Keeping visible / Staying alive
Today: Parker Molloy, author of The Present Age, a newsletter about the intersection of media, politics, and culture; and Luke O’Neil, author of the story collection A Creature Wanting Form and the newsletter Welcome to Hell World.
Issue No. 243
Asking and Telling
Parker Molloy
The End and After
Luke O’Neil
Asking and Telling
by Parker Molloy
I've been thinking a lot lately about whether I made a mistake.
For more than a decade, I've written openly about being transgender. When I started, it felt like the obvious thing to do. Society seemed to be moving in a more accepting direction—slowly, yes, but forward. Marriage equality would soon become law. “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” was gone. The arc of history felt like it really was bending toward justice.
Plus, I had a platform through my blog and my social media accounts, and that gave me the ability to reach people, to help them understand what it means to be trans, even to maybe make things a little easier for those who would come after me. Visibility felt important. Necessary, even.
But now, watching as Trump returns to office with an explicit agenda of erasing trans people from public life, I find myself wondering: Was I wrong? Did I put too much faith in the idea that progress was permanent? Did I make myself—and maybe, by extension, others—more vulnerable by being so public?
Keep us breathing fire!
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