“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”—Emily Pratt Slatin, Friendship Bracelets And Other Broken Promises

This quote from my wife, Emily Pratt Slatin, is surgical. It names what so many queer femmes—especially lesbians and trans women—have lived: not a “choice” but a gauntlet. Survival, first. Joy, later—if you’re lucky. Even then, you’re often expected to surrender parts of yourself to make other people comfortable with your joy.

Emily and I have survived, but this survival has cost us safety in so many queer spaces because those spaces are now infected with so many performative purity tests. If we don’t follow the right script—if our trauma doesn’t fit the trending framework—we’re out. That isn’t liberation, but rather curated visibility used to sell our identities back to ourselves!

The Trans-But-Not-Trans Crisis

More than ever, I’m watching as queer kids are being encouraged or coerced into transitioning not because they are trans, but because it’s more socially acceptable than being gay or gender-nonconforming. It’s a tragic reality, and whether you like it or not, it is happening.

That doesn’t mean transness itself is invalid, of course; people have spent my entire life trying to invalidate me, so the fact that I’m saying these things means there’s a real problem. It doesn’t mean that everyone who transitions young is misguided or even incorrect in making that decision—except that it’s often up to the parents who inflict their own social mores on their children. 

But when the culture pushes medical transition as a default escape hatch for queerness—especially feminine boys or masculine girls—we’re just building a new closet. It’s one with glittering wallpaper and rainbow branding, but a closet all the same to force people back into while telling them it’s for their own good.

Some of these people may later embrace their transition and find peace. But some are clearly suffering. But the pain is being silenced because even acknowledging this complexity is seen as being “anti-trans,” when in fact, it’s a deeply pro-queer, pro-truth stance. Because of my views on this matter, I’m no longer seen as trans by much of the queer community. Even Emily, who’s intersex, faces the same problem, because they see her as a girl married to a guy. Because nowadays, being a girl married to a trans girl means you’re straight or some kind of chaser or undesirable person. This means I’m being erased, too. And it’s bullshit.

What I’m saying is, we need to appreciate nuance in people’s gender expressions and identities. Take the judgment completely out of it. We need compassion for all paths, not just the ones that fit the X-ready narrative.

My Own Trans Experience

I have to tell myself everyday that I’m real, period. Whether I took hormones for two weeks or twenty years, whether I “pass” or don’t, whether the doctors gave me hell or smiled while denying my needs—I am a trans woman and a queer girl and alive. That’s more than enough.

The cruelty of being told I’m not “queer enough” because I didn’t jump through all the prescribed medical hoops is enraging. This gatekeeping, the purity tests, the erasure of intersex and medically complex experiences is everything we’re supposed to be fighting against. Yet here we are. And despite what doctors and therapists told me for years, the pain is not in my head. It’s systemic.

On the State of Pride & Queer Culture

This grief Emily and I feel—our disillusionment with Pride, the rejection by the very communities that should be our home—is something so many of us are feeling right now. Especially those of us who came into queerness before it became a marketplace. That’s before algorithms and ad campaigns decided who got to be visible and who becomes quietly erased.

What’s happened to Emily and I—being quietly pushed out, rendered inconvenient—isn’t just personal. It’s political. Also, it’s historical. We’re watching a cycle repeat: liberation movements being co-opted, commodified, and sanitized for someone else to profit. But the core of queerness is still there, of course. We just have to do a better job of owning it, while not letting others dictate how we can fit into their bizarre pyramid schemes of enforcing a heteronormative narrative.

Final Thoughts

If you’re queer, out or closeted, you are not alone, even if it feels like it right now. Your truth needs to be told. Not because it’s “representative,” but because it’s real. Because you’ve lived it. Yes,  it’s messy, and hard, and tangled in love, regret, hope, and rage. But it’s your truth and people need to accept it. If they don’t, you don’t need those people. Even if you lose all your family, all your friends, and perhaps even your career, then you just need to move on and find something else. I did and found Emily, a forever home and a purpose for being.

Humanity needs to make space for truths that don’t fit the slogans. Emily and I have survived the part that tried to take our truths away. But it wasn’t easy, and it’s left us often isolated and sometimes even erased. But we’ve learned that there are still people out their who appreciate us as we are and what we have to offer. So no matter what you’re going through right now, you’re not broken. Your anxiety or depression are not a disease. They mean you’re attuned to something inconvenient that people won’t let you address. That’s exactly why your voice matters. It’s the only way to remind others to just be themselves and forget society’s nonsense.

Be straight. Be queer. Be trans. But be it because that’s who you are, not because that’s who people want you to be.