This week I cried, staring at a flag of many colors as it was hefted high above my New England town, flying just below the star-spangled one that both unites and divides us. Ours is a banner arranged in stripes and angles that represent the wide-ranging rainbow population; I eschew the word “community” because, for me at least, we do not function as one. I knew I would cry, because the freedoms I enjoy in my blue state bubble are swiftly becoming the exception rather than the rule for transgender Americans like me.
I joined Twitter exactly 14 years ago today, and if it were not for tweets from leaders like Gillian Branstetter at the ACLU and writer/activist Charlotte Clymer, I’d go out of my mind.
“For the last two weeks, anti-trans terrorists shut down a [Wisconsin] town—including all schools—with bomb threats, demanding the school district close a Title IX investigation into anti-trans harassment by today,” Branstetter tweeted this morning. “Last night, the school closed the investigation.” She’s been documenting this story while the national media has turned a blind eye.
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Ohio Republicans slipped an anti-trans sports ban amendment into another bill on Wednesday, the first day of Pride. “Transparently intentional,” tweeted Clymer. This bill includes an external and internal genitalia evaluation of children suspected of being trans. Seriously.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have seen all this, and told Ohio, “Hold my beer.”
As The Daily Beast reported, his administration just delivered a one-two punch to the trans community in Florida: A request to state health officials essentially banning transition-related care for trans minors, and a report by another agency to justify banning Medicaid coverage for trans people of any age who want puberty blockers, hormone therapies or gender-reassignment surgery. Note the part that says “of any age.” What’s worse is that these draconian measures do not need legislative approval, which, let’s be honest, DeSantis would probably get anyway.
Branstetter noted “this would make Florida the 11th state to have explicit exclusions against gender-affirming care in its Medicaid program, despite numerous federal court precedents finding they violate both the ACA and the Medicaid Act.” Where is the Biden administration on this? Oh, it’s being reported Joe’s making travel plans to visit Saudi Arabia, where being LGBTQ+ is punishable by death.
At last count, 17 states have enacted bans on trans student-athletes, in a record-year for hateful anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. How many more red states will it take before the trifecta team of fundamentalist Christians, far-right extremists and TERFs turn the rest of this nation into Anti-Transland? How many courts will it take to block the stampede of Republican legislators and governors outlawing trans and nonbinary identity and gender-affirming care? How many federal prosecutors will step up to stop this wave of hate against LGBTQ+ Americans? And when?
This is not just a problem here. In the U.K., where being a TERF gets you a medal from the queen, a well-known anti-transgender activist and author is making headlines for calling trans people “damaged,” and that’s not the worst part. “The fewer of those people there are, the better, in the sane world that I hope we will reach,” said Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, in an online conversation with fellow “gender critical” activist Helen Staniland.
Yes: Joyce’s vision for “a sane world” is for fewer trans people to exist.
“We have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition,” Joyce said. She is literally proposing our elimination as a final solution to what she called “a huge problem to a sane world.”
A world without trans people? Even if you believe the Holocaust comparison is one step too far, that is not sane—it’s a psychotic fantasy. We’ve been on this planet for thousands of years, and we’re not going away. And what kind of human being not just wishes, but says out loud proudly, their desire to see the extinction and elimination of another?
A journalist I admire, someone I call my friend, tweeted that this Pride Month had better be “as radical AF,” given “everything going on.”
Like me, she’s transgender, loves sports and kids. Unlike me, she’s single and is a target for hate just for being who she is: unapologetically Black. It was my great honor to connect her with the late great Monica Roberts of Houston on our podcast before we lost Roberts to the angels.
While I was crying staring into the sky, Karleigh Webb and her sisters who inherited the spirit of Monica Roberts were out in the streets, fighting, organizing and standing up to the trolls both online and in their faces. One of my favorite lines Webb is known for is, “If you want to change this... it must be done in the streets, not the suites.”
But I feel like we’ve been backed into a corner of sorts by the “comics” who literally earn their living mocking us and punching-down. Despite “being canceled,” Dave Chappelle’s transphobia has made him the biggest star on Netflix. Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher are clearly clued-in to his secret formula: Tell jokes about trans people, rant about how crazy we are to think we might actually be who we say we are, and the laughs—and big paydays— will follow.
As Branstetter reminded me, Maher is the same clown who “denounced germ theory, claimed the flu vaccine causes Alzheimers, and platformed anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. and a guy who claimed you can cure HIV with goat’s milk.”
Even J.K. Rowling has figured that a tweet here and a blogpost there about how trans women are “bepenised” will give her recycled wizard stories a boost, especially if she can claim to be a victim of doxxing. She lives in a castle worth half a million dollars nestled on 12 acres in Scotland, for goodness sake; Rowling’s biggest concern should be mold and taxes, not trans people.
Besides, at least on that side of the Atlantic, she has the tabloids and the mainstream media on her side. TERFs are considered heroes in the U.K., and something as simple as being able to declare your gender identity or even use the ladies loo is considered by many to be a perverse and illegal act.
There are so many things to be sad about, to be mad about, from Uvalde to Ukraine, from Roe to Republicans running for control of Congress this November. So, it’s hard to feel positive about Pride, about not being dead, when that was my only other option when I came out nine years ago.
So, here’s my advice for Pride: Avoid the haters as best as you can. Don’t watch those comics or read Rowling’s works or watch her movies. Tune out the haters, and instead follow folks who are in this fight for our survival. Stand up and be counted. Wear your colors and wave them proudly!
This week, I searched for inspiration and found it in our flag, in my friends, and in some words written the year I turned 14. That was a turning point for me: It had been a decade since I first told my mother I was a girl, and at last I got to be one, secretly, as a child model. It wouldn’t last, especially once my father found out. But it was like a dream come true for me, and those sweet memories sustained me for a long, long time.
The year was 1978, and Maya Angelou most definitely did not have me in mind when she wrote “Still I Rise.” I may be trans, but I am like a lot of people from all walks of life who have survived Donald Trump and the pandemic, who feel beaten down by inflation at the pump and in the supermarket. 2022 has hit me where it hurts. Her profound words are like a salve:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
There’s more to “Still I Rise,” of course. But if that’s not your style, okay, hold on: I’ve got just the thing. Chumbawamba’s one-hit wonder may be 25 years old this year, but I dare you to not get up and dance to “Tubthumping”
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
That is my Pride anthem for 2022. It may not be “radical AF,” but it’s my truth. So, in the spirit of Chumbawamba, Maya Angelou and the trans and non-binary people who inspire me every day—like Shannon O’Connor, whose Daily Beast essay this week was a bracing ray of light—I am wearing my Trans Pride colors and hitting the streets. All I ask is that you join me, and if you will not… then get out of my way.
