Dear cis friends

your silence hurts

Dear cis friends,

As I write this, I’m still trying to calm my heart rate after reading another trans person’s words. She confessed her biggest fear was being rounded up and put into a camp under this administration. My heart thudded me too me too me too.

“If you're reading this and aren't trans, there's a good chance you think this is far-fetched,” she said.

And that’s the thing, cis friends. It feels these days like most of you think a lot of the dangers we’re afraid of as trans, nonbinary and gender expansive people in this country are far-fetched. Unless I’m on Substack, where I see a fair number of writers who aren’t trans acknowledging what’s happening to trans people (thank you), it’s nothing but crickets.

No, at least crickets are chirping. It’s dead silence.

I was talking with another trans friend of mine this week, and the word he used to describe how he’s been feeling about this silence from cis friends is abandonment. As if we don’t already live under the weight of invisibility, the inability of the cis people who say they care about us to acknowledge the threats we’re facing is yet another invisibilizing experience.

It’s one thing to not exist in the eyes of estranged family members. It’s another thing to be unacknowledged by the people I choose to have in my life.

If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been unable, largely, to access grief for the past few months, I don’t honestly know what state I’d be in, could I feel all this. And by all this, I mean all the terror, all the rage, all the grief, all the anxiety, all the betrayal.

I feel all these things intellectually, as I like to say these days. Intellectually, I feel my heart is broken.

Intellectually, I’m terrified. Intellectually, I’m pissed as hell. I say all this with a sad, cock-eyed smile and dry eyes.

When the reality of the election results began to sink in, several days later, I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep for hours, staring in the dark with wide eyes straining as if watching a film play on a grainy screen. Across the grainy screen of my mind, images played out of future scenarios. Men in uniforms with guns coming to my door in the middle of the night, taking me away, separating me from my love, putting us in camps. Never knowing if I’d be free again. If I’d ever have the luxury of waking up in my own bed, cooking breakfast, drinking coffee, doing yoga, making love. In one moment, how life as I knew it could be over (this, of course, is already happening to migrants, refugees and people who resemble one or the other and that is its own heartbreak and outrage).

These images paralyzed me that night, and the next morning, I almost didn’t get out of bed. But somehow I did, and life has gone on.

I’ve changed my name legally. I’m waiting for my new social security card. I’m working on changing my name on my birth certificate. I’m making plans to move to be with my love in Brooklyn, to live full time as family. I’m getting all the gender-affirming care I can as long as my NYS Medicaid insurance covers it. I feed my squirrel family and birds every morning and coo lovingly to them. I tend my forty-five houseplants. I kiss my sweetheart. I make dinner for friends. I sometimes dance in the kitchen. I go to work and caretake others and pretend I’m okay. I look each day for opportunities to show another human being kindness.

And still, I’m a dam waiting to burst with tears. They’re not coming yet.

What am I trying to say to you, friends? I don’t really know. Maybe I just need you to know how badly your silence hurts, when all it really takes is a text or a phone call or a card – “I’m just checking in. How are you holding up?” Maybe I hope you can understand that we’re facing the beginnings of a trans genocide — one that resembles the beginnings of other genocides in history — and we aren’t overreacting when we say we’re terrified.

Quite likely, someone who is a stranger is reading this, so I simply invite you to look around your friend group, your community, your family, and ask if you know any trans people you might check in on.

I’m going to keep writing about kindness, scanning the daily horizon for signs of human goodness and beauty. I’m going to continue living this one life I have to the best and fullest of my ability, for as long as I’m given.

And I’m going to stop investing my energies in trying to be seen by people who don’t see me.

So let’s take kind, committed care of each other.

xx,

Phoenix