Trigger warning: mention of abuse 

How is everyone holding up?  When asked in the context of being 3 weeks into the second Trump presidency, you might interpret this simple question as being overly dramatic, or maybe you unfortunately “get it.”  

I was holding up well enough … and even took a short break from mental health therapy the last month, both to give my wallet a break from the new year’s high deductibles and to take a break from thinking about my own trauma. I was getting to a point where I felt “safe enough” in my own body.  Yet, here I am writing a post that is focused on feeling freshly traumatized by a second Trump presidency as a transgender, LGBTQ+ Veteran, who is also an abuse Survivor.  I initially really hesitated to share what I wrote this past weekend, as I’ve emphasized before that this photo project is not politically motivated … it’s just motivated by human experiences.  However, I also hope I’m speaking for other people, both LGBTQ+ and Allies, who are struggling with similar feels right now, and just need to hear/see someone expressing it openly.  

PHOTO NOTE: It’s extremely rare for me to take self-portraits outside of an infrequent selfie snap … I’m used to being more on the invisible side – a theme in this article … and it’s easier to highlight the beautiful human expressions of other people more than myself. I stashed away these photos from an emotionally cathartic self-portrait session several months ago that occurred on the tail end of some darker PTSD symptoms, and this blog post seemed like a fitting place to finally share a few frames. Minimal edits on these – just me and all my humanness… with a few cheap LED lights.

Leave or Stay? 

A few days ago I ran into a wall of emotion.  I hit that wall HARD.  A wall of sadness, rage and fear.  A wall that threatened to swallow me up in a cloud of invisibility that felt like a threat to my life.  

I started running into this wall after despairingly expressing to my partner the night before that I just wanted to feel safe.  A small but increasing number of my queer friends and acquaintances were now talking about when to leave the country.  

I started giving more thought to WHEN is the point that you don’t feel safe?  When you should leave your home, if you even have the resources to do so?  There’s a vast grey bog between actually being safe and not being safe.  It includes the edgy sense of knowing you’re not really safe, not having laws protecting your demographic, and actually being discriminated against in ways that affect your livelihood.  At other times it’s only a hair’s breadth between being physically safe enough and someone committing an act(s) of violence against you that changes how you move in the world, changes your life, or ends your life.  

Sidelined by these Headlines 

The day after verbalizing my craving for a sense of safety, I jumped on my phone to look at the ongoing train wreck of news headlines.  Along with the rest of America, I had survived nearly 3 weeks of absolute chaos and absurdity in the headlines since inauguration day.  Two headlines momentarily paralyzed me – headlines that might have gone unnoticed to many others. 

These felt like two gut punches in a row.  I felt like I metaphorically doubled over, as I held my breath and slogged through my own fact checking online, something I’ve been doing a lot lately.  

I’m a survivor of childhood abuse…

…. you know, the kind that happens behind closed doors, making children entirely invisible in their own misery and vulnerability, while their predators mask as upstanding citizens and virtuous Christians to other family members and the outside world.  At 38 years old, I count myself as being only one year into my active recovery process … from years of unspeakable abuse.  In the last year, I’ve lost more family members who seem to wish for my disappearance from their lives due to the discomfort I caused with my disclosure, so I disappeared, at least from their orbits.  I’ve been made fully aware in the most harmful and isolating ways that my trauma makes many people uncomfortable, so I currently choose not to fully disclose my history on public platforms tied to this photo project, not wanting my own trauma to get in the way of people being able to connect with my work and stories from other people.  I do choose to disclose hints of it, to start separating myself from the damaging consequences of being entirely silent. 

I was not a trafficking victim, but in a neighboring category as an exploited and invisible victim of abuse over long periods of time.  The idea that the country’s leading nonprofit organization (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) meant to protect or rescue the child versions of me (at least if anyone had seen me) has been bullied into removing one of their most vulnerable groups from public data feels SICKENING to me.  LGBTQ+ adults and children in general are victimized at higher rates than other groups … and now we are erasing acknowledgment of these victims as a demographic.  

Erasing LGBTQ+ from human trafficking reports goes so much further than simply complying with the DEI witch hunt.  We are erasing the MOST vulnerable people in our population and telling one of the most frequently victimized demographics (LGBTQ+) that they should not even exist in a victim database.  As someone who spent years being “disappeared” by a human who held all the power to abuse me as they wished, this hurts to my core.  I also feel both pain and disgust for Americans’ collective ability to overlook the known sexual assaults of women and children by leaders they vote for. 

A few thoughts on that second article … one of my own abusers absolved all their unnoticed crimes with Christianity.  Those same Christian values instilled in me then played a key role in being compelled to hide my own sexuality, gender and romantic preferences until I was 30 years old.  Not only does this feel unsafe for abuse survivors who were silenced with religion, but also for the LGBTQ+ community overall who has largely experienced loss of community and family in the name of Christian ideals (To be clear, I am aware there are many queer folks with positive experiences of Christianity, and are unfortunately in the minority).  

So, then what are we doing setting up a commission that gives us permission to prosecute anyone who seems …. anti-Christian?   Does that target those of us who are just terrified of stepping in the door of a church, whether as traumatized abuse survivors and/or traumatized LGBTQ+ members who have been ostracized from church communities?  Does it give even more power to child predators who are praised as being virtuous Christians in their communities?  Does it make those Christian communities more insulated and unsafe for vulnerable people and minorities who can’t leave?  I’ve met LGBTQ+ adults in geographically isolated and heavily Christian communities who continually risk their own survival by being “out of the closet” even in small ways.  They already have very little to lean on when they speak up, with their existence in itself often being considered anti-Christian, yet we’re pouring our taxpayer dollars into creating a commission that erases them more. 

Surviving Every Day

I read those articles and executive orders, trying to keep the resulting possibilities in perspective.  Then I started crying with tears that came from the bottom of my soul.  I cried at the possibilities actively coming to life that vigorously erase people who already feel invisible … and unsafe. I cried with anger that so many of us are being re-traumatized by our own country, not only by the people elected to be in charge, but by everything they stand for and the Americans getting behind them.   I cried with grief over further losing the dream of our beautiful free country for ALL, that I signed my life away for in the form of military service.  

Every single day as a survivor of trauma living with complex PTSD feels hard and unsafe and messy.  It’s even messier living in a country that votes for the ideals that further perpetuate the same trauma.  Not everyone in the queer community has survived the same type of trauma, but so many us feel a certain level of being unsafe in a country where your existence and civil rights have been so precarious in the past, and are becoming increasingly precarious again.  Too many of us, queer and straight, are also survivors of sexual assault and abuse… then we watch the majority of our fellow citizens elect human beings, MULTIPLE human beings, MULTIPLE times, who are known perpetrators of these same acts/crimes that harm us. 

In my search for others experiencing old trauma being exacerbated by our political world, I came across some powerful articles from a writer and activist named Anne M Lauren.  I was glad to find her article that reflected much of my own sentiments on the Trump presidencies, but discouraged to see it was published FOUR years ago… we’re just doing the same stuff again.   A quote from her writing that deeply resonated with me:

“Healing individually can’t be successful if survivors are forced to participate in systems that continue to victimize them.”

Getting Back Up

This shit might knock us down multiple times, but it won’t keep us down.  Rounding back to the question of how long it will be safe to stay in America as a queer person and survivor?   As a Survivor … theoretically never – you will always be slogging through the PTSD consequences to some degree.  As a Queer person, I don’t know.  I do know that I will still stay until I’m not physically safe, although my personal reality is that I have been unsafe in my own skin for a long time as trauma survivor.  For right now, I have work to do though – work that goes largely unnoticed by most of the world, but more importantly seems to make some queer people and allies feel just a little more safe in this country. 

This work in the photo project brings visibility to people’s invisible experiences of life, and safely coaxes others out of the familiarity of their invisibility as well.  I think we’re entering a new era where visibility itself could now feel like the more terrifying prospect for some Americans though; I feel this too in weighing the consequences of having a government that is actively targeting the livelihoods of vulnerable groups.  However, my own experience of life tells me that invisibility of identities and lived experiences is so much more dangerous to me and everyone else around me. 

So, we’ve got work to do – together.  Let’s take care of each other and stay alive by not being erased.