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LGBTQ+ Perspectives
How Does a Trans Person Write Responsibly After Trump’s Inauguration?
My life feels like a dead-sober fever dream of magical realism
Until today, I’ve felt like I barely slept since the Inauguration. Into the exhaustion, the ghost of a former lover who reminds me so much of my country was whispering into my ear again: “you’ll sleep when you’re dead.” I haven’t been able to write much from that space.
None of this happens in a vacuum. It happens within its space in history, sometime just an overflowing handful of decades after the United States military left my people to die in concentration camps because LGBTQ+ people were still illegal in my country back in those days. Back in those days. I’m drinking lavender tea and remembering lavender scares where people lost and lose their jobs just for wanting people like me to stay alive. I remember a time when history folded in on itself and remember that the time is now. Again.
Since the Inauguration, my life has felt like a dead-sober fever dream of magical realism.
I’ve had so much to say and have struggled so hard with sharing any of it. What is responsible to say right now to and about groups of people experiencing mental health crises en masse not because of who they are but because of how we are perceived and left behind in perception? What is responsible to say while our people are being reduced as a group into a mental illness on social media?
I don’t want to contribute to the panic of trans people by validating our very real fears without solutions. I don’t want to reassure the cis people who aren’t paying attention right now by reminding them on behalf of my people that there is still plenty of hope and joy found in everyday life as a trans person, though there absolutely is plenty of that going around, and I want every person who hates my kind to know that I still experience happiness and love in the midst of this horrible moment in American history. Life goes on in spite of the hate flowing in. Like every human, I still experience a full life with all of the emotions, including the pleasures.
All of my conversations since the Inauguration have shown the kind of deeply uncomfortable constant…
