Day Twenty-four

From Laverne Cox:

“Some days I wake up and I’m that three-, four-, five-; twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-old kid in Mobile, Alabama who was bullied. Some days I wake up and I’m, I’m that kid who’s being chased home from school practically every day by groups of kids who wanted to beat me up because I did not act the way that people who are assigned male at birth are supposed to act.

Some days I wake up and I’m that sixth grader who swallowed a bottle of pills because I did not want to be myself anymore because I did not know how to be anybody else. And who I was, I was told was a sin, a problem, and I didn’t want to exist. Some days I wake up and I am that black, trans woman walking the streets of New York City hearing people yell, “That’s a man”, to me.
And I understand, I’ve come to understand that when a trans woman is called a man, that is an act of violence.
Some days I, I wake up and I am just a girl who wants to be loved, but I was told on more than one occasion by a man who told me that he loved me that he could not be seen in public with me, could not introduce me to friends and family because I am trans, and not only because I am trans, because people can tell I am trans. I am not passable enough by certain standards.
Some days I wake up and I don’t feel good enough. Because I’ve heard that over and over again. I’ve heard it from men I’ve dated, I’ve heard it from members of my own community who told me that I am not passable enough, that I should not go and get surgery for this and that and then I will be an acceptable trans woman.
Some days, I wake up and I have heard about another one of my transgender sisters who has been assaulted, raped, murdered.

And there’s no justice.

Amen.

There will be justice.

Some days I wake up and it is just too much. It is too much to deal with, it’s too–there’s too much pain, there’s too much cultural trauma around being who I am. But. But then I think, I think we are a resilient people…”