Published November 8, 2024

This is super long. I don’t expect anyone to make it through to the end. Do your best, though, and my disappointment, heartbreak and rage will probably come shining through.

There’s a photo of me as a child standing in my bedroom, the camera flash all but blinding me. Three things are visible on the wall paneling behind me: a big poster of Robin from the Batman comics, a smaller photo of the Beatles, and an even smaller postcard from the New Orleans motor hotel where my family went every summer.

The hotel was on an avenue with the same name as our street on the other side of the state. It felt like an extension of home after enough vacations.

The Beatles were everywhere, so I had to share them. Robin? That’s a bit of a mystery. Batman was the man. Robin was his sidekick. I’m guessing there was a Batman poster in my room, but it was not in the photo. In one of our home movies, I am wearing a Batman T-shirt. I remember wearing it one summer, maybe the summer of that home movie, and being asked by an older relative, “Are you a bad man?” I don’t think I fully understood the wordplay.

In the photo, I’m wearing pajamas and holding something pink that’s mostly out of frame. I would love to know what it was. It’s not as if I was encouraged to have pink stuff, which may be why I settled on blue as my answer when asked my favorite color. It seemed to make people happy when I said blue, much like when I made them laugh.

There you have it. Blue.

In the world I grew up in, you were one of the blue kids or one of the pink kids. I think it had something to do with whether you peed standing up or sitting down, important information a lot of people need to know so they can assign you a designation and decide whether there are limits on what you can become.

Blue, then. Turns out, it opened a lot more doors than pink, history records.

(That’s the background I used in announcing my transition in 2017.)

Quick aside: If you want to stop me in my tracks, ask me my favorite anything. Movie. Book. Song. Scent. Actor. My brain doesn’t work that way. A woman, visibly annoyed, once asked me, “Why are you so complicated?” Poor thing, she had made the mistake of simply asking my favorite foods.

A bad man

Batman was my superhero. I wasn’t wild about Superman. There were some other pretty interesting characters out there (The Thing, The Incredible Hulk, “Flame On!” Guy, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Ms. Marvel, to name a few), but Batman was my go-to. I learned the word “sinew” from a Batman comic book. I’ve got pretty good recall of that very page. Sinew.

Bad things happened to me at that hotel, but I still thought it was one of the most magical places in the world. That’s surely why I had a postcard from there on my wall. To confirm that’s where it was from, I searched online, and … yes. As soon as I saw the back side of the postcard, blank except for a brief description of the place, I could smell the desk drawers in the rooms and the soaps and scents in the bathrooms.

Someone once tried to drown me in the hotel pool. More than once. I got the worst sunburn you can imagine there, having been allowed to bare my fair skin for far too long on a sunny June day. I broke a top front tooth on the edge of the pool a year or two later and had to wear a silver crown for four years. In photos from that period, I no longer smile, which therapists over the decades were quick to notice.

Also at that hotel, an older boy punched me, hard, in the groin, to show off for some girls. I had never felt such pain, and I couldn’t understand why the girls didn’t admonish him after they saw tears running down my face. To respectfully borrow a phrase from a sister: Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.

Bad things happened there, but we went back. I still looked forward to going, but then again, I didn’t have much choice. That was an early lesson about life, I think.

In the photo, I have what they called a crew cut. I had one for the first 10 or so years of my life. I’ve heard stories about my soft, curly blond hair in infancy, and I can only dream of what might have been if I’d had the freedom to wear my hair longer and begin expressing a truer me. But no. Short hair for me for years.

I will grow it out as long as I can in the time I have left.

Owing to adults in my world, I came to understand that one of the worst things you could do if you were one of the people who peed standing up was to have long hair. When my favorite Beatle suddenly had long hair, I cried. My heart was broken because I thought now he must be a “bad man.” A lot of people seemed to not like him so much anymore, if they even (grudgingly) did before that.

Blue morning, blue day

In the photo, my short hair is more brownish-red than blond, and my eyes are all but closed because of the light. Decades passed before I learned I had a rare deformity of the corneas, which explained all the home movies and photos I am squinting in while others are not. My baby blues weren’t happy on bright sunshiny days that made everyone else happy.

My mouth is closed in the photo as I force an approximation of a smile. At that age, my teeth were all intact, so I know I wasn’t trying to hide the silver crown. That was still a few years away from happening. I just wasn’t giving up the open-mouth smile that day. To me, I do not seem at ease in that photo, as if I am pretending to be happy. Maybe it’s just the bright light.

The Joker is behind me, obscured, on the poster, an online search this week revealed.

I wrestled with whether to post the photo. When I look at that child, there is a mix of empathy and curiosity. Gender dysphoria makes it awkward because I can look at that young person and not know who that is. I’ve never really seen me in the mirror.

The way I’d try to right wrongs was to go outside and be a superhero. In our house it was accepted that you can’t fight City Hall, but maybe I could fight the bad guys. I knew they were out there. My mom safety-pinned a towel in front of my neck, letting it become a cape behind me as I ran around in the yard. I recall having a water pistol. Was it pink? I think at one time I had a pink water pistol. Was I holding it in that photo?

There’s no shadow behind me that I can discern. There is so much light in my face, I don’t think a shadow could have survived. What would it have looked like, I wonder.

I’m rambling now, the way you might when you are in shock. It has come in waves. You can probably recall or guess the hurtful plot points of the past decade — and the past few days.

It is one of the stunners of my lifetime that people who cheered the original “Red Dawn” (kill those Russkies!) now side with “a full-blown despotic, ruthless megalomaniac” in control of Russia (and those who curry favor with him) and want me to know he’s just another misunderstood man who isn’t so bad if you work with him and try to appease him. That’s the strategy we are probably about to witness after this week’s stunner.

I’m afraid — for myself and for so many people around the world.

Still, as the nausea lessens, I am hopeful that I am moving toward something rather than away from another thing. There will be time to understand and explain that.

My understanding of bad men has evolved and grown even more than my hair. My heart breaks less about the badness of bad men than it does about their inexplicable appeal to so many. I can’t wrap my mind around it.

I do have theories. They overlap like a multicolor paint splash, with dapples of cheering supposed signs of the approaching Second Coming, splatters of “if I am no longer one of the special ones, no one can be,” and dots of a weary desire to let someone else take the wheel, all mixed with some furious streaks of “burn it all to the ground.”

Anti-fascist documents

Last month I read excerpts from U.S. War Department documents distributed to the Army in 1945. The subject was fascism. One part jumped out at me.

“Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze, nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

That was during World War II.

“I go even further back than that,” Mr. Wabash might say. That was his line in “Three Days of the Condor.” Mr. Wabash was a high-ranking CIA official who’d seen action in wartime. It’s now the 1970s in the world of the movie. He’s in an office in the World Trade Center.

He picks up where he left off, at further back than that: “Ten years after the Great War, as we used to call it — before we knew enough to number them.”

A younger CIA deputy director asks, “You miss that kind of action, sir?” They both have office jobs now.

In exquisite John Houseman delivery, Wabash answers without hesitation.

No. I miss that kind of clarity.”

Same.

I miss that kind of clarity.

There didn’t seem to be much waffling about stopping fascists or other bad guys, in reality or in fact-based fiction. You didn’t have much choice. A timely reminder:

What changed, I don’t fully understand, but it did.

Without him in power, I don’t know who would have been significantly injured who isn’t already in harm’s way. I do know who will be now. A lot of people.

In retrospect, we should have seen it coming. This decade has largely been a litmus test for who can be bothered to care about and protect others — and who can’t. From early 2020 until around May 2023, if I could see someone’s full face in a public space, that was a pretty big clue. The outright rejection of science was another sobering sign.

Going back to the push for universal healthcare in the 1990s, the loud opposition told us that the U.S. has the greatest healthcare in the world, and that we shouldn’t want “socialized medicine.” Somehow, when faced with a pandemic that killed millions worldwide, the same crowd manufactured all sorts of reasons to renounce U.S. healthcare and the science on which it was built — and to be hostile to healthcare workers and those who cared about others.

“I don’t know how to make you care about other people” was suddenly everywhere.

It’s still a thing, just buried under dozens more things, buried next to all those who died.

The toll will be inestimable

There will always be bad men. They come in different forms. Some are wolves in sheep’s clothing. It’s often harder being around them. We can all spot the devil when he has pointy ears, a tail and a trident.

Some bad men are the easiest in all of history to identify. They have no fixed core beliefs and are happy to let other bad men have their way as long as they profit or at least are spared harm. For some — men and women — the cruelty is the point. And I know some women who are pretty bad men by proxy.

There will always be bad men and bad things that happen. Waiting for the day when there aren’t any is a setup for disappointment.

The best I can hope for at this age is that the people who disapprove of bad men, and who want to work as hard as possible to reduce the bad things that happen, far outnumber the people who are mostly fine with bad men and bad things happening — to others.

There doesn’t seem to be enough ways to signal the preference, but I think we just missed our best chance in my lifetime to send a fairly clear one before it was too late. It breaks my heart, a heart that has been working overtime for too long.

And there is still the matter of how often bad men get their way anyway. But this time we just put the ball on the tee for all of them and stepped out of their way.

Ignorance of what you are enabling is no excuse in 2024. Hiding behind the mocking misappropriation of words and phrases coined by others for themselves — and not for you — is no acceptable cover.

I’m reminded that the best revenge is to live a good and happy life. I don’t know how that’s possible for people who are consumed by hate — and ruled by it. How many times have you heard, about the LGBTQIA+ community, “Do they have to stick it in our faces?” Yes. Now more than ever. We will live good and happy lives and stick it in your faces. You can wallow in your misery. When you realize you were sold a bill of goods, that you have voted against your own self-interests, what will you have won then?

Besides, the straights who are obsessed with us lack the self-awareness to realize they’ve been sticking it in our faces their whole lives.

In the end, love will win. Hate will erode and destroy those whose primary fuel it has become. But before that happens, the toll will be inestimable.

What exactly is the problem? Lalah Manly, LPC, a therapist in Atlanta, shared her anger with an editor friend, who shared it with me: “(The president-elect) just removed all safety by promising safety to the people who have safety but are afraid not to.”

Nailed it.

Meanwhile, we are rallying to love, counsel and protect each other. Haters, swim in your hatred. Save your drama for your mama. We will be fighting for trans lives and trans joy, and to protect everyone who is vulnerable.

The myths you are already being told

People tell me to read Eric Fromm about how people embrace authoritarianism. They tell me to read other books about people who see themselves as the default for human and see others as less than, and how they other them.

What I know is that the two institutions that got the most out of me during my life — the Catholic Church and journalism — let me down in ways that can’t be fixed. The roots of the anti-trans movement are in the Catholic Church, and with a six-member high-court majority that is Catholic, and many voters doing the Catholicism à la carte thing, I am more endangered than ever now.

Journalism has failed me and people like me. Maybe people like you. Ask me about that someday when there are no longer restrictions on what I’m allowed to say.

We hear a lot about nepo babies, billionaires and other people of wealth in journalism today. For now, I’ll just say that Katharine Graham had bigger balls than some men who have ascended to powerful roles in U.S. newspapers on the basis of something other than merit. Their fingerprints are all over this moment, as well as on my heightened status as endangered.

Perusing the narrative (read: myth) they have allowed the usual suspects (read: awful men) to write and publish as a first rough draft of history, I am stunned to be told the following:

• What happened this week was a rejection of the “elites” in the U.S.
• Aligning with or submitting to the most lingering face of the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” 1980s was somehow a clear repudiation of elites. Come again?
• That I, apparently, am one of the elites.
• That I, a transgender woman, am one of the main and most troubling reasons why this country lurched hard to the right for the second time in less than a decade.

The mythmaking continues.

White, straight, cisgender men: the original and all-time champion beneficiaries of “identity politics” in the U.S.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. When perception becomes reality through well-financed orchestration, journalism’s hacks dance with the devil by taking the perception and turning it into reality as a thought exercise rather than grasping the gravity and historical weight of the moment. Some of us are not real people to them. We are theoretical, something they kick around with other “thought leaders.”

Besides, I think I know what they mean by “elites.” To shrieking evangelical “Christians,” it’s a little like “New York values” and “New York sense of humor.”

Elites. I’ve got your elites right here. *grabs controversial crotch*

You should also know that some Democrats are now abandoning us — us as in trans people. We’re catching hell from all over. I didn’t think this week could get any scarier, but I was wrong. When we are able to take out the trash, they need to go.

And lest you believe one of the biggest myths, let me clear up a couple of things. Other than a few vague “we’ve got your back” statements and “we will follow the law,” Democrats at the top of the ticket said almost nothing about us or to us. The other party never shut up about us. Harris didn’t lose because she pushed “identity” politics. Her campaign tried to make people forget about us.

How am I supposed to feel right now? We were abandoned for nothing. He still won. There is little upside to standing up for us. Very few people give much of a shit about us.

The horrible pundits keep overlooking something: This country, women included, is slow to let women have anything.

As for Harris, on a scale of 1 to 10 for “wokeness,” her campaign was: snoozer. Ask anyone who wanted real change. The strategy of not scaring the people of Pleasantville failed.

◊

I invoke movies a lot in my storytelling in part because they are one of the last forms of a shared reality we have in this country. This quote from “All the President’s Men” came to mind yesterday:

Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House.”

That’s a movie quote, yes, but it’s straight from Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, straight from the mouth of Deep Throat. No composite character he, Deep Throat was Mark Felt, their source inside the FBI. He admitted as much before he died in 2008.

I’ll have a lot more to say someday about how the news media sold me out, and people like me, but also about how the media did the same to tens of millions of others, did the same to people around the world. Many have thoroughly documented it. It’s a massive failure. Blowing the whistle a lot more often near the end to try to even out the calls and make the box score look better, as a basketball ref might do, hardly makes up for the dereliction of duty in the nine years before.

Ask me about that someday when there are no longer restrictions on what I can say. I’m not allowed to discuss politics publicly, but let me be clear: This is not about politics. This is about human decency and protecting endangered lives, including mine. It’s about irresponsible journalism. ACLU legal experts and other lawyers tell me I’m good. Or, as good as someone can be whose country and legacy institutions just threw her under the bus.

Can you imagine not being allowed to speak out on your own behalf? And being okay with that? If I don’t advocate for myself, defend myself, what does that say about me?

The rest of the Felt quote:

“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

Bookmark that.

The myths this country believes about itself

You can pay your bills and your taxes and go to church every Sunday and give your 10 percent and be a law-abiding citizen and think you are a good person, but maybe you are not. Maybe in being complicit in evildoing, you are a bad person. This is a concept I might not have understood with that faded old towel pinned to my shirt.

You can be arrested and go to jail for disobeying an unjust law — literally, a lawbreaker — and be on the right side of history, a good person. The very best of humanity. Notable people have taught us about civil resistance and civil disobedience. This is a concept I would not have understood while squinting in front of a fictional superhero.

People laughed at the depiction of the more tender moments in “Ted Lasso” locker room and team-bonding scenes, but that’s closer to the sports world I want to see than the one with the violence, false bravado and macho BS calling attention to itself. It would be a reflection of the world I want to create together and live in, where people don’t mind having less money and fewer material possessions if it means everyone is boosted up, that everyone is protected.

It’s a world where people rush to the aid of those less fortunate, those who have been shunned, those who are in need, and are glad to give but are sick about the need for it.

A world kinda like the one in the teachings of that same Catholic Church I grew up in. Maybe even a world like this one:

That movie has its problems, but that speech, pledging the wealth of the church (money, land, buildings and great works of art) for the relief of hungry people, has always resonated for me. “And if to honor this pledge, the church must strip itself down to poverty, so be it.”

Leave me alone, Catholic Church, Catholic governors and Catholic justices. Put your money where your mouth is.

“A rising tide lifts all boats” is a thing people love to say, but not nearly enough of us seem to want to see it happen. Only the right people get to have a better life, apparently.

In one of Garrison Keillor’s stories about Lake Wobegon, a matriarch tells a young person who’s setting out on an adventure, “Everyone is your friend.”

Let me tell you something: Not everyone is your friend.

People make their choices, and tens of millions of people just made a big one that put me and people like me in harm’s way. Many of them believe the lies said about us. They don’t bother to ask us whether they’re true.

That would shatter the comfort of the myths they wrap themselves in.

Another thing I learned this week is that facts don’t matter as much as I’d thought.

People are more emboldened now to let us know they don’t approve of us — and to intimidate us. I expect it to keep getting worse. Should I get a gun and be ready to stand my ground? Or is that only for certain people? I wonder if leaving a menacing, threatening Bubba or two to bleed out in aisle 12 would give the others pause.

Do they make handguns that look like pink water pistols?

The myths this country believes about itself are among the most harmful forces I have witnessed in my years of being aware. And still the white, straight, cis, male, privileged, nothing-to-lose-either-way mythmakers continue with zero self-reflection or real accountability.

Now this country is lying to itself about how this happened. It has to. That is its makeup. That’s its history. That’s its foundation. Whatever is left of it after it has been broken and sold off for parts will roll into its 250th birthday with a series of apt celebrations for such denial.

The 24-hour rule

I had a lot to process Wednesday, and I was as sick to my stomach as I’ve been outside of the ER, so I went radio silent and observed the 24-hour rule. Sports teams often enforce it, win or lose. Take 24 hours to process the victory or the defeat, then start preparing for what’s next.

I doubled down this time, giving myself 48 hours.

After decades in journalism, I still say I am the most cynical naive person I know, or maybe the most naive cynic. In times like these, the child that I was — taught the myths, good guys vs. bad guys, black hats vs. white hats, right from wrong, all of that and more — that child screams from deep inside and demands answers and justice.

I tell that child not to hold her breath.

Time to wrap this up. If I turned this in where I work, the editors would complain about the length. Heck, as an editor, I’d complain about the length. And yet, I’m only scratching the surface layers.

 

The sun did shine again after Tuesday. Even in the dark cave I live in now to protect eyes that are hypersensitive to light, I saw a shadow on the morning after, and then the next one. I usually keep the lighting minimal, so I don’t have to squint. I can see everything well enough except for how badly I need to dust and vacuum.

Support is pouring in from all over. I’d post it all, but I want to keep my friends safe. If you are one of the people who reached out to me, please know that I am thinking about you and grateful that you are in my life. It means more than you can possibly know. To those I haven’t heard from, don’t feel obligated to signal your support here or anywhere else publicly. I don’t want you targeted. You are in my thoughts as well.

I hope to catch up with all of you as soon as possible. You give me hope. Right now, I am still in a lot of pain.

The shadow that follows me around now will wear a cape, a long one that doesn’t require a safety pin to stay attached to me. (I mention safety pins knowing full well they are still ripe for mockery.)

Will I stay where I am? We’ll see. I expect any minute to hear the voice of Joubert, the assassin from “Three Days of the Condor,” advising me.

“You have not much future there.”

I’m close to Canada. I’m exploring that option and consider the clock already running.

I’ve started a list of ways to mend a broken heart and move forward. It’s not very long right now. All I know for sure as we begin whatever this next period of our lives is: My cape is never coming off.

◊

This story continues to grow, as does the reading list below. This is just the beginning.

Additional reading:

Erin Reed, Erin In The Morning: This Was Always Going To Be A Generational Fight For Transgender People

Alyx Bedwell, What the Trans: We Have to Keep Fighting

Alyssa Steinsiek, Assigned Media: Welp

Alyssa Steinsiek, Assigned Media: Conservatives Spend $125 Million on Anti-Trans Ads

Zane McNeill, TRUTHOUT: Republicans Spent Nearly $215M on TV Ads Attacking Trans Rights This Election

Parker Malloy, The Present Age: Fine, Let’s Talk About Trans Athletes

Hayes Brown, MSNBC: Democrats would get nothing for throwing trans Americans under the bus

Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian: Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do

Orion Rummler, The 19th via Louisiana Illuminator: Crisis calls from LGBTQ+ youth spiked by 700% after Election Day

Katelyn Burns, Xtra: Trans issues didn’t doom the Democrats

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Illustration of a woman casting a superhero shadow by Ramcreative via Shutterstock.

Image of the devil by arda savasciogullari via Shutterstock.

Transgender flag and fist by Ink Drop via Shutterstock.

Haruki Murakami “1Q84” quote party-time/nuclear-bomb-goes-off screenshots from the movie “The Big Short.”