Who Have you had the Honor to Become

02 Mar, 2025

This week, Texas released bill H.B No. 3399 : the first bill up for discussion to fully ban all medical gender transition for people of all ages. This week is the biggest learning curve yet in how to write a blog post. In my first draft of this post, I caught myself trying to explain myself and cite stats and examples about our political moment and the majesty of trans community. I wrote about my own transition and how it's opened me up relationally in unimaginable ways. But that post was for you, not for me.

A blog is not a journal -- I know people are reading this, and that's half the point -- but I don't know how to write for both you and me in this moment with integrity. I don't yet know how to talk about my rage, my nightmares, or my body in words that feel both true and like they're for Us not just for you or me.

In my artist bio, I name "visibility on and offline" and "how we present ourselves and our work to the world" as areas of interest, and continue to dance around the question of a language that does us all respect. These will remain central questions in my personal work and thought for a long time.

I cannot in my integrity tell you the stories about how expansive this transition[al] period of my life has been within the frame of H.B No. 3399, and this week that's the narrow frame I am stuck spinning out in. It would require a different frame, and an inciting energetic jump into that frame ¹, to speak of the expansiveness of this life and this place.

So I'm going to try something different this week. I want to prompt myself and you (anyone reading) to think about our relationships to trans people. I won't give you my answer from this narrow place, but I would love to hear your reflections on the prompt. I want to ask this question to us:

Who have you had the honor to become because of the trans people in your life?

Because of your own transition? Because of the beautiful trans voices you've read and heard over the past several years as transness has become more and more spotlighted culturally? What lessons have you learned? How have you changed? What has opened inside of you, and what has challenged you?

I ask this question because when the rage took a break and the grief poured in, this was the question I found. I think it's close to the Language of Us that I'm looking for.