Looking Through My Lens

Some people say that what I write is just as bad as the opposition’s rhetoric but I say you have to look though my lens. For most of my life I was a white liberal male but when I transition all that changed and not just in the obvious way.

When I first came out it was at a support group meeting which its members were mostly white middle income trans women. But then I went to the Transgender Day of Remembrance and I heard the names…

And when I read the name that I was handed I cried, and cried and could hardly read the name though my tears.

I started to ask “How can I help?”

Then in another support group a trans women came to the meeting all black and blue. She worked in construction and she was cornered by two who beat her. She ended up getting arrested for disturbing the peace when the officers wouldn’t arrest them she raised her voice.

Then there were the cutters, I never knew a cutter before but I have lost count of the number of trans people. Then there are those who succumbed to the hate against them.

Reading the news with all the state and national laws that were passed against us… The laws that want to make us criminals for just existing… The hate directed against us by those who want to force us out of existence.

Then there is the hate now coming out of Washington DC… Did you know that they actually banned flying the Rainbow flag at the Rainbow Inn for the fiftieth anniversary?

That is the lens that I look through, that is what shapes me.