I am looking out the window on the train home from Philadelphia with Beverly Glenn-Copeland singing a love song in my headphones. The sun blinks from behind the trees as it is setting across this very Pennsylvania landscape: rolling hills, the trees turning their October colours between harvested fields. My trans therapy clients live all across the state, in Philly and Pittsburgh and in rural towns and suburbs. They have different lives and different commitments in their communities, but they are all reeling from being trans in a world that seems to get more hostile every day. I share their fears and struggles, and I am also their therapist.

Back in my home office, a client logs in to the waiting room of the telehealth platform my private practice uses; I click a button, and their familiar face fills my computer screen. I usually smile, say hello and ask, “Where would you like to begin?” or, “What is important to you today?” For 55 minutes, we are together. The client’s world fills the room; I listen, allow silence, invite feelings, ask questions, attempt to tune my attention to this person and to our relationship alone. That both of us are trans is not the only thing that makes this work, but it is an important ingredient.

These days when I tell people I meet that I am a psychotherapist and I work primarily with other trans people, their eyes sometimes get wide before they furrow their brow and say either: Oh, I bet that is so hard, or, Oh, you are doing such important work. These responses, as you might have guessed, usually come from cis people. And while this person I am talking to likely means well, neither of these responses reflect what it is like to do this job right now. Neither reflect what it is like to be a trans person holding other trans people right now. Or it is more than all of that.

I do find myself overwhelmed by my own fear and longing. I linger on the danger and the harm, stuck on news stories about the most recent anti-trans executive order, state legislative action to prevent trans kids in sports or a right-wing grifter looking to get famous at a trans person’s expense. And I seek antidotes to despair wherever I can find them, in stories of trans life flourishing, a young person celebrated by their community or trans elders and ancestors who laid the foundation for my life today to help me remember that trans people have a future, that we are loved, valuable, possible.

@xtramagazine Trans Americans are choosing to move to different, more inclusive, states in response to rising anti-LGBTQ2S+ legislation across the country. That’s according to a new study from the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) and NORC at the University of Chicago, which aims to illustrate how queer and trans people are altering their daily lives in the current political environment in the U.S. Made up of responses from over 1,000 LGBTQ2S+ adults in the U.S., the study found that 57 percent of LGBTQ2S+ respondents—including 84 percent of trans and non-binary people—have either considered moving to a different state, changed jobs or took steps to be less visible in response to anti-LGBTQ2S+ legislation. According to MAP, 24 percent of trans people said they have gone to another state to get medical care since Trump was elected (compared to 8 percent of all LGBTQ2S+ people surveyed), while 9 percent said they moved to a different state entirely due to the political climate. This shift aligns with several anti-trans policies that have taken shape since Trump’s second inauguration—from bathroom bans, to attacks on gender-affirming care and an increased targeting of trans people in many U.S. states—which has prompted some to consider leaving the U.S. entirely. #lgbtqnews #queernews #trans #politicalnews #lgbtq ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

This is what it is like to be a trans therapist for trans people. To believe that trans people have a collective future and to be some part of supporting individual trans survival. I want other trans people to believe in that future too.

I feel the weight of what it is like to live under threat. I sit with trans people who come to therapy for the reasons many people come to therapy: they have daily struggles in relationships, haunting histories of harm, anxieties about their future, dreams they struggle to fulfill. But everything that we are working on together is coloured by the reality of being trans in the United States now, a country that has made us the scapegoat. That at best has abandoned us, and at worst, is coming for our very lives. And I worry that I do not know how to do this.

A client logs in to the waiting room of the telehealth platform my practice uses. I click a button to let them in. Their face is familiar and I remember what to do. I smile. I say, “Where would you like to begin?” We talk about how they will stay—stay alive, stay connected, stay upright in their body. I notice the echoes of other clients, friends and my own experience in their struggles and help them see the places they are connected to trans life and history. Together we remember their power, the ways they continue to change, the lineage in which we live as trans people that is a connection to the past and a promise we are making to the future.

My trans clients teach me how to contribute to a trans future. First and foremost, we will have to live. We will have to live alongside people who do not want to understand us, who are being taught to fear us, who hurt us because they are hurting. We will have to live and be resilient, practice building pockets of care and pleasure with our loves and the families we choose. We will have to live now, through this, because in our beauty and in our potential, we are proving them wrong. The world is not fixed. Change is not only possible but necessary. There is a future where we have won so we must live now with that knowledge that this is possible. We must live now and sometimes fight and sometimes rest and sometimes grieve and sometimes have fun together.

A client logs in. I click. Their face. Smile. Begin.