Pride 2025

Today, I will dress myself, head down to Seattle and gather with all of the other trans people out at Trans Pride Seattle. I am a bubbly person. I smile, I bounce, I scream in joy. I will generally match the energy that is given to me, even as I sort of advance to my “kindly queer aunt” phase of my life. So with that in mind, seeing me out, dressed up in my pride colors, it would be easy to just kind of conclude that that’s me and that is what Pride is for me. And while I know that countless, COUNTLESS other people have said the same sort of thing, let me reiterate that, in the last five years, much less the last twenty, I have experienced, personally, directly as a result of my trans status:

1. Family estrangement (1x a week contact minimum reduced to very nearly zero, in the course of five text messages)
2. A cross-country move induced by a rising wave of bigoted state-level lawmaking, resulting in a radical change to support structures and everything
3. Bearing direct witness to transphobic police violence
4. Being fired from a job (debatably, this was sexism, but hey, same thing), followed by a visibly changed salary range
5. A constantly shifting medical landscape for care (that I have navigated more successfully than most, but still, low grade attention always required)
6. Hostile stares, yelling, catcalling (this has diminished over time)
7. This sense of waking up every morning to check to see what thing is on the news, and in particular, seeing what new government legal document that will feature words like “deceit” and “mutilation” to describe things that are just banal features of my life, paired with the most absurd propoganda about trans people one could imagine, assembled by people who haven’t even talked to one of us.

And the above list is probably in the 5% most mild that I can share from my friend group over the same time period. I don’t want to indicate anything other than the truth that I am surviving and I am thriving, but I also do not want to hide what has been going on with all of this. It is a lot, and it is constant.

So, with that in mind, when I put those colors on and I dangle my legs out in fishnets and I wear the crop top and I dance amongst my siblings, I might look like a middle aged trans woman chasing a woo party time, or a poster child for some sort of hyperactivity sensory condition, but what I really am doing is channeling every thing that has happened to me, every story that I have ever heard from a friend over a signal chat, every story of systemic abuse that I have read about. I am taking every little threat from the national media, every indignity that I see, and I bring it to that gathering, and I say to myself

“We are here, we are together, and we are surviving and thriving. I take this with a smile on my face because I am persevering and I am continuing with my transition anyway. You find me disgusting? You find me to be cringe? Well, I am here, and I will not go away, and I will not stop liking who I am. And today, I will dance for all of the people who were killed, either by violence or until the social pressures became too much, and I will dance so that there will never be an equivalent to the 10 year old version of me that had no adults like me to see out there thriving. We cannot be erased, and we cannot be eliminated, and even if you did it, the very next day, there would be some “boy” somewhere that doesn’t understand why wearing that dress on Halloween feels so good. Because we are part of you and we have always been here. It is just a question of whether we thrive or die. And so, I choose to wear both the pain and the joy. And I hope that’s what people see — “I’m here, I’m happy, and fuck you if you want me gone. Hate me harder, in fact.”