feeling 'bout half past dead
Today I am feeling quite down, and you, internet therapybox, get to hear about it.
Reasons to be cheerless: there's a transpocalypse looming in a few weeks' time when the UK brings in a de facto bathroom ban. Your friends are freaking out, for legitimate reason. You're trying to kick up a fuss, but no-one's listening except the people who were listening already, and (expanding the gloom outwards) no-one's listening to them. The government doesn't care, the media is on the other side, the law is an ass. That's your professional opinion, by the way. The people who oppose you are not just a theoretical intellectual opposition in principle, but are aided and abetted by a sneering mass of internet trolls who'd love to make your life hell for no good reason except to punish you for standing up for your community.
And you have a 9am meeting where you've to intellectualise all of this, square it off with some quotes from statutes, come up with rational suggestions, and smile.
It is really heavy, being a trans advocate at the minute. I come at this from a few angles. I'm a legal academic who specialises in gender identity and human rights. I'm the political coordinator for my local trans pride group. I'm the co-chair of my university's staff LGBTQ+ network. I'm a genderqueer person. This is my work, my volunteering, and my personal life.
Mostly I wouldn't change that, but some days I want to take the weight off and put it down beside me on the sofa. I'd look at it kindly. It's tired too. We'd sit in companionable silence, me and this unbearable weight. We don't need to talk it out. We both know what it is, how it feels. It didn't ask to be mine and I didn't ask to belong to it. We just both live here now.
Sometimes you're the best-placed person to do certain work. Sometimes that work is really, really necessary. It's always been my view, with an unshakable loyalty to social justice, that it's a moral duty to do that work when you can. It won't always be your turn, but when it is, you show the hell up.
I didn't anticipate, when I started writing about trans people and human rights ten years ago, that in 2025 we'd be in this position. But what I can say is that I have ten years of experience in this field now. I didn't pick it up, as many of my opposing faction have done, like a fashion in the last five years. I didn't come upon it reading the Telegraph. I started working on this because I saw a gap in human rights protection and I thought, maybe there's something I could contribute here. I've developed my expertise through intellectual excellence and lived experience - mine, and the voices of others.
But now the crisis is here, and that's mine too. I don't get to make a career in this field, and drop out when things get rough. This is my fight whether I like it or not.
And today, I'm choosing 'not.' I'm all out of defiance and bravery. I'm just sitting here, with the weight.
Put the load (put the load) right on me.
