2024 will be a hard year in a string of hard years. How do we resource ourselves in the midst of such a challenge? And why is resourcing so important?

It’s no secret that run up to the 2024 election is going to be difficult for trans people. So how do we strategically plan when we know we are going to be faced with immense challenge?

In this moment where it feels like we are all being traumatized and re-traumatized, healing can feel like a fruitless pursuit. But healing allows us to be in relationship with ourselves, with our earth, and with one another. It is not a zero-sum game where we must only think about ourselves or others. Rather, it is a dance, a process, a spiral.

Gender touches almost every part of our experiences, and none of us fit cleanly into any gender box. Engaging in gender exploration is vital to heal our relationship to gender, regardless of where that gender exploration takes us.

It is absolutely vital that we disengage from this hamster wheel of doom. We can take back our attention, we can take back our time, we can take back our energy. I will use this space to offer three main strategies for protecting and preserving trans hope. I will go into depth with each strategy, with the hope that you can begin implementing even one of these things.

As a doula, I know that TDOV and other trans-centered days/weeks in the year often hit folks in a variety of complicated ways. So I want to be clear that visibility is not a one-size-fits-all thing. There are the impacts of visibility on individuals, on the community as a whole, and then visibility as a political strategy.

Self love has enabled me to find relationships that sustain me. It has enabled me to extricate myself from harmful structures and find ways that are aligned with my values and fulfill my needs. It has allowed me to course correct without getting completely overwhelmed with self-doubt. It has helped me to hold the struggles, pain, trauma, and resilience of others. It has created space in me to witness myself and my community. I practice self love imperfectly, with a great deal of stopping and starting, wobbling, faltering, and frustration. But I continue to practice it, and imperfectly or not, my life continues to change as a result.

Often, periods of growth mean, by necessity, periods of discomfort. It is not comfortable for our bones to grow in adolescence, so we have a word for this particular sensation—growing pains. It is not comfortable for hermit crabs to expose their softer parts as they exchange shells, it is not comfortable for invertebrates to molt their exoskeletons, it is not comfortable for snakes to move through the shed process.

Saying that all trans people are in the “wrong bodies” flattens our experiences, bypassing the richness, beauty, and complexity of trans bodies, identities, and lives.

We tend to have the most fear around the things we don’t understand. There’s the fear of regretting transition, the reality of regretting transition/parts of transition, and of course, the cultural narrative of regret. Each of these is its own large, nuanced topic. But I find that when you understand the reality of regret and what it entails, the fear of regret diminishes.

Raise your hand if, when you have told another person (friend, parent, doctor, therapist, etc) that you wanted to get a gender affirming medical intervention, they told you that you might regret it. Bonus points if they brought up some other “person they know” who got a gender affirming medical procedure and then had to get it reversed at great expense, and/or deeply regretted it, etc.

This question is just three words, but the moment it arises in your body and mind for the first time, it can really pack a wallop. For many folks, asking this question represents a much longer journey. This often starts when something inspires us to start questioning things about ourselves, the way we show up in the world, how we feel, and what it all means.

Regardless of how you identify or what you think about gender, there is no doubt that it is a powerful force for many people, and often effects a great deal of how folks live their lives. Similarly, regardless of whether or not you believe in rituals, they appear to have a strong effect on those who use them. Perhaps, instead of approaching names and pronouns as a zero-sum game, we can instead honor our experiences and all that we carry with us through the medium of rituals.