A lot of us down here in the South that are some flavor of queer aren't just being silent because we feel discouraged to speak up, we are actively oppressed. I was able to get driving lessons when I was younger because I wasn't aware i was trans. The driving "school" i.e. business that I learned from actively discriminates against trans people.
We are Trapped here! A lot of us are stuck in homes with people that, if they knew we were trans or gay what have you would happily see us in a pine box. My own parents were like that for YEARS till my brother gave them a reality check by moving out and threatening to cut contact over their fuckin bigotry.
We don't need to be cut out or abandoned. We. Need. Help! If you know someone in a horrible situation here and have a place to stay, offer it. A lot of us are getting fired for not being cishet. That means no healthcare, no money. Donate to Gofundmes and kofis and cashapps.
I lucked out, my parents are actually chill with me being trans for the most part now. I have a home and access to medical care and food. A lot of people don't. Go help them.
Edit: Look, I get that a lot of us on here are marginalized, but its important to reiterate this, for the people who aren't and as a reminder for us as well.
Quite a normal life to lead, until we started transitioning. What an interesting time that was- even though we were still hiding as a straight boy a lot of the time. We came out shortly after moving to Atlanta.
The community support we experienced there was intensely powerful. When we figured out we were trans, we joined a non-location-specific trans discord server from reddit or something. and then we found a local support group over the span of like one or two weeks simply by vagueposting pictures from around the city in that discord. like. no location mentioned, not even landmarks, just photos off various interstate bridges that you'd only recognize if you'd been there. Someone reached out to us saying "oh hey! you should come see my band perform, also come to the support group i run!".
Holy fuck. It took me a year and a half after I moved away to Seattle before I found anyone in the area even to hang out with, aside from the one or two people I knew before I came here.
Maybe it's that way in Atlanta because it needs to be. Almost everyone we met there was dealing with some kind of intense discrimination either at work, at home, at the doctor, or wherever in their day to day life. Riding transit often felt risky. I managed to sidestep a lot of it through luck and living circumstances and a stable job and maybe just the privilege of fitting alright into normative beauty standards, but I felt it too. Still, I knew that I had it good.
to support each other, everyone was always doing potlucks, parties in their rundown apartments, showing up to each others' shows, cheering on people at their roller derby matches. I remember there were these people who would come by the support group with free food, just drop it off and then head out. That wasn't specific to that group, they just did this for various queer meetings in the area. And if you needed to sleep on someone's floor, you knew you could. If you needed someone to drive you to your appointment to get HRT, someone would. to the limits of what the community could bear.
I dunno, maybe I just stumbled into the right crowd through sheer luck. And Atlanta is a big city, and probably one of the best places in the south to be queer. The population density certainly helps- being queer in a small town in north georgia really feels like being on an island by comparison. But I never experienced anything like that afterwards. I still think about it a lot. I think about how the queer group in my local highschool in the suburbs I grew up in fought tooth and nail against the administration so that a trans guy could use the bathroom he wanted to. I think about the gay man trying to figure out if the church that had been such a central part of his life would let him stay.
Seattle feels uncannily navigable in comparison. Did you know in Georgia you need to put a notice in a legal gazette for a month before doing a name change? I couldn't even figure out how to do it. Groups exist to try to provide trans people lawyers just to navigate the process. When I moved to Seattle, I just walked into a court, asked for a name change, paid them way too much money (this is a problem), and then got one later that day. There's lots wrong here, but it's... it's different. And things have gotten worse where I moved away from, since then.
but I also never really felt like I had found a support network here. I found individual people, individual friends, and what eventually became my local social sphere, reinforced by the years of the pandemic. But I never found a community, in the broadest sense of the word. Maybe I just never knew where to look.
I dunno, I don't think I have a coherent point here, but what I have got is memories.
I left because I could. Because I felt like I needed space from my past. Because I couldn't drive, couldn't afford a car anyway, and was struggling through the car-dependent space that is Atlanta. Because I was going through a lot of mental instability and had emotionally latched onto one or two people in Seattle in some particularly unsustainable ways. Because I didn't realize how special and important the people I had met there were to me. I'm still not sure if it was the right decision. I wonder how the years of near-death I experienced after that would've been different, whether it'd be better or if something else would've gotten me, if I'd stayed.
It's rough there, yeah. in a very real way. I feel like I have it easy where I am now. I still feel that familiar fear when I think about moving back. when i consider going to visit. idk. support your queer family, wherever they are. and people in the places where things are going the roughest right about now. they need it. And understand that they live in a place, a real place, with a real soul. with relationships and histories and complexities. with people they depend on, people that depend on them. not everyone can leave. and not everyone wants to.
I was raised in Philly for three years and then Michigan for four or five until I moved to Florida, but I agree with all this.
