Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality

by Sarah McBride

One in four transgender people in the report had been fired from their job because they were transgender. One in five had been homeless. And 41 percent had attempted suicide at some point in their lives. Nearly half had tried to end their lives, in many cases because the world was too hateful to bear.

Inheriting a legacy of advocates, activists, and everyday people who, through the flames of violence and the ashes of hatred, toiled and fought for a different world, we’ve grown into one of the most effective movements for social justice in history. And even as we’ve faced some crushing defeats, transgender people—and all LGBTQ individuals—have made historic advancements.

Representation in popular culture is key. It is often the first way many of us learn about different identities, cultures, and ideas. That evening’s episode had offered me the life-affirming revelation that there are other people like me and that there was a way for me to live my truth.

Each generation, it became clear, was defined by whether they expanded equality, welcoming and including people who had once been excluded or rejected.

And just as with happiness—for which there are varying words, expressions, and actions that demonstrate that same feeling—gender can have an infinite number of expressions.

While 41 percent of transgender people had attempted suicide, that number dropped by half when the transgender person was supported by their family. And it dropped even further when they were also embraced by their community.

Each of us has a deep and profound desire to be seen, to be acknowledged, and to be respected in our totality. There is a unique kind of pain in being unseen. It’s a pain that cuts deep by diminishing and disempowering, and whether done intentionally or unintentionally, it’s an experience that leaves real scars.

Increasingly, we are coming to grips with the reality that the sex someone appears to be at birth does not dictate their gender identity. It is this trend that links the fight for gender equity with the fight for gay rights with the fight for trans equality: ending the notion that one perception at birth, the sex we are assigned, should dictate how we act, what we do, whom we love, and who we are.

So I thought I generally understood what to expect. But in the end, I was so focused on the transphobia I might face after transitioning that I didn’t fully realize just how pervasive the sexism and misogyny would be.

The experience of each woman—cis or trans—is different, but a similar thread underpins it all: the policing of gender. The devaluation of lives, hopes, and one’s body. The threat of violence.

Growing up, my default face had always been that smile, but now I had to consciously train myself not to smile anymore, lest I invite unwanted attention from men on the street.

I never realized just how disempowering, unsafe, and unsettling it would feel to have a stranger assume they were entitled to comment on my appearance or my body.

These two identities—being a woman and being transgender—interact with each other in a way that serves to compound the animus that comes trans women’s way. This reality, referred to as intersectionality, recognizes that we all live our lives with multiple identities intersecting with one another, creating a mix of privileges and challenges that all people carry with us.

There are few things more dangerous to a transgender woman than the risk of a straight man not totally comfortable in his sexuality or masculinity realizing he is attracted to her.

Transphobia tells these straight, cisgender men that being attracted to a transgender woman makes them gay (it does not). Society’s homophobia tells them that being gay is bad (it is not).

But in the same way that my gender as a woman and my identity as a trans person intersect to foster discrimination or violence, my other identities combine to provide me with a cloak of privilege not offered to others.

As a white person, my race provides me with certain securities that are refused to people of color.

Having certain privileges does not mean that your life is easy or that you do not face challenges. It just means that you don’t experience specific kinds of obstacles or barriers faced by someone with a different identity or background. And our empathy should require us to acknowledge the plight of others in both its similarities to ours and in its differences.

And even for the most well-intentioned cisgender people, when they see my old pictures or find out my birth name, I can see the wheels turning in their heads as they reconstruct an image of me, seeing me not in the present but in the past.

“There are certain lines we should not cross,” he told me. “Yes, hypocrisy is bad, but if exposing that hypocrisy requires us to commit an even greater evil, then we shouldn’t do it. We should challenge people on their ideas. We won’t bring others to our side by harming people, even hypocrites. It may feel satisfying, it may even be in pursuit of the good of revealing hypocrisy, but it violates a first principle.”

Principles are worth something only if you stick by them even when they feel inconvenient. It’s easy to rationalize and find seemingly altruistic reasons for betraying a moral imperative, but that’s exactly when our principles are most important.

Sometimes vulnerability is the best, or only, path to justice. Those with power or privilege won’t extend equality easily. Logic isn’t enough.

If our pursuit of equality is built on the ability of some of us to blend in, then we will leave many of the most marginalized behind.

On the one hand, privilege shields me from much of the worst discrimination faced by the transgender community; on the other hand, those same privileges allow me to shoulder the burden of public education with less risk to my safety, security, and economic well-being than would be imposed on others.

Every fight for civil and human rights over the last several decades has included controversies about restrooms. It’s partly because we all feel vulnerable in those spaces, so it is easy to instill fear in people.

And the bullies see that. They see our power and they are jealous of it. They envy the agency we have been able to exercise and the clear power we hold. So often that is where their hate and vitriol come from.

Vulnerability is often the first step on the path toward justice. Vulnerability breeds empathy; empathy fosters support; support leads to action.

We must never be pacified by our progress or content with the pace of change. But we must always remember just how far we’ve come and hold firm to our vision of a fairer, more just society.