I wasn’t always afraid to come to work.
I realized that I was transgender in the summer of 2020. I know it’s not the story you’ve heard before, but it turns out that a lot of trans people didn’t realize that we were trans until a lot later in our lives.
The time when I was questioning my gender was a hurricane of panic and sleepless nights, and once I knew for sure I was a woman, that terror turned into a low-grade worry—how would my friends, my family, my coworkers and my students react to me? Worry, not fear.
I wasn’t always afraid to come to work.
Coming out as trans during finals week of the fall 2020 semester was joyous beyond anything I’d dared to hope for. Friends sent yellow and white roses of joy and friendship, heavy and bright with their love. The family buried me with calls, well-wishes and cards celebrating my step into freedom and authenticity.
My coworkers sent me an email of congratulations and welcome, celebrating the news of my true self.
And my students? Honestly, the response from my students was maybe the best of all. Every last one of them—four classes worth—made sure my real name was on every final project they handed in, even though I hadn’t asked them to.
Their messages of joy and congratulations were even richer than my coworkers’, and several of them took the opportunity to come out to me for the first time, whether as gay, lesbian, asexual or even trans themselves.
I’ve taught at Ferris for ten years now. I know this campus, and I know its students, faculty and staff. I love them. Ferris is exactly the school I’d always dreamed of teaching at. In the years since I came out, I’ve lost track of the number of LGBTQ+ students I’ve quietly talked with, offered comfort to and coached through their questioning, every bit as terrifying as mine was.
I wasn’t always afraid to come to work.
But the last semester has been different at every level.
There’s a case that the Supreme Court is considering right now that, depending on how they rule, could be used as a basis to ban all gender-affirming care for everyone in the nation—the lawyers who argued the case said so, in as many words, right in front of the transgender lawyer who was arguing against them. If these types of laws were passed, that lawyer would die. I would die. We depend on hormone replacement therapy for our very survival.
People like me can’t safely leave America now, which is one of the most grave international human rights abuses a country can commit. The government won’t issue us passports that show our real gender, meaning that if we fly internationally and the plane gets diverted for an emergency, there are about 100 countries around the world where a plane might be forced to land where we would be arrested and executed simply for existing. Public beheading in many of those nations to purge the corruption we apparently represent.
This is a position, it seems, that our government is sympathetic to, declaring that trans people simply do not exist—another human rights atrocity called depersoning. It’s what the Nazis did right before they started mass-murdering disabled people, Jewish people and LGBTQ+ people.
Throw them on the pile, I guess, next to the national autism registry, the government is now building. I’m sure it won’t be used that way again. Surely not.
Even at Ferris, my office door has been vandalized, specifically targeting me because I had the temerity to show a trans pride flag on it. Now, I have a safety escort to walk me everywhere I go on campus because there’s real reason to suspect that whoever’s behind it might try to attack me.
Vitriol and hatred towards trans people drip everywhere I look, and I find myself wondering where the people who welcomed me only four years ago went and who replaced them.
I wasn’t always afraid to come to work.
But I am now.