One morning, I woke from troubled dreams and found myself transformed in my bed into a monstrous cockroach.
It was Jan. 21, the morning after President Trump announced that from that day forward, the federal government would recognize only two genders and that these categories — fixed and immutable — are defined according to a unique theory: “Female means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell; male means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
After 25 years as a woman, I had morphed back into a man. You can imagine my surprise.
And yet it seems Trump Administration officials are not up on their biology: At conception, sex has not yet been differentiated.
After the order was issued, internet observers ran with the idea that it had actually just reset America to one gender — female — since about seven weeks pass before a gene on the Y chromosome triggers the development of testes. I found this suggestion wickedly amusing. “Welcome to my world!” I wanted to say to all my newfound sisters. Alas, though I love the idea of calling Donald Trump our first woman president, that idea, too, is a misunderstanding of human creation. At conception, we are but a single cell.
Biology and genetics are not really the point, of course. Even the order’s purported goal — “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”— is not the point.
The point, it seems, is to make transgender people’s lives as difficult as possible. The point is to isolate our small, vulnerable, maligned community and mock us for our difference. The point is to erase us from the public sphere. The point is to use our tiny, misunderstood population as useful scapegoats upon whom Mr. Trump can blame all of society’s ills.
This was just one of the executive orders taking aim at transgender people in the first weeks of the new administration. There was another ordering the Pentagon to reconsider its inclusion of trans soldiers; a third took steps to end gender-affirming medical treatment for anyone under 19. Then there was “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” aimed at prohibiting not men, but trans women and girls, from competing on sports teams that align with their gender. The new press secretary said that this was a “wildly popular position,” presumably for a public primed to believe there are hundreds of men clamoring to play women’s soccer.
Many aspects of these new orders have already been challenged in court. The National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law challenged the executive order regarding trans service members. The same groups have had some success representing incarcerated trans women. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of trans women to men’s prisons and the denial of their hormone therapy.
These orders, and the effect they will have on military readiness, morale, sports and who knows what else will surely be parsed for weeks to come. Today, however, all I want to do is to note how it will affect one family: my own.
Going forward I may find myself having to either use the men’s room on federal property, like a courthouse or a national park, or risk retribution. When I renew my passport, I may discover officials insist my gender marker “F” be reverted to “M,” thus putting me at risk for violence when I travel. It may be that my access to estrogen is made more expensive, or curtailed completely, especially after I begin using Medicare next year. (Presumably, postmenopausal women receiving the same care will not lose such access.)
My daughter, who is also trans, will suffer in similar ways. I transitioned in a time of hope for people like us; she comes of age during a time of blowback and fear. This is not the world I had hoped for her, or for anyone.
I went through transition way back in 2000. Nearly everyone I encountered — from my pastor to my children’s teachers — was relatively generous to me. No one had yet been issued formal instructions on why to hate me. They had nothing more to fall back on by way of understanding than their own sense of common human decency.
Now I live in a world in which men I’ve never met have decided that they know my soul, my self, my true nature, better than I do.
Now, as I walk through the streets of my little Maine town, I do so with the knowledge that a majority of my neighbors voted for this new world order.
I said that I’d awakened transformed into a monstrous cockroach. Of course, I meant this as metaphor. Still, my experience in Mr. Trump’s America feels nothing short of a coda to Kafka’s famous tale of metamorphosis.
Now, in my own country, with the changing of administrations, I feel like a stranger, an outcast, a freak.
I swore when Donald Trump was re-elected that I wasn’t going to spend every day engaging with the circus, that for the sake of my mental health I would try to focus on policy. But with this policy it is impossible for me not to feel the clowns in his Big Top are coming for me, personally.
The strategy of resistance that seems to hold the most promise for me is to simply continue to show up as myself, as the woman I have been all my life, without shame and without sadness.
How do I reject this cruel new world order? I live with the same love and grace that this government would deny me. I get up each morning and am a woman in the world, with a sense of auspiciousness and wonder and joy.
The post I’m a Transgender Woman. This Is Not the Metamorphosis I Was Expecting. appeared first on New York Times.
