Rebirth and The Fear

Transition’s not a panacea; you must build a self out of the person you become after it. I tell myself this constantly. But to build a self, you have to have a chance to, and every day it feels less likely I will.

I spent twenty-five long, long years hating every second of my existence, desperately trying to find some way to enjoy it. I remember months-long periods, hazy though they are, where I wondered how humanity had not died of mass suicide already—certainly, everyone went through life like this, right? Every day was a bleak and empty struggle against a world that lacked color, no personhood to recognize; why was I continuing? How did anyone continue through this mire of a miserable world? What the hell was joy other than a fleeting respite from absolute misery?

And then I transitioned and I became a human being.

And I don’t mean this in solely my form; I am vain, yes, I think I’m pretty regardless of the standards cisgendered society has built, also yes, but these feelings are so much deeper than that. I mean that I finally understand what it means to fear death, because I finally understand what it means to enjoy life. My standards for anxiety before transition were whatever goalposts I had built for myself, whether that was grades or job performance or my car’s running condition. There was no mourning a lost future or worrying about who I would become because there was no future and there was no person to become. If a truck hit me when I was the boy known as *******, it was doing me a favor.

When I transitioned, I gained a year of life. I spent a year completely terrified of the future, worried for my potential safety, but alive. I understood why people get out of bed and why they try to build a better world and why they raise families and why they fall in love and why they strive. The moment I quit my NASA career just about a year after I started to transition, discarding the life that I’d painstakingly built after college and spending nearly a decade in an industry I didn’t enjoy, just for the whim of automotive writing, wasn’t me throwing away fortune and stability for naught. It was my own recognition that I believed I could accomplish something.

I did. I had support. I had friends. And I finally believed for the first time in my life that my own existence was a gift and I could do something with it, and then I did that. I became an automotive writer, I traveled America, and I have a fulfilling career. I spent a year through all of its trials and struggles realizing why people live.

When I moved to Reno early this year, to be close to the deserts and vast open spaces I fell in love with on my travels where the horizons were so broad that they might as well be nonexistent, I began to plan. What could I accomplish next? I lined up a steady role at a site I loved writing for; all of a sudden, I had a career again. Maybe I could write a few books. Give myself a few years, and maybe I could make the leap into video production, as I’d hoped to get into since I was a teenager. I began an ongoing, nascent birth of a novel bopping around three different computers and dozens of documents, just waiting to be given form and molded into a story. The horizons were, briefly, truly nonexistent. I changed my gender, I changed my career, and I saw a new self rise from nothing. I could accomplish my dreams, I just had to define them.

And then Texas targeted trans people, the Supreme Court abandoned a fifty-year precedent of Roe v. Wade and every other “right to privacy” suddenly came up for relitigation, and I realized the horizons were very, very close and very, very dark. I can’t pretend I know what the future holds, but it is going to be a bleak few years in the very best case, and it’s going to be extra bad because I’m trans.

There are, currently, less direct impacts — I just get groped every time I get on an airplane, and I stopped going to car shows because Reno apparently has a lot of Proud Boys that attend them, and I don’t go out at night anymore because leering men call me slurs, and every time a pickup truck passes by me on a walk I scan the back window for stickers checking to see if the driver is an avowed fascist, and I plan my fuel stops and my bathroom breaks through the rural stretches of the desert all centered around the largest towns I can fill up with diesel in to avoid stopping in the most inhospitable places, and I get deluged with hateful replies and messages constantly telling me that not only will I never be a woman, but I’ll always be a freak.

And this, largely, seems to be where it starts; I have no idea where it goes from here, but my fears seem to be well-founded as trans people are increasingly blamed for every societal problem imaginable, evidence be damned. So two years in, still blinking the sand out of my eyes as I’m struggling to create a self I’ve barely had a chance to meet, I watch as this gift of life—of rebirth from the ashes of a miserable self unable to understand what joy in life truly is, to a woman who cries at the stars and feels jubilation to pet her cat—becomes a curse that everyone I love bears. We all live in a state of constant fear, worried which shoe will drop next; which places we can safely visit, what horizons will close to us first, all underpinned by the constant bleak thoughts about whether it’s going to get bad enough they finally fucking kill us (or forcibly detransition us all; personally, those outcomes feel pretty damn similar). The most beautiful thing I’ve ever done has kept me up at night more nights than I count.

And I sit here and wonder, how could a loving God bestow the gift of life on someone at long last and make that act the one thing that makes us so hated?