If you must know what is between someone’s legs, then you are the one with the problem.

 

I am generally a calming presence, or so I’m told. I know how to steady a room, how to sit with grief, how to speak softly so others can breathe again. On the surface, I am unshaken. But beneath the surface, the mantle is active and the lava is hot.

Some days, the headlines I read cause tremors in me.

The Supreme Court. 

The GOP.

 The Conservatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The endless cycle of “protecting children” that somehow always means coming after people like me.

The slogans engineered to ignite panic.

The campaigns that treat our existence as if it were a cautionary tale.

I see it.

I feel it.

I hold it.

But I do not explode.

Not yet.

I have lived in Canada since 1973, and I was almost twenty-four. But I was already sixty-three when the DSM was revised in 2013, and being trans was finally removed from the category of mental disorders. Forty years earlier, in 1973, the year I arrived in Canada, Sexual Orientation had been removed. It took four more decades for my identity to be seen as something other than pathology.

And I was sixty-seven when Gender Identity was finally added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 2017.

That happened twenty-one years after Sexual Orientation was added.

Two full decades.

This is why my generation grew up afraid.

Not abstractly. Not theoretically.

We grew up with a real fear of being institutionalized.

We grew up with a real fear of a criminal record.

In many jurisdictions, it was illegal to “impersonate” the opposite sex.

That was the language.

Impersonating.

As if we were actors in our own lives.

As if we were counterfeit.

As if we were fraud.

So we learned to suppress.

We learned to hide.

We learned to survive by silence.

We tried praying it away.

I’ll be honest: I am here because others went before me.

I stand on the shoulders of the pioneers who did not have that silence.

The ones who were studied, examined, photographed, and written about.

The ones who became the “experiment” while procedures and protocols were still emerging in the 1970s and 80s.

The ones who walked into clinics with no maps and no guarantees, who risked everything and paid dearly for every inch of ground gained.

They cleared a path for me.

And for those who came after me.

The word “transgender” did not even settle into public consciousness until around 1990.

They paid for that language with their lives, their families, their safety, their futures.

We did not fight our way toward visibility in order to dominate anyone’s life.

We are not trying to convert, convince, or capture anyone’s children.

We are simply trying to live honestly.

We want to hold our heads high.

To belong to our own lives.

To embrace who we are without having to hide or apologize.

To move through the world with our dignity intact.

This is not radical.

It is human.

And now I watch people talk casually about rolling the clock back.

As if history were a dial.

As if our life is an optional setting.

As if the cost had never been paid.

If that is where we are heading, shoot me now.

Get it through your head: today’s kids are not “suddenly becoming trans.”

There is no such thing as sudden-onset gender dysphoria.

Being trans is not a contagion.

Accept the fact that we finally have the language we lived without.

Language that breaks the old silence.

Language that lets truth speak rather than suffocate.

We have seen this pattern before.

Before the word neurodivergent existed, children were punished for being “difficult.”

Before ADHD was named, they were shamed as inattentive.

Before PTSD was recognized, survivors were dismissed as weak.

Before Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was identified, children were blamed for what their brains could not do.

Language did not create these realities.

It simply made room for compassion.

The first evidence-based standards of care for gender diverse people did not appear until 1979.

Not because we began then, but because the medical world finally began to pay attention.

Understanding evolves.

Care evolves.

Humanity evolves.

Slowly, imperfectly, unevenly.

And while understanding grows, something else has happened:

Our lives have become political currency.

Trans people are labelled a threat not because we are dangerous, but because fear is profitable.

Fear is an easy rallying point.

Fear moves votes.

Fear distracts from everything a society refuses to deal with.

This month marks my 75th orbit around the sun.

I have run out of patience for the idea that my existence is something to argue about in committee.

I want what everyone wants.

An ordinary life.

A warm dinner.

Work.

Belonging.

The dignity of aging without being turned into someone else’s cautionary tale.

If you insist on treating my existence as debatable, then you are not protecting anything.

You are repeating history that should have remained buried.

I am here.

I have always been here.

Your panic does not make me unreal.

And the ground beneath my feet, though restless, still holds.

I am here.
I am still becoming.
It hasn’t been a cakewalk.
Your fear cannot erase me.

I am still standing at seventy-five.
I am grateful.
Happy Birthday to Me!