Kat looked up from her phone, one black earbud nestled into her left ear, the other dangling down her bare chest. She was sitting in the queen-sized bed of a sparse hotel room with her back resting on the headboard, cushioned by a layer of pillows. Her gaze flicked to the single window in the room, which had its curtains firmly drawn to hide the view of the sky.

“The shuttle made it out of orbit safely,” she reported quietly. On the opposite corner of the bed, Rosa sat cross-legged, shuffling a tarot deck, passing the cards from hand to hand in quick, practiced motions. The tiny shff noise of the laminated cardstock was lost under the suspiciously loud humming of the ill-maintained A/C by the window. Rosa nodded, glancing around the room as if she had forgotten the cards in her hands even as she mechanically continued to bring them together and apart, together and apart, dropping a few cards at a time from one hand to the other, gradually changing the order of the deck one movement at a time.

“So I guess now we wait,” Kat added when it was clear Rosa didn’t have any response. That wasn’t unusual for their relationship; Kat dealt with her stress by filling her life with noise, music, podcasts, videogames, or her own voice if nothing else was available. Rosa, on the other hand, met her anxieties head-on instead of drowning them out, withdrawing into herself, locking herself and her fears into a metaphorical room until only one came out alive. Neither method was foolproof, but in the past four years they’d learned to find balance between their coping mechanisms.

Rosa snorted softly, hands briefly halting their motion. “Waiting is all we’ve been doing for months.”

“Yeah. Fair,” Kat sighed. “At least one way or another the waiting will be done soon, I guess.” Rosa nodded quietly; her hands moved together and apart, together and apart. Kat found the repetitive motion simultaneously soothing and a little agitating. Together and apart, together and apart, adding more and more chaos to the deck, never resolving. In her left earbud, a news anchor continued the same monotonous discussion that every network had been airing twenty-four hours a day for months. Now that the launch was done, there wasn’t much point in listening. It would succeed or it would fail; those unlucky enough to be on the ground just had to wait for news of their fates.

Kat couldn’t take it anymore, took the other bud out of her ear and clicked her cell to sleep, tossing the black screen onto the mattress next to her. She leaned forward until she was resting on her stomach and elbows, looking up at her wife, admiring the wavy black of her hair, the short stubble of her side-shave, her sharp nose and intense brown eyes. Rosa noticed her gaze and gave a loving half-smile, an expression Kat used to confuse for a smirk and now saw for the more self-conscious gesture that it was. Her hands didn’t stop: together and apart, together and apart.

“Those cards got any answers about what happens next?” Kat asked. She kept the tone light, teasing, but she sure was her partner recognized the genuine fear it held, the desire to shrink the giant unknown that laid ahead of them. Ahead of all of them. Ahead of everyone.

“I didn’t think you were interested in tarot,” Rosa replied. Her voice held the same duality, light yet heavy. Their banter, when they fell into it, was also a familiar pattern, a comforting conversational blanket they could snuggle into together.

“I’m not sure I’d use the word ‘interested.’” Kat put a hand on her wife’s knee, thumb gently caressing the soft skin and downy hair of her leg. They had discussed Rosa’s connection with tarot numerous times. Kat had always been tarot-agnostic, as she thought of it. Tarot, to her, fit in the same camp as astrology, or Meyers-Briggs personality types, or most religions; she wasn’t sure it had any true connection to the inner workings of the universe, but if it helped people make sense of the ridiculous entropy of life, more power to them in using it. Rosa, on the other hand, felt particularly drawn to the cards, and had a variety of decks that all, according to her, had different quirks and personalities; some were blunt and full of tough love, others gentle and supportive. The one she was shuffling now was her travel deck, a more standard and expendable set of the generic cards you saw everywhere whose name Kat couldn’t remember.

“I’m… I don’t know. Curious,” Kat continued. Then she snorted self-consciously. “And desperate, I guess.”

Rosa winked. “You know how much I love hearing from desperate girls.”

“Oh hush.” Kat slapped the woman’s knee lightly, barely enough to even register. “You know what I mean.”

Rosa looked at the cards in her hands as they continued their movement. Together and apart, together and apart, each iteration a new order, a new possible future. “You know I draw a card every day, right?” Kat nodded; they’d been living together for over three years, it would have been hard not to notice. “It helps me… focus on the day. Gives me, I don’t know, a feeling of forewarning. Tells me what to watch for.” This wasn’t new information, but Kat found the repetition of it comforting, like their banter, like Rosa’s half-smile, like so much of their relationship. Small, familiar patterns. Stability in a messy world.

Finally, startlingly, Rosa’s hands stilled. She clasped the deck together, then left it sitting on her right hand, offering it to her spouse. “You want to draw one for yourself?”

Kat blinked. “I thought no one else was supposed to touch your decks?”

“When you’re the one the reading is for, your energy on the deck is important. Go for it.”

Kat took her hand off her wife’s knee, brushed her hair with its faded purple dye from her face, and placed a hand on the deck. She felt scared of what she’d see, and also felt ridiculous about it. They were just cards. But all her fear and anxiety about the world, the launch, the everything, condensed down onto this unassuming stack of paper, and when she took the top card, she could see her hand was visibly shaking.

When flipped over, the card offered very little comfort. The Tower, it read, and the art showed a tall monolith on a cliff’s face. Lightning from the night sky was lancing the building, toppling its roof and sending flames from its windows. Screaming people fell down the cliff in a way that reminded her uncomfortably of news footage of the World Trade Center before it fell. A wave of nausea swept through her, and also a surge of anger and embarrassment for feeling that, for feeling anything about this, about a simple card.

Rosa’s hand on hers brought her back out of her head. Kat looked up and saw a sad smile on her wife’s face. She frowned, took a breath, trying to pull herself back from the anxiety spiral she could feel mounting.

“This seems, uh, not great,” she said, trying to force a lightness in her tone that didn’t match the tightness in her chest.

Rosa gently took the card from her hand, setting it face-up on top of the deck and placing the deck on the bed. The comforting, familiar sensation of her partner’s hand on Kat’s head, a soft stroking motion, caused her lungs to loosen a little. Stability. The known in a world of unknowns.

“The Tower is a… complicated card,” Rosa said quietly.

“Isn’t it the, like, really bad one?” While she didn’t practice tarot, Kat found you couldn’t be a queer girl in their circles and not pick up at least a few bits of information. Just like with astrology; she couldn’t tell you what her rising star sign was but she knew that when one of her star-charting friends talked about “Mercury in retrograde” all the others would commiserate about all the miscommunications and broken electronics that it had caused.

Rosa was silent a moment, eyes flicking to the curtained window, to the cards, off into nothing. Her hand kept gently running through Kat’s messy hair. She took a breath. “Like I said, it’s complicated. The Tower is about… change. Big change. Toppling of hierarchies. Upheaval of systems.”
Kat’s brow furrowed. “The art is a lot more dramatic-looking than that.” She reached over, tapped on the falling figures, the one on the left that was screaming in horror at the distance below. “This isn’t just change, it’s death.”

The other woman nodded. “Well, death is a kind of change.” Kat gave a frustrated snort. “No, no, it is. I mean it. Look.” Rosa tapped on the figure on the right, then the top of the tower. “Look, this person has a crown on, right? And the part of the tower that’s falling, it looks like a crown too. Death can be individual or systemic. The Tower doesn’t mean people have to die, though they might. It means the systems we are used to are going to fall. It means the life we know can’t go on the way it did.”

The purple-haired woman took the card, pulled it closer to examine it. She could see what Rosa was saying, but it was hard to look past the fear, the destruction. “So it’s… good? Monarchies falling, dictators dying, that kind of thing?”

Rosa sighed. Kat could tell that she was getting something wrong, and it irritated her, but she knew it wasn’t her partner’s fault. So she waited, and listened.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It’s not good or bad. It’s just big, at least from the point of view of who the reading is for.” Kat felt the comforting presence of Rosa’s hand leave her scalp as the woman made vague gestures to try to outline the shape of the concept she was communicating. “It’s an apocalypse.”

Kat’s stomach dropped. The word ‘apocalypse’ had been on her mind a lot in the past few months. The past decade, if she was being honest. Whether it was anxiety or a particularly dire time in history or maybe just the way things always were, she had spent most of her adult life feeling like the world was teetering on the brink of destruction. “That isn’t very comforting to hear,” she said quietly.

Rosa’s hand went immediately back to Kat’s head. She was grateful for a partner who was so responsive to her anxiety in these little ways. “Do you know what apocalypse means?”

“It’s the end of the world, isn’t it?”

The darker-haired woman shook her head. “It comes from Greek. It means ‘revelation’, ‘lifting the veil.’ It’s stripping away the curtain to see the wizard hiding behind it.” Kat didn’t answer; she didn’t really know how to process what Rosa was telling her, so she just listened. “Apocalypse doesn’t mean everything is ending, just that something is ending. And we see the truth lying underneath that thing, the core it leaves behind when it’s gone.”

Frustrated, Kat squinted at the card and then tossed it back at the deck in a way that left her feeling slightly guilty right after she did it. “I don’t think this is what I wanted to hear,” she mumbled, shifting to rest her head on Rosa’s leg. “I wanted, I don’t know. A card that showed a meteor getting shoved aside before it hit the Earth or something.” Her headrest shook a bit as her partner chuckled.

“Yeah, well, we all always want to draw The World, but life isn’t like that.” Moving gently to avoid disrupting Kat, Rosa leaned forward and picked up The Tower card again, looking at it. They sat quietly for a couple minutes as Kat felt the anxiety in her middle, like a pile of scorpions pricking at the insides of her intestines. She rolled her head to the side to look up and was surprised to see her partner’s face with a wistful smile as she contemplated the destructive imagery of the card.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

The hand on her head kept stroking, softly, calmly. “You know one of the most significant memories I have of this card?” Kat gave a tiny shake of her head. “One morning in August of 2022, I drew my card as I ran out the door to go to work at that shitty data entry job I was in. I didn’t look at it until I was on the bus. And it was this: The Tower. It was the first time I’d ever gotten it in my daily draw and I had a pit in my stomach all day about it, about whether it meant I was getting fired or that Joan was cheating on me or something.” She paused.

“What happened?” Kat prompted.

Rosa’s smile grew a bit and she held the card to her chest like a treasured keepsake. She looked down and Kat was surprised to see her eyes looked misty. “It was August 23rd. It’s the day we met at the book club I had just joined.”

The purple-hair woman blinked. “That’s… that’s it? That’s not an apocalypse.”

“Oh, it was. Meeting you changed everything.” The tears were starting to leak down Rosa’s cheeks now, and Kat was surprised to find she was crying too. “The day I met you I felt something I hadn’t felt in years. Our friendship over the next few months was what made me realize how toxic my relationship with Joan had gotten, that I needed to leave. The first night we kissed, my world fell apart because I knew I would do anything, tear down everything I had, to kiss you again.” The hand left Kat’s hair, went to her chin, gently pulling her face higher to better meet her wife’s gaze. “The day we met was the start of the absolute destruction of the life I’d known. It was an apocalypse, an ending and a beautiful beginning.”

Then they were kissing, tears mingling with lips mingling with other lips and tears. It was soft and gentle, much like that first kiss hiding under an umbrella from the bright California sun, a kiss from another world and another life. They stopped for a breath, to lock eyes, and then kissed again. Together and apart.

When the tears and kisses slowed, the two sat side by side on the edge of the lumpy hotel mattress. Kat was resting her head on Rosa’s shoulder and their hands were intertwined with a casual familiarity built up over years. “So,” Rosa said quietly, as if the conversation had never stopped, “do you see what I mean now? The Tower is complicated.”

“I guess so?” Kat whispered. It felt disrespectful to the moment, somehow, to speak up. “So it isn’t saying what’s going to happen is bad, just… painful. And big.” She felt her partner nod next to her.

“Yeah. And that’s the thing about the world, about life. There’s big, painful things happening all the time. When you got that job in Toronto and asked me to marry you, that was The Tower; we had to destroy our old life and start something new together. When you got fired and we had to move apartments. When you got the date for your bottom surgery and we only had two months to plan for it. Tiny apocalypses, all the time.”

Kat paused as if thoughtful, then quietly said, “I dunno, I feel like my surgery was more like getting The Tower inverted.” She laughed as she felt an elbow dig into her stomach, heard Rosa giggle next to her.

“Dork,” Rosa said fondly.

“Yeah,” Kat agreed, smiling. They fell back into silence; the purple-haired woman found her gaze wandering back to that closed curtain, her mind on the sky beyond.

As if sensing the mounting anxiety building in the quiet, Rosa said, “The good thing about the Tower falling is that you get to reassess. You sift through the rubble, see what’s important to bring with you to the next life. To the next apocalypse.”

Kat stood and tugged on her wife’s hand, getting her to stand as well. They walked to the curtain together, and finally, tired of hiding, tired of the tension of pretending, Kat shoved it aside. Behind the glass window and the reflection of the bedside lamp lay a parking lot scattered with cars, a city skyline dotted with life and light. Above it a night sky, so many of its stars invisible to them here on the ground. A bright shape, larger than the stars but not as big as the moon, ominous and too visible, hung there. To their eyes it seemed still, but Kat knew that it was moving fast, too fast, too close.

She felt a squeeze on her hand. She squeezed back.

“Life is apocalypses,” Rosa whispered, staring up at the meteor. “Endings and beginnings.”

Kat nodded, wrapped her arm around her wife’s shoulder, pulling her tight to her side. In the decades of her life, she’d faced so many possible endings, so many times when she was sure her world would split open with the weight of tragedy. And still they were here. And still they had each other. “I think we can do this,” she said quietly. “I think we can make something new.”

An arm slipped around her waist and Rosa placed a soft kiss on her shoulder. Together, not apart.

“I know we can.”

What they don’t tell you is that
It isn’t just your gender
That already seems hard enough:
Change your name, change your pronouns,
grow some tits, shave your face,
razor nicks on your neck giving you away
“Actually, it’s ma’am,” a dozen times a day
Coming home at night and wondering if you’ll ever be enough

They tell you all those parts
They prepare you for the worst
What they don’t tell you about
is the freedom
Like stepping outside in your first pair of glasses
Looking at the vague shapes of trees and seeing for the first time
that they’re made of hundreds of leaves
Like running through the house as a child with all my birthday balloons and they surrounded me
and there was a magical moment where I felt something, a joy and painful longing,
And I spent the afternoon trying to recreate the sensation but never could

They don’t tell you about becoming a person
Not a woman but a person
About what it feels like to suddenly care
About having opinions instead of apathy
About how joy bursts out of you like fireworks

They don’t tell you that you’ll look around the world and see so many rules binding us all
And maybe they once seemed like chains
But now they seem more like tripwire
Tense and brittle
A fragile spider web of control
And you say to yourself:
I’ve already broken so many,
why should I stop there?

They don’t tell you about family
About the familiar nod from the six-foot-tall girl in a choker at the board game store
About the burst of pride at seeing the scars on a friend’s bare chest as he goes shirtless for the first time
About fighting tooth and nail for partner’s pronouns when they can’t do so themself, your love a fierce mantra: They/them. They/them. They/them.

They don’t tell you about coming from that world full of brittle strings
to a home full of gentle words
About hand-me-down dresses that fit you better than anything in the store
About a lover stitching your new name on your Christmas stocking
About your spouse by your hospital bedside, sneaking you Frappuccinos and fries as you lie in a Percocet haze,
your crotch now matching your life: flipped inside out

What they don’t tell you about
Is the realization that your life is yours
And the fear and the power
of making decisions for yourself
No longer a passenger but behind the wheel
Driving off for who knows where
But enjoying the ride on the way there

For a “live” reading of this poem recorded for Pride 2020:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnYpBggkPGg

What They Don’t Tell You About Being Trans was originally published in Empowered Trans Woman on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Conent notes: This piece touches on hard topics, including the many ways in which dysphoria and gender dissatisfaction can manifest. These topics can be difficult and — especially for other trans people — possibly triggering. Tough topics include: body image and dissatisfaction (including weight), sexual topics (clearly marked with information on where to start reading again to skip them), depression, anxiety, depersonalization.]

It was autumn, 2014. I had begun identifying as genderqueer only a few months before: a word I discovered in my early 30’s and it seemed to match my directionless dissatisfaction with my assigned gender of “man.” As I laid in bed with a partner — a handsome nonbinary person I’d met at a camping event that summer — we talked about ourselves and our identities.

I expressed something that had been on the edges of my mind for awhile, a growing sense of being out of sync with the world. As closely as I can remember, I told them something like this: “I don’t feel like the protagonist of my own story. I feel like the supporting character in everyone else’s story.” I remember the sad look on their face when I said this, and how I quickly tried to reassure them that it was fine. It was good that I knew this about myself, I said; didn’t everyone’s story need supporting characters? Not everyone could be a protagonist.

I look back at myself, now, and I share that partner’s sadness.

When we talk about transness, the phrase “gender dysphoria” is regularly invoked. This nebulous concept is used as the benchmark of what makes a person “really” trans (as opposed to the equally vague idea of a person who isn’t trans but wants to be — a hypothetical that I’m not convinced exists).

According to the DSM-V, which is as of this writing the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a primary reference for sections of the mental health fields, gender dysphoria in adults meets “at least two” of the following criteria over a period of at least six months:

1. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics).

2. A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics).

3. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender.

4. A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).

5. A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).

6. A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).

While these symptoms, as written, are incredibly ambiguous, the core sense of them is this: strong associations with being a gender other than the current one; strong dislike of one’s own sexual characteristics (e.g. genitals, breasts or lack thereof, hip fat or lack thereof, body/facial hair or lack thereof); a strong sense of being something other than what you are. When we share the commonly held script of trans people feeling like they’re “born in the wrong body,” these are the concepts we are invoking.

[It’s worth noting that the World Health Organization recently put out a new version of their International Classification of Disease-11, an international lit of health diagnoses and coding, that reclassified gender dysphoria as a “sexual health” issue rather than a “mental health” one, reducing the stigma of transness as a mental illness.]

Here’s the thing with this script: for some of us, gender dysphoria doesn’t work like this. It doesn’t necessarily have this clear directionality, this sense of a goal. For those of us whose gender dypshoria doesn’t fit this script, we can struggle for a long time without realizing the core of the pain we’re feeling.

It’s December, 2015. I’m on the phone with my primary partner, trying on a gift they got me. It’s a full-body fishnet piece of lingerie, plus-size one-size-fits-all, from a local sex toy store — since my teens I’ve had an interest in feminine clothing, the clumsy label “crossdresser” added to my mental list of self-definitions for lack of a better descriptor.

I’m looking in a full length mirror and feeling frustrated. It fits. But it doesn’t look right. My body — testosterone-influenced, masculine, heavyset — doesn’t fill the item like pictures I’ve seen of similar items on models. The item is cute, but it isn’t cute on me. Even though it nominally fits, it hangs wrong, it looks wrong, I’m too tall, my shoulders too broad, my hips non-existent. It isn’t cut to flatter my form. I feel ugly, upset about my weight, frustrated that the clothes that catch my attention are made for bodies so unlike mine.

I don’t, however, think of it as dysphoria. I don’t think “I wish I had a woman’s body.” At the time, I think of it as a wish that things were made for my body. I think that I’m self-conscious about my weight. I think that I’m upset and crying because of seasonal depression, poor self-esteem, society’s strict gender norms on clothing. Physical transition is not a thing that seems possible or right to me.

The years before I started HRT were a time of increasing depression. I’ve struggled with generalized anxiety disorder and clinical depression for the majority of my life, but starting in 2014–2015, I started experiencing a difficult spiral in both. I spoke with my doctor about increasing my dosage of antidepressants and — amusingly, in hindsight — started being treated for low testosterone due to my lethargy. In late 2015, I started seeing a nonbinary therapist to help me navigate my depression and my increasing dissatisfaction with the fact that despite finding the labels of nonbinary/genderqueer for myself, I felt like something was off.

During these increasingly hard years, I experienced a lot of symptoms that at the time seemed utterly unconnected to bodily dysphoria or to my gender at all. I can only make the connections between them and gender dysphoria now that I’m free of them, after nearly 2 years of hormonal adjustment and drastic life redefinition. I’m sharing them here in the hopes that we can continue to expand our discussions of what gender dysphoria can be and feel like. I’m hoping that other people who may be suffering through these can feel less alone and check with themselves to see if maybe the roots of their pain may be connected to gender in ways that they didn’t expect.

The main things I remember about that time are feelings of hopelessness. The links between gender dysphoria and depression are well-established. As someone who struggled with depression for most of my life, I worried that the mental illness I’d been treating and fighting for so many years was getting too strong for my daily dose of Cymbalta to fend off. A marijuana prescription helped ease the fact that I was starting to have trouble sleeping due to nighttime anxiety and sadness.

It’s tough to encapsulate all the things I thought and felt at the time, especially now, as I sit in a cafe on a sunny day in a body I love. I can’t give a succinct paragraph that summarizes what it’s like. All I can share at the feelings themselves.

● The feeling of being a “supporting character” was amplified the worse my depression got. I had no story of my own, no purpose. I was not a character of consequence in whatever plots were going on. My role was to show up, give the protagonists what they needed, and get out of the way. I thought I was at peace with this feeling about my life, that it was okay to be a support character with no drive of my own. But as my depression worsened, I increasingly felt like a non-entity.

● Hand in hand with this, I had little to no vision for the future. Sometimes partners and friends and I would discuss plans, goals for our lives, ways we would affect the world. I had very few answers for this. Other than short-term, concrete instances of things I knew would happen (a board game convention I would attend, for instance), I didn’t have any grander plan for my life. At best I figured I would just keep working and providing financial support to the people I cared about, people like my spouse who were going to make a real impact on the world. (The fact that I had slipped into a traditionally masculine mindset of seeing oneself as a financial provider, despite the fact that my spouse was equally gainfully employed, doesn’t escape me now.)

● I had no cohesive sense of self. I had personality traits that I acknowledged (I was kind, a good listener, loyal, feminist) but no core around which I could wrap them. It’s a hard concept to describe. It’s like I was a bunch of disparate scenes from a story with no plot to tie them together. I had no foundation to myself, no fallback of “This is who I am” that I could turn to when I felt lost. This led to circumstances throughout my life (as early as middle school) where I would act like a “tofu person” — I had very little flavour of my own, largely absorbing and internalizing the flavour of those around me. I tried desperately to like the things that my loved ones and friends liked and would end up frustrated and feeling like a failure if I couldn’t keep pace with their interests. I had relationships hit stumbling blocks because I would attempt to become a copy of my partner and then get depressed or lash out when I found being their duplicate unsustainable.

● I felt lonely, even though I had loved ones who cared about me and friends who wanted to see me. It was a deep, cutting loneliness. I often found myself thinking that no one would understand me, but when I tried to probe that feeling — to ask what, exactly, people wouldn’t understand — I would come up empty. I knew I was fundamentally different from everyone around me and had no idea what it was that made me different.

● I felt like I was miserable because I had too many feelings. It felt like my heart was a dam full of cracks, holding back an ocean much too strong for its shoddy construction. At night I would sit and have the sense that feelings were pouring out of my heart into the rest of me without control or context.

● At the same time, I often felt dull and zombie-like. I felt a disinterest in a lot of life, including things that used to make me happy. I isolated myself from others, including my closest partner. Used to my introversion and the feeling of needing to recharge, I pulled further and further inward, thinking that if I only could spend enough time alone I’d find the energy to care about things again.

● I went through many days with a sense of “Well, I guess this is it, I just keep doing this until I die.” Life seemed boring, routine. There felt like no real point to it other than to keep doing it and hoping that by me doing my dull routine, I might enable someone around me, someone more interesting and powerful and self-assured, to make a difference in the world.

Overall, my mental and emotional state worsened continuously and felt out of control. I didn’t feel like life as an abstract concept was pointless, but I struggled to find meaning in my life, in my existence. I was terrified that I was broken; that either I couldn’t be fixed, or that the fix was too hard for me to achieve at my level of dysfunction. Any time the idea that all this had to do with my gender came up, my anxiety would flare to such a level that I had to shove the thought deep inside, lest I succumb to a panic attack and become unable to even carry out my robotic routine.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t have bodily dysphoria in addition to the mental and emotional ways my gender dysphoria was manifesting. I just didn’t recognize it for what it was at the time. Some ways in which I had bodily dysphoria included:

● A disassociation from ownership of my body. I didn’t feel invested in my body. When I was complimented on how I looked it felt strange and pointless, like being complimented on a hand-me-down piece of clothing you were wearing because it was all that was clean.

● These feelings became paired with a lack of investment in how I looked. Masculine fashion didn’t interest me, feminine fashion didn’t fit or look good on me. A lot of my outfits were t-shirts and jeans, often baggy or mis-sized — jeans I’d bought a size larger that I cinched together with a belt or shirts that were too small for my current size but I didn’t bother to replace. I cared whether people found me attractive, but hit a wall of disinterest when it came to clothing. (It must be noted that this intersected a lot with my own fatphobia — I also didn’t invest a lot in fashion because thinking about fashion required thinking about my weight and size and changes that had happened to it over the years. The relationship between gender dysphoria and fatphobia for me was, and is, complicated; I find it much easier to love my body for all its softness now that my softness sits in a more feminine way.)

● My reflection gave me no particular joy, no matter how pleasing to the eye it was. My feelings on looking at myself in the mirror ran from negative to studiously neutral. When I looked good, it didn’t really feel good; I just had a sort of recognition that, yes, this matched the aesthetics of a guy that I or someone else would find attractive.

● My struggles with not-caring about my body were probably best evidenced by my relationship with my facial hair. After giving up on being clean-shaven because I was bad at shaving on any sort of regular schedule, I experimented with styles of facial hair. I clearly recallhow a goatee caused me a weird sensation of “I don’t know who this is” when I looked in the mirror, which disconcerted me enough that I eventually gave up on it. I reached a beard I found attractive — a close-trimmed, 3–5 days of stubble sort that I’d grown after a partner pointed out research on what people find most attractive in facial hair. It was easier than shaving, and I recognized it as being attractive in a socially-acceptable, masculine kind of way. It never felt like me, though. Nothing about my body really did.

The next batch of points have to deal with sexuality and things like genitals. If these are uncomfortable topics for you or you don’t wish to know me that well, skip down to the image of a cute animal, where the non-sexual discussion will pick back up. (If you’re using a screen-reader, the description of the image will mention that it’s safe to start reading/listening again.)

● As my depression and dysphoria got worse, my relationship with sex got more difficult. The idea of sex made me anxious; a partner making a proposition would cause a surge of panic, especially if it was someone I didn’t know well. I suffered from spectator syndrome— I was too focused on whether I was doing a good job, whether my partner(s) were unhappy, to actually be in the moment. I liked the idea of sex but was increasingly withdrawn from the actual act. Some partners complained that I felt like I was following a script; they were often right. I was too anxious and dissociated from my body to be spontaneous or be in the moment.

● I never really found pictures of myself attractive or sexy. I could take flirty pictures modeled off of pictures of others I had liked. I could even sometimes recognize that a picture of me looked particularly good. But the knowledge of the pictures looking good didn’t bring me joy or make me feel any better about my body, it was just an acknowledgement that, yes, a person could find this picture attractive.

● I had a particular disinterest in sex when I felt I was being seen as a guy. This was most conscious once I started identifying as non-binary, of course, but in hindsight I see it colouring sexual interactions for years prior; this surge of anxiety and frustration when I was expected to engage in sex in a way that is societally defined as masculine.

● At the time, I didn’t think that I had any particular genital dysphoria; however, if asked, I would absolutely express that if there were a simple button I could press to swap my genitals for a vulva, I would. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that this was a dysphoria worth addressing: I thought it was kind of an objective fact that vulvas were awesome, and wouldn’t any AMAB person like to swap if given the chance? (Spoiler: No, most cis men wouldn’t.)

● While we’re on the topic of genital dysphoria: I had a strange, near-obsessive fear of my testicles getting injured. I have an anxiety disorder, so fixation isn’t necessarily out of the norm, but this terror has persisted from my teens to today. I shied away from most contact to them. Trying to do testicular self-exams to check for cancer would cause an intense, overwhelming nausea; I think I can count on one hand the number of these exams I’ve successfully completed in my life. It didn’t occur to me until well into hormonal transition that this may be a form of dysphoria, a disgust and sense of not-belonging that my anxiety re-routed into something that seemed more understandable.

Overall, once the surge of puberty hormones died down in my early to mid-20s, my interest in and comfort with sex dwindled. There are other factors in this, but a significant portion is intrinsically tied to my gender and dysphoria; now that I’m in a body I love and am able to engage with sex in ways that fit me better, it no longer is a terrifying task that I can’t connect with.

I could go back through my life and find plenty of other small signs of dysphoria (the weird twisted-gut feeling of panicky excitement I would get at media showing someone magically changing gender, for example), but I’m aware of this piece’s length and don’t want to overload it.

My hope with this piece is to help expand our discussions of what dysphoria is and what it can feel like. The general societal conception is to summarize it as feelings of “being trapped in the wrong body,” but there can be so many layers and symptoms, and we do trans people a disservice when we fail to accurately reflect the breadth of our experiences. When we minimize the many, many ways dysphoria can manifest, we keep people from realizing that struggles they are facing with symptoms such as these may be related to dysphoria. If I had known my pain for what it was, it likely would have helped me feel justified and valid in seeking help and transition-related resources sooner.

The remainder of this piece is going to be spent sharing others’ experiences with dysphoria, rather than my own. Before I switch to that topic, I want to end this on a happier note by saying this: a lot of these symptoms seem like a lifetime ago. I have been hormonally transitioning for just under 2 years now, and the anxious, depressed, dissociated person I used to be feels like someone else entirely. If some or all of these feelings resonate with you, know that there may be resources for you and ways you can address them. You do not owe the world your suffering. Be a better, happier, more connected self. This is your only body; as much as you can, make it something you can live in.

It’s June, 2018. I’m clothing shopping with my spouse at a plus-size women’s store. I’m in my own dressing room, trying on dresses, skirts, bras, things I used to anxiously try on at home. Things that often made me miserable about my body. I try on a pair of rugged denim shorts my spouse suggested, and a cute flannel top. I look in the mirror, and I nearly start crying. I see myself there, not a distant reflection. I see a soft, curvy, feminine, beautiful person and I feel, really feel, that person is me.

OTHER VOICES

If I only discuss my own experiences with dysphoria, I’m still falling short of the entire discussion. I asked on Twitter for other people’s experiences of dypshoria, and would like to share these voices as well (with their permission):

charlie the undying on Twitter

@Azure_Husky my experience with dysphoria has mostly been dissociation and feeling like im not a real person. not being able to focus on the world because i dont feel like part of it. not feeling like the future is a possibility because i didnt feel like i existed in the present.

charlie the undying on Twitter

@Azure_Husky for a while i developed a sort of like... second person in my brain to run me like autopilot cuz i couldnt deal with existing in the world as the wrong gender so i just dissociated.

Too Much Blood 🌹 on Twitter

@Azure_Husky My dysphoria manifested as intense anxiety and depression. This was particularly strong. Around the idea of me being "enough," perfectionism and having a hard time doing anything but trying to fulfill everyone's expectations of me at all times

Xer The Squirrel ♀🌺 on Twitter

@Azure_Husky To be honest, dysphoria feels like a numbness kind of feeling.

Emilia G. Robertson on Twitter

@Azure_Husky I was dysphoric for 30-odd years without realizing it had anything to do with gender? I had a seething core of self-loathing, and was convinced that, instead of a genuine personality, all I had was an affected, performative persona. I felt like a fake and a failure, constantly.

Privately via Twitter DMs: “ Nothing ever felt right. Ever. My skin was too rough and so all my tactile senses were thrown off. Once puberty hit I started developing all kinds of weird tics to do with sense of touch. If someone touched my fingernails, for example, it was horrific. […] Bathrooms were a nightmare… it took me 20 years to be able to use a urinal in a public restroom if someone else was there. […] I had stuff that’s pretty common like severe self-confidence issues that manifested in all types of ways. Like before HRT it was extremely hard for me to drive at all… I was constantly second guessing myself and afraid I would have a wreck and I couldn’t read other motorists at all. After being on HRT for a week, the differences in my driving were so noticeable my partner even commented about it.”

Rodent Party on Twitter

@Azure_Husky Dysphoria is overwhelming background static. Buzzing in the mind reminding you of all the ways you fail and all the things that won't be. Dysphoria is sitting in the bed 10 extra minutes before you can get up and face the world. It's looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.

Lilith Heresy on Twitter

@Azure_Husky For me it kind of feels like I'm always running; like I'm trapped in a war with no weapons. I can't fight back, so I run. I catch my binderless image, or a part of my body I'm trying to forget does a natural thing, and my mind races to get away from it.

Mason R. Flesher on Twitter

@Azure_Husky My dysphoria has manifested in multiple ways, but the most common occurance is feeling depressed and feeling lost. There is also a lot of dread involved where I feel like there is something /wrong/ with me but I can't figure out what.

⭐I am a Joker🌟 [SAKANA and OK KO] on Twitter

@Azure_Husky For me it's usually sort of a dull throb in my chest, if I think about my agab vs. my true gender, and wondering if I'm just delusional (I know I'm not, but.) Feels a lot like grief. And, on particularly bad days, I get physical symptoms, like migraines or an upset stomach, etc.

nuki on main on Twitter

@Azure_Husky being three fragments of a self at once: an outer, automated shell; an inner self who feels they're very bad at controlling the outside; and a middleman that relays messages with a negative attitude in a way that keeps the inner self only watching detachedly

whole ass mom on Twitter

@Azure_Husky My dysphoria manifests in ways where I just feel like my skin doesn't fit right. Sort of an "is this REALLY my body" and it's very jarring bc I'll see features in the mirror yesterday I was fine with but that day they look alien.

whole ass mom on Twitter

@Azure_Husky It's not really a "this should be more a or b" just a sort of sense of alarm that something is wrong, that it's not me in the mirror and it's so weird and unsettling

InordinateFondness on Twitter

@Azure_Husky Depression, being disgusted by body hair and being distraught when it came in, loss of any desire to have sex, contempt for people who got influenced by attraction, overeating, hoarding things, letting those things cover up the other half of the bed because who would ever use it?

break my neck 😍🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter

@Azure_Husky My body is not a home

I’ve stopped adding answers to this article to control the length, but I am compiling everyone’s responses, including anonymous responses by Twitter DM (with permission) to a Twitter Moment that you can find here; everyone’s experiences with this are valid and varied, and it’s important for us to see the diversity of them so we can improve how we discuss dysphoria.

Please feel free to share your experiences of dysphoria in the comments to this piece, as well.

As a final way of providing voices to others, I’m going to link to some further reading. I have only found a few instances of writings on more non-typical dysphoria symptoms, but am sure there are many: please feel free to comment or contact me (on Twitter is the best way) if you have more resources for me to add here.

Depersonalization in gender dysphoria: widespread and widely unrecognized, by Zinnia Jones, is my highest resource recommendation; it contains a lot of voices that cover so many ways in which dysphoria affects us.

“That was dysphoria?” 8 signs and symptoms of indirect gender dysphoria, by Zinnia Jones; sort of the precursor to Zinnia piece above and part of what inspired me to write this piece.

Changing what you love: on considering hormones when you’re non-binary, by Bex Talks Sex, provides some fantastic perspective, including addressing the concept that one doesn’t have to feel like they hate their current body in order to want to change it. [Content note: Some NSFW imagery.]

In this piece I use the pronouns he/him to refer to the person I used to be. This is a stylistic decision to help express the disconnect between myself now and myself then. It is not permission for anyone else to do so: if you are referring to myself at any point in my life, you should be using they/them or she/her.]

[Content notes: This piece covers topics of grief and loss regarding one’s prior identity. Trans readers in particular may find it intense; be gentle with yourselves.]

I sometimes tell people that transition is a lesson in patience. A lot of this process has seemed agonizingly slow. When I finally realized that my feelings of dysphoria and depression were strong enough that I wanted to pursue hormonal transition, the six week wait until I could see my doctor felt insurmountable. I know that I’m lucky; some of the people I’ve talked to have waited many months, even years, to get access to what they need. After I finally got my (so-called) “feminizing” hormones, objective physical differences were intensely minor for the first six months or so. Appointments for important gender-affirming surgeries are over a year out. When you’re uncomfortable in your own skin and your place in the world, the wait for things to be better can be a crawl. Transition is slow.

It’s also, in retrospect, incredibly fast. The amount that I have changed myself and my entire life in the past two years is baffling when confronted in its entirety. Often I find myself so focused on the next step — send in passport to get name and gender changed; send in surgery referral letters; get a blood test to make sure my hormone levels are right — that I don’t have a lot of time to sit with the magnitude of how far I’ve come.

Some trans people consider the use of the word “journey” to refer to transition as cliché or trite. Some see it as putting a friendly, palatable title on a process that is made incredibly difficult by a society that attempts to block it in a staggering number of ways. I still use the word myself, but I want to be clear: when I say my transition has been a journey, I don’t mean “Let’s jump in the car and drive to grandma’s house.” I mean it in the sense of the Hero’s Journey, where the goal is accomplished but the protagonist is forever changed. I mean Odysseus spending 10 years trying to return home from the war. I mean Inanna sneaking into the underworld to visit her dead sister and having to be rescued and resurrected to leave. A journey is struggle. It is exhaustion. It is freedom.

Above all, a journey is sacrifice.

Among some trans people and communities, there is a word used for old names, the ones that we were assigned at birth, the ones coupled to a gender that isn’t the gender we have now. These are our deadnames.

When I first changed my name to Blue in 2015 (over a year after I found the word “nonbinary” for myself, over a year before I would begin hormonal transition), I didn’t like the word deadname in reference to my old name. It felt violent, divisive. I felt like it didn’t recognize that I was still the same person, that I was just adjusting my life to fit more comfortably with who I was. I worried it projected an image of a selfish upheaval, that I murdered who I used to be. To 2015 me, the old me didn’t feel distant; who I was then felt like a natural evolution, no more of a drastic change than my four years of grad school or my move from the US to Ontario. I didn’t feel like I had erased the old me.

I use the term deadname now.

The core issue of this piece came up — as things often do — during a therapy session where we were working on something unrelated. We were talking about my medical phobia; I have an intense, visceral reaction to images of or thoughts about the insides of or damage to bodies, especially to particular portions of anatomy. I also am scheduling a major gender affirmation surgery to one of those aforementioned body parts. That is to say: my therapist and I have a bunch of work ahead of us in the next year.

My therapist was asking me to visualize an AMAB (assigned male at birth) body so we could do some foundational work on this topic. I imagined a fairly generic cis man’s body, a hairy person standing in a T-pose like a videogame character that had loaded incorrectly. A “dad bod” in its 30s or 40s, pudge over a layer of muscle, white (as a white person raised in a racist society, I’m still working on my implicit racism — it will be a lifelong project). His face and genital regions were blurry and unfocused.

My therapist asked for my feelings about the body I was visualizing. I was, for a moment, quiet. I was struck with a sensation of a kind of deep, gut-level fear and grief. My therapist waited.

Eventually I found words to put to my feelings and pushed them out: it felt distant, I said. Alien. It was hairy and harsh and rough while my body was soft and gently curved and nice to touch. My therapist pointed out that I was asked to picture an AMAB body, and I didn’t picture mine. I was suddenly on the verge of tears and couldn’t say why.

I figured it out later, lying in my spouse’s arms and relating the session, crying as sentences tumbled out of me. I was feeling loss. I was realizing that my brain had updated my mental self-image to something that no longer included “maleness” as a descriptor. Which, on one hand, is a huge step forward; part of my dysphoria is memories of who I used to be altering the me I see today. I pick out the parts of myself that still look too masculine because my brain, at its core, still thinks of me as an imposter. So me not identifying myself with a “male body” (as if maleness had a single look) is big. It’s something I’ve been working hard on.

It’s also like a lifeline snapped. It was the sudden realization that I had irrevocably shifted the course of my life.

This piece is about the division between who I was and who I am. I can’t discuss this without referring to old-me, but I don’t want to use my old name here. I’ve found that when some people learn a trans person’s old name, their brain registers that as the “real” name and never lets it go. Annoying, painful slip-ups and misgendering follow. I still have to be confronted with my deadname on documents that haven’t been updated yet, by Netflix emails that use the info from a credit card that I haven’t fixed, by telemarketers whose systems haven’t caught up. I don’t want to add more opportunities to be called it than necessary.

For the remainder of this article, I’m going to refer to the old me, to the one who thought he was a guy, as B.

When I look at pictures of who I was, of B, I feel a pang of regret. B was a handsome guy, by my standards. Nice, trimmed beard, ruffled hair, bright eyes and smile.

It’s hard to not feel a sense of waste, if that makes sense. B was smart, kind, cute, feminist. He was a good guy — at least I hope so. And now B is gone. That cute, bearded face will never be like it was (especially after a year of laser hair removal and ongoing electrolysis). There’s this cold little void in me that feels like when I started taking hormones, when I legally changed my name, when I started getting permanent hair removal, each of those steps took the possibility of there ever being a B again and caused it to fade away.

B doesn’t feel like me anymore. I’ve begun to have trouble remembering what it was felt like to be him. I remember parts, but it’s more distant, abstract. It’s thinking of a childhood best friend that you haven’t seen in a decade and realizing that you’re starting to have trouble picturing their face.

I remember the facts of B’s existence. I remember how he felt studiously neutral about his body. I remember the lack of emotional acknowledgment he felt looking in mirrors, and how he kept trying different styles of facial hair to find one that didn’t feel a strange in a reflection. I remember feelings and coping mechanisms he had developed about parts of his body, ones that seemed like random quirks and not compensation for an underlying discomfort. I remember moments in childhood where an activity or thought that had some essence of femininity would bring this sudden pang of longing in his chest that he didn’t understand. I remember the panic in his stomach, as his dysphoria grew and it became harder to convince himself that he was okay with himself as he was, that the envy he felt when he saw transfeminine people’s transition photos was something he could keep inside.

I remember all of this, but today I find it hard to tap into those feelings again, to empathize.

Being a geek who adores sci-fi babble about time travel and the multiverse, I think about it in terms of timelines. There was some timeline, some alternate version of our world, where B was a guy and was okay with that and was happy. And the choices I’ve made in the past two years have cut that branch off; it’s a timeline we can never be in now. Of course, rationally, I know that I am who I am and my heart is what it is and whatever caused me to not be happy with being B, that happened well before I took before my first dose of spironolactone and estradiol. But knowing and feeling are two different things, and it’s hard to not carry a bit of guilt.

When my spouse and I finished graduate school, we bought a house. It was so exciting. It felt like such a Big Adult thing to do. We had gone through school (so much school!), we had gotten our doctorates, I had secured a full-time job, and now we were buying a house. We were Grownups with a capital G.

Without getting into too much detail, I’ll say that our three and a half year stint of homeownership didn’t go as planned. The old house had serious issues that had been patched over by cheap contractors and missed by an unobservant inspector. We sank large amounts of money into fixing it and making this big adult thing work.

After three years and a bunch of fix-up work, my spouse accepted an offer for a rare, exciting job opportunity that would allow us to move to Ontario. We contacted a realtor to talk about selling. We found that despite all the money we invested in repairs, the housing market was poor and property values in our neighbourhood had dropped significantly since we purchased. We sold the house at a loss.

Even with all the problems, the ridiculous repairs that had been needed, and the intense stress of home-selling, I felt a stab of sadness when I locked the door on the house for the last time. I felt loss. I would miss it, even if it had been a source of stress and moving away was the right choice.

Earlier this year, we were back in the States for a conference. We went a half-hour out of our way to stop by and see our old house. It was well taken care of. It looked loved and lived-in; it was someone’s home. Other homes in the neighbourhood looked in better repair, and overall the area looked like it had finally started to recover from the housing bubble burst of the early 2000s.

I’m glad we moved out of that city and that house. Being in Ontario has been one of the hugest positive changes in our lives, and that house was a source of financial woes and anxiety for us. And still, while we sat there looking at this well-loved home, I felt a pang. There was a sad feeling that in some other universe, some other timeline, we could have stayed, we could have ridden out the housing market and turned down a dream job and invested money in repairs and that house would be loved by us, would be our home. And maybe life wouldn’t have been as good there as it is for us here, but we would have loved that house, and instead we gave up on it, and there’s a bit of loss there.

What I’m feeling is that. It’s that but with my body, with 30 years of my life.

The word “transition” doesn’t seem to necessarily do justice to the depth of the changes I’ve gone through, emotionally and mentally. I started this process thinking that all I would be doing would be changing my body, my name, my pronouns, and how others perceive me. What I’ve found is whole depths of myself I never knew existed. When the fog of dysphoria and depression began to lift, I found huge reserves of strength and resilience inside me. I found energy, I found purpose.

In the past two years, I’ve become a kinder, more thoughtful person. More animated, more extroverted. I no longer awkwardly try to end small talk with strangers as early as politely possible. I reach out when I see friends in pain because I have the energy to do so more often. I see my place in the world and have the drive to keep bettering myself and trying to make society safer and happier for others.

This doesn’t feel like a “transition.” This feels like reincarnation. This feels like burning to ashes a life that couldn’t sustain me and rising from them as something more beautiful, more powerful.

I feel this is all important to re-iterate: I don’t for a second believe I’ve taken the wrong path by pursuing a life that fits me. My struggles to cope with the feelings I’ve shared here are in no way indicative of any sort of regret about my decision or about taking control of my life. I don’t want this piece to be taken as evidence of some transphobic nonsense making transition harder for others. I am grateful daily that I’m on this path.

I’m sharing this, all of this, mostly because I hope it will help other trans people for whom some or all of this resonates. Some of the most powerful healing I’ve received in the last couple years has been through comparing my feelings and experiences with other trans people and finding the commonalities, seeing that I’m not alone. I hope that someone finds healing in reading this.

If people for whom it doesn’t resonate find empathy and maybe understanding for others around them, all the better. Understand that those of us struggling with changing our lives to better fit our true selves may be coping with a lot more than what’s apparent on the surface. Reincarnation is not a simple task.

This has been and will continue to be a journey. Some journeys require sacrifice; certainly this one has. I write about my experience to say this: it’s okay to decide that sacrifice is the right thing. It’s okay to say that a part of your life needs to be discarded or fundamentally changed into something that is better for you. And it’s okay that, even if that’s the right decision, you still feel a sense of loss. Humans are complex. We can carry a lot of truths at once. We’re allowed to grieve even those things that we’re better off without.

Thank you for sharing this with me. I hope that you pursue the best path for yourself, even when there may be losses to grieve on the way.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a brand new life to live.

Speaking of transness in big monolithic terms also betrays the incredible breadth and depth of my community. I’m aware that when I speak up, I’m yet another white middle-class transfeminine voice in the discussion when so much of my community — especially my trans siblings of colour — do not get the same amount of weight given to their words. So I’m wary about writing anything that comes across as being about The Trans Experience because I know how much more value will be placed on my words than the words of my more marginalized community members. [To balance this, I am attempting to add links to writings on trans visibility topics from more marginalized trans people, especially QTPOC, at the end of this writing.]

All that said, I am writing something, because this day and what it represents are intensely important to me. But instead of trying to say something Big, something Universal and Full of Truth, I’m just going to talk about the one thing I feel qualified to discuss: me.

For TDOV, I don’t want to focus on the hard period that directly preceded my decisions to hormonally and (loudly, unapologetically) socially transition. What I do want to say about it is this: I owe so much of my joy, my strength, and my self now to the visibility of other trans people. I am where I am because I was able to see so many powerful, beautiful trans people sharing their lives, their faces, their stories on social media. As someone who grew up in the Midwest U.S., my impressions of transness growing up consisted of the sad subjects of documentaries (such as Southern Comfort), fictionalized retellings of hate crimes (Boys Don’t Cry), or caricatures conceived of and played by cisgender people (ranging from Silence of the Lambs to Transamerica). Transness seemed something huge and scary, a process only carried out by the most lonely and desperate of society. It wasn’t something a normal person would, could do, and certainly nothing that lead to a happy, stable life.

I owe my life, as it is now, to trans visibility. I owe it to a veritable army of unashamed trans voices that showed me the breadth of our lives, that showed me transness in happy chosen families and couples and triads, in tech industry jobs and comic artistry and academia, in beaming selfies and painfully bad puns tweeted far too late at night. To people being vulnerable enough to show comparisons between their unique beauty now and the them of years ago. They showed me that transness wasn’t the monumental, terrible thing the media had showed me. It could be simple and complex all at once: it could be a life, a real life, a joyful life.

The Trans Day of Visibility matters to me because trans visibility saved me. It matters to me because as I’ve continued to find joy and strength and resilience in my new life, I’ve put as much as I can into being unapologetically honest and loud about my existence in a world that would rather legislate trans people into nothingness than listen to our voices. I share my life, my feelings, my story as much as I can so that, somewhere, someone who is now going through the same struggles I went through can see a face and a name and a life and think that maybe this isn’t as impossible as it seems.

To be honest and unashamed of oneself as a trans person is a politically radical act. We made our way through a world that has tried its damnedest to make us stay in the boxes we were assigned. We found the truth inside ourselves and followed it instead. This makes our existence an act of strong rebellion, of resistance.

That said: It must always be remembered that there are those of us who do not have the privilege of visibility, whether for their personal safety, their inability to access sufficient health care, their financial or familial contexts, or countless other reasons. Every year on the Trans Day of Remembrance we number the names of our community members (especially our black and Native/indigenous transfeminine siblings) who will never get that opportunity again. We must never forget that portions of our community are being silenced, and so those of us who can be loud must be twice as much so and work to amplify the needs of our most marginalized family.

TDOV matters to me because I am proud of who I am. I am proud of this identity that I have fought for, that I’ve worked for, that I’ve gone through electrolysis and tattoo and hormone injection needles for. I will not quiet it, I will not hide it. I will be loud, I will be true, I will shine too bright to be ignored.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility. It is a day we should celebrate. If you are able, show your faces proudly, my community, my family. The more we are honestly ourselves, the more we can love ourselves and each other, the more we are unavoidably visible, the more we will change this world.

Further reading from other voices (content warnings for racism, anti-trans violence, police violence):

For Black Queers, Invisibility is Often the Best Liberation Strategy, by Hari Ziyad

Show up for black and brown trans women, by Pax Ahimsa Gethen

The power — and the violence — of being an indigenous trans woman, by Gwen Benaway

seasons of gender: reflections on trans day of remembrance, by K. Ho

the politics of coming out, by K. Ho [Good links to further useful resources regarding the intersection of white privilege and visibility are in point 4 of this writing]

Gender Dysphoria From a Wheelchair: What It’s Like To Be Trans + Disabled, by Emet Tauber