This weekend, Atticus Sparks will take a six-hour concealed weapons permit course. He’s not a gun owner, but as an 18-year-old transgender man, he worries he may one day need to own a gun “just in case.” Since Donald Trump’s election, Sparks has faced threats of violence and sexual assault online from the president-elect’s supporters.
“I hope we don’t need guns anymore,” said Sparks, who lives in South Carolina. “But everyone here is very pro-gun. I work across the street from a gun store and I see people carrying loaded rifles all the time.”
In addition to taking concealed carry classes, Sparks faces the more mundane task of making sure all the paperwork is in order. This week he met with a lawyer about legally changing his name, but was told that due to the slow pace of family court, he probably wouldn’t have a trial date until next summer.
An existential threat and a bureaucratic nightmare: For transgender people across the country, Trump’s victory would mean a frightening acceleration of the discriminatory policies that conservative lawmakers have already instituted in states across the country.
Republicans spent about $215 million on anti-trans ads this election. (Sample line: Kamala Harris is “for them, not you.”) Trump’s official platform, Agenda 47, is “critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate “We will cut federal funding to schools that promote racial, sexual, and social ideas.” “Political content about children” and “keeps men away from women’s sports,” a reference to trans women and girls playing on teams according to their identities.
The president-elect also proposed banning federal funding for gender-affirming care and said he would encourage schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family.” This is an abbreviation for conservative Christian emphasis on gender roles and values in the public classroom.
Experts and advocates have warned that Republican control of Washington, D.C., could set back LGBTQ+ rights by decades, threatening transgender health care, marriage equality, and the safety of the gay community as a whole. are.
Faced with this new reality, Alex, a teacher in Texas, called the crisis hotline three times in the past week. “This is the lowest I’ve been in a while,” he said. “I feel like I get used to tolerating a certain amount of not being OK, hiding, being pushed around. But it feels like it’s gotten to a point where it’s almost unbearable.”
Some of Alex’s co-workers know he is transgender, but his students don’t. He considers himself “stealth” at work. In other words, they hide their transgender identity in order to conform to cisnormative standards. (For this reason, Alex has used a pseudonym in this article.)
“The big thing that people don’t realize is that they’ve likely interacted with a transgender person without knowing it,” Alex says. “I use the men’s locker room at the gym every morning, and no one is hurt or upset. I can assure you all that (Trump’s victory) will be a big blow to your loved ones, Or it’s going to affect the loved ones of their loved ones, and they just don’t know it.”
The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQ+ youth, reported a 700% increase in calls, texts, and messages to its crisis hotline since Election Day. Young people experiencing depression, self-harm or suicidal thoughts are encouraged to contact the organization, but according to the News on the 19th, “long hold-ups can occur at a particularly vulnerable time for LGBTQ+ people.” It is said that there is “time”.
Corinne Goodwin, executive director of the Trans Equity Project of Eastern Pennsylvania, said in an email that since the election, the nonprofit has seen a 600% increase in calls to its information line for people seeking resources and assistance. I wrote it. Participation in peer-led support groups increased by 200%, and requests for help regarding gender or name change markers increased by 1,000%.
Goodwin said the day after the election, the group received a call from a transgender person who lives in a very rural area of Pennsylvania. The caller said four neighbors had come to his home the night before, banged on his front door and threatened to assault him because he was transgender. The person called the police, but the police refused to investigate, saying there was no evidence of the incident.
“This is an example of what many transgender people fear: not only that their rights will be curtailed or taken away, but that the most reactionary elements of society will be emboldened to challenge them. I fear that he may seek to cause harm,” Goodwin wrote.
In Rochester, New York, Javana J. Davis leads Wave Women Inc., a nonprofit that supports underserved bipoc transgender and gender nonconforming people. “The challenges are going to get worse before they get better,” she says. “People are scared. That’s the main emotion pervading the community: fear.”
Davis said her goal is to help as many transgender people as possible navigate the tortuous process of legally changing their names by the end of the year.
Mike is a transgender man in his 60s who leads a support group in Pennsylvania. “People talk about moving to other countries, but the reality is that it’s not realistic,” he said. (Mike used a pseudonym and did not wish to print his exact age to prevent being identified by his employer.)
Sparks, 18, plans to move to a state with better access to gender-affirming care. This year, South Carolina banned access to care for transgender youth and also prohibited the use of public funds, such as Medicaid, to provide medical care to transgender people of any age.
South Dakota also limits access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth. So in some ways, the morning after the election “was just another day for them,” said Morgan Peterson, 25, an administrative assistant at the Transformation Project, which provides services to transgender people in the state. ) says.
Peterson, who is nonbinary, said many of his clients have decided to move to neighboring Minnesota, where there are better health care options. “In my case, I am not taking hormones and I am very lucky, so I am determined to stay here and fight for my people,” they said.
Zaya Perisian, a 22-year-old content creator from Los Angeles, renewed her passport this week. She has no plans to leave the country and considers herself somewhat relieved by the state’s blue status. But she wants to be prepared just in case.
“We seem to be in the early stages of something much darker for the future of this country when it comes to minority communities,” Perissian said. “The last time Trump won, we thought, ‘Everything is going to be fine,’ and for the most part it was. But this time, it’s different. I feel like there’s something very sinister behind it. Many of us just want to be prepared because we don’t know what kind of legislation they’re going to pass to erase us from society and history.”
Kendall, 47, from Pennsylvania, was planning to marry her partner next summer. They envisioned a grand, fairy-tale wedding, perhaps in Europe. But as the election approached, the couple, both trans women, decided they didn’t want to take any chances. They feared that President Trump’s inauguration could spell the end of marriage equality. They eloped in September.
“We had a few people come to the apartment and we did it,” Kendall said. (She asked that a pseudonym be used due to safety concerns.) “We did it in the living room, and people asked, ‘Did you have fun?’ We tried to play it like we wanted something intimate, but the real reason was because it needed to be legal. ”
Kendall now thinks, “God knows how long we’ll be allowed to be married.”
Shane Whiteside, a 30-year-old from South Carolina, also wants to legalize his relationship with his fiancée before Trump’s election. “I told her, I know I didn’t want to rush it, but I’m really scared that if I don’t marry you right now, the country won’t let me get married. Because they take property away from “same-sex marriage,” he said.
In the days following the election, some lawmakers and commentators scapegoated transgender people for Kamala Harris’ loss. Such messages reflect past retrograde thinking from John Kerry’s failed candidacy in 2004, when politicians on both sides blamed the loss on the senator’s support for Citizens United. He claimed that.
Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told the New York Times: I have two little girls and I don’t want them to get run over by men or former male athletes on the field, but as a Democrat I should be scared to say that. ”
Transgender people are already more likely than cis Americans to experience gender-based violence, poverty, and housing insecurity. Comments like Moulton’s add to the pain of those preparing for a hostile administration.
“When it comes to transgender people, it’s really just a bunch of bullshit coming from both sides,” Perissian said. “We’re just exhausted. We’re trying to find our American dream here, and unfortunately our future in this country is looking less and less bright.” I heard many transgender people say after this election that they feel like our best days are behind them.
Transgender people are now clinging to a sliver of hope. Alex felt it the morning after Trump’s victory when a colleague hugged him. Mike feels it in his transgender support group. Kendall got that feeling from watching old clips of Rogers being a good neighbor.
Sparks mentions a quote he saw on social media this week: “For every bigot, there will be an ally.”
“Communities and transgender people aren’t just going to disappear,” Sparks said. “They might take it away from school and stuff, but we don’t disappear. They don’t teach us that, so we express in words what we feel. I can’t do that.”
But for Perissian, “It’s not about hope. It’s more about waiting and seeing.”
In the United States, you can call The Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678678. You can also call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat at 988lifeline.org, or text HOME 741741. Contact a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
