When I walk to my classes in Founders Hall on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus, I pass by a poster that maps every transgender person who has been murdered in the United States in the past 10 years. Most of the time I’ll stop and bow, paying respect and honoring those who have come before me, and those who have come after but weren’t given the opportunity to thrive. Sometimes, on hard days, I stare. I need to stop myself from breaking down as grief overwhelms me.
In the last few years, transgender, gender-nonconforming and non-binary individuals have been experiencing a striking surge in hate and violence as bills are put forth and laws are passed limiting our freedom to exist in public, criminalizing our safe and provenly effective healthcare, and decriminalizing violence against us. In 2025 alone, 123 bills have passed limiting transgender rights and jeopardizing our safety, and 1,003 are still being considered. (See translegislation.com for a running list.)
We cannot allow our country to put transgender people back in the closet and trample our rich history to dust. Although the current English language we have to describe our identities did not exist yet, transgender people have been around and noted since the dawn of time. We were sometimes the holy people of ancient religions, given the divine gift of living as both genders — male and female, both and neither, or from one to the other. From ancient Mesopotamia to China, India to the Americas, we have always been here. Our pasts were recorded in oral histories and clay tablets. Here, it was only through colonization that that memory was erased from the public consciousness as our culture was rooted out and replaced with rigid, early Judeo-Christian values of what gender and sexuality should look like. Denying the existence of people outside the binary (or perhaps those within it who have crossed from one side to the other), also denies the legitimacy of our historic place in the world and cedes our important roles to those of colonizers and missionaries.
All that said, I am also aware that there are people in our world who do not deny that transgender people exist, but are far more concerned with the procedures and medical interventions that we may use to customize our experiences. A common talking point, especially when concerning young people, is that our hormones are experimental and dangerous, but I would argue quite the opposite. Our hormonal treatments and even surgical practices as we know them today, although still evolving like everything in medical science, have their roots in Dr. Magnus Hirschfield’s research in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Hirschfield was the founder of the Institute for Sexual Sciences and practiced some of the first sex reassignment surgeries, as well as early hormonal therapies. He pioneered the field of medical science around transgender individuals and lobbied extensively for LGBTQ+ rights in Germany. However, outside of niche queer spaces, his name largely fell into obscurity after Nazis raided his institute and burned much of his work.
Being transgender often means being an activist, as we are forced to all become public representatives of our community to the outside world. We can try to choose otherwise, but the world will always choose for us. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Marsha P. Johnson didn’t initially set out to be trans activists. Neither did Mack Beggs (a high school wrestler forced to play in the girl’s league after a law regulating transgender people in sports passed), Buck Angel (an adult film star who now advocates for comprehensive and trans-affirming sex education), Albery Cashier (a Union veteran of the Civil War who was almost denied his benefits after his birth sex was discovered) or Christine Jorgenson (the first transgender woman in the U.S. to undergo gender reassignment surgery). The world simply took a turn that forced them to become activists for their own survival.
The least we can do is share their stories and the stories of thousands — if not millions — of others like them across time. Not every trans person should need to become a political activist, health expert and historian to argue the case of their own survival, but that is the world we live in. So let us remember those who came before us and those who came after but who were not given the opportunity to thrive. Let us keep those still fighting the good fight in our hearts and work to lessen their burdens together. Because it just isn’t possible for us to lift the heavy weight of oppression alone without the solidarity of our surrounding community.
Caden Downing, aka Novice Sister Kit Caboodle (he/she/they), is a student at Cal Poly Humboldt and the mistress of propaganda (marketing) for the Eureka Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence: Abbey of the Big Red Wood.
This article appears in The Stopwatch.