The past several months have forced me to rethink my life. A major curveball has been the introduction of a spicy new fact to that life—

I am a homeless trans woman.

This is That Thing I’ve spent most of my life afraid of becoming. There’s a link between the two sides of this thing, like between an anchor and the ankle it’s tied to. How’s that for an on-the-nose image? And it does feel—always has felt—like sinking. Don’t come out because you might be disowned. Don’t push the line at work because you might be jobless. Don’t take up too much space because you might eventually lose everyone, and then you’d be on your own. The fear of that—being stranded, alone—is so deeply embedded in the experience of transphobia that it can be hard to separate them.

Happily, but in a way that often feels fragile and miraculous, I am not alone in this. I have my boyfriend, and because of a cascade of aid from a support network I’ve grateful to have, I’ve at least been able to stay off the street. I can remind myself of this every day: I am not alone, so there is hope to recover from this.

A good deal of this support has come from the publishing communities I’m a part of. Author friends I’ve made along the way, editors I’ve worked with, colleagues who’ve shared crowdfund posts and generously given donations the many times I’ve needed help.

I think often what a stroke of luck it was for me to become involved in these author and book communities to start with, because they’ve literally kept me off the street. But this has also led to a certain intensity in my relationship to those same communities.

This is why I speak through a tough, complex knot of deep ambivalence when I say this:

Publishing communities, you have a transphobia problem.

Always On the Edge

Let’s go back to the fear of being alone.

I thought for hours about how to frame this post, originally considering a breakdown of helpful things cis people could do to better fight transphobia, or common instances of transphobia that cis people can be more aware of. The problem is that we’d be here all day. Showing the anatomy of transphobia would require many different points, each one deserving of its own discussion.

My gut says that it’s better to delve into a core element of transphobia, characterizing all its lurid features and manifestations.

That element is exile. Banishment from the family, from the household, from the structures of everyday life, from jobs and relationships and safe places to sleep. Trans people are all, in our varying ways, dancing around the threat and consequence of this exile.

A point comes every year when I see people talking about a new report on trans murder victims of that year. The pattern isn’t hard to predict—the overwhelming bulk of those murder victims are Black trans women and other trans women of color, many of whom are also sex workers. Trans BIPOC who aren’t transfeminine and white trans women nevertheless also represent a disturbing rate of victimization for their population sizes, and all such victims tend to have unusually violent deaths. What these discussion don’t show us, though, are all the steps leading toward these outcomes. The abuse, the family alienation, the increasingly hostile environments, the gradually thinning piles of life options, an ever-mounting background noise of desperation.

Even white trans men who are otherwise relatively privileged still suffer alarmingly high chances of suicide, sexual assault, wage gaps, lost jobs, homelessness. We’re never talking about a single incident of violence, but a complex machine that gradually put you in the line of that violence with no escape. And the building blocks of that machine are all the ways we become pushed to the edges, and eventually out, of everyday life.

I find scar tissue left by this machine on the inside of my heart almost every day. So many poisonous dynamics built by the fear that I could always be kicked out—from family, from relationships, from school, from the ability to make a living. Trans people suffer above average risk of being unemployed, discriminated against in hiring, harassed in the workplace, denied housing. Trans kids of color and trans girls are both especially likely to be expelled from schools. A staggering percentage of trans women report having to trade sex in order to have safe shelter. Many, many Black trans women end up in prisons because of the over-policing of the sex work that they have to rely on to survive. Trans people always have to find a way to make lives poised on the edge of an abyss.

What we need to understand about the fear of exile is how brutally realistic it is—and just as it happens economically, it also occurs socially. In fact, this is the first way it happens.

The Trans Bubble

Last week, news broke of a bill in Texas designed to criminalize parents allowing gender-affirming care for transgender children. This was one of many recent developments in an escalation of institutionalized transphobia, and a particularly loud one.

A group stepped up to put together HEA For Trans Kids, a book bundle fundraiser for families that would be targeted by the Texas bill. The group has a mix of trans and cis people, with some high profile cis people volunteering the use of their platforms as well as their labor to organize the fundraiser. Please check them out and see if you can help.

This isn’t just cool or touching. It’s sort of a shock (though the good kind) because of how unusual it is as a response among cis people. When the news dropped, trans people in my circles all echoed a complex despair, both at the grim advance of oppression and at the sense that this would likely be yet another thing cis people would mostly ignore.

Doesn’t take long to learn this principle of being trans in a public space—trans people talk about shit that matters for trans people, and other people . . . don’t. This isn’t only about news cycles or laws. Sometimes it’s a little amazing how loud trans people can be about a problem with cis people still not noticing. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen a public figure denounced by groups of trans people years before cis people finally start to sniff out the odor.

I call this problem the trans bubble. It’s when we trans people wind up in a stanky lil’ bubble of our own, with our hurts and values and discussions all swirling around in a secluded subspace, not penetrating cis consciousness.

There’s a fun mutation of this, when cis people become aware of institutional forms of transphobia, but remain inattentive to communal forms of transphobia. Like when I could easily find droves of cis people talking about Trump’s transgender military ban, but nothing else that was percolating inside the trans bubble at the time, including things they were guilty of. This can foster the illusion among cis people that transphobia is a distant foe, the territory of fringe extremists and mustache-twirling villains, rather than a thing they themselves feed into.

I don’t know any trans people who aren’t aware of the trans bubble. The sourness of it comes from the fact that this is another way we experience exile, albeit a milder form. Just as we end up underground in the world, we inhabit an isolated layer of whatever social environments we’re in. Even when we’re not in direct danger, we suffer a lack of social integration.

Let’s be blunt here—on social media, transness itself is seen as another social interest, much like romance novels, webcomics, and MCU movies. Trans people effectively inhabit our own fandom, complete with lingo outsiders feel confused by, drama outsiders don’t pick up, and shared interest that outsiders naturally learn to tune out. Cis people tend to find our intra-group discussion arcane and academic-sounding, despite most trans lexicon never having crossed the pages of a university journal or thesis paper. Being trans is like a weird form of specialization.

The harm of that is that we aren’t talking about a fandom. Those insular interests are our lives, and the outsiders tuning it out are 98% of the world. A 98% that we desperately need to help us, whether they’re ready for it or not.

Pocket Full of Pain

It’s not that cis people never see or try to breach the trans bubble—I just gave a positive example of cis solidarity above. But consider what tends to be the signature way cis people extract things from the trans bubble, a process so wrapped around existing as trans online that most trans people become micro-experts at it without even trying. That process is education.

Heaps of cis people want to be educated. I hear they love that—lists of trans 101 topics, the correct language to use, ways to be more inclusive as an ally. This is good! I’m glad they love that.

Two big problems though: one, someone’s gotta do the educating, and that creates a natural social role for trans people if we want to be part of a social group. The worst, stealthiest layer of this is that whether it’s intended or not, we have to become educators if we want anything to get out of the trans bubble.

The other problem is that this leads to an impression among cis people that the root of transphobia is ignorance and the answer to it is knowledge. Since that knowledge has to come from us, we become responsible for fixing transphobia—by the 2% of us steadily educating the 98% how to not oppress us, how to not exile us. That’s a fucking scary place to be in.

This also leaves out a huge chunk of the problem, which is all the geography of oppression that isn’t about knowledge. It’s one thing to open your skull and say “okay, program good allyship into my brain, please and thank you!” even though this is a fundamentally passive stance toward solidarity. But this means an inattention to all the emotional aspects of the problem.

One of my big criticisms of social justice scenes—from sensitivity workshops to online discourse—is that they tend to massively emphasize mental work, like education, over emotional work. This emphasis eventually grows into a community that may be good at mentalizing about allyship and marginalization, knowing the right words to use and mottos to repeat, but not good at managing their motivations and attitudes about the people they’re trying to be allies to—or even identifying what those motivations and attitudes are.

If you try to educate someone, you’ll inevitably run into something that they’re uncomfortable being taught. They’ll have to compromise some value they have, feel unpleasant emotions, hold things together in their minds that they aren’t used to doing. This moment is often when a cis person—not ready to tolerate their discomfort and maybe not even seeing that it’s there—begins to tune out. The “lesson” becomes fandom noise again, part of someone else’s social interest.

This paradigm turns transness not only into a social interest but into an activist project, something processed mentally as A Good Thing but without emotional grounding, without the willingness to keep looking at it when discomfort strikes. Worse still, it keeps cis people from seeing the ways they enact transphobia that aren’t about ignorance—such as this very pattern I’m currently describing.

What cis people need to internalize is that fighting transphobia means relationship-building and conflict resolution, which are two things education alone cannot bring about. Cis people can easily come to feel like trans people in their lives are asking too much, demanding they rewrite their views of fundamental realities. About gender, about life, about care.

We do demand that. Transness is a challenge to a dominant mode of society, and so it puts you in conflict with things that seem normal, like basic parts of who you are. Not just your beliefs, but how you feel—about yourself, the world, and other people.

This means discomfort. But that discomfort is a price that has to be paid by tolerating it. Because when you don’t pay that price, we have to pay it. We pay it, over and over again, our discomfort becoming pain, pain we have to endure to not be pushed completely to the edge. We see, once again, that exile was always there, waiting for us to slip into its infinite mouth.

Someone’s Got to Be the Man Here

Transness is a tough nut to crack. It transgresses a bedrock layer of society, a fixture embedded into our most infantile selves from the day we’re born: “who is a boy and who is a girl.” Society is fundamentally not set up to handle us, which is why we get kicked out of it.

This also means that coming to terms with trans people hits primal regions of the self, built not in the mind but in the instincts. Say you’re a woman who’s learned to tense up in fear if you’re walking down the street and see a large, masculine-looking silhouette coming up behind you. Are you going to think “am I possibly misgendering that person?” Fuck no.

Gender is not an abstract label, it’s a dynamic communicated through infinitesimal social and emotional signals, and we use gender to collectively create in-groups, out-groups, sexual expression, and feelings of safety. Most of society is designed to be homosocial, a fancy way of saying we’re taught to prioritize social connection with people who share our gender. This pattern doesn’t hold for every individual, but most large social groups are built with gender lines in mind.

I learned this by being the only girl in a locker room full of boys. It didn’t matter that their heads said I was another boy like them. The social signals put me in the instinctive category “girl,” and the energy of my boy peers reflected that. I was an infection among them, and when they couldn’t force me out, they found other ways to push me to the edge.

We’re all doing this all the time, reacting to the gender signals in our environments and arranging social dynamics around them. It’s not always violent, but it always impacts something.

Cis people can find trans people confusing on an instinctive level because we often don’t fit their non-verbal language of gender signaling. We have our own unique patterns that are difficult to catch with the intellect, but register emotionally. We also have values and needs which confuse learned definitions of gender.

Romance—and Romancelandia—is a space I can speak to about this because of its relevance to my place in publishing. Romance is a huge example of a female homosocial interest. While not only women participate in romance communities, female homosociality is embedded into it because it’s one of few social interests that are led by women both culturally and industrially. “By women, for women” is not a difficult sentiment to find among romance fans. Female homosociality is often a bastion against male supremacist society, allowing female norms to win out over male ones, and among adult women with progressive leanings, female homosociality tends to be seen as the bedrock of feminist activity.

I also learned something else long ago, a kind of flip side to the locker room full of boys. Lots of people think that female homosocial environments would naturally be more friendly to trans girls and women—because after all, aren’t we women? But my experience has been that female-centric groups and spaces are usually deeply and especially hostile to trans girls.

Gender signals are part of this. Experience tells me that I confuse peoples’ gender signal radars. Most of the world emotionally and instinctively interprets me as a mix of male and female, and this is just as often true for cis people who say “trans women are women.” I am too much of a girl for boys, and I am too much of a boy for girls. Gender groups are self-purifying. Boys, for example, are fantastic at spotting things that are un-boyish and punishing or rejecting them appropriately.

Female homosciality relies on self-purifying its female flavor. Whether the cis women in these groups know it or not, they’re primed to sniff out male signals, male-coded values, and shifts toward male orientation.

You can understand this, right? Lots of cis women complain about Y-chromosome-havers, people with penises, jockstrap-scratchers, all recognized synecdoches for maleness. This is a way of pushing back against cis male misogyny, itself a tool for bonding among groups of men.

Romance also has a special purpose for signaling female orientation. You can barely throw a pair of underwear without hitting popular fiction that depicts women horrendously. Female characters that “breast boobily,” written in cartoonish strokes of misogynistic caricature. Some measure of “misandry” feels like feminist punch-back.

A giant fly in this soup is that female orientation here means cis female orientation, because that’s what it means in the rest of the society. In addition to stamping on non-women who don’t deserve to be out-grouped, it reinforces the transmisogyny baked into most homosociality. Trans women are profoundly underrepresented among romance circles, both as creators and readers; trans female-centric interests, writing, and expression are not prized the way cis female ones are. “For women” doesn’t mean for us. By design, I and other trans women are not supposed to go anywhere. We are supposed to be exiled.

Challenging this means giving up some of what makes such spaces feel like home to cis women. The same group-building that makes romance feel safely female-oriented is also a barrier against anything that feels too “male”—and many features of trans women tend to read to cis women as exactly that, often moreso than actual men.

Enter my pansy ass in the romance world.

I’m not the only trans woman who writes romance, but I’m one of few. One of the first real interactions many had with me was me asking them to change the way they think and talk about “male” bodies. Saying that a cis man “wouldn’t be so respected if he didn’t have a dick” doesn’t just misrepresent how gendered privilege works, it’s a sentiment that feeds into violent ideology against trans women. So right away, I came in with a big “fuck you” to a familiar social signal of female orientation.

I also have tended to directly confront people about these expressions in a way that can make them feel put on the spot. I took on my role of trans-educator because I sensed that’s what was expected of me, and this meant taking an analytical approach to my communication. All of this tends to read as male behavior to cis women.

It adds up fast. I also have many mannerisms and tastes that reflect gay male culture, which can strike cis women as aggressive. If you listened to me speak on a romance podcast, my voice sounds more like a flamboyant gay boy’s than a woman’s. If you read a book that depicted the kind of romance relationship that most accurately mirrored my life, it contours might feel closer to an M/M story than an M/F one.

Even to people who mentally label me “woman,” I scramble the social gender signals that romance culture relies on. And I do so I while asking you to change.

Guesses as to what this causes?

Discomfort. A slimy, stinky pile of discomfort. Discomfort around part of what makes romance communities feel safe for cis women. Discomfort that most people aren’t ready to deal with.

But when it isn’t dealt with, that discomfort gets turned back on me. As resentment, as annoyance, as recrimination. I feel that happening, as I’ve been trained to feel it, and sense the threat of exile once more rearing its head.

Is it starting to make sense why education alone was never going to fix this?

At Whose Mercy 

There’s another piece to all this.

Other trans people endure some version of what I’m describing. Some of this is universal, but I’m speaking from personal perspective. Partly because I can speak to transmisogyny, the virulent form of transphobia that targets trans women and transfeminine people. Transmisogyny isn’t just a belief, but a force shaping women’s (and men’s) social dynamics.

I also speak from that perspective because of my own discomfort.

When I speak about problems in my author communities, I always brace for an inner current of guilt. Part of me feels profoundly ungrateful.

When I was first becoming homeless, my dear friend KJ Charles, a cis author, created a fundraiser that raised over eight thousand dollars to help keep me and my boyfriend off the street. (You can find her website here.)

This was a grave need of mine that a friend stepped forward, on her own initiative, to do her best to fill. That and other financial support has helped me weather a terrifying situation. And a huge amount of that support has come from romance communities. Friends and their friends, a range of colleagues and companions who donated generously, who rallied a call for me, even when there was nothing in it for them.

I’ve had many supporters, but it’s striking how many of them, and how big a portion of the donations, came from romance authors and readers.

The negative response some parts of that community has given me in contrast has also been striking. As generous have some have been, others have been suspicious. I continue to find transphobic behavior more acceptable across the industry than the efforts of trans people to change them. The threat of exile still feels viscerally real, as is the emotional cost of resisting it.

No community is homogenous, and will contain the wonderful and the wicked. But the tension is disturbing because of how necessary it is to contend with. Many times over the past few years, crowdfund support from friends and colleagues in romance publishing has been the only reason I could afford rent, food, or medicine. I would likely have become homeless much sooner without it.

I wrote here in my recent essay about my difficulties with work, money, and supporting myself. In short, being an author and an editor is pretty much it for career options. I have considered sex work, and don’t misunderstand me, I certainly don’t think there’s anything shameful about it. However, I’m well aware of how easily it can become unsafe as a line of work for girls like me, especially considering institutional oppression of sex workers. So that too is a complicated option.

The pressure builds. It infuses my relationship to my author and reader communities with desperation, a mixture of tremendous reliance and utter fear. It feels harder and harder to separate myself from it, from the “please don’t kick me out” dynamic that has entangled me. You might be able to see what’s going on here—

This feels an awful lot like being a trans kid, doing everything you can to make sure your family still wants you.

A friend said to me recently that it seems like I feel I have to change peoples’ views on transphobia all by myself. And the response felt obvious: of course I do. Because that’s always how the world has worked. Since I learned to speak, since my first social experience, it’s always been only me dealing with this problem, advocating for myself before anyone else around me could understand it. Before I ever consciously knew what transness was, I had nightmares about being disowned. It’s always been me, alone, trying to make sure my family still wanted me.

This was one of my earliest lessons: you can’t just walk away. You can’t stop caring what they think. You have to make it work. Because if you’re abandoned, that’s it.

The horror of the threat of exile is how brutally realistic it is. Even with many hands trying to keep hold of me, I might still slip off the side. So social connections with my creative peers feel like life or death, because they kind of are. Social integration is a major part of career viability, and careers are already hard when you’re trans. A deep part of me whispers: you just have to fail badly enough that you aren’t wanted anymore.

I find it hard to take joy in my work anymore, to live in the excitement of creation. I feel parasitized by expectations, by the weight of that social conundrum. This isn’t just about breaking the trans bubble anymore, it’s about a primal pursuit of survival. It feels like May the artist became swallowed up by May the trans-educator, the person attached to my peer communities once again seeking refuge against exile. Against the raking gravity of the edge, all the twisted possibilities I dare not look down at. Homelessness was already one of them, and here it is, tugging on that anchor chain around my ankle.

I am back in the place of infant fears, trying to hold onto myself without hands to do the holding, because I am shrinking into its vastness, and the sensation of an abyss stretches in all directions.

What Is the Answer?

For me, the answer must include that I can’t be trying to attach to peer communities like a family anymore. I am grateful that I have friends (both author friends and otherwise), that I have a boyfriend who loves me, and I have real family. For all I fear being discarded, I have proof that I am not alone. I need to lean on the connections that are the safest, that feed me the most, and to detach from the group roles I’ve become identified with. I need to heal, to have space for my aching needs away from the edge of the abyss.

But that means I can’t be the one pushing to break the trans bubble anymore.

I need you to do it. I need you to sit with this, absorb what I’m telling you, and process the emotional work you may need to undertake to do what I’m asking. I need you to make friends with your discomfort.

I need you to accept the challenge that transness represents, the challenge to how our everyday lives are ordered, from the way we define bodies to how social connections form.

There is no language discourse or set of labels or pronoun pins that will get at transphobia at its root. It is not a task of mental work, but work of a deeper kind.

There are already models of how people can help—I’ve mentioned two specific ones in this essay. But others who don’t have the means or skills to organize fundraisers or similar aid can do small things to break the bubble. To speak up against others’ casual transphobia. To be the one pointing out the problem, so that we don’t have to keep paying the social cost. Look for little ways that you can fight the gravity of exile, and help trans people feel a little safer in your community.

***

If you’d like to donate to my homelessness fund, you can go to my ko-fi page or reach out to me at my email address, mayrpeterson@gmail.com. I’d really appreciate donations right now so that I can stay housed.