Originally written February 2023
Content notes: transphobia, suicide, surgery.
A black and white photo of teenage tash in 2004. Text overlaid on the photo reads 04/05 Senior Theatre Award with credit listed: Baltus Van Tassel Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Student Director The Crucible, Assistant Director Rumors
In 2004, I was a trans youth on hormones at 16 years old. I’d had a bone density test and seen three gender-specific therapists and received parental consent and conformed to the “real life test” in the sixth version of the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care (now called WPATH) before I even began. I was a trans youth whose suicidality was treated more effectively by testosterone than by Lithium. I was a trans youth who had chest reconstruction surgery at 19 years old.
The money that funded my medically necessary procedure, not covered by insurance at the time, came from a legal settlement. Along with a number of other children, I was sexually abused in my classroom during first and second grade. After the school let my abuser go quietly and he got arrested somewhere else, a group of parents filed a lawsuit which resulted in money that I and other survivors received after age 18.
Does it go without saying that a straight man, known by many in the small community was the abuser? That survivors almost never get financial settlements? That my school was mostly white? Does it go without saying that LGBTQ+ kids, like kids of color and kids with disabilities, are more targeted for sex abuse? Does it go without saying that most trans people have been assaulted at some point in our lives?
The very things the GOP is targeting - including cultural competency and gender diversity - would likely have prevented the bullying which made me a vulnerable outsider at 7 years old. Age appropriate sex education would have doubtless prevented at least some of the abuse done to me and other students. Healthy masculinity and consent culture may have prevented my adult male abuser’s widespread predation going on for so long. I was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse in a majority white rural fundamentalist town.
Twelve years later, I was a trans youth who traveled the farthest from home I had ever been in Montreal, Canada for surgery. I recovered for 5 days in a wing of mostly French-speaking hospital staff with a few other trans patients, all from the U.S. This almost doubled the number of people like myself I had ever met.
When I started working professionally with trans people and LGBTQ youth, I saw the hate mail and death threats in response to marriage equality. I sat in rooms with progressive elected officials who would joke, and balk, and sometimes understand when I explained the medical needs of trans people. I trained lawyers and medical providers, some of whom later would claim credit for the long advocacy work of trans people. I learned community organizing from and alongside queer people of color, and I learned that we are all targeted together. I learned that the tactics of anti-Blackness directly inform the ways that trans bodies are dehumanized. I sometimes helped other trans people come out, in small towns and large cities. And I learned that when we “go back” to being someone else, it is almost always in order to be safe.
I also worked with survivors of domestic and sexual violence. I learned that most adults knew their abuser, and up to 93% of people who commit sexual violence are known to the child or teen survivor. I learned that being trans is not predatory, not fashionable, and certainly not new. Gender-affirming health care is as complex and necessary as any medical condition which is estimated to impact 1-2% of the population. For those who are unfamiliar, I ask you to imagine someone you love has a rare and/or misunderstood medical diagnosis with innumerable variations of expression; now imagine the explicit details of your loved one’s highly specialized medical procedures being splashed across tv screens, deployed in political campaigns, and debated in legislatures. Whether you can only imagine it, have experienced it, and/or can easily draw paralells with IVF and abortion care, or not - we know that in real time, this is deeply impacting the safety of trans youth.
Today I am a trans person who loves rescue dogs. I am a trans person who donates blood. I am a trans person who has lost too many friends to suicide and racism and poverty. I am a trans person who understands that all of our liberation is intertwined. When the solemn inalienable right to our bodies is sullied and eroded by a white nationalism that has been burning 230 years strong, we must fight the lies and combat anti-trans disinformation.
For me there is no separation between my work against sexual violence and my trans affirming work and my racial justice work. The tendrils of white supremacy are connected to every law criminalizing poor people, trans people, and people with disabilities. Policies targeting trans people are not about protecting children anymore than anti-abortion policies are about protecting children. This is and has always been about controlling bodies.
Trans Day of Visibility is around the corner as Nebraska advances one of the hundreds of recent bills attempting to make trans people disappear, and further threatening bodily autonomy of all people in the U.S. It’s easy to observe the same obscene and contextless tactics of the anti-abortion movement playing out against trans health. It’s easy to see a similar Biblical justification of oppression that white nationalists have long used to further racism.
I’ll close with this wisdom from Audre Lorde’s speech “Learning From the 60s”:
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective.”
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