September 22, 2025

The Quiet Grief of Being Trans

Or, a Very Hard Week

Dear Reader,

Last week was a hard week to be trans. It was a hard week to have scars, to have a new name, to have your birth marker not match your license, to be perceived as anything other than the gender you were assigned at your tender arrival on to this Earth.

It was a hard week to work alone at home, to work alone in public, to work alone in the midst of political and personal chaos.

Moving through the world felt like mud and glass, heavy on the limbs with the fear of shattering something if you made the wrong move. These systems won't bend, continuously built against us - and for what?

I ask myself - why is the right so hateful of trans people? Why do they want us to die, to be institutionalized, to be disappeared? What I keep coming back to is - because we’re so magical it wipes out their vision of normalcy. We live so far beyond the constraints they so desperately want to maintain. Our every breath a refusal.

To see us is to see a brightness and an illumination of what is missing in them. How terrifying, to see what’s possible but be surrounded by hatred. I don’t mean to say every conservative politician is living in the closet, but I do wonder if the tie is too tight. I wonder what it would be like for them to step out of the rigor of straightness and into the light of gender euphoria.

In Michigan, a house bill was introduced last week that would criminalize individuals whose “biological marker shows a disconnection between their performed gender” aka being trans. The bill, nicknamed "Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" is an anti porn bill that throws in this part about being trans at the end.

While it is hard to believe anything like this could ever pass, it is exceptionally exhausting to see this rhetoric delivered to the people, specifically our neighbors and the people who we interact with on a daily basis.

This picture of Katy feels like an anchor to me - of love, of building a home, of trans women not having to be exceptional to earn their place. Just sitting on the couch, resting in her home, a threat to no one.

The only threat trans women pose is that the rest of us are faced with an insistence to look at where we are hiding. Where are you unwilling to see yourself fully? Where are you unwilling to shift into a butterfly? Where are you unwilling to be seen as you are meant to be?

There is a grief in being trans. In constantly being asked to prove something, to prove the right to exist, to correct someone’s misgendering, to desire safety that isn’t promised. And yet, there is also so much light. In the way we shape shift, turn dust into glitter, and build kinship out of scraps. The flicker of recognition at the grocery store when we spot each other.

We are remaking ourselves in front of the world, without apology. Many weeks this comes with great confidence, but for now it comes with a fear of safety - for Katy and I as individuals, for our group of friends when we are out, and for our partnership in public spaces.

We had a conversation about the future roadside stand, if we’d ever put a trans flag out on our road, and the different levels of being seen we are willing and not willing to risk in a rural place on a county road.

This ache remains, and yet the shimmering does too. They live alongside each other. The fear and the urgency to shine.

I don’t have answers or a neat closing thought. I don’t have a hot take on current events or how to support trans people this week. I just have this picture of Katy shining bright doing nothing, the love that fills our home, and the light that every trans person ignites in my heart.

May you love the trans people in your life a little harder this week.

Paying Attention To :

• Steve Gunn’s album Music For Writers is so beautiful

• Katy and I watched this amazing interview with Leonard Peltier and Amy Goodman.

  

  Peltier, an artist and Indigenous activist, spent the last 49 years and 2 months incarcerated as a political prisoner for a crime he didn’t commit. This interview is so moving - both in learning more about history and igniting a fire to stand in your values - no matter what carrot the government wants to dangle in front of you.

• This Wednesday at The State Theatre in Traverse City : The Prison Show - In Houston, Texas, a local radio airs a weekly show catered to prisoners and the families they've left behind, unveiling the tentacular reach of the United States' criminal justice system.

• I am incredibly excited for my copy of The Internet Phonebook to arrive

• I Can’t Tell You What’s Coming : or how to face the news by Margaret Killjoy made me feel a lot less alone

• This week is Pride Week in Traverse City. Parade and silent disco on Saturday, lots of fun things during the week.

• This Friday in Traverse City

  

• Thank you to Kate Ward who interviewed me for the Leelanau Enterprise this past week! It felt amazing to take up space as a queer and non binary person in our local paper. Zoom in to read or grab a copy at Buntings or Andersons ;)

  

• This week : Cross-Pollinations with Finnegan Shannon and Laura Davidson

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Are.na
Email : info@codycookparrott.com
Website : https://www.codycookparrott.com