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.

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.

Transgender people shouldn’t be treated with dignity because of how some of us look; we should be treated with dignity because we are human beings.

After trying to explain your basic humanity to people over and over and over again, it can make your own government feel entirely foreign to you. And when you look around and see no one like you in the legislature, that foreignness is compounded with a profound sense of loneliness.

government cannot be “of the people, by the people, and for the people” if wide swaths of the people have no seat at the table, if large parts of the country feel like there is literally no one in their government who can understand what they are going through.

It’s no surprise that antitrans extremists have targeted bathrooms. 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.

But it’s also more calculated and sinister than that. Access to a restroom is necessary everywhere: in schools, in workplaces, and in public venues. These so-called bathroom bills are nothing more than an attempt to legislate transgender people out of public life.

but after being told to kill myself thousands of times for days, the thought of suicide somehow became a rational thought in my mind for the first time ever.