I do not do then-now with pre-transition photos anymore. That mask I wore was not myself. I was never a man who became a woman. I was a woman who was told she was a man and believes that untruth because, at that time in the 90s, what reason did I have to think it was wrong.
The image on the left was taken in 2015, a year after I came out and the same year I began HRT. That woman was full of fire and rebellious energy. "Why stand on a silent platform? Fight the war, fuck the norm." After years of hopeless existence, she found a reason to live, to hope, to dream. It was a tough and awkward time, colored by the challenges of my high school diploma, minimum wage life.
The person on the right is tired. She has fought and lost a hundred battles. With herself. With the system. With those she loved and those she despised. The weigh of this world and the state-sanctioned violence she has endured weighs heavily on her shoulders, pushing them down towards the earth.
This is not a battlecry, for the air has been strangled from my lungs by the weight of the genocidal boot on my throat. It is a whimper of defiance in the face of a communal death by a thousand cuts.
As a trans woman who has been out for over a decade and sitting squarely in her mid-30s, I know the expectation is that I will be courageous, resilient, defiant, loud, proud, unflinching, selfless, visible, and ceaseless in my fight for trans rights, liberation, and bodily autonomy.
For today, I am allowing the armor to fall off. After years of relentless attacks on our right, our livelihoods, and our very lives and ability to exist, I feel none of those things. I am tired. I am scared. I cannot detransition, I cannot go fully stealth in either direction. I was a loud and visible figure for trans rights when it was safer to be so. I am locked into a state of vulnerability manufactured by billionaire pedophiles to distract from their greed, their corruption, and their violence.
There are few days that pass that I do not weep for fear of what is to come; tears of mourning for all that we have lost, all that we will lose, all that we may never again see.
I am filled with bitter rage at the casual assertions that my lived reality of 35 years is a myth, a hoax, a mental illness, or an elaborate scheme to abuse, violate, and marginalize others.
When I started doing queer inclusion training, I went into every room with the assumption that, at the very least, we all could agree that queer and trans people are human beings with inherent value. I can no longer engage in this approach or I risk alianeting my audience. I now must consider how I can convince the people that I am standing in front of that I am, in fact, a human being.
I am a long time student of history. I know where the path we are on leads. It has played out many times before. There are already camps. How far away are we from being added to the list of "undesirables'. If history bears any lessons for us, I expect it to be soon. The groundwork has been laid. The script has been written.
The right sees as a sub-human, demonic embodiments of evil and our persecution as a pathway to power. The "left" (the center-right) sees us as a political inconvenience and a detriment to their access to power.
In the words of King Théoden, "What can men do against such reckless hate?"
I know the fight goes on and that I must find new ways to fight. But when I look in the mirror and see the dark circles under my eyes worsen, my hair turning grey from stress, and the light fading from my own eyes, I cannot help but wonder what fight is left in me. What this fight will cost me.
I have no answers, no solutions, no paths of least resistance.
I have the resilience of the hundred battles fought. I have the wisdom of my elders. I have consolation that the earth and all her beauty will continue long past the day we all return to dust. I have the inevitability of trans existence.
Tomorrow, I will keep fighting, not because I have the strength, but because it is all that there is left.
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
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