#WontBeErased

Since I was eleven years old I have had a deep affinity for transgender people. Now as a 32 year old I understand that I saw part of myself within them. I am genderfluid meaning I am unable to identify with the gender binary on a personal, individual level. As a child, watching a documentary on HBO about being transgender I saw how it must be to live in a body that isn't truly your own. The awkwardness, the fear, the longing, the fact that it is forever. Forever, how you will be seen, how you will be spoken to, how you can navigate through the world.

When it comes to race this is how it is to move through spaces knowing no matter what you say, what steps you take to curate the interview, the interaction, the moment you first meet someone, that nothing will be louder, more listened to, than the color of your skin. This is how I understand being transgender. How whenever you enter a space knowing that you will be misgendered but having no way of knowing if that will be the end of it  or will they still challenge your identity further once you correct then. It is how I feel when I am called female, woman, and girl, when I am neither male nor female. But I am not going to discuss degrees or the intersections that comprise human beings which make us the victims of oppression, two times over-three times-four? I am writing this because it is of the utmost importance.

Can you imagine what it means to wake up to see headlines where the president of your country is forming policies denying your identify exists? Do you know what it means to be told that even as you stand there breathing that your are not? That you do not exist? That this, "erasing" can be signed into law? That around the world these conversations are being had on a spectrum that includes providing you with basic human rights and others calling you an abomination while others deny your existence? This happens in the form of microaggressions to the extreme and horrific trans panic defense.

Laws matter, the way the government talks about you, excludes gay people out of the census, and removes ones right to health care, it says something. Politics are one of the most significant forms of representation. If a law calls you 3/5ths a person it communicates very clearly where you fall on the lines of oppression. If you are denied citizenship, the right to vote, unable to serve in the military, these laws mean something. They impact education and freedom of speech. Think of where you are when you are asked to present your i.d. Think how it must feel to know your identification is incorrect? To have to change in the wrong locker room, to be denied access of shelter because the way you look and what is on your i.d. are disjointed. Think of having to serve time in a correctional facility with men when you are a woman. Think of having to hide your entire life for fear of existing when the laws says you don't.

Imagine trying to report a crime, when people like you aren't even considered real. It costs you nothing to call someone by their name. It does nothing to your overall experience to treat someone as a human being.

This is larger than midterm elections. This is genocide. To deny groups human rights, to deny health care, and employment, this is how you kill people. Trans women of color are already the highest group to be murdered. Suicide rates are higher among trans teens than any other group and they aren't killing themselves because trans people have higher rates of mental illness, they have those things at higher rates and experience suicidal ideation because they are not treated as people. They disproportionately homeless and unemployed. They are scared and made to feel as though they are alone. That's now, in 2018 that's before these proposed laws go into effect.

What do you do?
Vote, early voting has opened you have until November 6
Make friends with trans people
When a man says they are dating a trans woman don't call them gay and stop calling trans women grown men and any other forms of transphobia
Do your own research about the community, don't place the burden on LGBTQ folks
Visit your local trans resource center. Here's a link to the Albuquerque center
Call people by their name, not what you think they should be called or even what's on their i.d.
Read books and watch films with transgender main characters. For a list of inclusive books go here.


**For more details register for Val's Microaggressions Workshop**