Isolation

How the Pandemic informs the transgender experience

You have experienced the isolation that a pandemic can create. It happened on a world-wide scale. Unless you are a hermit, once the uniqueness of the experience wore off, for most of us, it became grinding and lonely. It is amazing how much we took the company of strangers in our daily lives for granted.

We need social contact; we seek human contact and we sometimes even crave any human contact. It is part of social fabric of our humanity.

Isolation manifests in so many different ways. Many of us have felt it from time to time independent of the pandemic.

There are different kinds of isolation. Some include:

• Feeling alone when surrounded by friends and family
• Feeling unaccepted and misunderstood
• Fear of getting hurt and being rejected
• Not trusting others and pushing them away

To someone who is transgender in today’s world, isolation seems to have a particularly painful reality.

It incorporates all four of those senses of isolation into a toxic mixture that eats at your soul.