This letter to the editor may have been edited for clarity.
Eds: Note use of vulgarity
Trump’s ignorance has reached new levels of insanity. It’s humiliating and it’s inhumane to have people deny us our identities, to cut us up into bite-sized pieces and shove us into narrow boxes to which we do not belong. I was a man most of my life, and I was miserable. I have never been more myself, more comfortable in my own skin, more honest, and more powerful than I am now as a woman. [I am] nothing less than a woman: a healthy woman, [and] a happy woman. How dare anyone deny me that! What right does anybody have, least of all an uneducated politician, to legislate our bodies, our histories, or our identities out of existence?
It destroys the spirit to be constantly turned into jokes, to be reduced to your genitals, to be used as a political talking point. There is no greater feeling of betrayal and misery than feeling compelled to flee your own country to be safe, to have your right to exist constantly called into question, to be made to explain your body and your history to total strangers because they cannot comprehend that it is none of their f—ing business, [Or] to have the person you love most in the world look at you with agony in their eyes and tell you emphatically, “I’m tired. I’m just tired.”
To shrug your shoulders and refuse to listen to us, to refuse to question the baseless assumptions the system pounded into your head, to deny us our right to live freely as the people we innately know ourselves to be, is cowardice. Moral and political cowardice. And I expected better of this country. It is the height of human arrogance to assume two little boxes completely explain the complexity and richness of the human tapestry.
Juliet Williams
