What was I doing on March 31, 2009?
I wasn’t observing the first International Transgender Day of Visibility. Back in the U.S. after years in Quebec raising a foster child with my gay partner, I was writing novels and living a Bohemian lifestyle in a Detroit neighborhood not at all dangerous like my White friends and family warned. If the day was sunny, I was likely to be on my porch clacking away on my laptop, waving at neighbors if they strolled by.
If I was thinking about queer issues at all, I was developing characters for what became a novel about a gay Air Force officer befriending and falling in love with the son of a Soviet general.
Today, I’m struck by what I did NOT write in that novel.
I worked super hard to fully flesh out a Black character, phoning and interviewing Black friends I served with. Heck, I did the same for settings, spending hours talking to a friend from Malta to make sure I got details right in 12 little paragraphs.
But not a single transgender person appears in my novel.
I wrote not one single idea about gender, even though I dedicated whole chapters to philosophies of human fulfillment ideally suited to affirming and celebrating queerness and transness. Maybe I didn’t include trans characters in my novel because I never met any trans people in the Air Force? Well, as soon as I left the Air Force and moved to Manhattan, I made many trans friends. So?
I think the real reason is simpler. In 2009, I was living in a world I presumed was super queer-friendly and would grow inevitably more friendly. I was living in the Land of Oz, with no notion that before seven years passed, a cyclone would roar to life and threaten to whirl us all back to Kansas.
I forgot the need for visibility and inclusivity, but even as I blithely clacked, Rachel Crandall Crocker (a trans woman in my own state!) created and announced the first Transgender Day of Visibility. She even convinced President Obama and Vice President Biden to acknowledge the day!
Let’s write about visibility!
You might be familiar with the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held every year since 1999 to honor murdered trans people. This is different. Rachel started International Transgender Day of Visibility to celebrate trans people — honor their accomplishments or just their simple joys.
Trans folks have become the whipping girls and boys of the folks behind the cyclone. Black people, immigrants, and women certainly have too! Trans people are being attacked in irrational, hateful ways that defy sense and ordinary human empathy, painted as dangerous criminals and even drummed out of the U.S. military without pensions.
So let’s tell real trans stories to counter the hate-driven propaganda.
Let’s celebrate real trans people.
Remember last year when religious people pretended to be outraged that the Trans Day of Visibility coincided by coincidence with Easter? They don’t have that excuse to hate this year. So let’s tell our stories and shine some bright lights! (We would anyway.)
Former Air Force intelligence analyst, longtime LGBTQ activist and alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, James Finn is an essayist occasionally published in queer news outlets, an “agented” novelist and a runner, Marine, Airman, polyglot and self-proclaimed “middle-aged, uppity faggot.” He blogs at Medium.