[repost] I'm still here!

[Asche]

This is a post I made back in 2021 which got eaten by the New Years whatever-you-want-to-call-it.  It still expresses a core part of who I am (and may be particularly relevant for those who fear for the future), so I'm reposting it.



Sometimes, in the night, I start to feel all the places I'm broken and recall how each was broken by their attempts to crush the spirit out of me and eradicate the me in me.  It makes me despair, but it also arouses in me the determination to drag myself to my figurative feet and shout at them:

    You failed!  I'M STILL HERE!

You gaslit me to convince me that I was defective and wrong and deserving of nothing, that it was my moral duty to stop complicating your lives by being who I am, indeed, by even existing at all.  But though I'll never erase the gashes you put in my psyche,

  I'M STILL HERE

You tried to erase the me in me and put a robot with my face in my place.  You drove the essential me into hiding in the deepest recesses of my mind, where it's still trying to find the way out,

    BUT I'M STILL HERE!

You put me through years and years of hell, hell that like some caustic poison gas ate away at my spirit and crippled my soul,

    BUT I'M STILL HERE!

My soul stands up on its twisted legs and defiantly raises its arms to the sky (arms which have bends in odd places where the bone was broken and never allowed to be set or splinted.)  But sometimes simply staying alive is a kind of victory, so my soul shouts its victor's cry to the world:

                    I'M STILL HERE!!

[Lori Dee]

I'M STILL HERE!!

And the world is becoming a better place because of it. Thank you for sharing!

[Northern Star Girl]

@Asche
Dear Asche:
I am so glad that you found your old posting ... and that you shared it again
here on the Forum.

Your determination, self-resolve and will power to overcome your fears and
conquer your future...  is very inspiring.

Thank you for re-posting.
Danielle [Northern Star Girl]

[Asche]

I generally compose any of my more original posts off-line and just cut-and-paste them into the post window, so this has been sitting on my disc ever since I wrote it.

I'd been meaning to repost it for a while, but what got me moving were two things:

1.  I was at the Phila Trans Wellness Conference and attended a session called "Surviving Transphobia," which had a book with the stories of a number of people who transitioned back in the dark ages.  One point they made was that it may get a lot worse, but it was a lot, lot worse back in the past, and trans people lived through it and even (more or less?) thrived.

2.  At my support group, people were worried that if the wrong side wins, we won't be able to get hormones and maybe much worse stuff will happen.  But as Surviving Transphobia documents, we trans folks are a lot more resilient (and resourceful!) than we think we are.

I kind of thought my post of defiance was my way of saying, you who want us to not exist and to never have existed, you will fail.  Even if you kill every one of us, new trans people will arise from the younger generation, and unlike in 1933, the knowledge has been spread so wide (esp. due to the Internet) that it can't be suppressed.

No matter what they do to us, trans people will still be here.