Last updated on 25/06/2026
Guess this has become a yearly tradition. What’s the line? Once is chance, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action? I’m not a consultant anymore, and I refuse to look up the quote. Anyway, it’s Pride again, and I’m still alive. Woooooo. Recently that has felt like a motherfucking achievement. The last year has been, well, it’s been shitty. Shitty enough that I set my professional life on fire and moved across an ocean. Turns out, I still believe that was the right decision in hindsight, we’ll get to it, but suffice to say, everyone who isn’t marginalized and actively standing between me and harm can feel free to eat my whole ass.
I started out my ’24 post as a rumination on the actual word ‘pride’, and how it’s weird to feel pride in a thing that’s intrinsic. I didn’t exactly choose to be trans, yo. Now, I would have, all things considered, and maybe I should write about that some day, but the tl;dr is that there’s real value in having trans experiences.
’25 gets a little closer. I mention Pride is perhaps the wrong deadly sin for June. In that piece I mentioned lust, tongue-in-something-ly, but mostly I was focused on wrath. I came back around to pride though. Here’s the operative bit:
If I am proud of anything during Pride, it’s that I’ve acknowledged who I am. I’ve stood up to say “Hey, by the way, all of those things you’ve assumed about me? Not so much,”… If there is anything I feel pride in, it’s spitting in the eye of a society that does not want people like me to exist, and telling them exactly where they can cram it.
It’s 2026 now, and as I said, I fucked off to a different country because where I lived was controlled by assholes that do not want people like me to exist. Look at this hateful sumbitch here, for example. That’s Mike Braun, the governor of Indiana, proclaiming June nuclear family month. The difficult thing about being a Hoosier is that I must admit my state can fail a child so completely that they might grow up to be Mike Braun. Or Mike Pence. Maybe the lesson here is not to name your child Michael?
Anyway, Braun is obviously doing this because he wants to be petty and insult queer people during June, but guess what, a whole fucking lot of us are both queer and in nuclear families. Mike is as incompetent as he is hateful; unsurprising, as one usually begets the other. I could fill the rest of this article with other examples of people in power being hateful, but we’ll just take it as read. Go check out one of the many excellent news sources about government, the law, and trans people. The point is the climate has become truly hostile.
And they want it to be hostile, have no doubt. They want being queer to be so miserable that no one would ever dare voice those thoughts. Why? To make sure that their children perform the roles they were birthed for, or so they don’t have to acknowledge the feelings they themselves have, or to please some authority figure. None of the reasons are good, but they have their reasons, and so I have mine. If they want me to hate being queer, then I will revel in it. If they want it to be so miserable that I hide it, then I will be the loudest rainbow-spewing jackass this side of a skittles commercial. I will gladly feast upon those that would subdue me.
Let’s talk about visibility.
I’m one of a small number of trans people in my department, and a conversation I’ve had repeatedly here is, give or take, “You’re so forward about outing yourself. It’s so {positive sentiment}.” So, I have two reactions to this. First, bitch, please. I don’t think I pass. Several friends assure me that it’s harder to see with every passing day, but even if they’re dead right and I pass perfectly, I personally will never feel that way. Or at least, I can’t imagine a future where that’s true.
Transitioned or not, out or not, I still struggle with dysphoria. I look in the mirror, and depending on day and mood, I see a guy with really soft features. There are days when I go through three or four outfits before going out the door. There are days where I feel like every eye is on me, even when it is not.
Why? Well, “We can always tell.” It’s a plank of the Republican party, and basically every other group of right-wing good-old-days-protofascists the globe over at this point. That constant drumbeat seeps into your bones, until you half believe it too.
On my better days though? Well, on those days, I want you to be able to tell. I’m fucking proud to be transgender. Not the whole intrinsic thing, but to have had the courage to be like “Hey, um, actually, I’m this way, not the one you assumed.” Like I’ve said elsewhere, it’s a small thing, but it’s a huge thing, and I wouldn’t give up the difference in perspective and experience that I’ve had as a result.
It’s more than that though. Visibility, as it turns out, matters. My kid is friends with another kid from a deeply religious family at school. We’ve hung out with them a few times, and my wife and I fight a little bit about the appropriateness of that association. I don’t want to control who my kid is friends with, but I’m a little frustrated hanging out with a family whose monthly tithes materially contribute to our modern hellscape. There’s a pretty much direct line from their income and beliefs to me not seeing my daughter the last six months.
On the flip side, it’s a big, deeply religious family. There are a bunch a bunch a kids, and given the ever increasing portion of the population that identifies as queer, there’s a good chance one of those kids is one flavor of the rainbow or another. That’s not gonna be a supportive environment for it, unless a deeply personal experience changes the minds of the family patriarch. I wouldn’t bet on that though. So there’s a good chance that my wife and I might be the only openly queer people in that kid’s life, for the 15 minutes of time we see each other during the kid’s play dates.
And, like, I hate to say it, there’s real value in that kind of visibility. When I went through college, I didn’t meet a single out trans professor. Turns out, I did have a professor that was some shade of trans, but they weren’t out at the time. When I think about that, it’s hard not to be angry. They don’t owe me being out, of course, no one owes anyone that. On the flip side, how different would my life be if I’d have met just one person where I could go “Them. They’re like me, and they get to have the job I want. I can do this”? I like to think it would be a lot different.
So, when we talk about me outing myself, like, I’m not so sure it’s true. But true or not, I’m gonna choose to do it every time. I remember what it was like to be the scared kid that had never seen another person like themselves. I remember what it was to think that I can choose a career or being myself. I remember how afraid I was that when I came out I’d lose all of my friends, my fraternity brothers, and my wife. I believed all of that because I’d been fed a lie. Powerful jackasses wanted me to believe I was broken for reasons that I still fail to fathom. It would have been easier to recognize the lie for what it was with just a few examples of out people just living their lives as if it was the most normal thing in the world. And while I may not owe that to anyone, it’s something I’m happy to give.
Happy Pride everyone. Remember to take your complimentary brick on the way out.