It’s that time of the year again. March 31st. Trans Day of Visibility. When suddenly, trans people appear in public, out of their slumber, and vanish just in time for April Fool’s Day. This year, however, things are so much more sombre than they should be.
This Trans Day of Visibility, trans youth in Alberta cannot get the healthcare they need to survive. For the first time since Canada’s own abortion bans were struck down in R v Morgentaler, politicized healthcare is banned in parts of Canada. Yet, that’s merely scratching the surface. Numerous other countries, including most of the USA, the UK, and basically most of the Anglosphere, trans persecution is becoming the norm. Trans people are outright seeing their ID be revoked overnight in Kansas (USA). Senegal explicitly criminalized transness less than three weeks ago. India has made “coercing or alluring” people to be trans a crime punishable by life in prison. Tennessee (USA) is planning on creating a list of trans women taking estrogen. Other notable recent setbacks include in Türkiye, where queerness is outright being criminalized, and Argentina, which used to have “some of the world’s most progressive” laws for trans people.
Our society has condemned trans people to a state of flux, between visibility and invisibility at its own discretion. The trans woman who finds herself living on the street is perpetually invisible, not even named when she is killed at the hands of an abuser trying to enforce gender roles. The trans man who works at the local brewery finds himself unable to defend his siblings, out of fear of being fired and kicked into homelessness. The non-binary teen at school finds themselves forced to skip class, even consider homeschooling, because of the increasing bullying they face, for the mere fact that they don’t fit in two neatly drawn boxes. Yet, the trans person who dares to hold to account a transphobe, who dares to get out in the streets and protest, who dares take any step up to confront the injustices of our society will inevitably be kicked, dragged, and publicly beaten to a pulp for daring to be visible.
Some of us want to be seen. Others don’t want to. Yet, this choice has been stolen away from us in the last ten-or-so years. It has especially been stolen away from us in the last three years.
Visibility isn’t safety. In fact, it’s paradoxically the opposite. Being visibly trans is having a massive fucking target on one’s back. It’s the impossibility to seek refuge, to seek help from anyone except the few who do care about us. It’s the knowledge that, du jour au lendemain, someone can weaponize your transness against you as soon as they don’t see you ‘as a passive, palatable doll or twink. The far-right “transgender debate” has become so normalized that we look behind us, scanning the places around us, not just at night, but in broad daylight; that we stockpile medication even when the tentacles of anti-trans legislation haven’t snuck up on us; that we find ourselves moving because of our very own state-induced visibility.
The public conception of transness has reached the point of absurdity. Billions of dollars have been poured into hating trans people. The Epstein class has convinced your neighbours that we are their biggest threat, that we are “transing your children”. They are telling you to be more afraid of a theoretical transfeminine athlete who’s somehow miraculously the world’s strongest human, whilst simultaneously making you fear that your local teenager cannot make medical decisions in their own best interests because of their alleged “weakness” and “vulnerability”. They dress up in care the language of oppression. They draft up, through normalizing the fear they manufactured in you, the laws they’ll use to commit genocide against us… and our visibility has absolutely not helped with that, given that said visibility is no longer in our control.
I’m exhausted. And so are so many of us. Many of us have families which are actively being bombed, friends who are being jailed. I know so many trans people who would want vengeance today. Yet, I know even more of them who just want, more so than visibility, vengeance or whatever other word beginning with “V”, a fucking bite of pizza, a roof above their head, and some spare cash to not end up bankrupt.