boy.
Adults policed my gender expression conscientiously, and I inferred that my feelings were unnatural and shameful. Still, I would sit in the pew at church as my parents took communion—we were Catholic—and silently rank which of the women who passed me I would most like to grow up to be. As a small, less-than-masculine child who hated sports, I became the target of bullying once I went to school. But I would lie awake every night, imagining myself becoming a girl—my only refuge from my strange alien existence.
Environmental factors didn’t make me this way. My parents were present and involved; my mother a caring, feminine homemaker and my father, a loud, masculine teacher and artillery officer who was sometimes frustrated by my unmanliness. Expecting me to grow up and marry and follow the same pattern, they enforced the “natural” gender norms they espoused every day of my life. Far from becoming trans through exposure to modern “gender ideology,” I was, simply and naturally, a trans child, even though everything in my upbringing went toward imposing a gender binary that itself represented an unacknowledged ideology. There is no “real me” beneath my transgender self. I have learned to mask it, yes, but if I were somehow to remove it, there would be no me left behind. No more could you remove the flour from a loaf of bread.
As soon as I was old enough to be left home alone, I began secretly wearing my mother’s clothes. Experimenting with femininity launched me into a deep and pervasive calm tinged with a fear of being discovered. After some years, I was found out through a misplaced blouse. I lied my way out of the tribunal that ensued—standing, panicked and alone, before my father and mother. My parents’ eagerness to accept my lies made up for their implausibility. The alternative was believing me to be some kind of queer, which I suppose is what I am.
My junior high coach, a morose sadist who later got fired and went on to a career as a campus cop, compelled boys to shower together in a dimly-lit subterranean cell. A small, undeveloped sixth-grader, I was thrust in there with big, masculine eighth-graders, their eyes ever-roving for some weakling to abuse. My unboyishness and isolation made me easy prey. As a transgender person whose brain was telling me that my body should be female, it’s hard to describe just how traumatic such experiences were. What made them unbearable—to such an extent that I began to self-harm and eventually to plan my own death—was thatI had no words or concepts to describe or understand what was going on with me. I was simply a freak of nature, an abomination who had to hide in plain sight, surviving from one morning to the next, hoping that no one would discover my secret, dying a little each day.
You may believe that the problem here was not my being forced into a simplistic gender binary that left me vulnerable to abuse and trauma, but rather my gender dissonance, and that I should have been made to feel at home in my assigned gender. In other words, I should have been coerced into being a normal boy. If you think that, survey the research: It shows, overwhelmingly, that attempts to “convert” gender nonconforming people into traditional gender identities and other forms of rejection are ineffective and traumatizing—in fact, the scientific consensus is that all forms of conversion therapy aimed at altering a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity result in long-term harm—while care that affirms gender identity results almost universally in positive outcomes. It’s also clear that what negative outcomes do occur owe largely to hostile environments.
But since we’re in the middle of a panic about transgender people “invading” sex-segregated spaces, let me add this: Far be it from me to make anyone feel uncomfortable or unsafe, but I have never felt comfortable or safe in any male space. Nor, I believe, would I have felt better in a female space. I prefer privacy for doing such things as defecating and stripping naked, and I find our regime of communal showers and toilets just a little weird and, yes, oppressive. Perhaps that’s one aspect of the problem we should be examining?
There hangs in my parents’ home a circle of my annual school portraits, which show me becoming progressively sadder from year to year. My body was turning into an alien thing with the onset of biological manhood. By the time I graduated, my mounting dysphoria and social problems—I also had an undiagnosed autism disorder—led me to begin planning suicide. In secret, I painted a picture of a girl cutting her wrists. I was the girl, you see. In recurring dreams, I was a young mother. Despair held sway over my waking life.
It was either leave home or die, so I moved across the state for college. My plan was to wait a few weeks and, if nothing changed, to kill myself in a shower stall. Something did change: I found love and acceptance in the woman who became my best friend and then my wife. Several years later, I was still alive, presenting as female in the privacy of our home and as male when I went out. This made me happy. For the first time in my life, I began to approach peace.
It was the turn of the millennium. I was a shelver at the university library, which often left me alone in the stacks at night. Sometimes, I would work in the gender and sexuality section and take down books to try to understand what I was. Many of the books were out of date for that time, and much has changed in our understanding of transgender people since. In them and on the nascent Internet, I encountered terms and categories that didn’t seem to apply to me, reflecting a time when researchers developed theories with little input from the trans community itself. So my gender confusion persisted.
My fragile peace was disturbed when someone to whom we’d entrusted our key entered our home without permission and went through our things. I felt certain that my secret self must have been detected. Mortified and afraid of being outed, I threw all evidence in the dumpster. I grew a beard as a bulwark against “temptation” and began two decades of self-contradiction and mounting desperation, which brings us to today.
“You have to go the way your blood beats,” James Baldwin said in an interview. “If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Belatedly, I’m coming to grips with this. My attempts to cope with gender dissonance have consumed much of my life, taking hours away from each day, isolating me from loved ones, alienating me from my body, leading to bouts of depression, ideations of suicide, and alcohol abuse. It doesn’t go away. In middle age, I’m forced to recognize that nothing short of being who I am will resolve my profound inner conflict. The word “transition” is terrifying but, however catastrophic the process of coming out may be, I’ll not be much good to those I love if I’m burned out, incapacitated, or dead.
“Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order Wednesday protecting the rights of LGBTQ people from Minnesota and other states to receive gender affirming health care, as he slammed the tide of other states rolling back transgender rights.
“We want every Minnesotan to grow up feeling safe, valued, protected, celebrated, and free to exist as their authentic versions of themselves,” Walz said. “Protecting and supporting access to gender affirming health care is essential to being a welcoming and supportive state.” …
Walz’s executive order parallels legislation awaiting a floor vote in the state House to make Minnesota a “trans refuge state” by protecting trans people, families and care providers from a range of legal repercussions for traveling to Minnesota for gender affirming care, which includes a wide range of social and medical interventions.
While sponsors said they’re optimistic about passage in the coming weeks, the governor said the accelerating trends against trans rights in other states made it urgent for him to impose protections immediately.
The bill is authored by Democratic Rep. Leigh Finke, of St. Paul, Minnesota’s first openly transgender legislator. It would prohibit the state from enforcing court orders or child protection laws from other states if they interfere with a person’s right to seek gender affirming care in Minnesota.
The importance of the governor’s order to LGBTQ people across the nation can’t be overstated, she said.
“The lives of trans and gender expansive people this nation are under attack,” Finke said. “There is a full-scale movement in this nation against trans, nonbinary, two-spirit and gender expansive adults and children that seeks to make our community disappear.”
A separate bill banning so-called conversion therapy for LGBTQ children and vulnerable adults won approval in the Minnesota House last month and is awaiting a floor vote in the Senate.”
Last November, Tiayana Hardy gave birth to her first child, a baby girl named Laylani.
“She came a week before her due date, but I can’t complain about that,” said Hardy. “She was born healthy, she’s an easy baby, and motherhood is amazing.”
But Hardy has concerns about her future. She is still experiencing bleeding related to the delivery as well as continuing postpartum anxiety. And now the Garland resident is about to lose the Medicaid coverage that got her through her pregnancy.
Hardy is far from alone. An estimated 2.7 million Texans—mostly children and new moms— are expected to lose their Medicaid insurance in the next few months, some as early as June. That’s almost half of all Texans now on the Medicaid rolls. Most of those affected had had their earlier coverage extended by the public health declaration that came during the COVID-19 pandemic. The declaration expires at the end of March.
Now the state must begin a federally mandated review of its entire 5.9 million-member Medicaid caseload. Texans who no longer qualify will lose their coverage, but so could current eligible recipients who fail to complete required paperwork for recertification.
“Advocates are very, very concerned right now,” said Jana Eubank, CEO of the Texas Association of Community Health Centers. “Families aren’t even going to know what’s going on, and they’re just going to lose coverage and show up at a doctor or a health center, and they’re going to be told, ‘Oh, you’re not on Medicaid anymore.’”
For over a year, public health advocates have raised concerns about Texas Health and Human Services’ (HHSC) ability to handle this recertification process, which begins April 1 and is expected to be finished within 12 months. State officials are apparently worried, too: HHSC recently requested an additional $143 million to cover more staff to process the approaching onslaught.
“It’s probably the largest enrollment event, if not the largest enrollment event since the ACA [federal Affordable Care Act],” Eubank said.
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Parents Tiayana Hardy and Desmond Gentle pose with their baby, Laylani, born Nov. 30, 2022. Hardy has relied on Medicaid to cover her health care needs since she became pregnant last year, but she’ll lose that coverage once the public health emergency expires.
Medicaid, a federal entitlement program administered by states, provides health insurance for low-income residents who cannot afford private insurance. Nearly half of Texas children depend on the program, as do 51 percent of moms, whose prenatal care and hospital bills are covered.
In this, the most underinsured state in the country, millions of people fall outside of Medicaid coverage due to Texas’ strict eligibility criteria and Republican leaders’ refusal to accept billions of federal dollars to expand the program. The state’s requirements around income eligibility mean the vast majority of working poor Texans make too much to qualify for coverage.
A single mother of two would need to earn less than $4,000 per year to be eligible for Texas Medicaid insurance, while childless adults are ineligible no matter how poor they are. Eligibility requirements ease for single pregnant women, who may make up to $2,243 a month, but that coverage cuts off two months after birth regardless of their care needs.
Despite Republican leaders’ past opposition to any expansion of Medicaid, Texas Speaker of the House Dade Phelan and Governor Greg Abbott both have named postpartum Medicaid expansion as a top priority for this session. But even if it passes, it won’t come soon enough to prevent confusion and distress for low-income families.
Under the national public health emergency initiated by the federal government in March 2020, no Texan who qualified and was enrolled in Medicaid could be dropped from the program. That meant Texas moms like Hardy who would have ordinarily lost their insurance two-months postpartum have been able to maintain their coverage for the duration of the pandemic. The same is true for Texas children who would have aged out of the program.
As a result, the state’s Medicaid rolls grew from 3.5 million before the pandemic to 5.9 million today. Federal dollars provided the financing for this temporary expansion.
But with the public health emergency set to expire, advocates say, families are now scrambling to find new coverage options and navigate a complicated and bureaucratic reenrollment process.
Of particular concern are the millions of Texas children currently enrolled in Medicaid who could miss prescription refills or have to forgo doctor’s visits if their parents are unable to complete the upcoming recertification process. According to state data, 4.2 million Texas children currently rely on Medicaid to access healthcare, up from 2.8 million prior to the pandemic.
“You’re going to go to your pharmacy to get your prescription renewed and they’re going to say, ‘Oh, you don’t have coverage anymore.’ Or you’re going to take your kids for their scheduled well-child visit to get vaccinations for school. And they’re going to say, ‘Oh, you don’t have coverage.’ That’s when they’re going to find out,” said Diana Forester, who oversees health policy at the children’s advocacy nonprofit Texans Care for Children. The organization recently launched a website to help Texans navigate the end of continuous coverage.
Wearing a blue America First cap, 19-year-old Max White stood among a dozen protesters, softly mouthing the Hail Mary prayers over and over: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
Around White flew the flags of right-wing extremist groups, including the American Nationalist Initiative and the New Columbia Movement, carried by men who looked to be in their 20s, strapped with rosaries or assault rifles or both. On a cloudless January day in Dallas, they faced off against a group of nearly 100 community members who showed up to support the drag show performance that White and his peers were protesting.
“I started going to these events last year, starting with the Pride event in Oak Lawn. … I was like, ‘If these people are going to go and protest this kind of stuff, just perverse sexual stuff for kids, I’m going,’” he said.
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Since he was 16, White has been following young white-supremacist agitator Nick Fuentes and groups like Protect Texas Kids, which has been targeting drag shows in North Texas, including the one that day in Dallas. The organization was founded and is directed by recent college graduate Kelly Neidert, who achieved notoriety by calling for transgender people to be criminalized and Pride event participants to be “rounded up” while she was the chapter chair of the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) at the University of North Texas in Denton. Now she is using the activism skills she learned from YCT to lead other young conservatives like White, a freshman political science major who hopes to become a lawyer one day.
“You have all these groups that are weaponizing young people in ways that we really haven’t seen before,” conservative political consultant Micah Bock told a group of teenagers and younger children to thunderous applause at last fall’s Texas Youth Summit. As he spoke, young girls at the front of the crowd took notes with their pom-pom pens bobbing.
It’s all part of a nationwide effort by multiple well-funded groups, many of which originated or are based in Texas, to mobilize young people, mainly Christian youth, to engage in right-wing politics. These groups and their leaders are part of a roll-call of Christian nationalist power players who defend the January 6 riots, promote hate speech, and aim to build their economic and political power by instilling Christian and constitutional “originalism” in the public sphere. To achieve their goals, they are increasingly defending the use of violence, particularly anti-LGBTQ+ violence, which has shot up in frequency since the start of 2022.
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What’s more, the leaders of the movement are set on convincing young people, starting even before high school, that they are the underdogs in this fight—the under-funded rebels fighting a rich, powerful leftist establishment–and that what they’re engaged in is a holy war for America’s soul.
The movement is meeting opposition from more progressive Christian leaders.
“What I think they really are concerned about is their loss of a privileged place in terms of influence and power. I think Christian nationalism is being used as a tool to maintain and to galvanize that power,” said Fort Worth Pastor Michael Mills, an outspoken critic of that movement.
“It feels a little bit like a form of indoctrination [in which] these poisonous ideas are passed from one generation to the next,” he said. “If there are no checks on that, it’s almost like, [as] each generation gets older, they get more and more dangerous, in a sense. And that’s the scary part.”
The March/April 2023 issue of Texas Observer magazine went to press last week and will be reaching mailboxes and select newsstands in the coming weeks. We’re very excited to share McHam Investigative Fellow Josephine Lee’s story on how christian nationalistists are training your kids to be gun-toting fascists—and all the rest of the great reporting in this issue.
When Jennifer Toon arrived at yet another prospective Austin rental in November 2021, she was welcomed by a dead rat. Its tail, curled limply on the duplex parking lot, was thicker than her cat’s.
While the rat seemed welcome, Toon soon learned that she was not. As one of nearly 70 million Americans with criminal records, Toon continues to face “collateral consequences,” including housing and employment obstacles, over a decade after her conviction—even in a “Fair Chance” haven like Austin.
“The worst experience trying to find housing has been in Austin,” Toon told the Texas Observer. “I have offered double deposit, double the first month’s rent. … I’m essentially just living where people will allow me to live.”
After her release from prison in December 2018, Toon struggled to find sustainable employment in her hometown of Kilgore in East Texas, and moved to Austin in 2020 when she got a job at the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities.
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It’s a familiar pilgrimage for many formerly incarcerated Texans; in the law-and-order-loving Lone Star State, Austin has stood out as the only city with a Fair Chance Hiring Ordinance since it was implemented in 2016. Since then, second-chance hiring has gained traction in DeSoto, which implemented its own ordinance in January. Its northern neighbor, Dallas, has been weighing a similar proposal in its city council since September.
With Fair Chance hiring in place, private employers with 15 or more employees cannot request an applicant’s criminal record until a conditional employment offer has been made.
“We’re doing things a little differently here in Dallas now,” Fair Chance proponent and Dallas City Council member Omar Narvaez told the Texas Observer. “We have to work together to figure out how we can keep people from falling into the system and not being able to get out of it.”
But in both Dallas and Austin, a tricky chicken-versus-egg scenario has emerged as formerly incarcerated residents search for viable housing options.
When Lori Mellinger returned from work early one March morning, she was surprised with a “for sale” sign leaning against her duplex.
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From February 2021 through February 2022, rents rose more in Austin than in any other U.S. city, according to Redfin. After slowing this summer, average rent still climbed 10 percent from October 2021 to 2022. Eager to cash in on the pandemic housing craze, when home prices swelled by as much as 20 percent from year to year, Mellinger’s landlord gave their tenant two months to pack up and move out.
Mellinger, who, like Toon, left the East Texas pineywoods for Austin around seven years after her conviction, had a few weeks to go before she found a property owner who didn’t screen for criminal records in Lockhart, 40 minutes from downtown.
As long as they aren’t violating the Fair Housing Act, landlords can deny any applicant that violates their screening process. Around 80 percent of landlords screen for criminal records.
Pulled in by employment opportunities but pushed out by housing barriers, Toon said many formerly incarcerated residents bounce between friends’ houses, put their rentals in a family member’s name, or find other ways to live in the city that claimed to welcome them.
“You feel like a fugitive,” Toon said. “I have another friend who lives out of her car, and she’s got a great job. You’re terrified to tell people where you live … [there are] programs to help you get a job right away, but what’s all that for if you have nowhere to live?
The bookstore has been closed for at least a year. The news that it’s now in the hands of Chip Gaines, who became famous for his exuberant passion for “Demo-Day” destruction on his television shows, has created a buzz through the town’s gathering spots.
Some residents are anxious to know if Gaines has bigger plans to give Archer City a fixer-upper makeover or if the books are about to disappear and the buildings left vacant, like many other buildings on the town square.
Democracy is a word on a lot of lips lately, but I’m not sure what it means: The right to vote?
Freedom of speech? All of it together forms this numinous enterprise of democracy that we can’t see or touch. But we can see and know workers, who are the fabric of democracy.
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Over the decades, I’ve done studio and commercial photography, photojournalism, landscape pictures, and art photography. My dad and I used to do crime scene photos for the Fort Worth Police Department. Here and there, I’ve also worked for the excessively affluent million and billionaires who seemed to know little about us mid-level workers. Their cultural currency was built on watching people’s behavior in the presence of great wealth.
But for the most part, us Byrds—I’m the fourth generation of photographers by that name in my family—don’t watch the rich. We document the great, squirming mass of humanity that has worked for a living since our Neander neighbors shared the planet with us. Our trade is the folks who trade their living moments for food and shelter.
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These days, I am obsessed with the anthropology of it all—the part my images play in capturing the lives of those around me who build, invent, educate, preach, cook, and strip.
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