Here we are in 2025 navigating rising oligarchy.

This last month, I kept trying to understand why thoughts were

coming to my mind, like,

“Why am I even here? Should I be here?”

It felt jarring and vulnerable at 40.

So I kept it to my real ones.

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To myself, I rationalized,

“I know this toxic narrative is wrong about us.”

“My partner and I have a loving, supportive relationship.”

“The kids are alright.”

“Other people have it way worse.”

“We’ve been through this before.”

“We know how to survive.”

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It’s true. We do know how to survive…

When your rights are stripped away on repeat

When the walls keep closing in tighter

When they burn your documents and send them back to you

destroyed

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because they can.

When it feels more possible to disappear than earn a doctorate

degree, survival becomes the primary goal.

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We know how to survive. A lot of us have been surviving our entire

lives.

And I’m not just talking about raw survival against street and

institutional violence.

It’s the way the hypervigilance we carry in our bodies impacts our

nervous system.

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It’s the increased prevalence of autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular

issues, depression, and PTSD among trans people, particularly those

who have also experienced racialized trauma.

It’s also the economic barriers to health care and discrimination

within the medical-industrial complex.

Being trans is beautiful, but the world makes it exhausting.

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Path to Liberation

Trans people have saved my life time and time again. I came out in

1998. I was 14 and living in a town along the so-called U.S.–Mexico

border. All we had was each other. In a time with few legal

protections and next to no resources, we had to organize deep systems of care

for ourselves. Over the past two decades, there have

been many political and cultural changes, thanks to the labor of

advocates (trans and otherwise) who have pushed tirelessly to

implement pathways to better protect folks.

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However, it is risky to become dependent upon incremental policy

change. As important as these kinds of wins are, what is granted by

colonial law can also be revoked by colonial law. When we become

comfortable within the bounds of what is “given” to us (often

crumbs), we settle for less than what we know we really need: real

solutions to the root causes of the political and ecological crisis we

are facing.

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False “solutions” and concepts like individual upward mobility or

assimilation (when even possible) often distract us with temporary

comfort and take us away from building up the collective care and

self-governance muscle that will actually protect us. We need

permanently organized communities that are rooted in values like

radical care, collective governance, and mutuality.

When we are not organized, the impacts of backlashes, such as the

one we are experiencing now, are far more detrimental because when

they come for us, what and who do we fall back on?

Our autonomy is our power. Our long-built systems of survival and

These are dangerous times for independent media, and

community defense are our power. There is so much to draw from in

our collective DNA to guide us through this time. We know how to

do this.

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Trans people: Brown, Black, Indigenous, working class.

So many beautiful stories.

So much cultural wealth and lived wisdom rooted in the will to

survive like hell against all odds.

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From street economies to the people’s pharmacies

From houses for disowned youth to adopted queer parents

From Stonewall to Compton’s Cafeteria

From our own designs of family to fierce love and solidarity

From prisons walls to asylum halls

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Trans people have navigated a million plot twists—many steeped in

violence—based upon a perception of us:

How we exist in the eyes of others.

Be it the state, religion, our families of origin, or neighborhoods.

And still they have no idea who we really are.

Nonetheless, we remain.

Our most prominent hxstorical rebellions powerfully led by Black

and Brown trans women.

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It Means Home…

I kept trying to understand why I was questioning my existence last

month.

It might have had something to do with the right’s violent campaign

to erase us while simultaneously hyper-visibilizing us, spending $215

million on anti-trans ads, to create another common enemy and boost

votes.

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“Take America back from pronouns and immigrants!”

Come on, we know they’re full of….

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But it worked. Across our backs.

Not even 0.5% of the population posed a supposed threat so big it

gave the right (and moveable center) a perfect point of unity:

“Protect our kids.”

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Protect them from what exactly?

Learning and embracing that all different kinds of people exist?

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A culture that teaches to not harm people for being different from

yourself?

It is no surprise that those who see our Mother Earth and her life

sources as nothing more than a dollar sign would despise a worldview

in which we respect and revere life in all of its complex and beautiful

intelligence.

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We will never understand all there is to this planet, but you don’t

have to understand it to respect it.

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If we are speaking ecologically: Diversity is our best defense in the

face of crisis.

If we are speaking like my old timers: “Everything in its place.”

Eradicating one thread in an ecosystem disrupts the entire ecosystem.

Global traditional knowledge has carried that teaching since time

immemorial. Everything is connected.

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Humans are but one expression of nature. And yes, we are human.

Never mind the dehumanizing, ableist narrative that we are

“imposing mental illness” by advocating for a right to a dignified life

and basic respect.

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Despite the long-overused weaponization of “nature” against queer

and trans people (“Its not natural!”), sex and gender variance is

reflected all across the natural world.

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From birthing male seahorses

to split-gill mushrooms’ 28,000 different sexes

to the female swallowtail butterfly’s “doublesex” genes that provide

wing pattern camouflage from predators—

Biodiversity is a part of nature.

Adaptation is a part of nature.

Trans, gender-expansive, and two-spirit people are a part of nature.

Honor it.

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My comrade asked me: “What are your wildest dreams for trans

relatives?”

My dream is not just for us to survive, but that we come to know

belonging.

That we remember the truth of who we really are in a mess of endless

projections and attacks.

I pray that as we endure a war on our right to exist—we hold the

deep knowing that we are not alone.

The Earth and so many others, human and non-human, are also

enduring profoundly violent disruptions.

We struggle in solidarity with all those who persist on the side of

justice, the side of life.

Now more than ever, our interconnection mandates us to protect the

living world. Yes, we have a right to be here, but more than that, we

need to be here.

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