Written by Victoria Scott
Victoria Scott is an author and transgender woman living in Idaho.
Today is her third Transgender Day of Visibility since coming out, and she thinks visibility is no longer enough.
"We've reached the limits of what can be done with awareness," she writes. "We need action."
It's my third Transgender Day of Visibility since I became visibly transgender, and I'm exhausted. It's not a long time — I've barely begun the process of reassembling the life I annihilated by coming out — yet it feels like every year has been the same exhausting slog.
Three years is long enough to know that I write the same story every year. I tell my audience in whatever terms come to me at the time that I'm an out and proud trans woman, as if there is any way for them not to notice. It's scary, but I keep doing it because I believe my community deserves to live proud, happy lives, and I make my impassioned plea for our plight to improve. It never does.
Every year I write this story, things get demonstrably worse
I finally decided to embrace myself and live as a woman openly in 2020. That year, there were a record number of anti-trans bills in the US under the umbrella of national anti-LGBTQ rule changes and laws from the Trump administration.
In 2021, despite a shift to the ostensibly pro-trans Biden admin, there was yet another record-breaking year of anti-trans legislation. In 2022, we broke the previous year's record yet again.
This year's bills threaten to erase trans people
Oklahoma is now mulling a ban on insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, including for adults; Tennessee has already passed an "anti-drag show" law that is so broadly worded it could be used to restrict trans people from public spaces, and states like Kentucky and Texas are contemplating similar restrictions.
On Transgender Day of Visibility, we need more than visibility
We need allies.
This needs to be a day where the country makes it clear they have our backs. We need more than throwaway State of the Union lines to protect us. We need federal legislation to protect us from state-level lawmaking. We need the people around us, in every city, to support us, rather than just in a scattered few safe places on the coasts. We need doctors who treat us like people instead of unfortunate accidents. We need our visibility to be repaid with a future we can actually imagine ourselves in.
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