I allowed myself to release a violent, joyous sound as I drove the pick hammer through the glass plate. Shards flew around, bouncing off my goggles and thick work gloves, and a camera shutter clicked from a safe distance away. My friends cheered as the Norman Rockwell image printed on the plate scattered, the perfect white, cisgender, heterosexual Americans split apart and nestled into the corners of the tarp with the broken vase and VCR.
It was November 16th, Donald Trump had been elected President 11 days prior on my 24th birthday. That screaming laugh was the first time I had felt any emotional release since that day. I was at a gathering of trans people at a large cabin in the woods, the kind of thing corporations rent out for team-building. A local organization put together the trans well-being summit before knowing how necessary it would become after the election. I spent the day making art, getting a massage, playing games and sharing a space with people who understood the sorrow and worry that had lodged itself firmly in my chest.
I closed out the day with the DIY rage room, constructed with several tarps between two trees. The whole time I was there, I knew it had to end. I couldn’t live my whole life in a secluded cabin full of trans folks, even though that sounds like my version of paradise. But this was one thing I had in my control, before I went back to what was feeling like an increasingly hostile outside world. I couldn’t do much, but I could break plates and scream.
A month later, I’m pouring canned soup into mismatched bowls at my kitchen table. The six seats are filled with trans people, all of us hungry, scared, and tired. We represented three households; myself and my two girlfriends, my girlfriend’s boyfriend and his girlfriend, and our friend and his girlfriend. I was well acquainted with the beauty and joy of T4T love, but I was beginning to understand it as survival.
We had notebooks and laptops open, I was toggling between Zillow listings and Erin Reed’s Trans Risk Assessment Map. The state we were sitting in was colored light red on the map: moderately risky for trans people within the next 2 years. The state, which stopped feeling like ours, has a democratic governor, but a republican supermajority in both chambers of congress.
We had set up this dinner to plan our cross-country moves. We all had different timelines and preferences for locations, but we had the same goal; find somewhere safer. We focused on the states with the strongest protections, highlighted in a peaceful dark blue on the map.
By the end of the night we had drafted our plans and knew what kind of support everyone could provide. As we rinsed our bowls and loaded the dishwasher, the energy in the home felt lighter. There was laughter and displays of affection, one friend thanked us before he left, “I feel better knowing we have a plan.”
The clinic is small, tidy, and cozy. A tall man with a lisp greets me from his position at the front desk, punching my personal info into his tablet before I even confirm my name. His tone feels different today, still sunny and comforting, but something else lingers at the end of each sentence. I think that same energy hangs off my words too, as I’m led into a private room and my doctor joins to ask about my sexual well being.
It’s a nice change of pace, thinking only about the number of partners I have, my condom use, and the regularity of my Truvada doses. My doctor talks to me like I’m a person, something I’ve learned not to take for granted as a trans man, and this time he is extra warm.
It’s not lost on me that this comfort and love I feel as I receive the preventative care that allows me to feel fully connected to my HIV positive partner, can’t be taken for granted Nothing but luck put me in a time and place where my partner’s diagnosis wasn’t a death sentence, and where I could access free medication and blood tests every three months.
I opened up the test results a few days later on New Years Eve while out with my friends at a completely packed, queer friendly bar. I announce that I am STI free as we’re hanging tipsily off a low-to-the-ground velvety couch and we ‘cheers’ our drinks.
This bar happens to be the only place I’ve always felt safe expressing outside of gender norms. That night, I was wearing a short skirt and a flowy long sleeved top that tied under my chest. My hair was freshly cut and dyed a screaming orange, my beard shaven, my mustache neatly trimmed, and my make-up done specifically to look good in the warm orange lighting of the bar.
I was dancing and drinking with abandon. I felt something like an electric charge running through the bar, lacing itself up my legs and torso, holding my trans body in its embrace. Then, the vibrations intensified, became real and physical as my phone alarm vibrated against the small of my back, where it was tucked into my skirt. It was 11:55.
I began working my way upstairs, weaving through drunken girls complimenting my outfit and flattening myself against the wall to slide past couples making out on the stairs. I crawled over some empty seats to finally fall in the lap of one of my partners, holding our seats right in front of the huge projection of the ball drop.
We giggled as I clumsily adjusted and we watched the ball drop together before cocooning each other in a kiss that blocked all of the bar sounds. We didn’t know anything about how 2025 would turn out at that point, but we knew nobody could take away our laughing, our dancing, or our kissing.
