Election Grief: "Our grief was their tool of oppression"

The transgender community spent 2024 as a political punching bag. Their grief is born from fear of the future.

Jan 03, 2025

Illegal migrants aside, the one group who has caught more fire for trying to live their lives has been America’s trans population. The past eight years has seen both greater visibility and hostility towards them. More trans people are out and visible, living their lives as what they believe is their true self. Congratulations to them for accepting themselves and taking that step.

Of course, with that has come a very public assault against them. The handwringing about sports has been deafening, as if it’s some sort of way to game the system for playing time or scholarships, so much so that ESPN even has a state-by-state tracker on legislation. To this end, I highly recommend

Pablo Torre

’s interview with Ember Zelch, the only transgender high school athlete in the state of Ohio and the reason for that state’s rush to pass a bill banning her and others like her from competing in girls sports.

PABLO TORRE FINDS OUT

What It's Like To Be a Trans Female Athlete Who's Not Very Good at Sports

2 years ago · 34 likes · 9 comments · Pablo Torre

Election Day 2024 was supposed to be a rebuke of chaos and hate. America was supposed to choose normalcy and decency. Instead, America decided to be America.

I’m not going to waste the screen space outlining everything that Trumpworld has said and promised about transgender people because I only have so much capacity to wade through the imaginary shit people have conjured and disparate reactions that have been proposed. Every link in this paragraph will take you to further analysis of what the Trump Administration could and may do along these lines. Little of it is kind and tolerant. All of it is cruel.

And it doesn’t count the numerous ways Democrats have turned against the community. After ignoring them during the convention, centrists and the pundit class have pinned Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss on her embrace of transgender equality. Two congressmen have even gone so far as to put their names on this scapegoating.

And all the trans community ever did to earn this disdain was 1) be born and 2) vote for Harris in record numbers.1

I can only hazard a guess as to what transgender Americans feel, so I wanted to tap into someone who articulate it in finer detail.

Robin Taylor (he/him)

writes

That Trans Friend You Didn't Know You Needed

here on Substack, among other projects2. I’ve been chatting with him on topics of grief in the trans community for upcoming editions, but I wanted to make sure there was a seat at the table for this conversation because it’s important.

Before going to his essay, Robin asked some trans friends how they were feeling in the wake of the election. They offered:

“I’m surviving…”

“It's really devastating, as a fellow trans guy I feel so disappointed and angry.”

“I get called slurs where I am on the regular.”

“My state passed protections for queer people, so I'm safe.”

“I live in a blue state and I still get called slurs!”

“It's just scary now.”

“We want to move, but we can’t afford to.”

“I was never so glad to be stealth, but I’m terrified I’ll be found out.”

Quick Interruption…

No one, least of all me, is interested in a debate on this topic. You don’t have to understand it. Any attacking comments on this post will be deleted and screenshot, and I will make it a point to follow you around on social media and remind people in the spaces you inhabit that you’re an intolerant bigot. I have the time and will get others to join me.

Please note the second word in the phrase “trans people.” People means human, just like you. For all of the right-wing Christo-facist handwringing about, well, everything, there seems to be a dissonance about acting like Christ as opposed to bastardizing scripture to attack someone.

Are we clear? Good. Here’s Robin…

The Post-Election Transgender Blues: Examining transgender grief in an unwelcoming world

Robin Taylor (he/him)

I read an essay today. It was well-written, thought-provoking, and accurate. It was an essay about how some political leaders within the U.S. Democratic Party believe they should blame transgender people for the loss of this recent election. This piece in particular spoke out against such a movement, and it did so in a very logical, organized fashion. It was — to be blunt — really great to read. But I didn’t stop there. I cruised through the comments, too (oh, I know what an awful idea that is). To his credit, the author removed and banned those who showed up to bully and spread transmisic3 views. It doesn’t happen like that in most spaces, especially ones that are owned and managed by cis4 folx. Really bad comments notwithstanding, the remaining comments were still a minefield of hatred, anger, thinly-veiled intolerance, both-sides-ism, and othering.

And that was from liberals, who apparently believe in keeping minorities like mine from harm.

We were used

Our names were invoked to fight a culture war, and we weren’t even invited to show up to speak on our own behalf. And now, so soon afterward, we are again being held accountable for the Democratic Party’s loss of the election. That’s a lot for anyone to take, let alone a marginalized community who is always having freedoms and rights restricted or removed.

We are your scapegoat

We have always been an easy target for hatred and intolerance. And, even though we asked for your support and your allyship, we knew deep down that these are surface promises. We knew that when things got really hard and scary, you would always choose an easier path. That makes us angry. It makes us apathetic. It makes the walls we build around ourselves thicker and taller and more difficult for our loved ones to cross. You’re making us tough, and tough is both what we need and what many of us have worked so hard to deconstruct.

We lost, too

We were not shocked at this loss, but we are heartbroken nonetheless. We wanted a political administration that would protect us as we face the very real potential of hundreds of laws to restrict us, punish us for existing, and erase us. 2023 and 2024 introduced catastrophic levels of anti-trans and anti-queer bills in nearly every state, and this election comes with the promise to make some of those bills federal. This means our community has to think about things like fleeing their state, leaving this country altogether, going “stealth” to hide in plain sight, or postponing or reversing our transitions. We will lose jobs. We will lose our homes. We will be victimized with no recourse.

We are still family

There is a strong faction of allies, family members, friends, and supporters of the trans community. I have heard their voices, too, and I’m grateful for them. But I’m not a monolith, and I cannot speak for all trans folx, many of whom are so hurt, so angry, so betrayed that they cannot trust those around them anymore. The bonds between us and the cis world have been strained. We find resilience in community and in the connections we forge with one another, but it is often the trans person who must shoulder the burden of that labor. We must ask for help. We must ask for solidarity. And that is an exhausting activity.

If it feels like too much of a risk to support your trans neighbors and family members when we are all barely keeping our heads above water, just imagine how it feels to be the one who is abandoned, the one who’s rights and freedoms are sacrificed, the one who is told — yet again — that today isn’t the day for our fight.

We are the canaries in the coal mine.

We were born into this world as beautiful, fragile, resilient things, and for many of us within moments or months, or before we learned to walk, we knew there was a misunderstanding happening all around us. We were taught to grieve ourselves in quiet solitude. We learned to grieve alone.

Our grief was mixed with shame.

We started by grieving the present. Our names and our pronouns and the directions our lives were guided along were chosen by others, and we knew — we knew very clearly — that we had lost something valuable there in those moments. We grieved the ability to trust, which forced so many of us to grow up in isolation. And along the way we grieved those who did not get to grow up.

Our grief was overshadowed by loneliness.

We were told that the world would not accept us, that it did not want us to be our beautiful, sparkly selves. And so we learned to grieve our future. It was a matter of survival. We tucked that sadness and betrayal deep inside of ourselves, and we focused on breathing, on moving, on making it through. We hid the very best parts of ourselves, even from ourselves.

Our grief was their tool of oppression.

For those of us who found our way toward authenticity and the revelation of ourselves, our process of transitioning frequently involved openly grieving our past in ways we had been unable to until then. We grieved our childhood and our adolescence, we grieved wearing a dress (or tux) to prom, we grieved being silenced, we grieved being ignored, we grieved being abused.

Our grief was finally for ourselves.

It’s a struggle to think about all of the grief that I and my trans community hold for ourselves. Because in truth, we’re still facing so much hatred and violence, discrimination and othering, rejection and blame that we don’t have time to grieve. Today we need to survive. We need to ensure that our future generations have trans elders to look up to and trans stories to read. How do we make time to grieve when our families are fleeing to protect their trans children? Where is the space for my emotion when I am not allowed to use a public restroom or unable to access medical care? How can I emotionally process what has happened when the damage is not done being inflicted?

Perhaps there will be space for our grief at some point in the future, but today does not contain that respite. And that knowledge only deepens the wound.

Robin Taylor (he/him) has been a wordsmith since the second grade. He comes from a long line of storytellers and embellishers. He didn’t set out to be a transgender activist, but creating space for trans and queer folx to find our community has brought him a special kind of transjoy he wouldn’t give up for anything. Robin’s writing connects the human aspects of parenting, growing food in his backyard, traveling, and navigating his gender transition in midlife. He’s kind of a mess, but it’s all a good laugh to be had with friends.