I don’t think I normally write anything for TDoR. It’s usually, for me, a personal affair. Moments to think back on the people we’ve lost: the people who could have gone on to do amazing things; and the people who could have gone on to achieve nothing spectacular. Who would have lived quiet little lives.
It does not matter to me what they would have done. It matters instead that their opportunity to wake up and eat cornflakes, to watch the sun rise, to sit and play PS5 until late in the night was ripped from them by cis society. It matters instead that their parents, their families, the people they thought were their friends, that random people on the street, that our public media would all rather see them – and others like them – dead than happy and trans.
When I came out there wasn’t the huge body of evidence there is now that the best treatment for transgender people is gender affirming care. That puberty blockers work, and work well, and that transition and gender affirming care massively reduces suicidality. That trans kids and adults – mostly their pain comes from living in a society that consistently demonizes and diminishes. Their trauma from living in a society that sometimes tacitly, but often overtly, encourages cisgender people to harm or even kill transgender people.
And so as the literal bodies of evidence have mounted that the best way to support trans people is just to let us live our lives, affirming who we are, allowing us to just be? I have become increasingly angry. Because when I came out no-one knew about trans people. Mostly we were just a weird anomaly and subject of ridicule. But now? Now we know. These studies are riven with blood and loss and pain. And despite that – despite that – across the world people are choosing to harm us.
They are choosing to inflict pain for the sake of what? A few votes from pathetic people who can’t accept anyone different from themselves. Because they fear anything outside their world view. Because they can’t empathize with what they can’t understand? Because they’re scared that the tiny number of us will somehow destroy society?
It’s TDoR, again. More people who should be with us are gone because our cis allies and their cisgender friends have let laws go into force that kill us. So this year as the candle burns and I’m shredded by the pain of another year of unnecessary loss, facing down the uncertainty of the next presidency, most of what I feel is anger.
