How To Begin
It was maybe the third time I got champagne in my hair in a span of an hour. Walking through a jubilant and growing crowd outside the White House, popping corks and pot smoke flew through the air the way rubber bullets and tear gas had just five months prior in that very intersection, now officially known as Black Lives Matter Plaza. Searching for a friend, a sparkling sweet mist found me amid cheers and dancing underneath blazing yellow trees.
It was a remarkable shift from my experience of the last election call when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. I was alone in an apartment in central Pennsylvania, only publicly out as a transgender woman for a year and wrapping up a year of discoveries and crises. My largest freelance client had shut down and the night shift I picked up at a hotel to make up the difference was leaving me sleepless and poor. After a string of days calling my car home, the apartment itself felt like a titanic achievement. And though I largely seemed to “pass” as a cisgender woman, I was far from spared the harassment, condescension, and air of risk all women know all-too-well.
Exhausted and alone, I watched “my” state help elect a man who had already proven himself morally repugnant, a mascot of the vilest beliefs my neighbors seemed to hold. Staring into a terrifying confirmation that societal progress was far from inevitable, I know I wasn’t alone among trans people in wondering if this was, maybe, not “the right time,” if the fear and limitless shame of the closet were not a safer harbor in Trump’s America than the world outside of it.
That was, of course, not my choice. I put off coming out as long as I possibly could, until a labyrinth of mental breakdowns and emotional crises made keeping this secret a larger burden than I could possibly carry. I nearly did not survive it.
That struggle did not always present itself as gender dysphoria, but hiding my trans identity worsened a vast number of problems I was already experiencing — the failure to ever mourn my parents, both lost to me in adolescence, and the trauma of being a child in the lives of two people losing battles with addiction, poverty, and the law. A variety of psychiatric diagnoses had left me no closer to taming the fear and anxiety that was my parents' most lasting bequest.
Confronting my gender, in many ways, felt like the B plot of my life, a running theme but hardly the one that felt the most pressing. Approaching the lifelong project of living with trauma seemed far more immediate and, given what I knew about trans people’s lives in the United States, far safer than coming out.
But it was a fool’s errand, a flaming cart put before a bucking horse. The truth is none of the work and recovery I needed to do was really going to be possible before confronting the shame that served as a cataract on my own personal growth. Beginning my transition did not solve all my problems. But it made solving some of them possible.
Most of the direst problems our country faces long predate the election of Donald Trump. The inequality sustained by a racist and misogynist system, the trauma factory we call criminal justice, and the widespread violence endured by transgender people did not begin on November 8, 2016 and they did not end on November 7, 2020. They are holistic failures, persisted by the policy choices of generations of lawmakers and leaders.
Removing Trump will not solve all those problems. But it makes solving some of them possible. There is no ground for activists to make in a Trump administration, and his veto power renders all legislative accomplishments moot. He was an embodiment of widespread fear and hatred, and rooting out the cancer — of which he was only a symptom — will take far more time and work. But now we can begin. Now the work can start.
Cleaning my glasses of champagne and mask fog, I found my friend by the White House fence, covered in the cardboard remnants of a year of protests. He was crying in relief, amazed to feel something like optimism again. The crowd grew around us, waving Biden Harris banners and chanting Stacey Abrams’ name.
Victory can, in fact, be nuanced. We can celebrate a good thing happening while recognizing bad things still happen. We can climb a lamppost and cheer an election result while keeping our mask on to ward off the deadly pandemic. You are allowed to feel joy and, occasionally, required to as a matter of survival.
What must be avoided, however, is transforming that joy into complacency. Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris — both with patchy records and middling commitments to values I hold dear — will do all the work that needs done to make our society more equitable, to end the institutions of police and prisons as we know them, to keep trans people safe. This election will not solve all of our problems. But it does make solving some of them possible.
