I came home from running errands to three voicemails on my phone which I left charging on the nightstand. Her tone went steadily from slightly annoyed to panicked and tearful. Just before arriving I received a text reading: “They are about to declare me 5150 because I’m asking to be released and they won’t let me go.”
I sat on a plastic bench which just was too uncomfortable to have not been designed to be that way, and about fifteen minutes later, my friend Pamela came out of the Restricted Area. Tears were still streaming day-old eyeliner down her cheeks, and she was clumsily carrying her stuffed bunny and a duffel bag. “Get me the fuck out of here…” she stated, striding half in fear, half in something I can’t to this day identify, out the door before I could even stand up.
Pamela is a trans woman who transitioned a little later in life than she would have liked. Gender dysphoria got the better of her at the age of 35 and she decided that she just couldn’t lie to the world any longer. After two years, she lost her job and hadn’t been able to find a new one. She’d been couch surfing for nearly a year and had tried camming for income, but for whatever reason, she wasn’t able to build a following. Adding to Pamela’s issues, she recently did not get a job she had really desired because she had been doxxed (doxxing is the practice of revealing another person’s personal information on the Internet) by a transphobic feminist, who had released her birth name along with a litany of libelous slander on several websites.
