Folly to be Wise
As I was putting my laptop on my bike to head home today, a coworker I'd never spoken with stopped to talk. I remember noticing the guy with a goatee and long blonde hair, wearing all black every day, who always looked like he'd stepped out of a renaissance fair, or possibly a fantasy romance novel cover (seriously, leather vambraces and boots were common accessories) maybe 10 years ago. Perhaps a year or so ago, this blonde woman of similar height, build, and aesthetic showed up, sans goatee, plus lipstick. Without preamble, she launched right in about how awful the new measures against trans people seeking affirming care are, and how she never saw it coming.
It turns out she didn't vote in 2024, and hadn't understood just how aggressively she would be targeted by Trump - not just as a trans woman, but as a veteran. The chaos has her frightened and feeling mistreated by the VA, right down to the needless cruelty of the provider she got her most recent hairpiece from (apparently, those flowing locks have been wigs concealing alopecia the whole time) She had never followed politics closely, didn't much care for what she'd heard about Harris, and did't know of anything the Biden administration had done to defend her rights.
I wish I could say I was flabbergasted, that a trans woman of all people ought to be attuned to the dangers posed by the new regime and take even the smallest effort to oppose it by voting. I think there are probably a lot of people like her, though - knowing that they're treated poorly by officialdom and some parts of the public, but who have also written off political action as a path to improving that because it's failed to make their lives better in so many other ways.
I'm glad that she felt safe confiding in me out of the blue - I'm tickled that so many trans folks have accepted me as a friend, an honor I never imagined when I was young - and I wish I had something more reassuring to tell her than that she's in a good spot (our company, Austin) within a bad area (Texas, the US).
It turns out she didn't vote in 2024, and hadn't understood just how aggressively she would be targeted by Trump - not just as a trans woman, but as a veteran. The chaos has her frightened and feeling mistreated by the VA, right down to the needless cruelty of the provider she got her most recent hairpiece from (apparently, those flowing locks have been wigs concealing alopecia the whole time) She had never followed politics closely, didn't much care for what she'd heard about Harris, and did't know of anything the Biden administration had done to defend her rights.
I wish I could say I was flabbergasted, that a trans woman of all people ought to be attuned to the dangers posed by the new regime and take even the smallest effort to oppose it by voting. I think there are probably a lot of people like her, though - knowing that they're treated poorly by officialdom and some parts of the public, but who have also written off political action as a path to improving that because it's failed to make their lives better in so many other ways.
I'm glad that she felt safe confiding in me out of the blue - I'm tickled that so many trans folks have accepted me as a friend, an honor I never imagined when I was young - and I wish I had something more reassuring to tell her than that she's in a good spot (our company, Austin) within a bad area (Texas, the US).
