I renewed my passport the day after Trump won again. It wouldn’t expire for years, but I did it anyway, along with many trans people I knew who could scrape together the fee. We all had the same thought: get your documents in order now, while you still can. For...
I renewed my passport the day after Trump won again. It wouldn’t expire for years, but I did it anyway, along with many trans people I knew who could scrape together the fee. We all had the same thought: get your documents in order now, while you still can.For over a decade, I’ve written publicly about being transgender. Since 2013, my words about transition, identity, and the fight for basic dignity have appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vice, and other publications. I wrote because I believed in an idea that feels almost silly now: that visibility would lead to acceptance. That if people just knew the stories of trans people, understood our humanity, they’d stop seeing us as threats or curiosities or political pawns.Now, approaching 40 years old, I watch as Donald Trump has returned to office with an explicit promise to erase trans people from public life. He calcified his campaign-trail hate speech into an executive order. His allies have drafted policies to void our passports, ban our healthcare, and make our very existence a legal impossibility. It’s the greatest attack on the trans community I’ve seen in my lifetime. And yet, somewhat selfishly, I can’t stop thinking about all those words I put out into the world. Every essay, every tweet, every moment of vulnerability I shared in the name of progress. Did I paint a target on my own back?This isn’t just my question, though. Across the country, trans people who spent the last 10-plus years living openly online are grappling with the same terrifying realization: the visibility we thought would save us might be exactly what endangers us now. Trans people built careers, communities, and advocacy on the promise that being seen was the first step to being accepted. But visibility, it turns out, can be a trap.In 2014, Time magazine declared society had reached the “Transgender Tipping Point.” Actress Laverne Cox appeared on the cover, and suddenly trans people seemed to be everywhere: in prestige TV shows, on magazine covers, in think pieces about gender and identity. For those of us who had been writing in relative obscurity, it felt like vindication — proof the world was finally listening. I mistook coverage for acceptance, as maybe trans voices weren’t having the effects we thought they were.I’d started writing about my transition a year earlier. Back then, most mainstream publications wouldn’t touch trans stories unless they involved tragedy or spectacle. Suddenly editors started calling. They wanted personal essays about coming out, about hormones, about navigating the world in a body that didn’t match people’s expectations. They wanted to understand. Looking back, I can see the hunger for “confessional” content that would generate clicks. But at the time, I was just grateful anyone wanted to listen.“In some ways, I’ve always lived my life online. As a teenager, I was drawn to spaces where I could be myself,” Erin Reed, a trans writer who spent years documenting her life online, told me recently.That ethos defined a generation of trans writers, one that believed that honesty was its own form of activism. Every story told chipped away at ignorance. Every personal revelation made us more human in the eyes of readers who might never knowingly meet a trans person.Even if I wanted to vanish tomorrow — scrub every trace of my trans identity from the internet — it would be impossible.“But online recognition is different now — it can be terrifying when so many people hate you for who you are,” Reed continued. “The risks are higher when people actively wish you harm. At the same time, a big part of my job is documenting what has happened while I’m here to witness it. I want people to understand how we got from where we were when I started to where we are now. Having this record out there permanently means there’s a public archive that shows the trajectory. That matters to me.”But while trans writers were churning out personal essays for $50 apiece and tweeting their transitions to a few hundred followers, conservative activists were taking notes. They screenshotted tweets, archived essays, and tracked the lives of trans people who dared to live publicly. When marriage equality became the law of the land in 2015, these groups needed a new target, and they found one in my community.By the early 2020s, the narrative had begun to shift. Tucker Carlson was claiming on Fox News that California teachers were trying to “indoctrinate schoolchildren,” saying, “They’re grooming 7-year-olds and talking to 7-year-olds about their sex lives.” Conservative influencer Jack Posobiec began pushing the “OK groomer” response in January 2021. Trans people weren’t brave truth-tellers anymore. According to an increasingly organized opposition, we were predators, groomers, threats to children and society itself. Openness became evidence in their case against us. Every personal essay about taking hormones became proof of an “agenda.” Every photo of a trans child living happily became ammunition for those claiming we were “transing” kids. The visibility that was supposed to protect had become a weapon aimed directly at our heads. And most of us didn’t realize it until it was too late.The technical reality of trying to disappear online is brutal. I know because I’ve looked into it. Even if I wanted to vanish tomorrow — scrub every trace of my trans identity from the internet — it would be impossible. My work lives on hundreds of different servers, cached in search engines, screenshotted by both supporters and harassers, archived by institutions I’ll never know about.And yet, much of the most meaningful published work about trans people is being extinguished. “It all exists at the whims of the capitalists who own those sites,” Katelyn Burns, a trans journalist who’s been writing publicly for a decade, told me. “I’ve written for too many publications that just suddenly folded and disappeared their catalogs to think that it’s all permanent.”She’s pointing to a cruel irony: the content that could help trans people is often the most vulnerable to disappearing, while the content that could hurt us gets preserved forever by those who wish us harm. Support forums vanish when companies fold. Transition timelines disappear when YouTube changes its policies. But screenshots of old tweets? Those live forever in the folders of people who want us gone.The platform-specific challenges are immense. On YouTube, transition videos that helped thousands of people understand their identity can’t be selectively edited. It’s all or nothing. On Twitter, even if you delete your account, your old username can lead people to cached versions of your posts. Change your name on Facebook, and the URL might still contain your deadname. Every platform has its own complicated rules about what can be changed, deleted, or hidden.Then there’s the archive problem. The Internet Archive, which serves a vital role in preserving digital history, also means that versions of personal blogs from 2008 can resurface at any moment. What happens when the blog post that helped a scared teenager in 2010 becomes evidence in a custody battle in 2025?Burns tells me she predicted this situation years ago. In 2017, she advised parents to keep their trans children anonymous in media coverage — advice that seemed paranoid then. “Parents looked at me funny when I explained what I saw were the risks back then, but now it’s almost standard practice for media outlets to use pseudonyms for trans kids for safety.”She saw it coming. Many of us did, on some level. But by the time we fully understood the danger, years of our lives were already part of the permanent record of the internet. And the people who wanted to hurt us knew exactly where to look because we’d put ourselves out there. Today, the way visibility has changed our daily lives is perhaps the most painful part of all this. We’re not just managing old content; we’re navigating a world where being known as trans fundamentally alters every interaction, every decision, every post.These days, Burns rarely mentions anything personal online. She doesn’t post photos with identifiable geographic landmarks. There are no pictures of her kids, nor does she ever mention their names. “My kids aren’t allowed to have social media, but I’ve already drilled into their heads that they should never publicly identify themselves as my child,” she said. “Think about that. How sad is this world we’ve all created?”Here we are, writers who believed in the power of sharing our stories, teaching our children to hide their connection to us. The openness that once felt revolutionary now requires constant vigilance about what we reveal.“I can’t take it back, nor would I,” Reed told me about her years of visibility, “but it has changed the calculus for so many who would otherwise feel free to speak but now rightly fear the implications.”The platform exodus is real. Trans people are fleeing to smaller, safer spaces, but at the cost of reach and community. We’re choosing mental health over visibility, safety over impact. It’s a sensible choice, but it means ceding the larger platforms to those who drove us away.“The weird part is feeling myself being pushed out of the mainstream,” said Evan Urquhart, who founded Assigned Media. “I’m not a radical. I’m a careful person; I really try to write carefully and make sure everything I say is fully backed up by the facts.” He described the dissonance of watching “the mainstream consensus moving in a radically anti-trans direction based on innuendo and conspiracy theories,” adding, “Just helplessly watching the culture go places I can’t follow even though my temperament would prefer to remain with the crowd is uncanny. I don’t like it at all.”We’re living in a world where being reasonable, factual, and human isn’t enough. Where sharing truth becomes a liability. Where protecting your children means teaching them to deny their connection to you.“I wish there was a more private space where a bunch of us could talk through these conversations,” Burns said, “without cis people looking on in the peanut gallery.”That wish for privacy, safety, and space to process what’s happened to us runs through every conversation I’ve had about this. We’re isolated by the very visibility that was supposed to connect us. So where does this leave us? After all my conversations, all my worrying, all my late-night scrolling through old bylines and wondering if I should try to delete them, I keep coming back to something Urquhart told me: that the risk is worth it for the people it helps.“I know it’s worth it because someday some young kid who’s had everything about trans people censored all their life will happen across something I wrote and know they aren’t alone,” he said. When I asked if he’d do it differently knowing what he knows now, his answer was clear: “If I had to do over, I’d do it all again and more.”Every trans person I know has a story about finding something online that saved their life. A transition timeline that showed them a future they couldn’t imagine. A personal essay that gave them the words they’d been searching for. A Reddit comment posted at 3AM that talked them through the darkest night. I get emails from people who found my work years ago, telling me it kept them alive. Something that told them they weren’t alone, that transition was possible, that life could get better. How can anyone take that away from the next generation just because they’re scared?The internet is where trans people found each other.There’s no good answer here. Trans people who’ve written publicly can’t unpublish themselves. They can’t abandon the people who need to find them. Trans writers are trapped between their past hopes and their present fears, between the world they thought they were building and the one they actually inhabit.But maybe that’s not the whole story. Yes, the internet preserved trans people’s vulnerabilities for those who wish them harm. But it also preserved their strength. The conservative groups archiving their posts are inadvertently creating an undeleteable record of trans existence, joy, and survival. They think they’re building a database of targets. What they’re actually building is proof that trans people have always been here.And those voices are still needed. Every day, trans kids are born into families that don’t understand them, in towns where they’ve never seen anyone like themselves. They need what previous generations found: evidence that trans people exist, that they grow up, that they find love and careers and boring Tuesday afternoons. They need the messy, human truth of trans lives — not the sanitized version opponents want to force on them.The internet is where trans people found each other. Where isolated kids in rural areas discovered they weren’t alone. Where parents learned how to support their children. Where communities built networks of care that no amount of legislation can fully dismantle. Abandoning that space doesn’t make anyone safer. It just makes trans people smaller, more isolated, easier to erase.What I’ve come to understand is that visibility was never just about acceptance. It was about insisting on humanity in a world that would prefer trans people didn’t exist. The people targeting trans people now want them to regret being visible. They want trans people to wish they’d stayed quiet. They want us to believe that sharing their truth was a mistake. Yes, I’m more careful now about what I share. But I’m still here. Still writing. Still visible.
