I’ve lived in the Bay Area my whole life, but I had never been to Trans March, the community-led celebration that kicks off San Francisco Pride weekend. 

But here, on a foggy June afternoon, I found myself at the pre-march picnic at Dolores Park surrounded by more trans people than I’d ever seen gathered in one place: couples canoodling on blankets, activists passing out flyers, elders walking their rescue dogs, families with grass-stained giggling children, drag performers working the stage—whole constellations of queer community celebrating in our own little ways.

Then the celebration became a march.

As the crowd seeped into the street, I felt the energy shift slowly, then all at once. A change in gravity, like the whole park and time itself exhaled together. A sense of necessity, destiny, and history being written. Thousands of us moving as a single current, declaring “We Are Not Going Anywhere.”

Just six months ago, being trans in the current political moment had left me so hopeless and isolated, I landed in a two-month outpatient therapy program trying to reclaim some agency in my life. But, feeling the gravity of the march and tears welling in my eyes, I felt a sense of defiance, of kinship, of hope.

Choosing to be seen—on purpose, in public, and in community—felt like an answer to my previous despair in the face of a world increasingly hostile towards trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people like me.

It was also a spiritual reset.

As I write this, I am reminded of a sentiment shared by trans, nonbinary activist Alok Vaid-Menon during a speech:

“I’ve come to the conclusion that trans people represent some of the most robust spiritual leadership alive. What is transness but a practice of saying out loud and in public: I have faith in something you don’t see yet. I have a knowing in me that is deep and felt, and you will spend your whole life trying to disprove this thing that I know, precious and vital within me. In fact, you’ll try to kill me for it—this belief in my divinity, this practice of my sacredness. And yet, trans people make that revolutionary choice to continue showing up, which is the ultimate form of love and mercy. We have to go through our own internal baptism, cry so many tears, to realize that actually, everything we were taught was wrong, and pathological, and broken. That’s our godliness.”

So what does it mean to embody that sacred individuality?

For me, getting my first tattoo three summers ago wasn’t just about ink—it was about (re)claiming a body that had spent years being told, implicitly and explicitly, that it was wrong. It was about daring myself to do what my parents wouldn’t approve of, while working at a Jesuit university where my queerness already felt like a quiet nudge against the norm. It was a small, permanent insistence: this skin is mine to decorate, to alter, to transform.

That first tattoo (now followed by fifteen others) was one of the first ways I began embodying my truest self. In a world where all bodies—trans and cis—are constantly policed to conform, I consider that piece of body art to not only be a form of gender-affirming care, but also human-affirming care.

A month ago, I was camping in Big Sur with my partner when we visited a quiet beach—a brisk, salty morning air, rock formations crowded with tide-pool life, dark red tendrils of seaweed splayed across the wet sand, billowing like hair in the icy tide. I hadn’t packed a swimsuit, but post-top surgery, I was content to wade into the sea in just my underwear.

The water burned cold against my skin, creeping up slowly past my knees, my hips, my belly button. The waves roared against me, and eventually, after the water kept tugging down my underwear, I removed them and dove back in the buff.

I was suddenly a kid again, playing naked and free, before I knew there was anything to prove or defend. Running back into the waves and letting them throw me down, laughing, jumping back, doing it again. Just my body and the primordial ocean. Ever-changing. Where all life came from.

Showing up, being visible in a body in public: that’s one form of rebellion. But there’s another form that looks like an adult splashing around in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, naked as the day they took their first breath. It’s the joy of being alive in a body that politicians are trying (and will ultimately fail) to legislate out of existence. The sense of homecoming when a body like mine is at play or at rest in the natural world, two sacred creations rediscovering their oneness.

“God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”

– Julian K. Jarboe, “Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel”