Adrift in a Sea of Hate: Building a Raft in a Time of Trans Crisis

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I walk through this embattled, contested world as a pink-white-and-blue flash of light. If I am Icarus, I have flown too close to the sun, my wings have burned, and I have sunk far beneath the waves. Today, I think that I tread water, waiting for the raft that will save me, in purgatory between my former self and my true, transgender self. I know that I could be brilliant, but I know too that even the brightest of lights must eventually be extinguished and die. Somewhere, lost between those realities, I endure.

The raft never arrived, but I have begun building one myself. I have lashed drifts of therapist bamboo together with anti-depressant twine; fashioned a sail out of my partner’s bulwark cloth and the rough patchwork quilts of my friends; a coping-mechanism oar that doesn’t quite work yet. It isn’t perfect, it isn’t beautiful, but it is something. And so I drift, I drift, I drift.

I might not be a sailor, but by god am I sailing. I have sailed to all four corners of the earth, and I have fallen off the edge. Climbing that slick, water-carved rock might be the hardest thing I have ever done. And still I sail. But those four corners and the very edges of the earth keep me from moving on. They surround me, entrap me. They are vast, yet they suffocate too. The day this dawned on me, entwined with the…