Well, here we are.

I learned young that there are no ends to the earth that cruelty won’t follow you to. To be vulnerable a moment, as if I’m ever not in all these writings, when I was bullied, I was often bullied in what I’d consider a shockingly trans way, in retrospect. I was a lonely kid. Easy to pick on and tease. Isolate. Calling me names and using their words to get as far under my skin as they could just to watch me explode. It often made me wish my bullies were the kind who would try to beat me up, but a bully knows not to fight you in a way they know they can’t win. Worse, the smart ones know to bully you in a way that looks just enough like it isn’t breaking any rules. As many of you will surmise, yes of course I got in trouble for beating their asses to the ground once I had enough. That constant, dogged hounding, always trying to make me lose my temper because it was funny. The same way some ghoulish bigot thinks he can ‘trigger’ me and show everyone what an angry freak I am. My teachers, my parents, my adults and gods would tell me, “You just have to ignore them. You need to learn to just walk away.” Where? Where can I go where they won’t follow? Where do their feet refuse to fall, where is the line they’re too scared to cross? I searched that recess yard for years, teacher. All I learned was that even if there were no end to the horizon and infinity were real, even if the town were big enough for all eight billion of us and kept stretching on and on into forever, they would stop at nothing just to follow me a little longer. I’m not asking for a homeland to fight for or an eden of my own. I am telling you, they would not even let me have the rubble or the camps if they thought I could find the briefest reprieve from them there. They would take the wasteland from me if that’s where I ran to to hide and live in isolation, just trying to carve myself a peaceful life and for what, what is my sin? I am asking to live, and worse yet, because I am human, I dared to try to do so unalone.

I have been threatened in front of my mother as we rode the train together. I remember how I shouted back at the man how I just wanted to be left alone, to be left in peace, how I didn’t deserve this, any of this. I remember the way every passenger looked at me then looked away, because they couldn’t bear to have their own peace disturbed. I remember the one teenage girl that started to lay into him too once I yelled loud enough to the rest of the car what this man was doing, bless her rage. But I also remember the way my mother’s hand gripped my arm. I remember the fear in her eyes. I remember the pleading look, don’t fight this, don’t let him hurt my baby, don’t put yourself in this danger. She thought I would die that day if I decided to defend myself too audaciously and for me, it was just another Tuesday. I looked at this man and I knew he was easily a weight class or two above me. He looked so deeply unwell in his vile rambling. Of course I could die if that’s what he wanted. If I were all alone on that train, maybe I never would’ve stepped off or maybe it would still be just another Tuesday. I chose to become a woman knowing of the men I could meet in the woods. I made this choice knowing both what it would cost me and the risks I’d face by choosing this life. Never once have I regretted it. But I still can’t shake the look I saw in mom’s eyes. How that paralyzing animal fear rose up in her that she was going to watch her daughter die in front of her. How lonely I felt, looking back at her. Shouldn’t it make you so angry that you start shouting too?Where would I even run, mother? I don’t want to run. Don’t I deserve the train too? Don’t I deserve the bathroom and the computer and the workplace? Don’t I deserve my pound of flesh or at least a little peace? If no one else on that train was going to shout and fight for me unless I did, why shouldn’t I make a scene? Don’t I deserve to be fought for? I want more than courtroom justice. I want more than pride parades. I want more than basic fucking decency. I want to be fought for. If I’m the only one that’s willing to pick that fight then I’ll gladly do it for my sake alone. That’s the very least I deserve.

Sometimes I’ll sit for over two hours arguing, yelling at people on discord about how fucking stupid and illiterate they are. I don’t seek these people out, I just have the audacity to use a mic as a woman and the gall to have an androgynous voice. I don’t leave my online games and I don’t mute people after I report them, not unless they’re especially tiring and noisy or I myself am exhausted that day. I’d rather fight and tear into them or even just piss them off as hard as I can til I teach them that they’re the ones that are going to have to learn to shut the fuck up. That they can’t say whatever they want without someone biting back, hard. I know what a stubborn woman I am. No, I won’t laugh it off and jokingly call myself a fool. It is simply me and I take that very seriously. What if there’s someone like me watching in the wings, wondering if it’ll be safe to come out? Watching like I used to, if it was a safe place where others like me felt okay being seen in. I’ll give you a tip: there always is. Call it a sick kind of fun, call it heroic, call it unstrategic, but it’s who I am to live this loud and headstrong. I’ve made the world better for it, by inches or less probably, but even just those small victories give me the confidence and willpower to reach for the greater ones. But when I tell friends how I made things better in the end or at least how I neither bent nor broke while I made a fool of them all… I’ll admit, I can still sorta tell how they never really get it. I don’t blame others for not wanting to expose themselves to the shit that’s on my shoes. In case the above paragraphs weren’t clear, it’s not like it’s fun. But it does get… lonely. It’s easy to say “I would’ve just left,” or “You need to learn to just walk away,” when you’re not angry enough at the world. It’s easy to say that as long as you don’t think about how lonely it feels to have to do that again and again and again while everyone around you gets to do what you can’t. It’s easy to say that if you don’t want to get to do the same things men can do or feel the same safety when you choose to speak in the same public spaces. Isn’t it?

But I wish to go where I please. I wish to live, just like you, in sunlight, on crowded streets, in online forums and public facing workplaces. I wish to live in these places with a pride and love for myself so deep it crushes all my doubts under the pressure. I am willing to fight for that small and profound social privilege I once had as a young man but I do not bereave others who find my way too harsh, too direct and forceful. It’s ugly and it’s messy and damn can it ever be a burden on the soul wondering if you’re doing and saying all the right things, riding the razor’s edge of high running emotion and calm, coherent rhetoric. But I’m also privileged enough to live somewhere I’m loved, somewhere I have a home and close community that has accepted me even after all the wrong I’ve done in my life. I have somewhere I can go when I’m tired. If I want to go somewhere new, I know I’ll have to stay hyper vigilant. If I don’t want to be called sir I’ll have to put on makeup and not dress too butch. I’ll need to steel my heart against any flaw I hear in my voice. I know the sheer energy it takes just to be strong and how exhausting it is to feel safe. But I know I can do at least a little good with this strong heart of mine, not just for others but for myself. I deserve to be fought for too. I deserve to be fought for and I am strong enough to fight so I will fight until it’s safe enough for you and me and all those we love to rest at last in the peace we deserve. When I am tired I will rest and heal and dance and sing and rise again unbroken. I am loved and love in kind; it makes me gentle and nurtures my hope. My deepest scars were always healed by love. Oh, what an ugly, rare thing it can sometimes be to find your strength hiding in the callouses of your heart. But oh, what an honour I feel to use it for the sake of those I love.

Suffice it to say, I have never feared what may fall upon my head from on high. And they are not the rain. They are men. Bigots. They are not calamity, they are not disaster and there is nothing natural about the way they think the world ought to be. If I were to run, the storm won’t follow but men always will. If they both fell upon me, the rain would heal my nature but the men would burn it all, just another harvest for their vile machine gods or a light chuckle for their circuses of ridicule and humiliation. There is no amount of space they will ever be satisfied with taking. You can walk away and walk away and walk away and one day there will be nowhere left to go and when you face them again, you will have forgotten the rage you have to grip with two hands just to say, “No, this is where I belong, you are the one that is going to leave,” because rage is a muscle that must be exercised. Learned and learned from, but never feared. If you learn how to use it, it will protect you. It will save you from the fear that holds your hands and the darkness aching in your deepest regrets. The first weapon you ever held in your newborn fists, now yours to form against those who would dare to come for you and the people you hold dear. The first step, and the only step, is to just keep trying, no matter how many times you’ve failed before. To try and speak up, to challenge the wicked whenever you can and even if it never gets easier, even if it doesn’t do much, know that you still changed my world for the better. For people like me, just seeing that someone else tried for me is enough to keep me going. We’ll rage for love and we’ll rage for pride. That is enough. There is no victory too small to matter when you fight to make your world a kinder, softer place.

So you can tell me how you would’ve just left or how you’d never do that to yourself but don’t you dare dishonour my wish to live. Tell me how you could never do what I have no choice but to do every time I merely wish to exist unalone, but pity not my beautiful, angry life. Fight for me, fight by my side or love me from afar from wherever it is safe, but don’t you dare call me a fool. I know what privilege means and I gave that up gladly to live as a woman. Now I’m going to take it back, by wrathful pride and righteous love because that is what we all deserve.