Murmurations: A Dream for Trans Belonging

Here we are in 2025 navigating rising oligarchy. 
This last month, I kept trying to understand why thoughts were coming to my mind, like, 
“Why am I even here? Should I be here?” 
It felt jarring and vulnerable at 40. 
So I kept it to my real ones. 

To myself, I rationalized,
“I know this toxic narrative is wrong about us.”
“My partner and I have a loving, supportive relationship.”
“The kids are alright.”
“Other people have it way worse.”
“We’ve been through this before.” 
“We know how to survive.”

It’s true. We do know how to survive…
When your rights are stripped away on repeat 
When the walls keep closing in tighter 
When they burn your documents and send them back to you destroyed
because they can. 
When it feels more possible to disappear than earn a doctorate degree, survival becomes the primary goal.

We know how to survive. A lot of us have been surviving our entire lives.
And I’m not just talking about raw survival against street and institutional violence. 
It’s the way the hypervigilance we carry in our bodies impacts our nervous system. 

It’s the increased prevalence of autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular issues, depression, and PTSD among trans people, particularly those who have also experienced racialized trauma.
It’s also the economic barriers to health care and discrimination within the medical-industrial complex. 
Being trans is beautiful, but the world makes it exhausting.

Path to Liberation

Trans people have saved my life time and time again. I came out in 1998. I was 14 and living in a town along the so-called U.S.–Mexico border. All we had was each other. In a time with few legal protections and next to no resources, we had to organize deep systems of care for ourselves. Over the past two decades, there have been many political and cultural changes, thanks to the labor of advocates (trans and otherwise) who have pushed tirelessly to implement pathways to better protect folks.

However, it is risky to become dependent upon incremental policy change. As important as these kinds of wins are, what is granted by colonial law can also be revoked by colonial law. When we become comfortable within the bounds of what is “given” to us (often crumbs), we settle for less than what we know we really need: real solutions to the root causes of the political and ecological crisis we are facing. 

False “solutions” and concepts like individual upward mobility or assimilation (when even possible) often distract us with temporary comfort and take us away from building up the collective care and self-governance muscle that will actually protect us. We need permanently organized communities that are rooted in values like radical care, collective governance, and mutuality. 

When we are not organized, the impacts of backlashes, such as the one we are experiencing now, are far more detrimental because when they come for us, what and who do we fall back on?  

Our autonomy is our power. Our long-built systems of survival and community defense are our power. There is so much to draw from in our collective DNA to guide us through this time. We know how to do this.

Trans people: Brown, Black, Indigenous, working class. 
So many beautiful stories. 
So much cultural wealth and lived wisdom rooted in the will to survive like hell against all odds.

From street economies to the people’s pharmacies
From houses for disowned youth to adopted queer parents
From Stonewall to Compton’s Cafeteria 
From our own designs of family to fierce love and solidarity
From prisons walls to asylum halls

Trans people have navigated a million plot twists—many steeped in violence—based upon a perception of us: 
How we exist in the eyes of others.
Be it the state, religion, our families of origin, or neighborhoods. 
And still they have no idea who we really are. 
Nonetheless, we remain. 
Our most prominent hxstorical rebellions powerfully led by Black and Brown trans women.

It Means Home…

I kept trying to understand why I was questioning my existence last month.
It might have had something to do with the right’s violent campaign to erase us while simultaneously hyper-visibilizing us, spending $215 million on anti-trans ads, to create another common enemy and boost votes.

“Take America back from pronouns and immigrants!”
Come on, we know they’re full of….

But it worked. Across our backs.
Not even 0.5% of the population posed a supposed threat so big it gave the right (and moveable center) a perfect point of unity: 
“Protect our kids.”

Protect them from what exactly?
Learning and embracing that all different kinds of people exist? 
A culture that teaches to not harm people for being different from yourself?
It is no surprise that those who see our Mother Earth and her life sources as nothing more than a dollar sign would despise a worldview in which we respect and revere life in all of its complex and beautiful intelligence. 

We will never understand all there is to this planet, but you don’t have to understand it to respect it. 

If we are speaking ecologically: Diversity is our best defense in the face of crisis. 
If we are speaking like my old timers: “Everything in its place.”  
Eradicating one thread in an ecosystem disrupts the entire ecosystem. 
Global traditional knowledge has carried that teaching since time immemorial. Everything is connected.

Humans are but one expression of nature. And yes, we are human.
Never mind the dehumanizing, ableist narrative that we are “imposing mental illness” by advocating for a right to a dignified life and basic respect.

Despite the long-overused weaponization of “nature” against queer and trans people (“Its not natural!”), sex and gender variance is reflected all across the natural world. 

From birthing male seahorses 
to split-gill mushrooms’ 28,000 different sexes 
to the female swallowtail butterfly’s “doublesex” genes that provide wing pattern camouflage from predators—
Biodiversity is a part of nature.
Adaptation is a part of nature.
Trans, gender-expansive, and two-spirit people are a part of nature.
Honor it.  

My comrade asked me: “What are your wildest dreams for trans relatives?” 
My dream is not just for us to survive, but that we come to know belonging. 
That we remember the truth of who we really are in a mess of endless projections and attacks. 
I pray that as we endure a war on our right to exist—we hold the deep knowing that we are not alone. 
The Earth and so many others, human and non-human, are also enduring profoundly violent disruptions. 
We struggle in solidarity with all those who persist on the side of justice, the side of life. 
Now more than ever, our interconnection mandates us to protect the living world. Yes, we have a right to be here, but more than that, we need to be here.