Each year between November 13 – 19, people and organizations around the country participate in Transgender Awareness Week to help increase understanding about transgender people and the issues members of the community face.

So, as your resident transgender person, I guess I have to do a thing. One can’t go against the global calendar cabal. I just wonder why I haven’t seen many of the other folks doing things. I’m terminally online, especially in trans spaces.

Finding Slack Like a Dutiful Subgenius

I made some passing comments in our work’s inclusion slack channel. I thought about posting to the dei channel for the local tech organization I flit about the edges of, but thought better of it. The last post was for Juneteeth in 2023. My post in the work slack was the fourth post of the year. The other two were my posts, of course, offering little flags for pride and linking an article where Abigail Thorn spoke about her VA work in Baldur’s Gate 3 and trans representation in gaming in general.

What do I want you to take away from that? That slack channels aren’t a meaningful way of building community within a space? No, not really. Looking at other work channels, we see relatively vibrant communities, discussing knitting, tabletop RPGs, and videogames with hundreds of posts this year, most with dozens of posts in the last month.

What Then?

Drag Queen Trans Lady Story Hour

Let me tell you another story.

Currently, there’s a bit of a schism in my family. I have a relative that consistently misgenders me. After months of correcting them and no progress, I got tired of it and read them the riot act, and they no longer speak to me. Then, months later, they blew up at my wife when she used my proper pronouns while talking about me. The relative eventually apollogized to my wife for the outburst, but no one has really addressed the underlying issues, like why my spouse gendering me correctly made them yell.

One more, and then we’ll get to my point. Swearsies.

Shortly after the election, a friend asked me how I was. Part way through that conversation, he made a point of saying that he didn’t want me to be in a super-negative echo chamber, and that things would be alright. The echo chamber in question was the company of other concerned and upset trans people. I wonder what he thinks about that conversation, or even if he thinks about that conversation.

Ok, But What’s Your Point?

Most people, even people in my immediate orbit, are somewhere between indifferent to or ignorant of… well me I guess. They don’t know what it’s like to be me well enough to understand why those stories above are upsetting, and they sure don’t know those sorts of dissapointments are frequent.

Days of visibility, weeks of awareness, and fortnights of familiarity are tools. They give large entities an opportunity to do some of the labor of introducing people to the broad strokes of the trans experience so that we don’t have to.

But also, they give me an excuse to invite people in my orbit to engage. I’m not out here saying “we should all know about and recognize this holiday”. My take, if it’s not obvious, is that it’s largely made up bullshit. But it’s largely made up bullshit that means well and that maybe we can leverage.

I’m out here saying “As a relative, friend, or coworker, I wish you knew more about me. Why don’t you ask?”