I was talking to a close friend I’ve known since I was a teenager this week, and I noted that I was about to reach a significant milestone in my Ph.D. program. She commented that it was amazing because when she met me, my dyslexia was so bad that I couldn’t write a decipherable sentence.

As a youth, I was dyslexic, trans and closeted, homeless as a child and homeless as an adult, survived drug addiction and abuse, and survived society trying its goddamnedest to throw me away. I endured fascism’s Straight Slate fight as a youth, and I endured fascism’s anti-HERO fight as an adult. I survived the AIDS epidemic even as my friends did not; I survived beatings even as friends did not; I was able to transition, even though I lost everything in doing so; through technology, I was able to compensate for my learning disorder. I came so close to acting on the lie that I was wretched, wrong, worthless, and utterly powerless. Had it not been for the trans community reaching out to me the very night I’d planned my suicide, I would have died believing their lies.

When I think of the things that I’ve been able to be a part of or even instrumental in, I am more than awestruck. From setting up a trans shelter and indigent trans medical care program in the 1990s to fighting for and accomplishing setting up the first trans-specific housing-first program and getting to be intimately involved in establishing two trans-positive FQHCs; from helping Brenda Thomas with her dream of having a trans center to somehow being able to make it happen, over and over again; from collecting some trans history as a hobby to setting up a trans archive and library; from helping Brenda with her research decades ago to getting several papers of my own published; from being curious about trans lexical and feminist history to being able to help rewrite that very history… to now working on my doctorate in clinical psychology.

The gratitude and genuine awe I feel are humbling. Here, I think it appropriate to quote Aimé Césaire’s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in thinking about the self-regard fascists and bigots inspired in me:

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.

Lying is your trademark.

And you have lied so much to me

(lied about the world, lied about me)

that you have ended by imposing on me

an image of myself.

underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,

That is the way you have forced me to see myself

I detest that image!  What’s more, it’s a lie!

But now I know you, you old cancer,

and I know myself as well.

Self-resentment, guilt, and shame can come so easily in a cishet-supremacist culture, becoming something of a Gordian knot, locking genuine selfhood away in a tomb of interwoven toxic messages until it becomes an identity that one might even fight to preserve. I shudder to think of all that would be lost had cishet-supremacist culture succeeded in its work of dividing me from myself.