This document’s title, on my desktop, has been “Xtra Despair.” Not coincidentally, this is an accurate description of how I’m feeling. Since Trump’s second inauguration, I’ve hit a wall: there’s an overwhelming sense that none of the arguing or writing or activism I’ve engaged in for the past four or eight or 10 or 20 years has actually made things better, and that I’m fresh out of ideas, or maybe out of options.
I’m not alone in this. I get messages from young trans people, or from their parents, asking how to get past feelings of despair. I see the numbers—the Rainbow Youth Project, a crisis hotline for queer teens, normally gets 3,700 calls per month. After Trump’s inauguration, they received 5,500 calls in the first ten days.
So I’m starting here: I don’t know what to do. I don’t! If I knew what to do, I would have done it already, and all the world’s problems would be fixed. There’d be no reason to write this article. Yet I do know what my job is, which is to talk to smart people and try to get answers. I have been asking those smart people about despair lately. Here, so far, are the answers I’ve got.
This crisis has been building for a long time. “Do you remember the vibe shift?” asks trans journalist Evan Urquhart, who wrote about “queer despair” for Slate in June of 2023. Even then, it was an old feeling. Urquhart says he was inspired to write the piece by a rash of 2022 trend pieces wherein marketing experts promising a pop-culture reset mixed fashion predictions (“American Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair”) with political statements like “the culture-war topic no longer seems quite as interesting to people” and “younger people are less interested in things like quote-unquote cancel culture.”
“That’s when I knew we were headed for bad times,” Urquhart says. “Not because of who hated us but because of who’d recently decided it was passé to come to our defense.” After all, “if no one is interested in stopping a hate movement from dictating policy, and they start to dictate policy, then you can expect to see them do so more and more.”
I, too, remember being creeped out by the vibe shift—but it wasn’t the only warning sign. Among trans people, the feeling that we are headed into a dark chapter of our collective history has been building for a long time, and rates of mental health issues in our community have been getting correspondingly worse. Between 2014 and 2022, rates of psychological distress and depression among trans adults more than doubled. In 2023—well before Trump won the election—72 percent of transgender students in the U.S. reported persistent “hopelessness.”
This is not a matter of one politician, or even one administration—but Trump’s election does, at least, seem like confirmation of many people’s worst fears. It also inspires deep feelings of helplessness. After all, we already voted him out of office once, and now he’s president again. How are we supposed to believe #resistance will work?
This is where things get dangerous. True despair is not just sadness or fear. It’s the lack of a framework to help you make sense of the adversity and sorrow you experience, an inability to situate your struggle in some wider context. Trans scholar and author Florence Ashley explains this to me as a breakdown in “metanarratives.”
“It is easier to cope with the trials and tribulations of life when you find forms of meaning in life that transcend your immediate situation,” Ashley says. Until approximately the 1940s, metanarratives were plentiful and optimistic—whether it was religious faith, a secular faith in Science or Progress or a leftist belief in the inevitability of communism, most people had a story that told them things would work out all right in the end.
Then came the Nazis. “The Second World War was disastrous for these metanarratives,” says Ashley. “For those of Abrahamic faiths, the question was how could a benevolent God let something so horrendous happen. As for scientific positivism, the nuclear bomb and Nazis’ use of science as a technology of death and torture against the background of the scientization of racism led many to the sobering realization that scientific advances may spell less the happiness of humanity than its utter destruction.” Faith in communism was shaken by Stalin and by capitalism’s stubborn persistence.
It is not new to suggest that Trump represents a turn to fascism (his own vice-president has described him as “America’s Hitler”) and, like those mid-century catastrophes, his rise to power has been disturbing and despair-provoking for many people precisely because it upends the liberal narratives of progress that we were brought up with. It defies our understanding of the long arc of history, and how it’s supposed to bend. We thought we got rid of Trump, but we didn’t. We thought America beat the Nazis, but it invented new ones. “People are finding it harder and harder to find hope in an eventual, healed future,” Ashley says; we can no longer rely on narrative logic in which good is rewarded and evil is punished, or tell ourselves that history will have a happy ending.
Yet 21st-century trans people are not the first group to be faced with this problem, nor are we the worst harmed. “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering,” wrote Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor E. Frankl, in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. During his time in Auschwitz and Dachau, Frankl observed that “those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were the most apt to survive.”
That task could be, and often was, very simple. It could be a determination to take care of other people in the camps. It could be a determination to hold onto one’s own humanity in the face of brutality and hatred. “We all need to find ways to give life (including our life) a meaning and significance that transcends immediate circumstances and sufferings. That’s how we keep going. That’s how we find strength. That’s how we don’t give up,” Ashley says. Yet, according to Frankl, that kind of meaning is not simply granted to us. It is something we must consciously decide on, particularly when circumstances are bad, because it keeps us alive.
So: If we don’t have a guarantee of a good outcome, where do we find that meaning? Simple: in each other.
Science writer and journalist Sandy Ernest Allen began the newsletter “What’s Helping Today” as “an expression of my desire to talk more specifically about the daily work of how we keep going even when the going is really impossible-feeling,” he tells me. Since the election, that topic has become particularly relevant, and his newsletters have been widely circulated.
One key takeaway, which Allen has covered several times, is that “helping others is good for you too.” Altruism actually has concrete positive impacts on the person extending help, as well as the person receiving it. People who engage in altruistic acts —anything from charitable donations to working in animal welfare to donating a kidney —routinely report higher life satisfaction than those who don’t.
Organizing and activism are altruistic acts. What this suggests is that we keep doing them, not because we are certain of victory—which no one ever is—but because the actual work of trying to make things better is part of what keeps us sane.
The most basic form of activism we can do right now, and possibly the most helpful, is community-building and showing up for other trans people. “Community is mental health care, full stop,” Allen says. “I think for fellow trans people right now, it’s that gesture of ‘I see you. I love you. I care about you. I know what we’re all going through’ … for me, I’m thinking about, how can I literally invite trans people in my community over for cookies? That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it, and so far everyone is down.”
The way out of despair is to admit to despair, says Urquhart: “If we tell people we’re okay when we’re dying inside it isolates us from the only thing that might help, which is community,” he tells me. “We tell ourselves we’re doing it to protect people, we tell ourselves we can’t put this heavy burden on them, and not only does it stop us from getting support but also from supporting them because what we don’t realize is they feel it too.”
Just getting together with other trans people and expressing despair doesn’t feel huge. It doesn’t have to—helping others in even very small, practical ways pays off in terms of increased mental health, and it also helps us build the community we need for larger and more dramatic forms of protest.
“I would say if right now you feel super alone, start with one,” Allen says. “Start with one person, one way that you can feel less alone. And that can be community that you find in real life. That can be community that you find online. I don’t think it’s important. I think what’s important is that you find something that works for you and that you remember that it’s important to stay connected to other people right now. What they are trying to do is separate us out from each other and kill off the weak, right? So let’s run toward each other.”
This is not just therapy-speak, but “basic trans elder wisdom,” Allen says. “Look for the others—especially those older, wiser or further along in experience than you—who are maybe gonna be able to say ‘Hey, we’ve survived some tough shit. We’re gonna continue to survive some tough shit.’”
And if, by some miraculous chance, you can’t find even one other trans person—good news: you still know one trans person who is very important. Just caring for yourself, keeping yourself alive, is Caring For Trans People and Saving Trans People—and your survival is a way to spit in the eye of those who would eliminate us. These are dark times, and anger, fear and sorrow are all reasonable responses—but giving up is not something any of us can afford. “For the world is in a bad state,” Viktor Frankl wrote, 41 years ago, “but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.” So just do your best. Stay here, until you find the other people who need you to make it through.
Why you can trust Xtra
