I was featured in New York Times’ Transgender Today. Now I feel betrayed.

Elinor Burkett’s “What Makes a Woman?” Felt Like a Knife in the Back

When I was first contacted about contributing to the New York Times’ “Transgender Today” feature, I was extremely excited. It felt like an opportunity to do something good and have my voice heard by many who need to hear it. It felt like a chance to say all the things I’ve wanted to say for so long to my community and to cisgender people. It felt like a commitment from a major news source to promote transgender awareness and to not promote the lies that so often are used to excuse our continued abuse, discrimination, and, all too often, deaths. For the first time in a while, I felt some small glimmer of hope for my community. Then I saw the Elinor Burkett piece that the New York Times chose to publish, and it felt like a knife in the back of my hopes for positive present change.

An initial disappointment came when I learned that I had to limit my text and the duration of my video as a condition of being included in the piece. Still, I was riding the high that came with the hope of finally seeing some change in mainstream media. I decided to take that hope, and and try to help the trans community that has become such a big part of my life, feel that hope too. I shared a little of my story and then the good things going on in my life while holding on to the hope that this was when I would begin to see real, meaningful change.

Then the Burkett piece came out; I shuddered as I read it. Word by hateful, inaccurate, bigoted, word. Much of the faith that I had originally felt with the piece was already lost in the melée of hatred I witnessed when Caitlyn Jenner came out. But when I saw that piece in the very paper I had just felt so much hope for, it felt like an enormous betrayal of my community for headlines and click bait.

All at once, I was reminded that trans people, trans women specifically, are still hated, still questioned, still unaccepted in even the tiniest ways, and that this hatred and the questioning of my identity is still wholly up for use as a profit revenue. So few other hate groups would be given the platform to spew their hostility like that which the New York Times gave to Burkett. To do so would have immediately caused a gigantic uproar in a large percentage of the population. Yet my very existence, as well as those of an entire group of human beings, and our right to exist in peace, are still up for grabs. The dehumanization that was allowed to be printed by the New York Times made me recoil in sadness at these realizations I had hoped were going to slowly become a memory. I realized that my life as a trans woman still is, to this day, involved in the same Jerry Springer-esque sensationalism that it always has been, just with a sometimes slightly more nuanced vocabulary to cover the bigotry.

In my video, I chose to share the good things going on in my life at the moment. I tried to pretend that it wasn’t as bad as it always has been. The facts are, being a transgender woman in this society is still incredibly traumatizing, full of road blocks, and full of very valid and real fears to step out the door every day.

This is my reality in the truest sense. What I didn’t mention in that video is that I spend most of my free time in bed due to the stressors of simply existing as a neurodiverse trans woman in the world. I don’t go places alone if at all possible due to fear of being attacked, raped, or murdered. I have trouble working in even one of the most well-rated companies to work for in terms of LGB(t) equality in the work place due to the lack of trans focus given by the groups who create these ratings systems. I get misgendered almost as often as I’m correctly gendered in person and every single time it hurts a little bit more. I no longer speak to my father because he has chosen to not accept me as the woman I am. I deal with under-informed medical professionals even in LGB(t) clinics. I deal with being scared of going to the hospital in personal medical emergencies due to the memories of my last stay at one of the nation’s leading hospitals; an experience that left me in a catatonic state of trigger from the misgenderings and the lack of care given when it was brought up over and over again. I deal with not even having the peace of being able to sit down and watch pretty much any television show, without some kind of transmisogyny or transphobia rearing its ugly head at some point and having my existence be made the butt of a joke. I deal with seeing the hatred in people’s eyes when they realize I am trans. The anxiety of how they will react to that realization. I often deal with the crushing thought that life would be so much better for those I love, if I was just gone. I deal with reading about too many of my transgender family gone for similar and/or completely different reasons. I deal with all those things and so much more that this paragraph could continue until my fingers no longer would type.

I was not even paid for my contribution to the New York Times’ “Transgender Today” piece. Yet Burkett was paid for her op-ed of hatred. This highlights an all too often overlooked problem in the trans community. While Burkett profits from her bigotry and gains forward economic and social mobility, trans people are often asked to share our stories for free. Our visibility as trans people in this society makes gaining what Burkett has, from her hatred, all the more difficult for us to achieve. The knowledge that we have spent years amassing as we try to better understand ourselves in a world that only pushes forward a cisnormative narrative, is all too often expected to be given freely so that others may profit economically and/or socially while we are left with nothing.

Seeing Burkett’s piece in The New York Times made me keenly aware that I must still deal with mainstream media outlets feeling it appropriate to profit off of the hatred and willfully ignorant misunderstanding of my community. I felt such hope that things were changing. I chose to ignore the reality in front of my face for two minutes to try to see that hope grow and increase and manifest itself into the world. That hope disappeared after reading Elinor Burkett’s piece and all I was left with was the reality that too many in the transgender communities are left with.

The reality is that while Burkett, the New York Times, and far too many other mainstream media outlets profit from continuing to question the validity and right to exist of trans people, we are left to pick up the pieces left behind in the form of depression, anger, hopelessness, and continued oppression.