I am six and decaying. The heat’s out, Toronto’s winter is angry, plum-red in its fury, and my dad knocks; he must hear me shivering. I hear the thud of his boots before I see him, all bald and devoted. He glances at me, mutters “Be right back,” and the wobbly house holds its breath as he sprints. He returns not with a blanket but a towel. Kneeling, he drapes it over my feet and tucks the cotton beneath my toes. It’s not soft, not what I wanted, but it’s heavy. “All better,” he says, like he believes it. I think I do too. As I fall asleep, I dream I am falling through the sky, and I feel weightless, free.

I am eight and I just got out of a soccer game. This is back when Texas was beautiful. The sun is dripping nectarine-orange over the field and the other boys are huddled up, cheering, spinning around in a way that makes me dizzy. Mom got me Whataburger to celebrate the win. I’m starving, so I take a bite, wash it down with my milkshake, and grab a fry. Mom snaps a pic of me, grinning wide. Both of us are. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more free. Maybe this is what America’s all about.

I am seventeen and nude under a hospital gown. The prick of badly shaven thigh hair rubs against the polyester garment. A chill draft from the air vent reaches down, cooling me like frozen putty. The doctor comes in, takes my blood, gives me a smile meant to make things easier. As I leave, holding my mom's hand, I look out at the other children in this waiting room—'the sea of lost souls,' I think, those the state claims are mentally ill and ought to be kept away. A trans girl rests her head on her father's shoulder, his beard enveloping her. Across from her, a trans boy taps his knees—one two, one two—waiting to be called for his appointment. Our lives have been shamed for as long as we've been out, maybe even before too. But we are smiling while we still can.

I am nineteen and stuck. The American Airlines woman's eyes dart between my face and my ID, her mouth tightening with each glance. My teeth chatter and my legs begin to shake, anger rising hot in my throat. Like acid, poisonous and garish gray, I feel myself bubble. But I swallow it down, press my lips together. All I want is to have my bag checked, to disappear into the crowd of passengers around me. To be unremarkable. Nobody told me that sometimes survival means staying quiet, letting yourself be small.

I am twenty and free, or so I feel. In Dallas, there are no lakes that aren’t man-made (growing up here, that was the rumor). Most people don’t believe me, which is understandable. But it’s never something I’ve questioned. As I told this story to a friend over Ratty brunch in Rhode Island, of lakes made by corporations, he frowned, his eyebrow raised like a broken pencil. “Why’s that?” he asked. I opened my mouth, trying to explain, but the humidity turned my saliva thick against my gums, and dust made its home on the roof of my mouth, jagged and streaked with moisture. I kept quiet. Home needs no explanation. It doesn’t get one. It just is. 

I still sleep with a towel on me sometimes.

***

I close my eyes, thinking of my hands and their creases, how they map a future that others might not get. If I were fifteen now instead of twenty, I'd be among those left behind in Texas, where my old clinic stands empty and providers have gone silent. I think about the children still there, their stories paused, futures hanging like unfinished sentences. 

What the headlines don't capture is the weight of absence: empty waiting rooms where children once sat holding their parents' hands, providers who dedicated their lives to this care now forced to leave or change practices, families splintering under pressure or fleeing their homes like medical refugees. They don't show you the text messages between desperate parents asking which states are still safe, which clinics might still help them, and how long they have to wait. 

This is what makes an elegy: not just what was lost, but what never got the chance to be.

***

I find myself pondering these questions in a post-Trump 2.0 world. Sometimes, I consider it to be a mourning. 

So far, he has signed an executive order that recognizes only two biological sexes—which is scientifically false, has been criticized by medical and legal experts, dangerously ignores the lived experiences of intersex people, and permits state-sponsored discrimination based on sex. He has banned trans women from women’s prisons, putting them at an extreme risk of violence; he did so by removing trans inmates from sexual assault protections, effectively making prison rape legal, only against trans people. His Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suspended passport applications from anyone seeking to change their gender marker, an attack on the democratic right to public documentation, effectively leaving me unable to leave the country (unless I use out-of-date documentation) nor update my passport, even though I am a dual citizen. This has also left thousands of trans people who have been in the process of changing their documents after the election in preparation for this very moment in limbo. The State Department has erased any record of trans people from being able to travel outside the country on their website, now only listing the eerie: “LGB.” All trans people are banned from enlisting in the military via an executive order. Medicaid’s coverage of gender-affirming care—a legitimate, life-saving form of health care as recognized by the United Nations—is now dependent on the state, leaving thousands of trans kids to suffocate. Even trans adults who use Medicare are at risk, or have to terminate their care completely due to the mass-closing of clinics, which are only expected to increase after Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order. Dozens of major U.S. hospitals (even in liberal states: see NYU Langone) have suspended any healthcare for trans youth (including mental healthcare) after this order when he threatened to withhold federal funding for the entire hospital system.

Scariest of all is perhaps the CDC’s being forced to halt every study with the word “trans” in it. Devastatingly, the very few studies that track trans people’s long-term health are now paused.  For decades, trans people have been demonized in the medical community—we have been used as test subjects, abused, all while being understudied. 

This retraction means that in-depth longitudinal research about the long-term effects of HRT, as well as social discrimination, on the body will not see the light of day for years. Not just for trans kids, but even adults: 20-year-olds like me, 60-year-olds too, citizens of this country we call our home. 

I am terrified for my health, the health of my community, and the fact that our fascistic government is trying to erase us from the rest of society, burning us, treating us as deviants who ought to perish. 

I mourn us, though we aren’t even gone.

***

Federally, so much is changing. Too much, too quickly, too dangerously. Yet my day-to-day life feels awfully the same. I go to class, I get dinner with friends, I write, and I sleep. How do I reckon with that? It is almost a deceptive change, and even more so when I ‘log off’ from the news.

I do not have to experience empty waiting rooms where children once sat holding their parents' hands. I have simply been lucky enough to age out and attend college out-of-state.

This new era, this Trump 2.0 world, is not just a political shift—it’s a cultural one, an erosion of human dignity, and it’s terrifying. The world I knew in Texas has already started to evaporate from my memory, but what of those still suffocating in its wrath? Watching from a distance feels like complicity, like a betrayal to the people I love and the communities I belong to.

We can’t pretend this isn’t happening. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of silence in a time when our futures and our lives are being legislated out of existence.

***

Every time I go home, my mother still hugs me like I'm breakable. My older brother's room is unchanged, the walls sap-green, and the kitchen still smells like cilantro and whatever meal is coming next. This place—Texas—will always be mine, even as it tries to disown me. My family remains here, rooted deeper than any legislation can reach, and so a part of me will always belong to these dusty highways and wide skies that know my name. It doesn't matter that I've 'escaped' Texas for good, because it will always be a part of me, a place I long for and return to on breaks, only to feel fractured and disillusioned with what it is coming to be. Texas is a dinosaur that I keep feeding little pieces of grass so it licks me and hugs me and calls me its child.

I sometimes think about the fragility of my own safety—even as someone of racial and economic privilege. As a young trans person, I grew up in a world that didn’t know how to protect me, a world that saw me as an aberration, a mistake, a thing to be fixed. I managed to survive that, only to step into this new world where the stakes feel even higher. I’ve “made it out,” yes. But what does it mean to be safe when the people I grew up with are not? It’s an ugly paradox—safety comes at a cost, and mine might just be a byproduct of my privilege, my ability to leave, and the fact that I was born in 2004 rather than 2010. But what about the trans kids who can’t? What of the ones for whom leaving is an impossible dream, held back by families, finances, or the brutal pull of home?

I imagine a girl, fifteen and fading. Her clinic walls are cracked, the air thick with sterilized desperation. Her mother presses her palm against her child’s back, the heat of their body a fragile tether between them. The child’s eyes are wide, too old for her age, watching the other kids in the room like she’s seeing ghosts. “It’s going to be okay,” the mother whispers. Because that’s what mothers do, what they must do.

Now, I close my eyes, let myself rest, the jet-black of my lids enveloping me. I can see my future—our future—and it is dazzling: we have access to documentation, healthcare, and we are loved. We have children, we get married; we cook steamy Thanksgiving turkeys and watch our friends wrinkle. Our kids go to college and make lives for themselves, too. The days of discrimination and tyranny are gone. We are no longer the scapegoat but simply a people, united as one—worthy and seen for it. And everything turns out okay. But it won’t just happen on its own. It will take every ounce of fight we have left, and we must keep going until it’s real.