Keeping My Head Up
It was after a long day of teaching when I got a text from a friend:
Do you have a website or social media for your writing? Someone reached out to me about putting someone from a magazine in touch with a trans writer in Kansas.
The text led to emails, then to an offer from Harper’s Bazaar. The features editor was looking for a personal essay from someone affected by SB 244, the law that instantly invalidated the driver’s licenses of transgender Kansans and barred us from bathrooms on pain of imprisonment. The gig was mine if I wanted it.
I had to do a lot of thinking about whether or not I wanted it.
Harper’s Bazaar is a major publication with a wide readership. Didn’t I want to get my writing in front of a big audience? That’s what I try to do all the time, after all. I wrote a whole thing about it.
But an audience of queer speculative fiction readers is a very different thing from a mainstream audience. Especially when the writing is about how awful it is to be a trans person in Kansas. What if my article blew up, got picked up by Libs of TikTok or some equally heinous bigots? Would I get doxed? Hate mail? Death threats? That seems to be part of the remuneration for prominence earned by writers who are trans women—hell, any women at all, really.
Things are hard in Kansas these days. Lately it’s been a massive struggle to function at a basic level—to go to work, walk the dog, cook dinner—without having a full breakdown. Did I really want to invite more threat, more difficulty, into what’s already grown into an incredibly difficult life?
On the other hand…if I don’t want to be in the public eye, why the hell am I trying to get my writing published in the first place?
Dandelions are wild, beautiful, and nigh-unkillable. We should all aspire to be more like dandelions.
Honestly, I never really considered not seeking as big a stage as possible for my writing. At least, not until I spoke with Luke Babb, a good friend (and excellent writer, incidentally). Luke and I were friends in college, and they’re one of the first nonbinary people I ever knew, making them a very important figure in my life and my queer imagination. Trans sempai, to put it in as cringey a way as humanly possible.
We chatted for the first time in years in 2024, the same year as my first publication, two years into my transition, when I was brimming with self-actualized pride and gender euphoria. As I bashfully talked about my struggles to sell my stories, Luke knocked the wind out of me by expressing a halfway dismissive attitude toward publication.
“The thing I care about is writing the stories I want to, maybe sharing them with a few friends. Publication is a road that leads away from that,” they said, or something close to it.
As ever, Luke was impossibly cool to me. Make your music to please yourself, the saying goes. What an awesome way to live. It must be like perching in lotus position atop Maslow’s pyramid, removing any ego or approval-seeking from the writing process and pursuing true artistic satisfaction.
Yet that’s not the road I find myself on. I’m still seeking publication. Hell, I’m succeeding more than ever. So isn’t it silly to run from the public eye, the thing I’ve been seeking?
Yes, I finally reasoned. Yes, it is. So I took the gig. I wrote the article.
Selene, goddess of the moon.
“Keep your head down” has been my survival strategy as a trans woman living in Kansas. Don’t call attention to yourself. Be careful whom you trust. Stay quiet, stay out of sight.
That’s been my strategy for the last four years. I didn’t tell a soul at my workplace that I’m trans, and apart from a very deliberately cultivated queer community, have kept distance between my writing career and my personal life.
Maybe keeping my head down has saved me from threats I’ll never know about. There’s sure a hell of a lot it hasn’t protected me from. I’m still breaking the law every time I use a women’s bathroom. I’m still tempting fate by existing as a trans person in public. I’m still living in a state that wants me gone, in a country that wants me dead.
So maybe I’m done keeping my head down.
The Harper’s article came out. Then I was approached by a documentarian at Mayday Health, agreed for them to accompany me to the DMV when I surrendered my driver’s license. Their video got in front of a lot of folks on Instagram, and apparently is getting picked up by some bigger channels. I spoke about my transition at a queer storytelling event. I came out to a few people at work, then a few more. Next week I’ll be speaking on a panel designed to help cis Kansans understand the lives and struggles of their trans neighbors.
I might be making a mistake, sticking my neck out like this. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, certain I’m tempting fate, making myself a more enticing target for the cruelty of the universe.
But those are the dangers of the road I’m following, the road that leads to notoriety and readership and becoming a prominent member of my community, and I’m not turning back.
Good god, is that a self-important way to talk about oneself! Indulge me. I’ve had a hard couple of months.
Correction, 4/5/26: My conversation with Luke happened in 2023, not 2024. That would be the year I sold my first story, not the year of my first publication, and only one year into my transition.
