depth of grief i feel around trans youth & my status as a trans educator is so overwhelming. a structure of feeling that is collective & so i want a kind of communal solace & solution, & yet i feel so isolated in my profession, which is by design, yet another iteration of an old gay panic there’s a transphobic fascist in my neighborhood who has some axe to grind against "the woke agenda” and public schools & there’s all this community effort being put into shutting down his shitty little thrift store & i’m so jaded that i’m wondering if it’s even worth it when the small media outlets are positioning this as some kind of free speech issue, where the trans protestors & allies are depicted as the true aggressors, those who want to censure the speech of christians. & it just gives me so much whiplash to my adolescence in the ultra-evangelical suburbs of west michigan during the bush era & my sadness & sense of futility deepens i had a dream a few days ago that i was trying to course correct the homophobia of an entitled private school student & in the dream all of this accumulated grief bubbled to the surface & my sobbing was so intense that i woke up with the feeling of having actually sobbed, although my pillow was still dry
