As a child, I was for the Rebellion against the Empire.

Of course I was. The Rebellion had Princess Leia: beautiful, sassy, principled, and very clearly on the side of justice and liberty – even if I didn’t yet know what those words meant. The Empire was faceless, grey, rule-bound, and cruel. Easy moral geometry. Rebels good, Empire bad.

Then I went through what I now think of as my Imperial Age.

I was still a child, but now I was into war games and maps. Empire stopped being about oppression and started being about territory. Power became abstract: shapes on paper, borders in atlases, pages coloured pink. In retrospect, this was not just a childhood phase – it was a national one. Much of Britain understood empire in exactly the same way: not as domination, but as coverage.

Growing up cures you of that kind of innocence.

When I started thinking seriously about politics – about power, legitimacy, liberty, and who pays when systems fail – my sympathies shifted again. Not back to the Empire, and not towards romantic rebellion either, but towards something much duller and much harder to sustain: democracy.

Not democracy as spectacle or slogan, but democracy as a system: law, procedure, precedent, and constraint – the unglamorous machinery that stops power from becoming arbitrary.

Democracy in this instance is boring. It runs on procedures, norms, precedent, and paperwork. It moves slowly. It compromises. It protects people not because they are glamorous heroes, but because rules apply even when no one is watching. And crucially: it only works if most people agree to play by those rules.

That matters if you are a eunuch. Or queer. Or trans. Or disabled. Or otherwise marked out as expendable when things get loud.

Minorities do not survive revolutions very well.

We survive systems.

And yet – and this cannot be ignored – rules are not the same as justice. History, including the history of queer liberation, is full of people breaking laws, risking everything, because what was legal was not right. Sometimes protest must be illegal, disruptive, or unglamorous, because the system itself enforces injustice. I do not dismiss that truth. My own life as a voluntary eunuch is, in its own quiet way, an act of defiance: a refusal to conform to expectations of bodies, desire, or roles.

But here and now, as the threats to minorities grow, the brutal reality is that the system – imperfect, slow, flawed, and occasionally indifferent – still offers more protection than the alternative. For the moment, surviving it, insisting on procedure, insisting on fairness, is not cowardice. It is strategy. It is moral work. It is the way to buy time for the moments when protest, disruption, and defiance will be necessary – and effective.

That’s why I get nervous when politics becomes obsessed with rebellion aesthetics – with “burn it down” rhetoric, with contempt for institutions, with the idea that rules are just obstacles in the way of righteousness. That posture feels thrilling if you imagine yourself as the hero. It feels very different if you know you’ll be collateral damage.

Authoritarian movements understand this perfectly. They don’t attack everyone at once. They probe. They test. They pick minorities who are small enough to be undefended and strange enough to be dehumanised.

Trans people.
Migrants in small boats.

These aren’t the “real issue”. They are probes. Bridgeheads. Ways of discovering how much cruelty can be normalised, how many rules can be bent or ignored, and how little resistance will be offered in defence of people the media is too timid to protect.

Nobody cared which toilet trans people used until it became useful to care.
There was no “small boats crisis” until Brexit deliberately dismantled the systems that prevented one.

Manufactured crises are not accidents. They are tools.

And the people wielding them are not rebels in any noble sense. They are not fighting oppression. They are not smashing unjust rule. They are attacking the idea that rules should bind them at all.

They don’t want liberty.
They want freedom from constraint – especially the constraint that stops them accumulating more wealth and power.

C. S. Lewis once made the point – in Prince Caspian, I think – that a king cannot break the law, because it is the law that makes him king in the first place.

That isn’t a literary flourish. It’s the core of how legitimate authority works. If your power comes from the law, then obedience to that law isn’t optional – it’s constitutive. The moment you treat the rules as optional, you don’t become freer; you simply stop being legitimate.

That’s why they lie casually, repeatedly, and publicly. A claim doesn’t need to be true; it only needs to be loud enough and repeated often enough to bend reality around it. The system assumes bad faith within the rules. It struggles when confronted with people who simply refuse the idea of rules altogether.

Democracy is under threat. I’m far from blind to that. I am acutely aware of it precisely because I belong to groups that are always the first to feel the heat.

But it has not fallen yet.

And because it has not yet fallen, it is not time for rebellion.

It is time – frustratingly, unglamorously – to work the system. To insist on fairness. To be visibly committed to rules, due process, and legitimacy. Not because the system is perfect, but because abandoning it too early hands victory to the very people who want to dismantle it entirely.

Rebellion may yet be necessary. History suggests it always becomes so eventually.

But rebellion that comes too soon doesn’t save the vulnerable.
It just clears the ground for those who were waiting to rule without restraint.

I no longer root for the Rebels by default.

I root for democracy – flawed, creaking, and under strain – because while it still stands, people like me can still survive within it.

… because while it still stands, people like me can still survive within it – and that, for now, is the fight, not the war.