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

by Sarah McBride

“The best way I can describe it for myself,” I told them, “is a constant feeling of homesickness. An unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that only goes away when I can be seen and affirmed in the gender I’ve always felt myself to be. And unlike homesickness with location, which eventually diminishes as you get used to the new home, this homesickness only grows with time and separation.”

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. And I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I experienced street harassment. 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. Walking by a man could elicit an unwelcome comment, an invitation for objectification for having the audacity to walk down the street. If I’m not smiling, I’m told to smile. If I am smiling, it’s seen as a request for more comments. And then there was the man in an airport who repeatedly chastised me for smiling too much. The sexism had come full circle.

Every relationship is the result of a series of events and coincidences that lead people to one another.

In other battles for trans rights, anti-equality activists and politicians had stoked unfounded fears that protecting transgender people from discrimination throughout daily life, including in restrooms, would allow sexual predators to dress up as women to harm or assault women and, particularly, young girls. The argument was completely disingenuous. A person intent on committing a crime in a restroom is offered no cover from laws that merely protect transgender people from discrimination or harassment. More than a dozen states and more than a hundred cities had passed similar bills without any problems of that kind. These arguments were just recycled talking points from previous gay-rights fights.

A 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.

One in four transgender people reported being fired from their job simply because of their gender identity. A quarter of same-sex couples experienced housing discrimination in one survey. More than half of LGBTQ students reported feeling unsafe in schools because of their sexual orientation, and roughly one-third feel unsafe because of their gender according to the student advocacy group GLSEN.