https://rosenzweig.io/blog/growing-up-alyssa.html?=1

Growing up Alyssa

21 May 2023

When I was 10, I came out as transgender. I was a girl and I knew it.

I was one of the lucky ones.

After four painful years, I was fortunate enough to access
gender-affirming health care. First testosterone blockers. Later
estrogen, the stuff my peers soaked in for years while I threw myself
into software development to distract from pain.

Despite being old enough to go through the wrong puberty and suffer
its permanent changes, it took four years to access the medical fix.
Four years of gender therapy, hard talks with doctors, and a lot of
determination.

There's a vicious myth that kids just walk into clinics and leave
with hormones. Quite the opposite.

I was lucky: my parents supported me, and by then we lived near San
Francisco, where a gender clinic was willing to take me as patient.

I'm 21 now. I'll be blunt: if not for gender-affirming care, I don't
know if I would be around. If there would be FOSS graphics drivers
for Mali-T860 or the Apple M1.

If I were a few years younger, lived in the wrong part of the US,
that may well be the reality, because gender-affirming care is banned
for minors in conservative areas across the United States. Texas, for
example, would threaten to take me from my loving parents under Greg
Abbott's directive.

Even now, I'm lucky I don't live in the wrong place: the medication
I'm prescribed is banned for adults in several American states.

I fear the 2024 election. How long until there's a ban nationwide?

In high school, I knew this day might come. I applied to Canadian
universities. Canada isn't perfect, far from it. But stripping trans
rights isn't on the ballot yet.

Growing up, we liked visiting Florida.

Now there are travel advisories against it.

One recent Florida law threatens jail time if a trans person uses the
bathroom - any bathroom - in a public space. I remember in high
school, arguing back against "bathroom bills" designed to marginalize
trans people. They seem tame next to the vile attacks on trans people
championed by Ron DeSantis.

What's next?

Does anybody remember the Nuremberg laws?

I was raised Jewish. Growing up, we were haunted by the spectre of
the Holocaust. I knew queer Germans were in the cross-hairs alongside
Jews. I didn't know that Berlin was a queer centre before Hitler came
to power.

In high school, I understood if fascists came to power in the United
States, I might be first to go. Nazis had a special symbol for people
like me: a pink triangle superimposed on a yellow triangle. I was 16
when I wondered if one day I would be forced to wear it.

In 2020, Donald Trump used the Nazi's symbol for political prisoners
- forced to be worn in camps - to threaten leftists in a campaign ad.

Subtle.

You don't need to like Democrats, but I need you to understand that
if you vote Republican in 2024, you vote erasure. You vote
oppression. You vote fascism.

Maybe you "just have some concerns" about trans kids.

I was a trans kid, and I want you to know that DeSantis, Abbott, and
Trump were my nightmares. Their policies will lead to the deaths of
transgender Americans. With hundreds of GOP-sponsored anti-trans
bills and laws simultaneously sweeping the United States, it's hard
to believe this isn't by design.

It doesn't have to be that way.

The trans experience isn't inherently defined by suffering. Not for
trans kids, not for trans adults.

When treated with respect, allowed to transition, when we can access
the medication we know we need, life can be great.

Personally, I have felt virtually no gender-related discomfort in
years now.

I once recoiled at my reflection. Now I look in the mirror and smile
at the cute woman smiling back at me. I'm surrounded by lovely
friends, and we support each other. Laugh together. Cry together.
Text endless stickers of cartoon sharks together. Past the shared
struggle, there is immense trans joy.

When we are made to suffer - by banning our medication, arresting us
for peeing, legislating our identities out of existence on the road
to establishing a theocratic state - that is a policy choice.

We're not asking for much. We don't want special treatment. We just
want respect. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Right now I want legislators to get the fuck out of our doctors'
office.

I'm on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans. If
all you care about is Linux, resist the attacks on trans people.

If you have any decency, fight back.

It's your choice.

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Selected reading:

  * May Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map

  * Why It Took Decades for LGBTQ Stories to Be Included in Holocaust
    History

  * Facebook takes down another Trump campaign ad, this time for Nazi
    imagery

  * NAACP Issues Travel Advisory in Florida

  * Texas begins investigating parents of transgender teens for child
    abuse, according to a lawsuit. One parent works in the department
    involved in the investigations

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