Transgender Visibility Day and I am Invisible
March 31, 2022
Next Thursday is Transgender Visibility Day and I am technically invisible.
I am still stealth for professional reasons. I have also decided to forego full transformation to maintain my relationship with my spouse. I am trying for androgynous and she trying for acceptance. We both care enough to try.
I have let the last three celebrations pass without recognizing them. I didn’t want to be transgender and I didn’t want any of my existing friends and family know that I was transgender. In the first year, I carried fear of discovery and shame for who I was. For the last two years I still carried fear of discovery. So now I am coming up to my fourth year and I feel a need to participate.
But how? I am invisible.
How can I show support for the transgender community in a visible way?
Do I hang a transgender flag outside my house? Do I wear a transgender t-shirt? There don’t seem to be any organized parades or celebrations in New York City. I have googled “transgender bars” but there are none around. There is one or two lesbian bars and a hand-full of gay bars but will I be accepted or will it become another opportunity for a TERF or gay/lesbian transphobe to attack me once again.
I am so tired of fighting to prove my right to exist. I would just like to acknowledge the day with a toast to the transgender warriors who fought to give me at least the right to breath fresh air in my transgender lungs.
So, I have come up with my solution.
I actually scoured Greenwich Village last week for any transgender pride material and struck out. I wound up buying a transgender string bracelet on Amazon. I then found out that a local LGBTQ group is doing a clothing drive for transgender women of color living in poor neighborhoods. I called and they need bras so I am going to a local department store and buy a mixed bunch…
I am then going to the Stonewall Inn. I am going to hoist a drink for my heroes and heroines who fought for me. They showed the world that I do exist and it is my right to exist. I may even use the ladies’ room somewhere that day.
It seems like the right thing to do.
Emma Holiday
- “They emerged from the events that took place at Stonewall in 1969 as leaders in the Gay Liberation Movement. Together they helped found the group STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which offered housing to homeless and transgender youth, a particularly vulnerable population. Johnson and Rivera recognized that many transgender people turned to sex work after being rejected by their families, and they faced additional hardships and dangers through being unsheltered. Johnson and Rivera opened the first LGBTQ+ (Lesbian Gay Transgender Bisexual Queer) youth shelter in North America, and these trailblazers became the first Trans women of color to lead an organization in the United States.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/marsha-p-johnson-sylvia-rivera.htm
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My writing has three specific goals:
1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.
2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.
3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.
