Five Things - Blatant Transphobia

I have a regular series called Five Things where I talk about a topic and five things in that topic. The last time I did this, it was on my summer of trans joy. I've had so many wonderful moments since I began my transition. Today's article isn't that. Trans people have to put their armor on, to one degree or another, every time we venture into public. Typically I don't face anything. But when I do, it's a lot. These retellings are not going to be a lot of fun to read. I'm going to detail five blatantly transphobic incidents. Before I get into these events, realize that these are not by any means the only blatantly transphobic things that I've encountered.

There is so much I won’t be going into in this article. I won't be retelling how the judge at my initial name change hearing stated that I could be looking to waive public notice to avoid creditors as I’ve already written about that a bunch. That was so fucking gross. I also won't be going into the regular transphobic comments I get online. There would be way too many of those to post. To give you some idea of how often that happens, on my queer Instagram/Threads account, I have 1455 accounts blocked. I began HRT a little over a year and a half ago, so that's just shy of three accounts blocked per day. That's certainly not linear, as I might go a week with blocking only one account or two. But if a post, especially on Threads, if the post gets over fifteen thousand views, the transphobic comments come out. I just block those people, hide the comment for everyone, and move on. They seem to have the same tired tropes. "You're a man", "I don't care what you do, but leave the kids alone", "find Jesus", "you should kill yourself" or similar garbage. It’s so tiring. Lastly, I won't be telling anything that happened where a person I know offline was the instigator of transphobia. These happen and they really suck, no matter if I'm blindsided or if I saw it coming. Yes, I've lost people. I think it's likely that I've lost fewer people than the typical trans person. I've had someone I interacted with often tell me that I shouldn't come out to other people yet. I've had someone refuse to bring their pre-teen around me because of my transition. That's some really disgusting shit and it's a lot to process and deal with.

So, if much of this is so vile, why am I writing it? I remember in 2020 when so many Black people spoke about the crap they regularly face after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. To be clear, Black people didn't start speaking up about this in 2020. They've been telling us how America treats them since well before I was born. Of course I had heard incidents that Black Americans had encountered before then. Looking back, it's obvious why I was able to really hear Black people in 2020 like I hadn't before. In short, it was depth and breadth. I had heard Black people tell their experiences before then, but I hadn't heard a Black person tell incident after incident after incident. Then another Black person, and another, and another. Unfortunately it took that for me to decenter myself and really hear them. It's obvious in retrospect that before 2020, when I heard a Black person tell of their lived experience, I was trying to relate it to my own. Well, I'm not Black, so there isn't an experience that I had that I could relate to for their experience. Brains are hardwired to relate things to our own experience and it takes active effort to overcome it. But in 2020 I was able to hear these experiences, know I didn't have their experience, and learn from it. We will always be on a journey to understand experiences that diverge from our own. This is my motivation behind writing this article.

I can assure you that every trans person has similar stories to the ones I am listing. That I can be this selective, winnowing out online stories and incidents with people I know offline, and still have stories that didn’t make the cut for this article is abdurd. One story can be written off as an odd ball occurrence or that someone is a jerk. Five stories, plus the personal stories I referenced above, plus 1455 blocked accounts, is not an odd ball event. It's a pattern that emerges. That I'm the happiest I've ever been despite this systemic pattern should tell you how important it was for me to transition.

1) Voting - It's March of 2024. I had been on HRT for about five months and had socially transitioned less than four months earlier. The Illinois primary was March 19th, four days after my name change did not go through. Despite being Veronica, I still legally had my deadname and I was uneasy about having to out myself to vote. Thankfully, my wife came with me for moral support.

We went into our polling place and check in. At our polling place in Illinois, you pass through multiple stations. It was the primary so we had to state our names and declare our party. My wife led and I followed behind her. We get to the table where we need to sign our name, and the election judge compares the signatures. My wife is first. After she signs her name, the election judge reads her name. She confirms that is her and she gets a code to vote. I'm next and I sign my legal name. The judge looks, and LITERALLY YELLS MY DEADNAME! He yelled it and literally every person in the polling place heard him. They could hear my former name and see the trans woman standing in front of him. He might as well have put up a billboard saying "Hey everyone, there’s a tranny in the neighborhood!"

It was absolutely fucking disgusting. It's one thing when something like this happens in the wild. It's something else entirely different when it happens when you are your neighborhood like this. My house is literally only blocks away. To top it off, the kicker is that the election judge that did this is a Democrat. This goes to show that just because someone is voting for my party does not in and of itself mean that they support me or my trans siblings.

Since this incident, I've been freaked out about voting, despite the protection of my legal name change. I've asked my wife to go with me both times, and I have voted early at an early voting center because they serve a much larger region, not just my neighborhood. In this way, if any election judge tries to do something shady, they won't be outing me in the neighborhood when I'm not voting in my neighborhood.

2) The Pennsylvania Turnpike - I am a huge roller coaster fan. As of this writing I've been on 395 different roller coasters. I take at least one major roller coaster trip each year with my nephew. For our trip in May of 2024, we drove from Chicagoland to the northeast. Our trip began with parts of three days at Cedar Point in Sandusky Ohio which is sometimes referred to as the roller coaster capital of the world. I was excited as I had my nails done with the iconic Millennium Force roller coaster so I had to get some photos of me with the coaster.

My nail tech does absolutely incredible work

Millennium Force has received the prestigious Golden Ticket award for being the best roller coaster in the world ten times!

Millennium Force was the first complete circuit roller coaster in the word to be three hundred feet or taller.

My nephew and I left Cedar Point and drove to the next stop on our trip - Washington DC. This involved extensive time driving through the Appalachian Mountains on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I'm doing seventy-seven MPH in a seventy MPH zone and I see a police officer in the distance. We pass the officer and they pull out onto the road. As the officer is coming up behind me, I move to the right lane, as I typically do. The officer puts their flashers on and pulls me over. In the last five years traveling the country (I've driven in forty different states since 2021 in my vehicle) I've logged tens of thousands of miles on interstates. This is the only time I've been pulled over.

The officer comes up on the right side of the car, the passenger side. My nephew rolls down the passenger window and the officer asks if I know why I was pulled over. I say no. He tells me that I was doing twelve over, that he clocked me at eighty-two MPH, and that he needs my license, registration, and insurance. I tell him that I wasn’t doing eighty-two. I get my license out, and hand it to my nephew to hand to the officer. At this point, my name was legally changed for less than a month. I had my new license for just over a week. I'm really glad my license has Veronica on it. We normally keep our insurance cards in the center area of our cars but I didn't immediately find it. I also need to locate my registration. I tell the officer that I'll need a minute to locate it and he goes back to his vehicle.

We found the registration sticker in the glove box. My sticker always comes due in January and the Chicago cold and snow can make that a bad time to put the sticker on the plate. That’s no big deal. However, we couldn't find the insurance card in the car. I go to bring up an electronic copy of my insurance card on my phone. FUCK! The electronic card on my phone was showing my deadname. I did call in my name change into the insurance company earlier in the month, but on the app the card was still showing my deadname. SHIT! There's going to be nothing I can do about outing myself when the officer comes back. We are sitting there and it seems like it's taking forever. Finally, the officer comes back up and again approaches on the passenger side. He asks about my insurance card, and I show him the card on my phone. I also show him the registration sticker. He says "OK, I'm going to let you off with a warning. But slow down." He hands me a warning ticket.

Well, that should be good, but something feels very off. I never typically get pulled over in that situation, and why was the officer coming up on the passenger side and talking to me across my passenger. I look down at the warning, and it becomes clear as to why this all happened. The ticket is issued in my deadname. The ticket was preprinted, so my insurance card is not how he got my deadname. Then I see that it lists on the warning ticket who the car is registered to. Yep, the car was still registered in my deadname. That's how he got it. It's so gross. I know that it wasn't some computer system error, because if he keys in my Illinois driver's license number, that number has only ever been issued to Veronica. For an Illinois driver's license number, gender plays a role in how the number is assigned. When I updated my name and gender, that automatically generated a new license number. The fucker gave me a warning so that he could write the ticket in my deadname. He wrote the ticket, with my new driver's license number, linking my deadname to my new number.

I felt so violated. What the hell happens in that situation if my nephew isn't with me? I drove away and we found a spot to switch drivers in short order, because that took so much out of me. I'll tell you that when I drive out of state now, I try to only take my wife's car that we got at the start of the year because that car has never been registered in my deadname. These are the games that get played in my head to avoid the possibility of ending up in another situation like this.

3) Wanna Fuck? - Let's step back to late February of 2024. I had only been out for about three months. I was on a work trip and my wife also came. We finish the work meeting and a few of us meet up for an afternoon lunch. The event is over and my wife and I start walking to our car. It's a few blocks away. I'm in strappy open toed sandals and as we are walking to our car, one of the straps on my heel breaks. Well, shit. This strappy sandal was absolutely not designed to be walked in with a broken strap, but I'm not up for walking barefoot on a city street. Being only about three months into my transition, I'm not great at walking in heels yet, but this is absolutely a struggle now to get back to our car. I'm doing my best to walk like I'm wearing a clog and my shoe on each step keeps bouncing around on my foot. I can only imagine what I look like as I'm walking slowly down the street, just a touch behind my wife who has no such shoe impairment.

Up comes a man and he starts walking next to me and he's making small talk. Alright, I'll respond as he walks and asks me questions but I'm not giving him much because I just want to be left alone. So he moves up to my wife, and they start talking. My wife seems to attract randos who talk to her on a regular basis. He walks next to her for about a block and they are joking around.

Finally, to my wife, he blurts out "Wanna fuck?"

"Nah"

"Are you sure?" he asks

"I'm good"

At that, thankfully, he walked away.

The guy clearly had assumed that I was trans, and I'm sure I looked like I had no idea what I was doing in heels as the broken shoe strap did not help. But the takeaway here is that the trope of trans women being sex workers is so strong that he solicited my wife for sex. Sex work is work, but I did not expect to see people's ignorance playing out so boldly in front of me because I'm finally living as me.

4) Karaoke - I have a friend named Gina. We met when I was her boss for seven weeks (I RAN from that job) in 2008, but we kept in touch. When the Great Recession hit, she got laid off. I kept looking for a chance to bring her on board at the company I went to, and I finally got that chance in 2010. We worked together for three years. When I was at my next stop, she was getting recruited for a prominent role, but I was able to give her inside information that the role was not all that it was being presented as so this time she avoided a potential pitfall. She's continued to have a thriving career and we have stayed in touch.

About three months after I socially transitioned, she pinged me with a supportive message. The following month, she messages me on seeing my pictures on social media, and asks if I do karaoke. I hadn't done karaoke in over a decade, but an invite to a fun night out with a woman that I've adored for years I'm absolutely signing up for. She tells me that she's going to bring her karaoke girls crew with her too. So, I'm going to get a girls night? Friendship with other women is one of my favorite things since transition, but a girls night sounds absolutely amazing! Gina is a friend that I would have been much closer with had the dynamic been different earlier in my life. The entire time we worked together, I was in management. And as I had an inauthentic gender expression at that time, I absolutely needed to hold myself back and not be that creep manager around a woman a decade younger than I was. But now, we don't work together and we're both women, and I love that for us.

Come August, things work out and we're able to do a karaoke night. I’m planning on wearing a dress, as that is what I wear most days. Gina gets the other girls to wear dresses too. As to what I'll sing, that's a bit complicated. On the one hand, I'd love to sound feminine when singing. But while I have gotten reasonable in sounding feminine when talking, singing is another matter. I didn't have well over a thousand hours in practicing my singing voice that I had in speaking. So there are two options. One is to sing something that I can sound feminine doing. The other option is to just go with my more natural singing voice. We meet outside the bar and we walk in together. More of the girls arrive, and we're having the best time.

The karaoke crew

I remember why I really liked being in Gina's orbit. She's just so fun to be around because she exudes joy. I end up singing two songs. The first was Taylor Swift's Fortnight. I picked this because it's a pretty low vocal range for a song with a woman vocalist, so I thought I could pull off singing this in tune. That and I absolutely adore Taylor Swift. I did pull it off, but it was really straining the edges of my range. My other song was Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This song is very much in my natural range. I've been singing it for thirty years, so I could just let go on this one and it was great. We had a blast and would do it again.

Next month, we're back. I'm so much more comfortable this time out. I now knew what to expect and I had decided I enjoyed singing in my natural range so much more than stretching to a feminine one. When it's my turn, I go with Wonderwall by Oasis. This song is very much in my natural range and I really liked how I sounded. So I go back to sitting with the girls, and again, we're having the best time. A couple of songs later, a patron from another group stands up and starts singing a song with some derogatory lyrics about women. Yeah, this is a little less fun now. He gets to the final verse, and it now becomes clear why this song was picked. The final verse is about how he picks up a sex worker. Of course the sex worker is trans. The trans sex worker trope is back. He sings about her genitals assigned at birth, misgenders her, pleasures her, then sings about beating her up. He repeats a lyric about pleasuring her and beating her up literally nine times. As he's singing this, the fucker is glaring right at me. WHAT THE FUCK? It's a fucking threat. I am rattled to say the least and I start going into a daze. After a couple of minutes, an entire group that he was with stands up and makes a show of walking out. But of course, you can't see the parking lot from inside the bar. So, did they walk out in protest of a trans woman being at the bar, or did they walk out to jump me when I walk to my car. I have no idea. Gina was also rattled, but she's working to get me pulled out of my daze. She keeps asking me if I want to go. Of course I do, but are they waiting to jump me? But a new thought enters my head. Did they go to the car to get a gun? Are they going somewhere to come back with a gun? If they are going to have no shame about threatening a trans woman, they could easily be the types of people to come back with a gun in America in 2024. While I was initially in a daze and thought I was safer inside than walking to my car, the right answer is that I need to get the fuck out of there. Right now. I settle up and Gina walks me to my car like the good friend that she is. Thank goodness I keep pepper spray on my purse and at the ready at all times so that I could feel safe being walked to my car and leaving.

5) Downtown Chicago - It's June of 2024 and I'm working out of my company's downtown office. That's because there's a mixer after work from an organization that we partner with - Out in Tech. Out in Tech is an organization with over 60,000 members with dozens of local hubs across the globe. So this event was being put on by the Chicago group. Myself and two others from my company met up to do the three quarters of a mile walk over to the company that was hosting the mixer. The guys are certainly walking a touch faster than I am as I'm in 4" open toed sandals. My feet are already sore when we get to the mixer, and we're standing around for a bit waiting for it to get going.

The mixer was great. I met quite a few people that night. There was a nonbinary person in their early 30s. They are in consulting and told me that before meeting me that night, they had never met a trans or gender nonconforming person in consulting older than them. This comment hit hard because it’s so rare that I meet someone who is out, trans, and older than I am. I had only met one person like that in my entire life before I realized that I needed to transition. There was a trans woman that I talked to for a bit and a bunch of other queer folks. Next thing I knew, I had been standing in my sandals for another ninety minutes and it was time to walk back to my office and my car to drive home. Downtown Chicago turns into a bit of a ghost town after 6PM, as it's very much a business district. But the sun isn't going down for a while as I begin my three quarters of a mile trek back to my car. My feet are feeling it, but not so much that I can't take a selfie at the Sears Tower.

My Sears Tower selfie

I'm now only a few blocks away and I know my walk is not as easy as it was earlier in the day. My feet are on fire from all the standing and walking in this tall heel. Next thing I know, a car pulls to a stop right next to me. The driver rolls his window down, points at me, and starts laughing at the top of his lungs. Instantly, I pick up my pace and start walking briskly, so that I'm past the car. What immediately popped into my mind was that I don't want my name read on November 20th. The road I'm walking next to is a one way in the direction opposite that I'm walking, but I absolutely don't know if this guy is going to come circle the block and come back. Thank goodness I made it back to the garage without further incident. That said, this incident is why I had pepper spray at the karaoke bar a few months later.

All of these events aren’t just scary moments. They all leave scars. Am I safe? Will I be mocked for existing today? There is a daily battle between putting my armor on or leaving it down so that I can experience joy. No one can have their armor on all the time. But if it’s not up, any of these incidents can absolutely destroy me. All of my trans siblings have to face either the possibility of one of these events happening to them, or flat out erasure (or both), every day.