Fear

I don’t have the means to attend any Day of Remembrance gatherings. I wish I did.

I’ve been verbally assaulted about being trans a few times in my life. A couple was looking for help getting into a motel and needed a credit card. I didn’t have a credit card and said so, and the man became angry, and started accusing me of racism and screaming about how I was really a man. His girlfriend calmed him down, got him away and apologized. I don’t blame him for the racism accusation, and I understand his frustration in trying to find a place to stay, even for a night. Still, when he started calling me a faggot and a shemale, I was terrified for my life. We were standing on a busy street, but I didn’t feel safe, I didn’t feel any expectation that if something happened, anyone would stop it. When the words cross that line - what I am instead of what I’ve done, there is no safety. I’m now the other, an unperson, a subhuman, an “it.”

Another time, in a lesbian bar which I’d been to many times, several gay men started approaching me, complimenting me on how well I pulled off drag. I wasn’t dressed like a drag queen, although I was wearing leather. I found later that one of the women I’d gone to the bar with had basically asked multiple guys to do this. After the third man - this one complimenting me on my breast implants, and I don’t have breast implants - approached me, I started to feel claustrophobic and panicked. I knew I was being targeted, and I knew that any space - no matter how safe it looked - could turn hostile at any moment, and I immediately left. When I don’t feel safe, it becomes a matter of life and death. I know what people can do, and I know that once I’m identified as trans, my personhood is no longer a given.

I’ve had the police called on me for using a woman’s restroom - a restroom I had used repeatedly over the years before, in a local Shari’s. Just this one time, someone who saw me perceived that I was trans. Thankfully, the “F” on my ID card warded me from any problems that time, but violence could have easily ensued if the person who saw me reacted differently.

For me, as a trans woman who is seen as a cis woman much of the time, no place is safe. Anyone at any moment might read me as trans, might get angry at something I did or they think I did, and attack me for both being trans and having the gall to assert myself as their equal. No matter how safe a place appears, it can turn against me at any moment. This is something I have to worry about in addition to the threats cis and trans women have to worry about - getting sexually harassed, stalked, raped.

Whenever anything happens, I always worry that because I’m a trans woman, the confrontation might escalate just because I’m seen as disposable, as compared to a cis woman. Because violence done to me would not be as awful as violence done to a real person. When a trans woman is murdered, cis people often get into blaming the victim - it was her fault for getting into that situation, it was her fault for putting herself into a vulnerable position. That tells me that my fears - where no physical violence has happened yet - aren’t even worth mentioning, let alone valid. Obviously, if something does happen, I obviously brought it upon myself for walking down the street.

This really isn’t easy to write - I suck at talking about my fears and anxieties. I know that I’ve had it relatively easy, and some might say that my inability to feel safe is just a sign of me being oversensitive, but I don’t think it is. I think that looking how I’ve avoided , that my lack of a sense of safety should be a sign of how bad things can be. That the slurs and slights I deal with really are only a hair’s breadth from actual violence.