ANALYSIS: It\u2019s a dire time to be trans. Here\u2019s what we can learn from the past about how to survive the moment and despair itself<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This document\u2019s title, on my desktop, has been \u201cXtra Despair.\u201d Not coincidentally, this is an accurate description of how I\u2019m feeling. Since Trump\u2019s second inauguration, I\u2019ve hit a wall: there\u2019s an overwhelming sense that none of the arguing or writing or activism I\u2019ve engaged in for the past four or eight or 10 or 20 years has actually made things better, and that I\u2019m fresh out of ideas, or maybe out of options. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not alone in this. I get messages from young trans people, or from their parents, asking how to get past feelings of despair. I see the numbers\u2014the Rainbow Youth Project, a crisis hotline for queer teens, normally gets 3,700 calls per month. After Trump\u2019s inauguration, they received 5,500 calls in the first ten days.<\/em><\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n So I\u2019m starting here: I don\u2019t know what to do. I don\u2019t! If I knew what to do, I would have done it already, and all the world\u2019s problems would be fixed. There\u2019d be no reason to write this article. Yet I do know what my job is, which is to talk to smart people and try to get answers. I have been asking those smart people about despair lately. Here, so far, are the answers I\u2019ve got. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This crisis has been building for a long time. \u201cDo you remember the vibe shift?\u201d asks trans journalist Evan Urquhart, who wrote about \u201cqueer despair\u201d for Slate<\/em> in June of 2023<\/a>. Even then, it was an old feeling. Urquhart says he was inspired to write the piece by a rash of 2022 trend pieces wherein marketing experts promising a pop-culture reset mixed fashion predictions (\u201cAmerican Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair\u201d) with political statements like<\/a> \u201cthe culture-war topic no longer seems quite as interesting to people\u201d and \u201cyounger people are less interested in things like quote-unquote cancel culture.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat’s when I knew we were headed for bad times,\u201d Urquhart says. \u201cNot because of who hated us but because of who’d recently decided it was pass\u00e9 to come to our defense.\u201d After all, \u201cif no one is interested in stopping a hate movement from dictating policy, and they start to dictate policy, then you can expect to see them do so more and more.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n I, too, remember being creeped out by the vibe shift\u2014but it wasn\u2019t the only warning sign. Among trans people, the feeling that we are headed into a dark chapter of our collective history has been building for a long time, and rates of mental health issues<\/a> in our community have been getting correspondingly worse. Between 2014 and 2022, rates of psychological distress and depression among trans adults more than doubled<\/a>. In 2023\u2014well before Trump won the election\u201472 percent of transgender students in the U.S. reported persistent \u201chopelessness<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not a matter of one politician, or even one administration\u2014but Trump\u2019s election does, at least, seem like confirmation of many people\u2019s worst fears. It also inspires deep feelings of helplessness. After all, we already voted him out of office once, and now he\u2019s president again. <\/em>How are we supposed to believe #resistance will work? <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is where things get dangerous. True despair is not just sadness or fear. It\u2019s the lack of a framework to help you make sense of the adversity and sorrow you experience, an inability to situate your struggle in some wider context. Trans scholar and author Florence Ashley explains this to me as a breakdown in \u201cmetanarratives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is easier to cope with the trials and tribulations of life when you find forms of meaning in life that transcend your immediate situation,\u201d Ashley says. Until approximately the 1940s, metanarratives were plentiful and optimistic\u2014whether it was religious faith, a secular faith in Science or Progress or a leftist belief in the inevitability of communism, most people had a story that told them things would work out all right in the end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Then came the Nazis. \u201cThe Second World War was disastrous for these metanarratives,\u201d says Ashley. \u201cFor those of Abrahamic faiths, the question was how could a benevolent God let something so horrendous happen. As for scientific positivism, the nuclear bomb and Nazis\u2019 use of science as a technology of death and torture against the background of the scientization of racism led many to the sobering realization that scientific advances may spell less the happiness of humanity than its utter destruction.\u201d Faith in communism was shaken by Stalin and by capitalism\u2019s stubborn persistence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is not new to suggest that Trump represents a turn to fascism (his own vice-president has described him as \u201cAmerica\u2019s Hitler\u201d<\/a>) and, like those mid-century catastrophes, his rise to power has been disturbing and despair-provoking for many people precisely because it upends the liberal narratives of progress that we were brought up with. It defies our understanding of the long arc of history, and how it\u2019s supposed to bend. We thought we got rid of Trump, but we didn\u2019t. We thought America beat the Nazis, but it invented new ones. \u201cPeople are finding it harder and harder to find hope in an eventual, healed future,\u201d Ashley says; we can no longer rely on narrative logic in which good is rewarded and evil is punished, or tell ourselves that history will have a happy ending. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet 21st-century trans people are not the first group to be faced with this problem, nor are we the worst harmed. \u201cIf there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering,\u201d wrote Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor E. Frankl, in his 1946 book Man\u2019s Search for Meaning. <\/em>During his time in Auschwitz and Dachau, Frankl observed that \u201cthose who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were the most apt to survive.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n That task could be, and often was, very simple. It could be a determination to take care of other people in the camps. It could be a determination to hold onto one\u2019s own humanity in the face of brutality and hatred. \u201cWe all need to find ways to give life (including our<\/em> life) a meaning and significance that transcends immediate circumstances and sufferings. That\u2019s how we keep going. That\u2019s how we find strength. That\u2019s how we don\u2019t give up,\u201d Ashley says. Yet, according to Frankl, that kind of meaning is not simply granted to us. It is something we must consciously decide on, particularly<\/em> when circumstances are bad, because it keeps us alive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So: If we don\u2019t have a guarantee of a good outcome, where do we find that meaning? Simple: in each other.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Science writer and journalist Sandy Ernest Allen began the newsletter \u201cWhat\u2019s Helping Today\u201d<\/a> as \u201can expression of my desire to talk more specifically about the daily work of how we keep going even when the going is really impossible-feeling,\u201d he tells me. Since the election, that topic has become particularly relevant, and his newsletters have been widely circulated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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