Twenty years ago this month I stood on the banks of Great Pond, in Rome, Maine, holding my children in my arms. It was New Year’s Eve. Over the frozen lake, fireworks burst, welcoming the new millennium.
Something inside of me struggled to be known.
The next morning we climbed French’s Mountain, in Belgrade. We do that every year, on New Year’s Day. We ate clementines.
At the summit I looked down over Long Pond. What would happen, I wondered, if I finally spoke the words aloud, after all these years? Was this the moment I would lose my children, my job, my marriage?
On Jan. 6, 2000, I did it. I’m transgender, I said.
So much has changed since then. In some ways, this country has become safer, as more and more of us step forward to proclaim our realness.
In other ways, we’re more threatened than ever.
When I came out, no one had yet been schooled on the finer points of hating me; most bigots in this country didn’t know a trans woman from the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Because my existence was so far off their radar, few people had bothered to come up with laws to make my life worse. No one lost much sleep over trans folks serving their country. Caitlyn Jenner and Chaz Bono and Janet Mock were not publicly out; Laverne Cox was 13 years from her epic role in “Orange Is the New Black.”
There had been plenty of public fighters for trans people before me — including the iconic Sylvia Rivera, as well my friend Kate Bornstein. But still, there were times when trans advocacy was a lonely place to be.
It is not lonely now. The country abounds with trans people, and not only people like me. There are drag queens and nonbinary people and genderqueer folks and so many others. It is awesome to think of how far we have come.
But it’s also scary. Because now that we’re on the radar, conservatives (and others) have developed a new language with which to demonize us.
In 2000, the terrifying prospect of “gay marriage” was used to fire up the base. Since marriage equality became the law of the land, though, it’s become fairly clear that letting people love one another has somehow failed to destroy the Republic. So conservatives, led by President Trump, have moved on to people like us, coming up with one falsehood after another to diminish our humanity.
A Trump cabinet member warns of “big hairy men” winding up in the ladies room. This is false. I have been in thousands of ladies rooms, and no one has ever said as much as “Lindsey Graham” to me. Fact: more Republican members of Congress have been arrested because of their conduct in restrooms in this country than trans women.
They warn that trans women competing in sports will somehow destroy women’s athletics. This is also false. A year of hormone replacement dramatically affects performance; most trans women lose the events they compete in. It’s only when they win — as the cyclist Rachel McKinnon did at a World Championship in California — that they’re accused of cheating, as Jen Wagner-Assali, the bronze medalist, accused Ms. McKinnon.
Ms. Wagner-Assali somehow failed to mention that she’d beaten Ms. McKinnon in seven of their 12 previous races.
They warn that trans people serving their country in the military — something that President Bone Spurs did not — are an insurmountable problem. This is also false. The chief of staff of each military branch has testified that trans service people pose no threat to readiness.
They warn that coverage for trans soldiers’ medical care is too great a financial burden. This is likewise hooey. A RAND Corporation analysis found the cost of medical coverage for trans service people to be less than 0.017 percent of Pentagon health care spending.
My theory is that people objecting to the sanctity of the powder room, or tearfully defending women’s athletics, or terrified by the prospect of us serving our country, are not actually concerned with those issues at all. What they really object to, when you come right down to it, is the fact that trans people exist in the first place.
Our existence, to use a technical term, weirds them out.
I guess I can understand that. When I was a child, it weirded me out too.
But what they never suggest is what trans people should do instead of being ourselves. We still don’t know what, if anything, makes people trans, but it’s clear that conversion therapy does not work. You can be upset that trans people exist, I suppose, but no amount of upset about us can erase the absolute fact that we are here, same as you, and that we have been here for centuries.
Transgender people were not put here to make Mike Pence — or Germaine Greer — unhappy. Transgender people, like everything else, were created by God — or nature, if you prefer, glorious evidence of creation’s inventiveness. We were not made to hurt your feelings. We were made to see if you meant it when you said, “Love each other as I have loved you.” Did you?
I did not know what the future would hold, as I stood there on the banks of Great Pond twenty New Year’s Eves ago. Maybe it would have raised my spirits if I’d known that in the years to come, I would get to see how truly loving some people could be.
Would it have deterred me, if I had known for certain that the world would also contain truly heartless and terrible people, at least one of whom would eventually become the president? It would not.
I would still have gone about the business of becoming myself. Which is what I did on Jan. 6, 2000. It was the night of the new moon, the first of the new millennium. It was the Feast of Epiphany.
That night I looked once more into a starry sky and said, Enough. I will set out on this journey, although I do not know the way.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College. She is the author of the forthcoming “Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs.”
