i heard the door slam shut behind me
if you live long enough, you can see possible futures open. nobody prepared me for when they close, too.
I will never forget getting the “Trans Tipping Point” issue of TIME in the mail. I was 14 in 2014, and because i enjoyed not having friends, i was a rabid news consumer. I asked my grandmother for a subscription to TIME for my birthday that year, and the day it came in the mail was like christmas for me.
I was also a closeted trans kid. I had known for about a year that i was different, and i had come out to my parents the summer before (it did not go well and i went back into hiding, chocking up the whole thing to a depressive episode). Seeing Laverne Cox on the cover shocked me. It had been impossible to believe that someone like me could be so feminine, so beautiful, that they could grow old and have a life and have one worth featuring in a major American magazine. I remember the content of the actual article very little. That photo on the cover though, the one that told me that maybe things could get better, maybe i can transition one day, is etched in my mind. It felt like a new chapter was beginning, like a door had opened.
If the Trans Tipping Point felt like the beginning of something, well, the end feels like all of the anti-trans executive orders signed by President Donald Trump purporting to end “gender ideology” and protect kids from “chemical and surgical mutilation” during the first few weeks of his second term. That these things happened about ten years apart is not lost on me (If we want a cleaner timeline, Caitlin Jenner came out a decade ago this year, meaning that I’ve technically been trans for a little longer than Caitlin Jenner has).
In the rough decade since the point tipped, I finished public education, moved out of my parents house, came out and started hormones, changed my name and gender, finished college, moved cities and got a career. All the while, i watched trans people like me gain marginal acceptance and paltry legal protections. I went to a conservative public university in Texas and almost noone cared i was trans. It felt like the point really had tipped. but since i’ve left college, things have gotten worse, first slowly and then all at once. Half of all states ban trans kids from recieving the healthcare I rely on to survive and ban them from playing sports. several more ban teachers, who I relied on to affirm me when my parents wouldn’t, from supporting queer kids or teaching them about my existence. The President of the United States ran campaign ads saying that my existence takes away economic opporitunities from others, and when he was sworn in, he banned me from the military on the grounds that i am too dishonorable to serve. As Jude Ellison S. Doyle wrote in Xtra, “Ten years after the iconic ‘TIME’ cover, trans people are subject to even more widespread hatred and legalized bigotry. If we’ve ‘tipped’ in any direction, it’s backward.”
I knew pretty much as soon as my parents pushed me back into the closet that transitioning as a minor was not happening. It helped that I didn’t really know how it worked. I think had I known that there were doctors treating kids like me in a non-abstract way, it would have made me insane. But I just had to wait my turn, and luckily I transitioned early enough that many don’t know I’m trans at all. But now that I’m a mostly happy trans adult, I know firsthand how suffocating being a trans kid is, how dysphoria is like a thousand fire ants under your skin and sweating in the night from the heat inside your heart and tv static that plays non-stop in your mind. If i had had a pill to make it all go away, I would have done anything to take it. If I had been able to live in a world where I was told I was normal, that we actually have drugs and shit for that now, that I could be a normal kid, I don’t know what I would be driven to if it was taken away. I know now that I would and will do anything to preserve access to my own care, though.
In my very short lifetime, I think trans rights is the first time that it felt like maybe there was a future where everything ended up good before the door slammed shut. I feel like I’m no longer just mourning the childhood I didn’t get to have, I’m mourning for the trans kids who got to have the childhood I didn’t that but are now having it taken away. My heart breaks for them every day, and I feel like I failed them somehow. It feels weird to be finished transitioning as a young adult and have watched things get worse, not better. I can’t imagine being a trans kid now. I almost feel like I caught the last helicopter out of ‘Nam, or something. What would I tell my young self if I could meet her now? “Hey babe, in the future you’ll be much happier but also not. Things got better for a while, then they got worse?” Maybe that’s just how things go. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that I’m a white trans woman with health insurance. People have had it much worse than me for much longer.
Maybe it was all bullshit, anyway. Reading the Trans Tipping Point a decade later feels almost quaint. It was written before trans troops were ever allowed to serve, before their service had been banned, then reinstated, then banned again. It mentions that “many insurance plans have explicit exclusions for treatments related to gender transitions.” That would be crazy if that ever happened again, right? Right? We’ve gotten some great movies and TV shows with trans characters (and some really bad ones, too!) and a lot of backlash to it all. We even have our own Congresswoman now, and she gets misgendered just like the rest of us on the House floor. Things change. Every moment now is a possible tipping point,a place where straight lines turn into corners and curves on the timeline of history. I have to believe this moment will pass; it’s the only way I can wake up tomorrow and live to see it recede out of view. I have to believe people are still good and compassionate and caring, and that they have the capacity to learn new things and grow. Living through it now, with the door slammed shut on a future of easy-won trans rights, feels almost like we’re back at square one. This time, I won’t be naive enough to think that change can come from a glossy magazine cover.
Thanks for reading. I’m going to try to blog semi-regularly again as a way to stay in practice when I’m not working and have a good creative outlet that isn’t related to my job. Feel free to subscribe to get this in your email when it comes out.