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Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility, often shortened to Trans Day of Visibility (or TDOV).
It was created by Rachel Crandall Crocker in Michigan in 2009, and it’s now celebrated in countries around the world.
Most estimates put trans and nonbinary people at between 0.5 and 1 percent of the total U.S. population, but some data suggests we may be as high as two percent.
Personally, I think it’s higher than that. I believe there are millions of closeted trans and nonbinary and gender-expansive and gender-questioning people in our country who don’t have the necessary encouragement and resources to live authentically.
I don’t need to elaborate on how our political climate has been saturated with an ongoing campaign of fear and terror against trans people.
That’s why visibility is so important: it saves lives, it gives voice to the voiceless, and it offers joy and hope and comfort where scarce.
I would not be alive today were it not for three primary blessings: 1) friends of all backgrounds who ensured I had love and safety and dignity, 2) the grace of a merciful and loving God who kept me buoyed through many difficult years of feeling incongruent with the world around me, and 3) every trans and nonbinary person whose visibility gave me strength and confidence to come out in my own time.
I exist today in my authenticity because of the visibility of trans and nonbinary people whose selflessness and courage paved roads that have permitted me to navigate the world with an expansive liberation in broader society they never got to experience.
I think of the closeted trans girl in Central Texas who once felt so alone and scared and ashamed of how I was born. For many years, I prayed every day that God would cleanse me of my desire to be who I really am, and it took a long time to recognize that being trans is a gift from God and part of my soul’s commission.
I thank God that I’m trans.
I can’t help but feel sympathy for the tens of millions of non-trans people in our country who are constantly burdened and tortured with struggling to meet the gendered expectations demanded of them by so much of society.
I think many non-trans people struggle with how our culture successfully and cruelly controls them, forcing them to be who they’re not, shaming them who they really are, all in service to a painful and unnecessary gendered framework that insists on an unforgiving rigidity solely meant to avoid discomfort based on irrational fear.
I think non-trans people who hate those of us who are trans are really motivated by a taught fear of themselves. It has to be terrifying to suppress oneself, only to witness people who have rejected that painful suppression.
Every transphobic argument can basically be boiled down to: "I actually don't know the science at all or have a good argument here, but trans people challenge my long held view of the world and it's very uncomfortable and everyone should be expected to move around my discomfort."
There’s obvious bigotry in that mindset, of course, but there’s also an extraordinary and unyielding and obvious pain, too.
Trans people are a constant reminder that there’s an entire world outside of what most non-trans people have been aggressively and irrationally conditioned to accept.
Today is about trans visibility and trans joy, to be sure, but I would also like to believe it can mean so much more. It can mean that non-trans people feel greater comfort and acceptance in embracing their own authenticity—however that may look—by the example trans and nonbinary people set.
I want every trans and nonbinary child in this country to be safe and loved and empowered, and I also want that for every non-trans child. I want every trans and nonbinary adult to be safe and loved and empowered, and I also want that for every non-trans adult.
I think that’s an essential North Star worthy of any compass.
That’s why I’m visible, and that’s what I wish for all of you, too.
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