You hate me.

You hate me.

You don’t know me, who I am, how I think, or how I love my dear old cat. You don’t know the thrill that I get out of riding my motorcycle, or listening to Beethoven or the Beatles, or baking and decorating fanciful cakes for my children’s birthdays. Mostly, you hate the idea of me – but when you craft legislation and support violence targeted against my demographic, it feels very personal.

Because I advocate for the equality and humanity of all persons, you hate me and call me woke. As I understand this invective, for you woke means that I have strong convictions about the need to live very differently on this planet that we are so quickly trashing, and about the urgency to bridge the widening divide between the obscenely wealthy and those who are enduring grinding poverty. You call me woke because I dare to think about the weight of oppression carried by people across generations; people who had no say in what race they are, and who dare now to hold their heads high and celebrate their racial identity and culture in all its beauty and depth.

You also hate me because I worked very hard for many, many years to learn to think deeply, to study, to listen to the wisdom of others, and to become a person who carries that wisdom and joy of learning forward to new generations. There was once a time, not that long ago, when being a professor of ethics would be considered an honorable calling. But not now, not for you. Having that hard-earned Ph.D. gives you another reason to hate me by defining me as an elitist East Coast intellectual.

Mostly you hate me because Fox News and divisive politicians tell you – again and again and again – to hate all who are LGBTQI+. After all, I am the person your pastor condemned, even though your pastor does not know that I am a person of deep faith who tries her best to live the simple life of my Quaker religion. Your evangelical churches gathered money to send to Uganda – a country I know well and love - so that your gospel of hatred, exclusion and violence could spread there and across Africa, fueled and funded by venomous groups such as the Family Life Network. So many LGBTQI+ Africans are targeted by your bizarre but very damaging claims of LGBTQI+ people “recruiting” young people into deviant lifestyles, or being a threat to family and culture. Among those Africans whom you target are my dear friends; worthy, caring, wonderful Ugandans who now fear for their lives simply for being themselves, and for loving the “wrong” person. Just like them, I don’t harm anyone by being LGBTQI+. I just live my life, but still you hate them, us…me. To be sure, I am not your usual target (although you are quick to call all of us “gay”, whether accurate or not). ?I am a transgender woman.

See – now you can crystallize that hatred. You can label me sinful, delusional, a ridiculous or pathetic aberration, an abomination, a man-in-a-dress. You have so many hate-filled words to throw at me and my transgender siblings in my community, as you design your laws all across this country and around the world and cast your hatred in legislative concrete. Even though you have no point of reference to imagine the pain of dissonance that comes from being in the wrong body, and even though my gender transition harms no one, you felt no hesitation to tell me "No" when I began my transition. Fortunately for me, I did not obey, but for transgender youth in so many Red states and in so many countries, their options are few.

You are so fast to define being LGBTQI+ as a choice or a lifestyle or a sin or a delusion. You will point your finger or carry your placard to denounce us as “not our culture”, or as "sinners". Why? Does my existence threaten you in some way? You don’t know me, we’ve never met, but you see me as a threat? Or is simply hating me enough; you have no need to think too much about me being a person. Hate, and a convenient target, is all you need.

There are not that many of us, our voices are not that strong but they – we – are frustratingly resilient. You redouble your efforts to crush us under the rectitude of what you call “family values”. I am a professor of values; those are not the values of any loving, caring family that I can imagine, much less care to teach about or attempt to justify. Those values come from dark places of exclusion, self-righteousness, ignorance, deep bias, humiliating jokes, anti-woke politics, violence, bullying, and hatred.

Many who are transgender or nonbinary are very young and very vulnerable – but you will not tolerate the possibility that those young people might actually know who they are. Their (incorrect) birth certificates and all your new hateful laws stand in the way of them claiming their authenticity and getting the medical care that they need to be whole, and to avoid the lifelong damage of going through the wrong puberty. Do you care if they turn to suicide? No, you will say that they were troubled, or that they were groomed, or recruited, or abused by their loving parents, or anything that denies them the existential right to own themselves in their own integrity. ?

I am not young. I left my wrong body behind many years ago. I have never missed it – not once. Still, I am not superwoman; I remain a vulnerable old woman whom you can crush if you try hard enough. You are indeed trying to do just that. And yes, I am a woman, even though you aren’t having it. I cannot help you with that – you (and your TERF allies) will not listen or learn or open yourself to the possibility that just maybe, just maybe – this old woman might really be a woman. A different kind of woman, I grant you, but a woman nonetheless.

Young transgender people and their loving parents ask me for hope. My LGBTQI+ friends in Uganda ask me for hope. My cisgender allies, be they straight, gay, lesbian, or queer, ask me for hope as together we strive for a society characterized by decency, care, compassion, and human rights. But your hatred is so strong, so self-righteous, so powerful, so inflexible, so certain, that it makes that hope very hard to find, much less to share.

My hope is that love will win in the end. Love is all I can offer those who ask me for hope.

It will have to do. ?