Existing As a Form of Resistance

on cohabitating in a civilization with people who hate me

Since the recent election of Donald Trump, I have been greeted with terrifying and illuminating changes in the way I’m treated in public.

I’m a trans woman. I’m not stealth, meaning, I do not pass as a cisgendered woman. It’s obvious I was born in a male body. I’m tall. My voice is low as result of the testosterone fueled puberty I suffered as a teen, and I just don’t care to try and hide myself. I am who I am. If that’s triggering, go fuck yourself.

My entire gender transition has been colored by the ever-changing vibes coming from people in the world around me.

When I still presented male at the forefront of my transition but had begun allowing myself to wear ‘non-masculine’ colors, keep my face shaved, and wear jewelry — just beginning to explore new ideas of how I might feel at home in my presentation — I immediately began being treated with disgust and intolerance in public.

There’s something within people who are coded very strictly into binary ways of looking at things which causes them to treat people in one of two ways, you’re either a boy or you’re a girl, and each are to be treated quite differently than the other.

These people are sexist by their very nature. When you begin to disassociate with what they view as one of the two monolithic genders, somehow including arbitrary guidelines on what colors you’re allowed to dress in, you become an enemy to their way of living.

The energy I received in public during this time was frankly horrifying.

As my transition took me across the great sea between male and female presentation — to finally land firmly in a place where my secondary sexual characteristics and presentation read more female than male — people began treating me better.

Even though it was obvious I was assigned male at birth due to my body and my voice, binary coded people became less opposed to my existence. They saw me as less of a threat. They found it easier to decide which box to put me in, and how that meant they should treat me.

One wonders why they cannot treat people as people regardless. Why it’s so important for others to meet arbitrary and superficial standards to be treated with any semblance of dignity or respect.

I’ll be honest. Seeing this dark underbelly of our society, which non-binary people face every day, has truly stained my hope for mankind.

People will treat others terribly for no reason other than they reflect their own biases and shortcomings of worldview. To see someone who doesn’t fit into your ideas of the world, and instead of adjusting your preconceptions, make the other person out to be wrong — to treat them like trash because you’re uncomfortable and uneducated — is a truly irredeemable character flaw in my eyes. The journey to being myself has taught me just how blind, ignorant, and hateful people really can be.

There is a superficial veneer of friendliness on the surface of interactions with people like this. Don’t let them fool you. They are blind and hateful people by their very nature.

This evolving journey of treatment in public has provided a very interesting wrinkle since the election of a man who ran on a platform of delegitimizing transgender people and stripping of us the little of dignity we have earned in the last decade. Not only has he run on a platform of taking away trans teens and adult’s medical care, which will literally cost lives, but he’s also destroying repositories of knowledge and dismantling organizations which provide education on the subject. Instead, allowing the feelings of pathetic and disaffected white men — along with the brainwashed and bigoted women who live steeped in internalized misogyny beside them — to stand in their place.

This has empowered a boldly ignorant class of men and women to stand vindicated in their hate of me. I noticed it immediately. Since the election, certain people have treated me with a kind of exasperated distain.

Didn’t I vote to not have to deal with seeing people like you? — that’s the energy.

Truly, it’s tangible how ready they are for me to not exist.

Most of these people just glare at me. Even when they’re serving me as a gas station attendant or handing me food I’ve ordered over a countertop. Usually calling me ‘man’ overtly, multiple times, as they wouldn’t for anyone else. They look at me with open disgust, clearly sending a message that I’m not welcome in their presence.

Cool, I’ll add this to the ever-growing list of gas stations and restaurants I do not feel comfortable in. Have a great day!

Additionally, I’ve had a new trend develop that’s seen men follow me in cars while staring daggers into me, scaring me half to death. The exact same kinds of men who will call me a man repeatedly because of their own sexual insecurity.

To be completely honest, I’m actually quite scared for myself.

Trump has emboldened his supporters to feel like they are righteous in viewing me as an enemy to ‘sanity’ and ‘America’. He has proven to them that he will pardon despicable crimes if they line up with the ideological garbage he’s spouting. And he’s made trans women out to be a threat to society, particularly, women and children.

So, male predators are now feeling empowered to use their nightmare-fueled, sexually deviant minds, to come for people like me.

I’ve always been committed to never buying a gun. I’m a non-violent person by nature. Yet, this swiftly changing social energy has tested that resolve.

Still, I will not buy one. I will not fight fire with fire. If I’m to be killed for being myself, then so be it. I will write and produce all the creative works I can in the meantime and hope that my sacrifice will enlighten people once I’m gone.

I hate that I feel this coming. I hate that it’s a legitimate thought I have when moving through this world.

I wonder when some bigot is going to kill me.

I would fear that it was my own sick projection, built of worry and dread that wasn’t justified, if it weren’t being enforced daily by the hateful eyes and actions of my ‘countrymen’ and the very structures of our society.

There is no one looking out for me.

It’s just me, moving through the world, often with my daughter who calls me ‘mom’, clearly drawing the ire of all those swayed by these dastardly politics. And there we exist, her and I, absorbing the hatred of despicable men who have been empowered by blind masses to openly despise me. Feeling in my heart, how likely it is that one of them will someday kill me, just for being me.

Oy Vey.

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