What a time to be trans and in love!! Truly, what a fucking time. I am so grateful to be surrounded by trans people on the daily, to have a life so full of people who have looked the threats of direct and systemic violence in the face and decided to exist anyway. Full stop, existing would be enough. But my loved ones do the fucking most. Trans nurses, trans writers, trans teachers, trans warehouse workers, trans scientists, trans customer service people, trans artists, trans legal advocates, trans social workers—we are everywhere, doing everything cis people do while also facing some of the most disgusting, dehumanizing rhetoric I’ve ever heard and on top of that, many of us choose to be loving through it all.

I love us. While I obviously pick favorites (isn’t that what marriage is essentially? like yeah, this is my best friend forever and even the government says so…I digress), I swoon over trans love everywhere. Folks who do each others’ shots, bulldog for each other in the sex-segregated bathrooms, play nurse after surgeries, try out names and pronouns together, trade clothing and accessories, and show up at protests and meetings and living rooms to make sure we all keep existing together—my heart swells with pride when I see us doing right by each other.

To be trans is to extricate your inner sense of self from the world’s perception of you and, when you are ready, to challenge others’ perceptions to change. The government’s interference in this process through forced outings; public humiliation attempts; attacks on our character, on our morality, on our existence, serves to create more work for us when we try to share ourselves with the world. We still do it, and it means the respite of t4t love and being in relationships where we don’t have to fight against narratives of us being unfit for life in public feels even more needed.

For every kind stranger, there is one who would break you.1 When I met my dear husband, neither of us knew which type of stranger the other would be. And then we chose to be kind, and kindness turned to admiration, and admiration turned to love, and every day we practice the give and take of being inside each other’s worlds. Emory and I have spent nearly five years learning by trial and error how to show up for each other when the horrors are overwhelming, a dedication to understanding each other’s inner worlds that is the foundation of our relationship.

It’s this process—recognizing something deep within you that must come out and translating it into something legible from an outside perspective—that creates intimacy. In situations where the pressure is on (for example, if the federal government has decided it both does not want you to exist in the country and won’t allow you to get a passport to leave), making our inner worlds legible even to ourselves is a challenge, let alone to others. It’s hard work to endure attempted genocide and not blow up in the faces of the people who love you most. Still, we try our best and apologize when we fuck up. We keep trying again and again and again to love ourselves and to love each other. May we all be so loved that no divisive bullshit could ever get in the way of being good to each other.

XOXO, Jozef

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