I Think I Hate Trans People

A love letter to my sisters, who are not going to read it as one

This essay is free to read. Paid subscriptions are genuinely how I cover groceries and keep this going full time, so if the work means something to you, I’d really appreciate it

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There are mornings now when I read the word sister and something in my chest goes flat and cold, like a hand pressing the air out of a room. I used to feel the opposite. I used to feel the word like heat. I built half of who I am on the belief that there was a we, that somewhere out past the cops and the family who stopped speaking to me and the men who wanted me dead or wanted me quiet, there were women who had walked the same fire and come out the other side carrying the same burns, and that we would know each other on sight, and that knowing would be enough. I gave years to that belief. I gave it money I did not have and time I will never get back and a kind of open-throated trust that I do not think I am capable of anymore. And I am going to tell you what it has cost me, because the title of this essay is a confession and I am too tired to dress it up. I think I hate trans people. I think I hate my own. And I need ten thousand words to explain why that sentence is a lie, and why the truth underneath it is so much worse that I have been circling it for a year without being able to land.

The tiredness is the thing everything else grows out of, and nobody warns you about it. They warn you about the violence from outside. They warn you about the laws and the bathroom bills and the men in trucks and the long ugly machinery of a country that has decided your existence is a debate it gets to host. I was ready for that. I built myself to survive that. What I was not ready for, what no one had the decency to tell me, was that the deepest exhaustion of my life would not come from the people who hate me. It would come from the people who love me, or who say they do, or who loved me until I said the wrong thing in the wrong thread on the wrong Tuesday and discovered that love in this community is a lease and not a deed, and that the lease can be terminated by anyone, at any time, for any reason, with no notice and no appeal. I am tired in a way that sleep does not reach. I wake up already braced. I open my phone the way you’d open a door you heard a noise behind. And the noise is never the enemy. The noise is always us.

Somebody decides you are bad. It does not take much. Maybe you wrote something that landed wrong. Maybe you have a kink somebody finds embarrassing. Maybe you said you were tired, the way I am saying it now, and somebody decided your tiredness was an attack on their joy. Maybe you simply got too visible, took up too much room, became a name people knew, and the knowing made you a target the way a lit window makes a target. However it starts, once the decision is made, it spreads with a speed that has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with appetite, because the accusation is not really about you. The accusation is a permission slip. It tells everyone within reach that here, finally, is a person it is safe to be cruel to, a person whose suffering will be applauded instead of mourned, and people who have been starved of any way to feel powerful in their actual lives fall on that permission like it is the last food on earth. Women I knew to be gentle became unrecognizable inside a pile-on. I have watched people who could not get a landlord to fix their heat or a boss to respect their pronouns discover that they could, at least, destroy another trans woman, and feel, for the length of that destruction, like they finally mattered. And I understand it, which breaks me worse than not understanding would. I understand exactly where that hunger comes from, because I have felt it too, and understanding it has not made me forgive it. It has only made me lonelier, because now I cannot even hate them cleanly. I can only watch the mechanism run and know that every single person inside it is a person the world has already made desperate, turning that desperation on the only targets soft enough to reach.

The community in the abstract is one wound and the sisters are another, and the second one is the one that does not close. When I say sisters I mean the women, the trans women, the ones who were supposed to be the inner circle of the we, the people the whole architecture of my hope was actually built on. T4T. You know the phrase if you are one of us. Trans for trans. It is supposed to mean that we choose each other, that after a lifetime of being chosen against we finally have somewhere to put our tenderness that will not flinch, that the woman across from you knows what it is to be looked at the way you have been looked at and will therefore never look at you that way herself. It is the most beautiful idea I have ever believed in. And I am telling you that in my experience it has also been where I have been cut more precisely than anywhere else in my life, and the cruelty is precise exactly because it comes from someone who knows where the soft places are. A man who hurts you is working from the outside. He has to guess. A sister who turns on you has a map. She knows the thing you are most afraid is true about yourself, because you told her, at three in the morning, when you trusted her, and she keeps that knowledge the way you’d keep a key, and when the moment comes she does not hesitate to use it. I have had my own confessions read back to me as evidence. I have watched the most vulnerable things I ever said become the exact tools used to dismantle me, wielded by women who said the words I love you and meant them, I think, right up until loving me became inconvenient to their standing.

This is not a few bad people. If it were, it would be an easier essay, the kind where you name the villains and everyone goes home feeling righteous and having learned that some individuals are rotten. I am describing a pattern so consistent, so reliable, so reproducible across different cities and different friend groups and different years, that at some point I had to stop calling it bad luck and start calling it what it is, which is the way this community is built to work. We turn on each other because we have been given nothing else to turn. That is the materialist heart of it and I will keep coming back to it because it is the only thing that has kept me from sliding all the way into the hatred the title promises. We have no power. Read that slowly. We have no institutions. We have no money to speak of, no land, no real political vehicle that belongs to us, no capacity to actually punish the people and forces that are killing us. The cops do not fear us. The men do not fear us. We cannot reach any of them.

And all of that thwarted force, all of that rage with nowhere legitimate to go, all of that hunger to feel for one single second like we are not the most disposable people in the room, gets turned sideways, onto each other, because each other is the only thing within reach that we are actually strong enough to hurt. Horizontal hostility is the clinical phrase and it is far too clean for what it describes. What it describes is a room full of people who have been beaten until they cannot reach the people beating them, and who therefore beat the only people they can, which is the people next to them, who have also been beaten, and who beat back. A circle of the wounded, taking turns. That is the we I gave my life to.

The phrase no power can sound like an alibi, and I do not mean it as one. I mean rent. I mean that most of the trans women I have loved have been one bad month from the street, that the only safety net under us is other broke trans women, that mutual aid in this community works less like a lovely principle than like a frantic daily scramble in which the same forty dollars circulates between the same desperate people while the actual machinery of wealth sails on untouched overhead. When you live like that, when your survival is genuinely braided to the goodwill of the women around you, every relationship carries a weight it was never built to hold. A friendship is also a lifeline. A falling-out is also an eviction risk. The woman whose couch you might need in three months is a woman you cannot afford to be fully honest with, and the woman who might need your couch is a woman whose crises become your crises whether you can carry them or not, and underneath every interaction runs this current of raw unmet need, on all sides at once, and need that large makes people frightened, and frightened people guard what little they have, and in a community where what little we have is each other, guarding it means controlling it, and controlling it means the knives come out the second anyone seems like they might take more than their share of the tiny pool of care that is all we have managed to build. Call it plainly. We are drowning, and there is one piece of driftwood, and it was never going to hold all of us, and we knew that, and we climbed on anyway, and now we are doing to each other what drowning people do when the thing meant to save them starts to go under.

The moment a Black trans woman says what I am about to say, a certain kind of white person in this community arranges their face into hurt and the conversation becomes about their feelings, which is exactly the thing I am describing. So. The standard I am held to is not the standard anyone else is held to. I have watched white trans women do the exact things I have been crucified for and receive nothing, less than nothing, a soft landing and a round of supportive replies, because when a white trans woman is messy she is human and going through it, and when I am messy I am dangerous, I am toxic, I am a problem the community needs to be protected from. I am allowed to be useful and I am not allowed to be hurt. I am allowed to produce, to theorize, to make the thing everyone reposts, to be the Black trans intellectual whose work gives the room its credibility, and the instant I have a need, the instant I am anything other than a resource, the warmth evaporates and I am reminded, in a hundred small ways and occasionally one enormous one, that my place here was always conditional on my labor and never extended to my personhood. Hortense Spillers wrote about the way Black womanhood gets unmade, the way the categories that protect other women were never built to include us, and I read her in graduate seminars as theory and I live her now as Tuesday. The white trans woman gets to be a damsel. I get to be a workhorse and then a scapegoat, and the transition from one to the other takes about a week.

And there is a second move layered on top of the first one, subtler, almost flattering until you understand what it is doing to you. I am not only held to a different standard. I am made into a symbol, and being made into a symbol is its own quiet erasure, the kind that arrives dressed as honor. They want me visible. They want the Black trans woman in the lineup, the name on the panel, the face in the photograph, the proof that the room is not as white as it looks, and as long as I am performing that function I am celebrated in a way that feels, if you are starved enough, almost like being loved. But a symbol is not a person. A symbol is not allowed to be tired or in need. A symbol exists to make the people displaying it feel a certain way about themselves, and the instant I do something that complicates the feeling, the instant my actual humanity pokes through the function I was raised up to serve, the elevation reverses with terrible speed, because a symbol that misbehaves has become an embarrassment, a liability, a thing to be disavowed quickly before it stains the people who were using it to feel good. I have been the most celebrated woman in a room and the most disposable woman in that same room inside a single year, and the two are the same fact, because the celebration ran on what I could be made to mean. I was the occasion for it and never once the subject of it. And the day I insisted on meaning nothing except myself, just a woman, just human and therefore inconvenient, was the day I learned how thin it had all been, how it had never been love at all, just a kind of usage with very good lighting.

This is why the word starts to curdle. Why hate begins to feel like the honest name for it. Because what I am describing is the weather. It is the medium I move through, constant and ordinary as air. And there is only so long a person can be told they are family by people who treat them like staff before the word family starts to sound like a threat. I have sat in group chats that called themselves chosen family and felt more alone than I have ever felt in any room of strangers, because strangers do not promise you anything, and these people promised me everything, and the gap between the promise and the delivery is the exact size of the grief I carry, and that gap is the whole cruelty of it. Plenty of things have failed to love me. The world is mostly things that do not love me and I made my peace with that long ago. The community was different. It told me, specifically, repeatedly, as a core tenet of its entire self-understanding, that it would love me, that loving each other was the whole point, that we were each other’s only safety in a world built to grind us down, and then it did not, and the not-doing was dressed up in the language of justice so that I was not even allowed to call it abandonment. I had to call it accountability.

I had to thank them for it.

And then there is accountability, the word that has done more damage to me than any slur. A slur at least announces itself. You hear it and you know what it is and you know who said it and you can decide what to do. Accountability arrives wearing the clothes of everything I believe in. I am a leftist. I believe in repair, in transformation, in the idea that we owe each other change instead of disposal. I have written those words and meant them and I still mean them, which is what makes this so hard to say. Because the version of accountability that actually operates in this community, the lived practice as opposed to the gorgeous theory, does neither of those things. It launders cruelty through the vocabulary of care. It lets a person destroy you while feeling, and being seen to feel, like the most ethical person in the room. The structure is genius and I almost admire it. You take the natural human urge to punish, the oldest and ugliest thing in us, the thing that built every prison and every gallows, and you give it a new costume, a costume sewn from the language of liberation, and now the person doing the punishing is not a punisher, they are a survivor centering their truth, and the person being punished is not a victim, they are an abuser facing consequences, and there is no move available to the punished person that does not confirm their guilt, because defending yourself is fragility, silence is complicity, and any feeling at all is making it about you. I have been inside that box. There is no wall of it you can push on that does not push back harder. And the people operating it are not cynics. That is the horror. They believe. They think they are doing the work. They have simply rebuilt the courthouse and the stocks and the public square inside the only space that was supposed to be a refuge from exactly those things, and they have done it so thoroughly that to point at it is to be accused of defending everything it claims to oppose.

Let me slow one of them down for you, because the abstract lets you keep your distance and I do not want you to keep your distance. It starts small. A screenshot, usually, something a woman said, lifted out of the conversation around it, posted by someone with a following and a grievance, framed with a single line that tells you how to feel before you have read the thing itself. Within an hour the first wave arrives, the people who repost without checking, because checking is slow and outrage is fast and the rush of being early to a pile-on is real. The accused woman comes back to her phone after work and finds it, and she does the thing every one of us does the first time, the fatal thing, she tries to explain. She writes a long earnest reply laying out the context, certain that context will save her, not yet understanding that context is exactly what the format is built to refuse, that her thoughtful paragraph will be screenshotted too and held up as more evidence, look how she doubles down, look how she refuses to be accountable. The second wave is larger.

Now it is her response that is the crime, her tone, her insufficient grovel, and people who have never heard her name are explaining her psychology to thousands of strangers, and the diagnoses harden into fact through sheer repetition. By the second day the people who actually know her have gone quiet, every one of them, because they have done the math and felt the heat moving and understood that standing near her means catching it, so the friends evaporate, and she watches her entire support system perform its disappearance in real time, watches the people who told her they loved her decline to type a single word, and that specific abandonment, the silence of the ones who knew better, is the part that actually breaks a person, more than the strangers, more than the lies. The strangers were always going to be cruel. It is the friends going quiet that teaches you what you are worth.

And then it ends, with no verdict and no repair, just the crowd getting bored and moving on, leaving her standing in the wreckage of a life that took years to build and ninety-six hours to level, while the people who did it have already forgotten her name and moved their appetite to fresh meat, and she will spend the next two years trying to remember how to trust a single human being. I have watched that happen to women I loved. I have watched it happen to women who deserved better and to women who had genuinely done wrong, and it looks identical either way, which is the part that should keep you up. The machine cannot tell the difference. The good woman and the bad woman are fed through it the same, and the crowd feels the same righteousness destroying both, and that is how I know it is not justice, because justice is supposed to be able to tell the difference, and this cannot, and it does not even try.

None of it happens in the air. It happens on platforms, and the platforms are engines built to find our worst impulses and pay us for having them, and anyone still calling them neutral pipes has not been watching. The pile-on is the technology working exactly as designed. Outrage moves faster than nuance, so the feed selects for outrage. The screenshot stripped of its context travels further than the context, so the feed selects for the stripping, and every one of us learns, without ever being taught, that the way to be seen, the way to get the numbers that have become the only currency of relevance any of us can reach, is to take part in the destruction of someone, because destruction is what the machine pays out for. We are a wounded people turning on each other inside a casino that has rigged every game to reward the turning, that profits from our pile-ons, that discovered our horizontal hostility is extraordinary for engagement and tuned itself to pull as much of it out of us as it can. The cruelty I keep describing is partly us and partly a product, farmed off our pain by companies that have monetized the spectacle of trans women tearing each other apart the same way they monetize everything else. And we do it for free. We generate the content of our own destruction and they sell the ads against it, and we call it discourse, and we call it accountability, and it is neither, it is a machine eating us with our own hands.

And you are not allowed to say any of this, which is what closes the trap. A community under genuine external siege, and we are under one, the laws are real and the violence is real and I will never pretend otherwise, develops a deep intolerance for internal criticism, because every external enemy has taught it that disagreement is the first crack the enemy pours through. So dissent becomes treason. Naming a problem inside the house becomes handing matches to the people trying to burn the house down. I understand the reflex. I share it some days, the protective clench that says now is not the time, the enemy is at the door, we cannot afford to air this where they can hear. But a community that can never afford to air anything has agreed to rot quietly rather than risk being overheard, and the rot does not care that the timing is bad, the rot just proceeds, and meanwhile every woman being chewed up by the internal machine is told to swallow it for the good of a movement that is actively chewing her up, to take one for a team that has decided she is the thing it sacrifices. There is no worse time, I have been told, and there is always no worse time, the siege is permanent and therefore the silence must be permanent, and what that arithmetic builds is a people who will defend to outsiders the exact dynamics that are hollowing them out from inside, who will swear to the enemy that everything is fine in here while quietly bleeding, because admitting the bleeding feels like losing and we have lost so much already that we cannot stand to be seen losing one more thing, even when the thing is the one that is killing us. I am done with that arithmetic. I have run that math for years and all it ever bought me was a quieter death. Saying this out loud might cost me what is left of the community. The silence was costing me myself, and between those two losses I have finally, today, worked out which one I can actually survive.

I named this thing in my own work a while ago, before I could feel the full weight of it, when it was still partly theory to me. I called it feminized punishment. It is a specific kind of social discipline aimed at people read as feminine, a punishment that operates through accusation, where the accusation itself is the conviction, where the charge does not need to be proven because the whole function of the charge is to authorize a feeling, the feeling of being permitted to hurt someone, and proving it true was never the point. And I built the concept looking outward, at how the broader world does this to women, to trans women, to feminized people of every kind. What I did not want to see, what it took being on the receiving end of my own community to force me to see, is that we do it too. We do it to each other. We took the master’s oldest tool, the accusation that licenses the mob, and we picked it up and we use it on the women next to us, and we tell ourselves it is different when we do it because our cause is just. It is not different. The woman being burned cannot tell the difference between a righteous fire and an unrighteous one. The fire is the fire. And I have stood in it and I have also, God help me, helped build it under someone else, in years past, when I was younger and more certain and more frightened, and I would like to pretend I never did, but this essay is supposed to be honest, so. I have been the mob. I know its pleasures from the inside. And knowing that I have been what I am now condemning does not soften my condemnation, it sharpens it, because it means I am not describing them, the bad ones, the other people. I am describing us. I am describing me. I am describing a thing we all carry and almost all of us deploy the second we are scared enough, which in this life is often.

I said I have been the mob. The general version of that admission is a way of confessing without confessing, so here is the other one. Years ago there was a woman, and she did something, and the details do not matter and naming them would only restart the thing, and when the pile began I joined it. I did not start it. I have always told myself that, I did not start it, as though there is innocence in being the second knife rather than the first. But I joined, eagerly, and I remember the feeling, and the feeling is the part I have to be honest about. It felt good. It felt clean. For the length of that pile-on I was not the scared precarious woman I actually was, I was righteous, I was inside something warm and certain, and she was outside it in the cold, and I did not spend one second on her cold, because thinking about her cold would have ended my warm, and I wanted the warm more than I wanted to be decent, and so I helped a mob destroy a woman who is, last I heard, still not okay, years later, still carrying what we did to her. I do not know how to make that right. There is no mechanism for making it right, which is its own verdict on all of it, that a community which talks without end about accountability has built no actual road back for the people it destroys and no actual ritual of repair for the people who did the destroying, only the pile-on and then the silence and then the next pile-on. I carry her. I will carry her the way the women who carry me are carrying me. We are all hauling around each other’s wreckage and calling it a movement.

I keep saying we and I notice myself doing it. You would think, if I really hated trans people, if the title were true in the way a transphobe would want it to be true, that I would have stopped saying we by now. That I would be writing they. That I would have stepped outside the circle and started lobbing in. But I cannot do it. I have tried. In my worst hours I have tried to perform the exit, to tell myself these are not my people, I owe them nothing, I am free of them, and the words turn to ash because they are not true. They are my people. That is the entire problem. You cannot be betrayed by strangers. Betrayal requires belonging. The reason this hurts the way it hurts, the reason it has a claim on me that no transphobe’s hatred could ever have, is that these are mine, this is home, or it was supposed to be, and this kind of wound only ever comes from home. The man who screams at me from a truck window is nothing to me. He cannot touch the inside of my life. He is weather, he is noise, he is the cost of walking around in this body and I paid that cost a long time ago and I do not think about him. But the woman who held me while I cried and then, two years later, signed her name to the post that ended my place in the only community I had, she lives in me. She is in here now. I will be thinking about her when I am old. Because I loved her, and love does not have an off switch, and the love did not die when the trust did, it just turned into this, this thing I am writing, this ten thousand word scream that is actually, if you read it right, the longest love letter I know how to write, addressed to people who are not going to read it as love because they decided what I am a long time ago and they are not revising.

There is no dignified way to describe being cast out. Every word for it is pathetic. Excluded. Unwelcome. Dropped. There is a particular humiliation in admitting that you were not wanted, that you showed up and they closed ranks, that the group chat went quiet and then you realized there was another group chat, the real one, the one without you in it, the one where they talk about you. I have been on both sides of that second chat. I know it exists because I was in it once, talking about someone else, and now I am the someone else, and the symmetry is not lost on me. There is no high ground here. Nobody in this story gets to be innocent, least of all me. But knowing that does not make the exile hurt less. It makes it hurt more, because I cannot even comfort myself with the lie that I am a good person who was wronged by bad ones. I am a flawed person who was wronged by other flawed people in a system that takes our flaws and weaponizes them against each other for the entertainment and the moral capital of the crowd, and there is no villain to hate, and there is no innocence to reclaim, and there is just this enormous tiredness and this enormous love with nowhere to go and the slow horrible understanding that the home I thought I was building toward does not exist and may never have existed and that I have been homesick my entire adult life for a place that was always already a story we told each other to keep from freezing.

What undoes me most, on the worst days, is the gap between the slogans and the people. This community produces solidarity as an aesthetic at a rate I have seen nowhere else. The graphics are beautiful. Protect trans women. We keep us safe. The phrases are everywhere, in soft colors and careful fonts, reposted by tens of thousands of people who would, I have learned, watch a specific trans woman be torn apart and never lift a finger, who would in fact join the tearing once the woman had been properly labeled, because the slogan was doing its real work for the poster, for how the poster wanted to be seen, and the actual trans woman it named had nothing to do with it. We keep us safe. I have screamed into a pillow over those four words. Because I needed keeping safe, by name, on a particular night, and the same people whose feeds were papered with that promise were nowhere, were busy, were unwilling to spend one unit of their own standing to extend me any of the safety they posted about so beautifully. The abstraction gets all the love. The actual woman gets nothing. It is so much easier to protect trans women as a concept than to protect the inconvenient trans woman in your phone who is asking you for something real, and this community has perfected the art of doing the first loudly enough to never once have to do the second. I do not want your infographic. I wanted one person to stay in the room when staying got expensive, and I have learned how rare that person is, and I have learned they are almost never the ones with the prettiest feeds.

Desire is tangled in all of this, and pretending it is not would be dishonest. I am a lesbian. I am a transsexual lesbian and I want women, and the women I want are, more often than not, women like me, which is to say the same sisters I am telling you have hollowed me out. You cannot understand the specific despair of my position without understanding that the people who have hurt me most are also the people I am most drawn to, that the well I keep going back to is the same well that keeps coming up poisoned, and that there is no other well, because the whole brutal joke of being T4T oriented in a community this small and this volatile is that your entire dating pool is also your entire pool of potential destroyers, and the line between a lover and an enemy is one bad week long. I have wanted women who I knew, even as I wanted them, were capable of doing to me what others had already done. I have walked toward that fire on purpose because the alternative is a loneliness so complete that the fire starts to look like warmth. And I do not know how to fix that. I do not know how you build a love life out of the same population that has taught you to expect betrayal, how you stay soft enough to be loved by people you have learned, with good reason, to fear. The community did that too. It took the most tender part of me, the part that wants another woman’s hands, and it tied that tenderness to terror so tightly that I cannot reach for one without bracing for the other. That is a kind of damage I do not have a clean word for. Heartbreak is when one person leaves. This is when the entire category of people you are built to love becomes a category you are also built to flinch from, and you have to live inside that contradiction every single day, wanting and flinching, reaching and bracing, in love with your own people and afraid of them in the same breath.

And it reaches the body, which is the place I thought was finally mine. I spent so long getting to live in this body, fought so hard, gave up so much to arrive in it, and I expected that here at least, among my own, the body would be settled, a shared understanding, the one subject on which we would never wound each other because we all know what it costs. I was wrong about that the way I have been wrong about everything else. This community runs hierarchies of the body as vicious as any the straight world built, more vicious for being denied. Who passes and who does not. Whose transition has gone far enough to count and whose is still suspect. The endless silent ranking of faces and voices against a standard nobody will admit to holding, the way a room recalibrates around the woman who passes and quietly withdraws from the woman who does not, the particular cruelty of being measured by the very people who know to the cell how much the measuring hurts, because they are being measured in the same instant. We carried the regime of the body inside with us and we run it on each other, and we are worse about it than outsiders are, because an outsider’s judgment I can throw away, an outsider does not know, and when my own sister’s eyes move over my body and I watch her file me somewhere in her private ranking, that one lands, because she does know, she knows to the cell what she is doing and she does it anyway. The thing that was supposed to be our common ground became one more arena. There was nowhere it did not reach.

There is an audience for this essay that I despise, and I can feel them leaning in. There are people who would read everything I have just written and feel vindicated, people outside our community who have always said we are sick, that the trans thing is a contagion, that we devour each other because there is something rotten at the center of what we are. I can hear them already, building the quote tweet, lifting my sentences out of my mouth and hanging them around all of our necks. So let me say this as clearly as I have ever said anything. They are wrong, and the fact that I am telling the truth about us does not make them right, because their explanation and mine are opposites that happen to point at the same evidence. They think we hurt each other because we are degenerate. I know we hurt each other because we are destitute. They think the cruelty proves there is something wrong with being trans. I know the cruelty proves there is something wrong with a world that gives a whole people no outlet for their rage except each other. The behavior is real. The bruises are real. I am not lying about the bruises to protect anyone’s image. But the cause is not in our nature. The cause is in our conditions, and the difference between those two explanations is the difference between a people who deserve their suffering and a people who have been engineered into inflicting it on themselves, and I will spend the rest of my life on the side of the second explanation even on the days, like today, when the first one would be so much easier to believe.

I think about the ones who came before, the women whose shoulders this whole fragile thing is standing on, and I cannot tell whether thinking about them helps or makes it worse. They had so much less than we have and they built each other anyway, in the worst years, when the dying never stopped, when community meant a phone tree for funerals and a rotating watch at hospital beds the families would not come to. They kept each other alive with nothing, actual nothing, no language yet for half of what they were, a whole society that would have preferred them dead and got its wish over and over. And still, somehow, they managed to be more for each other than we are, or that is the inheritance I was handed, and maybe the inheritance is romance, maybe the dead are always gentler in the retelling, maybe they tore each other apart too and everyone who could say so is gone. But I do not think it is only romance. I think they understood something we have misplaced, which is that when the water is genuinely at your throat you cannot afford the luxury of disposing of each other, the stakes are too bare, you need every hand there is. We have a little more room now, a little more safety, a few more rights, and we have spent that room turning on each other with a freedom they could not have survived. The margin they bought with their bodies went straight into our cruelty, and I am ashamed of that, and some days the thought of having broken the hearts of women I never met, women who died so that I could stand here and be this tired, sits heavier on me than anything the living have managed to do.

Because that is the temptation, isn’t it. That is what the title is really about. The easiest thing in the world, when you have been hurt this much by your own, is to decide that the problem is your own. To let the hatred become general, to let it cover everyone, to stop making the exhausting distinctions between the structure and the people and just hate, cleanly, totally, the way you are allowed to hate things from the outside. It would be such a relief. I cannot tell you how much I have wanted that relief. To be done. To say, fine, you are all poison, I am out, I hate trans people, I hate my sisters, I am taking my love and my labor and my one wild body and I am leaving and I am never coming back. And the only reason I do not, the only thing that has stopped me every time I have stood at that door with my hand on the knob, is that I know, the way you know your own pulse, that the hatred would be a lie, and that living inside a lie that big would kill me faster than any of them ever could. Because I do not hate trans people. I cannot. I have tried and I cannot and the failure to be able to is the truest thing about me. What I hate is what has been done to us, and what we have been made to do to each other, and the unbearable fact that I cannot separate the people I love from the harm they have caused me because the harm came through the love, was carried on the love, would not have been possible without the love. You cannot be gutted by someone you do not let close. I let them all the way in. That was not a mistake. That was the whole point. That was the bravest thing I have ever done and I would do it again and it cost me everything and I would still do it again, and if that is not love then I do not know what the word is for.

I have thought a lot about whether there is a version of this where I just leave and am happier. Where I take the lesson the community taught me, which is that other people are dangerous and trust is a liability, and I build a small life with high walls and a few vetted people and no exposure, no community, no we, no risk. And I could probably do it. I have the scar tissue for it. I could become one of those people who got burned young and never reached again, careful and safe, and from the outside it might even look like wisdom. But I know what that life is. I have seen it on the faces of older trans women who made that choice, the ones who survived the eighties and nineties and the deaths and the abandonments and decided never again, and there is a particular deadness in them that frightens me more than the volatility of the people who are still trying. They are safe and they are gone. Something went out of them when they sealed the door, and I do not want that, I would rather keep getting hurt than become a person who can no longer be hurt, because the capacity to be hurt is the same capacity as the capacity to love, they are one muscle, and if I cut out the one I lose the other, and a life without the other is not a life I am interested in surviving for. So I stay soft. I stay stupidly, dangerously soft, in full knowledge of what softness has cost me, because the alternative is a kind of death I am not willing to call living, and because every once in a while, not often, but enough, the softness pays. A sister shows up when I am drowning. A woman I barely know reads something I wrote at four in the morning and sends me a single sentence that puts me back together. The thing I keep betting on actually comes through, just often enough to keep me at the table, and I do not know if that makes me wise or makes me a sucker and I have stopped being able to tell the difference.

A different kind of writer would turn it around here. Offer you the lesson, the redemption, the part where the community is worth it after all and we just need to be better to each other and here are the seven practices that will heal us. I am not going to do that, because it would be a lie, and because you have read enough of those and so have I and they have never once changed anything. The pile-ons did not stop because someone wrote a thoughtful essay about why pile-ons are bad. The disposability did not end because we all agreed in principle that disposability is wrong. Nothing in this community has ever been fixed by someone naming the problem beautifully, including by me, and I have named some of these problems about as beautifully as they can be named and watched the exact behaviors I described continue at full volume, often aimed at me, often by the same people who liked the essay. So I am not going to pretend that this is anything but a scream. It is the sound a person makes when they have given everything they had to a thing that did not hold them, and it is allowed to just be that, it does not have to resolve into a program, it does not have to end with hope, the demand that every account of suffering end with hope is itself one of the small cruelties, the way we make people who are bleeding reassure us that they will be fine before we will agree to look at the blood.

And I know what this essay is going to cost me. I am not naive about it. There will be women who read the title and never read past it, who slot it into the file they have been keeping on me, who hold it up as the last proof of whatever they decided I was. There will be people who say I have handed ammunition to the enemy, that a Black trans woman airing this in public is a betrayal, that I should have kept it in the group chat, except the group chats are the thing that broke me and there is no group chat left that would hold this. I am publishing it anyway, knowing the cost, because the alternative is to keep performing a wholeness I do not feel for an audience that has already shown me it will not protect me whether I perform or not, and if I am going to be punished either way I would rather be punished for the truth than for failing to perform the lie convincingly enough. That is close to the only freedom I have left.

There is also a particular knot in being the kind of writer I am, the kind who stays alive by turning this into pages, and you are reading the proof of it right now. I pay my rent with my wounds. That is not a figure of speech. The essays that keep me housed are the ones where I open myself the widest, which means I have a material incentive to bleed in public, to take the worst things that happen to me and shape them into something you will pay to read, and there is a version of that which is simply honest work, the oldest work there is, and there is another version, harder to look at straight, in which the community’s cruelty toward me is also my inventory, the raw material of the only career a Black trans woman who was never going to be let into anything else could build. I cannot always feel clean about it. Some days writing this is the one power I have, the power to make meaning out of what was done to me, to refuse to let it stay mere suffering. Other days it feels like I have found a way to profit from my own destruction, to keep the wound open because the open wound is what sells, and I cannot always tell which kind of day I am having. This essay is free to read, I wrote at the top, and asked you for money at the bottom, and both of those are true and necessary, and there is still something in the arrangement I will be turning over for years, the fact that my heartbreak is also my product, that I am standing here selling you the most painful thing in my life because selling it is how I eat, and that this too is what it is to have no other power, to be left nothing to sell but your own slow breaking.

The love was real. Even today, even writing this, even with the word hate sitting in the title like a stone, that is what I believe. Everything else can be taken from me, every group chat and every place at every table, they can rewrite the history and decide I was always the problem and erase me from the story they tell about those years, and I have made my peace with the fact that they probably will. But they cannot reach back and make the love not have happened. It happened. There were nights, real nights, when I sat in a room full of trans women and felt, for a few hours, what the whole idea promised, felt held and known, felt for those hours like the we was a fact instead of a hope and I was finally home, and those hours were real and they are mine and no betrayal that came after can retroactively unmake them. That is what I am actually grieving. Something that was real. Something that was, for a while, the most real thing in my life, and that turned out to be unsustainable, true the entire time and impossible anyway, because we were trying to build a home out of people who were each individually on fire, and you cannot build anything stable out of burning materials, you can only watch it light up gorgeous for a while and then watch it burn down, and stand in the ashes wondering if you imagined the warmth. I did not imagine it. I have to hold onto that. I did not imagine it. It was warm. It was just made of fire, and fire does what fire does, and loving it did not exempt me from the burn.

I have started, lately, to think that what comes next cannot be another community, that the shape of the thing is itself the problem, that I handed the word a weight it was never going to carry. I asked it to be my family and my whole context for being alive. I made it hold the entire load a hostile world had stripped from me everywhere else, and nothing can hold that, no group of frightened broke traumatized people can be all of that for each other, and the asking was part of what doomed it, because a thing asked to be everything fails you in every direction at once. Maybe what comes after is smaller and more honest. Maybe it is a few women, named and specific, chosen slowly and held without the fantasy that they are a movement or a guarantee of anything. Maybe it is love without the architecture, love that does not pretend to be infrastructure, love that knows it might end and stays for as long as it lasts anyway. I am not there yet. I am still standing in the rubble of the big version, the one that promised everything, and I have not finished grieving it enough to build the small one, and maybe I never will, maybe I am simply a person who will keep reaching for the big doomed thing because the big doomed thing is what I was shaped to want. But on the clearer days I can make out the outline of something that is not the community that hurt me and is also not the sealed bitter solitude that frightens me, something in between, with the softness kept and the expectations buried, and I am trying to walk toward it the way you walk when you have been hurt in every direction and no longer trust the ground.

So no. I do not hate trans people. I am a trans person, and I am writing this in a trans body, with trans hands, thinking in the language a thousand trans women taught me, grieving in a grammar that is ours and nobody else’s, and even this rage is a trans rage, a family rage, the kind you can only have at people you cannot stop belonging to. The title is a lie. I needed it to be a lie out loud, on the page, in front of all of you, because I have been carrying the feeling that gives rise to it in silence for so long that it was starting to rot me from the inside, and the only thing I have ever found that stops the rot is saying the worst thing plainly and then sitting with whatever is left after the worst thing has been said. What is left, after I say I think I hate trans people, is the discovery that I cannot, that I have never been able to, that the inability is the bedrock of me, that under all the exhaustion and all the betrayal and all the precise terrible cruelty of my own sisters there is a love so stubborn that it has survived everything that should have killed it, and that this love, which has brought me more pain than anything else in my life, is also the only thing in my life I am completely sure was worth it.

I am still tired. Saying all this has not fixed the tiredness. I will close this document and open my phone and the noise will still be there, and some of it will still be us, and I will still flinch, and the next time someone is buried by a pile-on I will still feel the cold flat thing in my chest and still have to argue myself back from the easy hatred one more time. None of that is over. There is no version of this where it is over. But I have said it now and the building did not collapse, and I am still here, still soft, still betting, still in love with my doomed beautiful burning people against all evidence and all self-preservation. That is just the truth, which is that I came to the edge of hating my own and looked over it and could not jump, and walked back, and sat down, and wrote this instead. Make of that what you will. I am too tired to make anything of it myself. I only know that the love outlasted the hate, again, the way it always has, the way I am beginning to suspect it always will, no matter how many times these women break my heart, no matter how many tables I am thrown from, no matter how thoroughly the home I wanted refuses to exist. I keep loving them. It is the most foolish thing about me. It is the only thing about me I would not change.

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*If this work means something to you:

https://ko-fi.com/bundleofstyyx