I Will Not Take Part In My Own Self-Annihilation

Over the next few weeks, a terrible man in a boring suit is going to make a lot of important-looking proclamations about something he will never understand.

Legally, according to the government he now controls, men are men and women are women and that’s just biology, stupid. After all, every true genius knows that scientific law needs to be codified into judicial law, lest someone attempt to drop an apple up or create energy from void.

He wants me to be terrified of this stuff. I’m supposed to buckle and break under the pressure. I’m supposed to accept that I cannot transcend the hallowed principles of his outdated sixth grade biology textbook.

They want me to give in, to submit, to burn my soul from my body and rejoin the walking dead. If I don’t do this, then they will attempt to rip my human rights away like flesh torn from bone. They will chew and claw and rip and bite until there’s nothing left, and I will have no choice but submission or sublimation.

They’ll try humiliation first. Forcing me into the wrong bathroom, wrenching away my legal sex and name, stripping away my marriage rights. They’ll make it more difficult for me to get a job, to pay my taxes, to join organizations, to start businesses, to play sports, to get a library card, to travel freely, to live in public. Anything that allows me access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be systematically dismantled.

They will fail. Spectacularly.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a very real threat, especially to the most vulnerable of us. If you’re terrified, you’re not wrong, and you’re not overreacting. Trump and his ilk are going do to incalculable damage, and we won’t all survive it.

And yet, they cannot win.

You can’t legislate away trans people for the same reason you can’t legislate away the moon. You can tell people not to look at the moon. You can pass the Moons Aren’t Real Act of 2025. If you scream and howl and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-moon propaganda ads, you might even get a plurality of the electorate to support your lunarphobic policies, despite the fact that the whole endeavor is absolute nonsense. The moon doesn’t care. It’s gonna moon whether anyone else likes it or not. Even if he managed to blow the moon to smithereens, each and every smithereen would still exist, each one a meteorite ready to rain down on the earth in a storm of orbital hellfire.

##

One question I get a lot from newly-out trans people is, “when does the anxiety about whether or not I’m really trans go away? When will I truly feel valid? Is it after HRT? After surgery? Six months in? A year? Ten?”

Here’s the truth: it only comes when you fully internalize your transness. Not as a terrible tragedy that befell you, but as a ball of warm light in the center of your soul. You have to weave it into the fabric of your sense of self, integrated to such a degree that no external source could ever convince you otherwise. No doctor, no politician, no brain scan, no executive order. The ten smartest people who have ever lived could all be in a room with me, and they could show me indisputable scientific proof that I wasn’t trans. It wouldn’t matter. I wouldn’t detransition. I wouldn’t change my name. I wouldn’t do a damn thing differently. This isn’t just who I am, it’s who I wish to be.

The only way to get to this point is by accepting a hard truth: being trans is amazing. It’s a gift. It’s something to be envied. It isn’t a curse, a defect, or a burden. It’s beautiful, and kinetic, and divine.

Now, I did endure quite a few burdens due to being trans, but all of them were due to our society’s corrosive attitudes on gender and queerness. If I had grown up in a world where transition was fully normalized and celebrated, I wouldn’t have suffered at all. There is nothing inherently traumatizing about being trans. It’s traumatizing because everyone else forces it to be that way.

The two main flavors of trans trauma are social and physical dysphoria. My social dysphoria came from not being seen as a girl, and my physical dysphoria came from having to endure male puberty and the body it forced me into. If I’d been trans in a world where being trans was openly and eagerly discussed in childhood, I’d have been able to figure out who I was much earlier. In a world where such things are celebrated, I would have been allowed to socially transition at my leisure. Puberty blockers into HRT would have eliminated most physical dysphoria before it even arrived, and surgery would have taken care of the rest. I would have been fine. I would have been able to live a full life as my truest self. My trans self.

Other than all the transphobia, being trans is amazing. How many people on this big blue ball truly get know themselves? I do. I’ve re-examined every building block in my tower of self, choosing what to discard, what to replace, and what to cherish. I didn’t just accept the identity I was handed — I built one from scratch; every piece a choice. The foundation may have been given to me by nature and nurture, but I tore down every wall, opened up the kitchen, let in the light, and painted it in pink and lilac.

Being trans has helped me see the world with enviable clarity. When you transgress a boundary as thick and impenetrable as gender, it shows you that the walls hemming us in are figments of our collective imagination. We abide by holy writ handed down to us by our parents, by our culture, by our religion, by our government — even if it conflicts with everything that we wish to become.

“We just don’t do that here.” “That’s just the way it has always been done.” “That’s not allowed in our culture.” These are ersatz prison bars, and you can slip right through them whenever they conflict with your values or happiness. So many of my loved one are trapped in these cages, and I want to scream and cry and tell them to just close their eyes and walk forward. They can also be free, if only they can trust the voices screaming deep inside their soul, begging to be let out before it’s too late.

Do you like who you are? Do you like who you’ve become? How much of yourself have you cut away to appease your parents, your boss, your spouse, or even just the part of yourself that desperately needs to fit in to feel safe? How much color have you bled out of yourself, leaving only eggshell white and millennial gray?

Being trans isn’t a cure for existential ennui, but it does grant you the power to truly understand the malleability of existence. I did not know how to be happy in the cells where I was locked, and transition gave me the power to walk through the walls and out of the whole damn prison. This is a promethean gift, and it’s one I wish I could impart to everyone in my life, regardless of gender.

##

The fascists can do an incalculable amount of damage, but they cannot take away your identity. There is no piece of paper on this Earth with the power to force you to become something you are not. They can whine and crow and stomp around like the diaper babies that they are, but they don’t know your soul, and they definitely don’t have the power to change it. They’re counting on you to eviscerate yourself. they need you to comply in advance, lest you suffer years of humiliation and torture.

I don’t want to downplay how bad the humiliation and torture may get, because that story hasn’t been written yet. We can’t control what may happen to us, or the indignities we will have to suffer along the way. We won’t all survive. Those of us who do survive will not survive unchanged.

But I will not let them into my heart. I will not let them redraw the bars of my cage. They will attempt to overwhelm me with executive orders and narrow legislative victories, but I will not let anyone else decide who I am ever again. If they take away my name, I will correct everyone as loudly as I can. If they take away my medicine, I will endure until I get more. If they throw me in jail, I will shut up and comply until I am freed. They may imprison my body, and they might overwrite my legal identity, but they will never own my soul. Not now, not ever.

The key to this mentality is pride. If you view yourself as a temporarily embarrassed cis person, you will have a much harder struggle to maintain your sense of self through What Comes Next. You have to find a way to love yourself, and that means trying to find a way to love that you are trans.

The more you embrace this, the more foolish their whole movement begins to look. Imagine, a bunch of sapient primates spending their one and only life on this beautiful planet screaming about how someone else’s sense of self offends them because they’re fragile and scared. This is a faithless and unscientific ideology, based on fear, power, control, self-hatred, and willful ignorance. Each and every one of them is definitionally miserable, and I am thankful each and every day that I’m not among their wretched ranks. Their sense of self is based on making up arbitrary rules about Who Gets To Be What and enforcing them so they can feel big. It’s a sad and confining life. Even though I didn’t get to become myself until my thirties, every lungful of air that I breathe as Cassie is a freedom far beyond anything they will ever experience.

This is how we fight back.

We walk straight into the coming storm with pride, joy, and unabashed defiance. We find a way to love our transness, to embrace all it has given us, to discover levels of freedom and self-discovery we never knew possible. We shout it from the digital rooftops wherever our speech is allowed, and we whisper it in back alleys where it is not. We lift each other up, providing community and support whenever it is needed, doing whatever it takes to prevent the most vulnerable among us from taking the brunt of punishment. We continue to find kindred souls, to grow our ranks, to built something that can never be dismantled. We endure. We wait.

And then, one day, the storm will break, and the morning sun will peek over the horizon and warm the ground once more. You and I will be there, ready to survey the damage. Hand in hand, together, we will rebuild.