Front Lines

Everyday seems like a battle. I walk around my college campus and it seems like everyone stares at me as if wondering who and WHAT I am. They don't even bother to try to talk to me, they just stare. As if I am some side show freak for their entertainment and wonder. Often I am walking and a group of people will see me and go DEAD quiet, even if they were talking excitedly a moment before, when I cross their path. As if one of them has some big secret and doesn't want me to hear. After I am far enough away, they start talking again. I often look back and watch how someone else crosses their path and the group doesn't go quiet.

I wonder if they even KNOW that I notice it happens every time. Maybe they do. Maybe that pointed silence is a way for them to say "We don't want you here" or "Fucking freak, you're going to hell!" and try to scare me, get me to drop out and quit living my life. Wouldn't shock me at all if that was indeed the purpose. Most of the time, the stare and the silences don't bother me at all. I shrug them off and don't care, but some days these things make me want to breakdown. My friends tell me all the time that it is their lose for not trying to get to know me, but still the constant grind wears me down.

I feel like I am constantly battling the world and that I am always on the defensive. Sometimes I think I should just say something to the idiots who stare or the idiots who go dead silent, but I would probably be wasting my breathe and might get beat up. So why bother? I don't even want to be on the offensive, I would rather just be and not have to worry about all this shit. People often wonder why I seem so down and why I don't smile, its because all I do is fight. There was a time in my life when I didn't fight at all. I don't much miss that time, but I would like to rest. All I can do is keep fighting.

My high school teacher Mrs. Brumm told me once that I was on the front line of the transgender movement. I don't really have a choice in being on the front lines. I'm a transwomyn in a world, and more specifically a country, that doesn't fight for my rights or care about my rights. This forces me to have to educate people about trans issues, even if I really don't want too, because if not me who? The trans community has NO national leader and thus it is up to us everyday people to educate society at large and help them become allies.

I don't expect anything very significant to happen in my life time in terms of transgender equality, but I will fight for future trans people. I don't have a choice. I don't mean for that statement to sound negative when I say it, in fact its not negative. I feel that I have this duty to fight for these rights simply because I am trans and have seen the bullshit we have to go through and put up with. Pisses me off more than I can say. Words can't describe how angry I get when I hear things about transgender people being unfairly treated. I'm just being realistic in the fact that it ISN'T a choice for me. I'm here, I'm trans and damnit if I am going have to put up with society's bullshit anyway, I may as well fight as hard and as long as I can to change it!