Waking Up Trans in Trump’s America

“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams,” Kafka’s Metamorphosis famously begins in one translation, “he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” There’s something quietly remarkable about this line, which catapults us, with disquieting ease, into a world of horror, of monstrosity.

It’s one of those lines you remember without having to memorize it. Like the openings of Genesis, A Tale of Two Cities, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or the multitudinous variations of “Once upon a time” in many fairytales, there is something in how the author chooses to begin that almost compels us to remember them in spirit if not in letter, seduced as much by their simplicity as their suddenness. Here, Kafka sets up his protagonist’s tension immediately: he has been turned, inexplicably, into a cockroach, a gargantuan one no less, and he must now navigate the world of humans as something decidedly nonhuman, an abomination, a thing more from Lilith’s time than Adam’s.

What strikes me now, though, is just how applicable Kafka’s sentence feels to my life in America today. From the moment the story begins, Gregor Samsa is already a monster; he has started off the narrative with an identity forced upon him, the note about his just having awakened thematically appropriate, for he has become a thing better fit for dreams, a nightmare that has leapt the fence between slumber and waking.

He has been “transformed,” yes, like one of Circe’s pigs, but why or how or what it means is not yet clear, and lest you think it may be a story where it is excellent to be vermin, the word “horrible” dispels you of that notion—tellingly translated, in other versions, as “monstrous.” All we really know, at this opening moment, is that according to the narrator he is vermin, a monster, a thing meant to evoke some primal response of fear and disgust.

What a thing, to be a monster the moment your story begins.

I understand this, in my own way. As a trans woman in America today, I’ve become accustomed to being defined first by stories, by myths about people like me. In 2015, a poll memorably found that more Americans had seen a ghost than a trans person; nine years later, it is clear that far too few Americans know anything about trans people, that far too many Americans have been told stories about us that define us not as fellow humans, but as lurid caricatures.

Like Gregor Samsa, our story often begins with monstrosity: in countless conservative narratives, after all, we are sexual predators stalking bathrooms and locker rooms, or grinning fiends conspiring with schools to force children into sex-change operations, or hucksters trying to have an advantage on sports teams, or simply dangerous, delusional freaks seeking attention and following some trend of the blue-haired left. (None of these, I’m sad to have to spell out, are true.) We almost never get to just be people.

If Trump does the things he has promised, like removing our access to hormone therapy or refusing to federally recognize our existence at all, I may not have much more of a story left in this country.

I would love to tell stories, instead, of riding my Vespa through Queens. Of the time I passed out while skydiving. Of playing Sonic the Hedgehog games for three decades. Of gazing at the Northern Lights one night so cold my wife’s hot chocolate froze. Of dancing terribly. Of failing at love, then finding it. Of being boring. Of making weird noises just because. Of feeling one with the wondrous cosmos on magic mushrooms. Of trying to skateboard like Rodney Mullen and failing epically. Of yelling at a black bear ten feet from me and my wife one evening at a campsite in upstate New York. Of snorkeling, improbably, with a tiger shark feeding on the carcass of a wild boar in Kona on a wildlife-snorkel excursion. Of worrying about money. Of wondering what it will be like to be a parent. Of the simple joy of cuddling after a long day, body pressed to body.

But, instead, I find that my story has often already been told for me. I walk clad in myth, in the rough cloths of propaganda. And those monstrous, Kafkaesque versions of us are the ones that our President-Elect and many of his administrative picks clearly believe in.

On the precipice of Donald Trump’s next reign, a reign that Trump has assured us will purge the country of much of its so-called “transgender insanity” from Day One onwards, I can’t help but feel like I didn’t have a say in the way this story is being told—and I’m increasingly nervous that if Trump does the things he has promised, like removing our access to hormone therapy or refusing to federally recognize our existence at all, I may not have much more of a story left in this country.

*

When Trump won the 2024 election—not narrowly, even, but decisively—I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning. My hands were shaking as I held my laptop, refreshing webpages with crimson electoral maps. I tried to distract myself with a videogame, tried to blast myself to the moon with cannabis moonrocks, tried to close my eyes and realize I was in a terrible lucid dream.

Nothing worked. He was in power again—and this time, I knew, might be worse than the last. This time, you see, he had promised to do what he failed to last time around: to erase trans people from America by removing our rights, legal protections, and ability to access medical care.

And some Americans who voted for him did so not in spite of such draconian measures, but partly because of them. “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you,” Trump’s most successful ad infamously claimed in a dig at non-binary people and trans folks more broadly, predicated on the assumption that no voter could support such persons; the ad itself, which may have increased support for Trump by two percentage points for those who saw it, is filled with childish caricatures of what the average trans person supposedly looks like.

It is an attempt to make simplistic, unscientific, fear-based propaganda into government policy.

While Trump’s censure tends to target minors and transgender athletes, he has explicitly laid out plans during his campaign that would harm every trans citizen, including horrifying promises to federally redefine sex as solely what you are assigned at birth, which would make it impossible for trans people to update their federal IDs and thus outing them every time they need to show it; removing federal funding from schools and medical institutions that provide gender-affirming guidance or care, as well as possibly banning us from accessing hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgeries; and even allowing patients to sue doctors who provide such services.

These policies are essentially federal versions of the heartless legislation Republicans have tried for years to enact in red states, and they constitute a wholesale attempt to deny our existence—or, at worst, to force us to detransition, leave the country they already do not want us in, or even to kill ourselves. How much easier it would be, after all, to deal with our corpses than the inconvenience of our existence.

It is an attempt to make simplistic, unscientific, fear-based propaganda into government policy. While these proposals will almost certainly become entangled in legal webs and would create untenable logistical nightmares both federally and at state levels, the mere fact that they are being discussed is the problem.

And I don’t know what to do if it all happens.

*

Here’s what I do know. All around the country, there are trans people, like me, contemplating—privately and publicly—whether they’ll need to run away to other countries. There are trans people packing go-bags with the basics we need to survive on such a quest—not that survival is guaranteed for any trans person anywhere. There are trans people wondering if they will have to go back into the closet, perhaps indefinitely.

There are trans people frantically updating their documents before such possibilities are taken from us. There are trans people asking why, why so many Americans are so afraid of us that they want to vote us out of existence—because most of us just want to live in peace, just want to walk to a grocery store in peace, dance somewhere in peace, wander the woods in peace, find love in peace, find peace in love.

Perhaps this was inevitable. America, at least constitutionally, is no Christian nation, but it is defined to this day in countless ways by the puritanical and evangelical tendencies of its earliest European settlers. It is from this heritage that America gets its tribalistic purity tests and the one-drop rule of miscegenation, its worldviews defined by dividing one group from another, Black from white, Republican from Democrat, saved from sinner. It is a country of binaries, of neat little boxes you are meant to fit into. And it also isn’t, for America contains multitudes—but the ones who hate that multitudinousness now control the presidency, House, and Senate.

Being trans in America is radical, in that it forces people to confront binary notions they may have taken for granted their whole life.

It is a country, then, that does not always do well with people like me who do not fit into its mythic boxes: mixed-race rather than one race or the other; a woman, who is trans. This is partly why Harris’s biracial status caused such a stir for some voters—how dare someone not solely be one or the other!—and it is why being trans is seemingly so difficult for some Americans to understand. These issues are nuanced, but the way they are discussed attempts to eradicate that nuance.

In this way, then, being trans in America is radical, in that it forces people to confront binary notions they may have taken for granted their whole life—and, to be fair, this is no small task. Being trans forces people who believe in the tidy-but-false myth that everyone is either male or female by virtue of their genitalia or chromosomes to have to rethink their views.

Being trans unsettles America’s foundational myths about the simple, supposedly God-given categories things belong in—and this, above all, is why we are so feared, why there are so many bills restricting us, why we are the subject of so many right-wing posts and podcasts.

We are, you see, the unruly in a world of silly rules. We are the Other. We are the Strange, the Weird, the Wyrd, the whisper that blows off the armor of the certain. We are the monsters, the monstresses, the witch-born in a country that still fears witches in some primal sense. We are a thing to be Feared with capital “f” because the mere notion of our existence threatens the tidy assumptions those in power want to curl up besides.

We are the ones told we are powerless when the very fact of all this fear, all these stories that begin with us as monsters, shows the extraordinary strength we do have, easy as it is to forget.

*

And yet, when you take away these myths about binaries, being trans becomes far less unusual. Many people are born intersex, unable to fit neatly into one sex or gender category at birth. There are many other medical conditions in which people’s chromosomal or corporal makeup deviates sharply from this male/female binary. These are not deviations from biology; these are biology, are the more nuanced story of humanity. Nature is not neat and tidy; it prefers spectrums to binaries. And to me, this is beautiful.

But America’s rigidity about categories betrays the conservatism that underlies much of it, and with conservatism comes an obsession with ideas about how families are supposed to look and how men and women are supposed to behave. Conservative outlets repeatedly broadcast to men, in particular, that they will be lesser, weaker, somehow more “effeminate” if they are queer, and they turn this toxic idiocy into homophobia and transphobia—both of which were darkly alchemized into votes for a man who wishes to end our existence.

To accept us, by contrast, is to accept wider possibilities of being. To embrace the idea that binaries are too restrictive, that life, at its core, is a curious flowing thing that cannot fit our simple human categories. To accept us is to reject a frighteningly powerful myth.

*

I’ll be honest. I felt betrayed by America on election night. It’s not that I believed that America was some panacea for us; it never has been, particularly for those of us who are poor, nonwhite, and undocumented, as well as those of us who either do not “pass” or do not wish to.

No. It’s that Trump explicitly said how much he hates us—and the electorate in every single state seemed fine with it, seemed, really, to love it, given the massive rightward shifts across the country. Obviously, many voters didn’t cast ballots with this in mind—the economy, immigration, and democracy were the top issues for voters, according to exit polls on election night. Others may have assumed Trump’s most autocratic claims were simply bluster.

How do you not start to feel that every election is existential—and to fear that more and more Americans may not care, it seems, if our existence ceases?

But I heard the cheers at clips of his rallies when he promised to destroy our rights. I watched Trump supporters interviewed on the street or at rallies assert that people like me are crazy, threats to their kids, monstrous. And I saw Democrats assert, after Harris’s loss, that their political support of people like me was at least partly to blame for Trump’s win, just as Bill Maher famously claimed that Democrats should stop focusing on “boutique issues” like trans rights after Trump’s 2016 win.

What feels worse yet is that I left the Caribbean country I grew up in to escape its anti-LGBTQ laws and attitudes, thinking I could, at least, find less governmental discrimination in America, a story many queer exiles share; how cheated I now feel to find that America’s government may become more explicitly anti-queer than the island I left.

How, then, do you not take it all a bit personally? How do you not start to feel that every election is existential—and to fear that more and more Americans may not care, it seems, if our existence ceases?

I don’t want to have to leave this country if the worst-case scenario unfolds, where I am no longer allowed to access the hormone therapy medication I have happily been on for years and intend to be on for the rest of my life. But if they take it away, I don’t know what to do.

It’s unfair. It’s really, really unfair. And what’s incredible is that I haven’t even said a word yet about the other groups Trump will try to ruin the lives of: immigrants (even naturalized citizens may be under threat of deportation), protesters (who Trump wishes to reclassify as terrorists), Palestinians and Jews alike (he both uses “Palestinian” as a slur and surrounds himself with proud neo-Nazis), women in general, and the American people in general, including those who voted for him, as his absurd tariffs and tax cuts for the richest threaten to tank the economy, his proposal to drill in natural parks will destroy countless endangered species, and his deregulations in health and the climate will harm the health of countless people now and in the years to come, long after his administration is but a memory.

But so it goes, as Vonnegut said. It’s all part of a larger story, after all, of a pendulum of the world swinging rightward. It has happened many times in history, and it will happen again. It is difficult to remember in the moment, when things are so frightening, but all political movements, all regimes, all empires eventually fade, as Shelley wrote so memorably in “Ozymandias,” conjuring up an Egyptian pharaoh’s empire one is meant to tremble before, according to a famous inscription—except that where this mighty civilization once stood is now, in the poem, simply a sea of sand.

The pendulum will swing again. I just hope we won’t have lost too many members of our community before it does—because I fear where the pendulum is now will drive vulnerable people to death. This is an old story in of itself about trans folks and suicide—but this one, unfortunately, is all too often true.

I know it well. Many years ago, I seriously stood on the edge of a train track, ready to jump, convinced I would never find someone who could love a freak like me, convinced I was a worthless mistake, convinced I could never fit into the world. I’m grateful my cowardice and hesitation protected me that day, even as it took a long time to heal from that self-hatred. This is what happens in a society that tells trans people day after day that they are lesser-than.

There is power, yes, in our ability to unsettle, to dissolve the borders and binaries humans cling to for an illusion of stability in an ever-flowing Heraclitean cosmos like dams in an infinite river. But there is power, too, in getting to just be. I wish I had more of that.

*

This piece began as a piece about beginnings, and I don’t want to end it on a note of endings—the end, that is, of our existence here in America. After all, there is no end to that. We’ve existed as long as our species has, and no policy can change this simple fact.

So let us cling to that, for one. Let us think about the way we want our stories to begin, and let us live out the stories we yearn to, however and wherever we need to be for them. Let us remember that we will still be around, if our species has not eradicated itself, when America has become a great overgrown thing, its monuments dense with kudzu, its streets bursting with grass, the ruins of its buildings and their signs incomprehensible to the ones who walk it and tell stories around flickering fires. Let us remember that, no matter how dire it gets, we are still no less worthy of love and lust and ludic looniness. Let us remember our astonishing power in a world so afraid it tells us we should be powerless.

Let us just be, and be proud of such simple marvels.