In Texas Observer

My happy but plain vanilla life stands in contrast to the lurid rhetoric and terrifying intentions of Governor Greg Abbott, his allies in the state Legislature, and Republican lawmakers across the country, as well as the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint for America’s future. Friends out of state urge me to leave Texas, which is where I have always lived. They fear for my safety. Some trans people I know refuse even to travel through Texas.

Their fears are not unwarranted. What I’ve found, however, is that even in rural Texas the average person couldn’t care less about my gender. Most Texans who know me and hear my story are supportive, wherever they happen to lie on the political spectrum. They may not understand it, but they accept it and move on. Those who do shun, hate, or fear seem, in my view, to be either insecure in their own identity or to be captured by merchants of fear in right-wing media.

Trans people endure constant psychic strain as we make our spaces and serve our communities while lawmakers plot our extinction. But the staged uproar over our supposed effrontery has less to do with reality than with our antagonists’ covert aims and unexamined anxieties. Someone I know recently suggested that trans people bring hate upon our own heads by always seeking attention and affirmation. The prosaic truth is that we simply want to exist.

“You have to go the way your blood beats,” James Baldwin said in an interview. “If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Belatedly, I’m coming to grips with this. My attempts to cope with gender dissonance have consumed much of my life, taking hours away from each day, isolating me from loved ones, alienating me from my body, leading to bouts of depression, ideations of suicide, and alcohol abuse. It doesn’t go away. In middle age, I’m forced to recognize that nothing short of being who I am will resolve my profound inner conflict. The word “transition” is terrifying but, however catastrophic the process of coming out may be, I’ll not be much good to those I love if I’m burned out, incapacitated, or dead.

Knowledge is power. If I had simply known more, I would have been spared some suffering. The idea that I’ve been converted by the “gender cult” is preposterous. My starting point was my own experience, going back years before I could even articulate it. I simply was what I now call “transgender.” My brain and flesh and bones told me so. And peace could never be mine until I had uncovered its nature and found a way to live with it.

The many bills trying to prevent youth from learning about trans identity trouble me deeply. They seek to condemn another generation to the deathly dysphoria that has burdened me in the belief that people like me are misbegotten or perverted, and that state-imposed ignorance can prevent children from turning out like us.