Hey you,
This might look a little different than what I usually write, but every time I sat down to write something more formal about what’s going on right now, it felt wrong.
An article can’t change the world, and the world feels pretty bleak at the moment. Besides, you know what’s going on: you’re taking in the news (or as much of it as you can handle at a time), and you know that it sucks and it’s sucked for a while now and it probably will suck for a while still. You don’t need someone you don’t even know to tell you that. So instead, I offer this letter against the current moment, in hope of providing some words that help, or at least make you feel less alone.
I’m writing to you as a trans person who’s seen a lot in my relatively short time on this earth. I came out to everyone in my life in 2010, a little bit after my 18th birthday, and before many people had heard of the transgender “issue.” In secret and in private, I had been trans and online for a long time before that, haunting forums and poky little bespoke websites, sharing with a few very trusted friends, and knew absolutely no other trans people IRL. It felt like a different time then, and while we as trans communities are no longer invisible to each other in that way, which is great, we are also no longer hidden from the ideologues and fascists who use us a convenient excuse for their cruelty, which is awful.
Since then, I’ve worked in and set up trans health services, helped run LGBTQIA+ youth holiday camps and organizations, written resourcesexternal link, opens in a new tab, and known and shared with so many different trans people around the world. In that time, I’ve had the privilege of seeing the myriad ways that people survive and find meaning even when things feel really dark. So these are some of those ways, written down in this letter to you, in the hope that we might find the threads necessary to knit together all the futures we can dream of.
Find your people. First off, we don’t have to go it alone. Take this letter as your first proof: I’m here, as is everyone else who has read this. We’re all well and good, but it also helps to find the people you can actually connect and talk to.
When I was struggling to know who to trust and where to be myself, I found I had three categories of people in my life:
- People I was honest with but who didn’t have enough information to harm me, such as people online who I was a girl with, but who didn’t know my name or where I lived
- People I lied to so they couldn’t out or harm me, which were most of the people I knew IRL
- People I was honest with and trusted them to look after me, like a best friend or a blood relative who’s a steadfast ally.
Having these groups in mind helped me to make immediate decisions about where I could share information and still be safe, like how I was able to be myself online as long as I was using a different name and not sharing anything identifiable. Your people could look like friends IRL, or on Scarleteen, Discord or somewhere else online, it might be family members, the relatives of a friend you know, fellow gamers, or a pen pal.
Who they are will vary, probably depending on how safe your city or state is, your community, and who you’re connected to already. If you’re at all unsure if someone is safe, or if they might share something you don’t want shared, err on being cautious: you can always tell someone later, but it’s hard to take it back.
Find the safe places to be yourself in. While the increasing reach of fascists can make it harder to feel safe to be ourselves in public, they can’t take away our ability to know who we are and to be that self in private. This might be in your own home, whether around trusted friends and family or in private; it could be online, talking to friends or strangers (like in the community spaces here). Maybe it’s playing a game as a character that feels closer to how you want to be, or in a written form, like in a diary or private blog. Whatever it is, having an outlet to be yourself can make the times you aren’t able to be just a bit easier to bear.
It’s showing my age to admit it, but before I was out to any friends I had a separate Facebook account where I followed the pages that my closeted self didn’t feel able to and posted some unidentifiable photos that felt like me. Even without sharing that with anyone, and without posting photos of my face, it was a place I started to practice liking the things I liked, and figuring out what kind of girl I wanted to be.
While thinking about what this looks like for you, have a think about your information security and privacy—it might not be possible to do this on a computer or device you share or that has parental controls, but can you use a public device like at a library, or go old school and write it on paper that you burn afterward?
Find trusted information networks. Trans people have always found ways of sharing information, even in the most restrictive and risky circumstances, because there is a truth in us that will always be there. This information has been hard to access in the past—from paper copies of zines or letters, from the occasional medical publication, and by word of mouth.
If you haven’t come across a trusted source before, you’re in luck: you’re reading one right now! I really recommend looking up zines and other publications by and for trans people, which are more accessible than ever online. Some favourite topics of mine include comprehensive hormones information, sexy sex ed, trans dating and blogs or personal essays about why being trans is cool and hot. Trans folk are such a smart, creative group of people, and there is so much information able to be accessed out there without anything other than an internet connection and, if you want to be really fancy with it, a printer.
Even with information bans and digital restrictions today, we’re lucky that there are so many places that talk openly and honestly about trans bodies and lives. We just need to make sure that what we’re finding is correct (such as on Scarleteen, where content is by and for LGBTQIA+ people and edited to ensure its factually accurate), and that no one we don’t want can find out what we’ve been reading or searching, whether that means deleting your history, searching stuff only on public computers, hiding paper copies somewhere that won’t be found, or whatever method feels safest for you.
Look to those who’ve come before. At my darkest moments, when it all feels at its most hopeless, I always turn to our histories. Despite everything, trans people have existed for as long as humans have (which is a really bloody long time).
I really encourage you to read things about and by the trans people that came before us, and in particular to people who lived and loved and fought in the same part of the country or world as you. If you can find copies, try Susan Stryker’s Transgender Historyexternal link, opens in a new tab, Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriorsexternal link, opens in a new tab, and Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Transexternal link, opens in a new tab, and round it out with the beautiful I Hope We Choose Loveexternal link, opens in a new tab by Kai Cheng Thom—if you’re taken with any of them in particular, hit the reference list and keep reading!
One of the things I take most from our histories is that trans people have always lived full, incredible lives, no matter when—or even if—they start transitioning. I started hormones when I was 18, after waiting almost 5 years to be “allowed,” and I remember how each day of waiting felt: I won’t lie that it sucked really hard. Reading about the women who’d come before me, who’d started hormones at 18 or 25 or 40 or even 60, and who were incredible, beautiful women didn’t make it all better, but it helped me see that a future was possible.
As we face increasing bans on gender-affirming care, waiting for medical affirmation is going to be more common, and I want to hold that it is unfair and sick and evil, and that I’m so sorry, but that I know you can find your way to a place where you get what you need to live and exist. Our enemies are in the business of making us feel alone and scared and defeated, when the reality is that trans people have been around for longer than not just them, but the whole origin of their awful ideologies.
Make plans for the future. For me, this was the hardest part, the part that hurt the most, and also the part that allowed me to survive.
In the times where things sucked, where I was too scared to be myself, or tried and was rejected and told I wasn’t allowed, giving up felt so much easier than imagining a time when it would be different. You might be feeling this too, not even able to imagine what better could look like when it’s months or years away and full of uncertainty, but dreaming it allows us to believe, which allows us to plan it and make it a reality.
Through the hardest moments, I had this image in my head of a woman, an adult, living in the city she wanted to live, of her loving and being loved, her having friends she could rely on, of looking the way she always wanted. I had no idea how I would cross the gulf between me and her, or if becoming her was even possible, but she gave me the strength to keep trying. Over time, I started to believe it was possible, working a little bit each day, until one day I realized almost accidentally that I had become her.
Through those dark moments, they couldn’t take that dream away from me, just like they can’t take yours away from you, but it requires us to survive. This isn’t always easy, or simple, but you’re not alone in it either. Trans history shows us that our lives have rarely been easy, but we survive and we love one another and we find the ways to make it better, one step at a time, because the world is a better world because you’re here.
With love,
Liz
