By Ash Lazarus Orr
For nearly four years, I worked in communications for a national LGBTQI+ organization. Much of my job involved responding to reporters, sitting for interviews, writing and trying to make complicated policy and legal developments easier for people to understand. That also meant noticing the circumstances under which people seemed most interested in hearing from trans people. There was almost always something happening that needed to be explained: a new law, a court decision, a restriction on healthcare, a school policy or another government agency deciding which parts of our lives it suddenly had an interest in regulating.
I believed deeply in the importance of that work, and I still do. There are real consequences when the public doesn’t understand what a policy means for the people who have to live under it. News also requires something to have happened, and I don’t expect a reporter to show up at someone’s house because a trans person had a reasonably pleasant Tuesday. But after years of explaining trans lives through the things happening to us, I started wondering what gets lost when crisis becomes one of the primary ways people encounter us.
I know this personally because I am the named plaintiff in Orr v. Trump, a federal lawsuit over the Trump administration’s passport policy for trans Americans. Being a plaintiff has required me to talk publicly about parts of my life I otherwise would have little reason to explain to strangers, and I chose to do that because I believe it matters. Being able to move through the world with identification that accurately reflects who you are affects everything from traveling and applying for jobs to whether you can hand someone your ID without wondering what will happen next. At the same time, it is strange to have something so politically significant become one of the most publicly recognizable facts about me when it represents so little of what it actually feels like to live my life.
Most days, my life is remarkably ordinary. I ride my bike, play board games with my spouse and friends, snuggle with our cats, fall asleep reading books and travel whenever I can. I get too invested in whatever new hobby has caught my attention—looking at you, bead tapestries—and spend an embarrassing amount of time wondering whether my beard looks good, whether my clothes fit the way I want them to or whether my body looks the way I think it should. These things occupy far more space in my life than federal litigation, and most of them aren’t interesting to anyone outside of it. I think that’s exactly the point.
Trans people have spent years being asked to make the most difficult parts of our lives useful to other people. We explain our healthcare so someone else can understand why we need it, our childhoods so someone else can understand how long we have known ourselves and our experiences of discrimination so someone else can understand the consequences of anti-trans politics. We explain our families, bodies and relationships, and sometimes the worst things anyone has ever done to us, because there is always the possibility that the person listening might understand trans people differently afterward.
There is enormous value in that kind of storytelling. I have also started to wonder what happens when suffering becomes the most publicly useful thing about us. If someone primarily encounters trans people when we are explaining why something hurts, what has been taken from us or why we are afraid, they may understand the danger we face without understanding much about the lives we actually live.
Even the way we talk about trans joy can carry the same expectation. There is the person who survived everything and built an extraordinary life anyway, the kid who was finally allowed to transition and is now thriving or the trans person who became the first to accomplish something previously inaccessible. Those stories deserve to be told. But somewhere between tragedy and triumph is where most people actually live, and I don’t think we have become very good at making room for trans people who exist there.
Not every trans person has a compelling transition story. Not everyone remembers knowing exactly who they were at three years old, and plenty of people took years to understand themselves. Some people’s families reacted terribly when they came out, while others were mostly concerned with getting their name and pronouns right. Some people transitioned and became much happier but still hate their jobs, struggle with money, have complicated relationships, pick up hobbies they abandon three weeks later and spend too much time worrying about things that will never matter.
There are also trans people who are selfish, irritating, difficult or simply unkind. Let trans people be villains. Marginalized people are often easiest to defend when we are sympathetic, and there is something deeply unfair about requiring someone to be likeable before deciding they are worthy of dignity. The trans person whose story is supposed to change someone’s mind is asked to be vulnerable enough to create empathy but composed enough to remain credible, angry enough that the harm feels real but not so angry that someone stops listening. After years of preparing for interviews and thinking about how something would land with an audience, I became very familiar with those calculations.
Sometimes those calculations are necessary. They are also exhausting when you realize how much freedom there is in being allowed to disappoint people only as yourself. A cisgender person can be an asshole without anyone treating their behavior as meaningful evidence about cisgender people as a population. Trans people deserve the same freedom to be mediocre, annoying, wrong or unlikeable without someone deciding our individual failures reveal something larger about whether people like us deserve to exist comfortably in the world.
I want that freedom in happier and more boring ways, too. I want trans people to get old enough that the biggest events in their lives have nothing to do with transition. I want someone to have been on hormones for 30 years and realize they forgot the anniversary. I want trans adults whose lives have accumulated so many careers, relationships, mistakes, hobbies, moves, vacations and friendships that being trans remains part of who they are without needing to remain the organizing principle of their biography.
I especially want that kind of life for trans kids, who have been asked to become public advocates for themselves at ages when most children should be allowed to worry about smaller things. Young trans people have testified before legislatures, spoken at school board meetings and answered deeply personal questions from adults with the power to make decisions about their lives. I admire the young people who are able to do that, but I don’t want courage to be required of them. I want trans kids to be bad at algebra, care more about whether someone likes them back than what their state legislature is doing, make questionable fashion choices, get embarrassed by their parents and eventually look back at photographs of themselves from middle school with the same horror afforded to everyone else.
For years, my work involved thinking about which stories could make someone understand something they hadn’t understood before. I still believe that work is necessary, but I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that trans people have to make our lives useful in order for other people to find them worth knowing.
There should be room in the public record for the parts of our lives that don’t prove anything. The hobbies someone picked up and abandoned, the place they grew up and still miss, the career they thought they wanted until they didn’t, the vacation they saved for, the person they loved, the friend they haven’t spoken to in years and the stretches of time when nothing important happened all tell us something about a person’s life without needing to tell us anything about trans people as a whole.
Right now, much of the public record of trans life is necessarily a record of conflict. People looking back at this period will find legislation, litigation, healthcare restrictions, discrimination, protest and resistance. They will know what governments tried to take from us and how hard trans people fought to keep it. Those things belong in the record. I just hope that isn’t all anyone finds.
I hope they also know what we did on Tuesday.
I hope they know that we went to work and came home, fell in love and got bored, changed our minds, made bad decisions, found new hobbies, abandoned old ones and worried about things that had absolutely nothing to do with gender. I hope they know some of us did extraordinary things and most of us didn’t, and that neither group was more deserving of a full life than the other.
Trans people deserve stories about our survival, our joy, our resistance and the extraordinary things people in our community accomplish, but we also deserve stories that ask nothing from us. Sometimes there is no larger lesson, no remarkable act of courage and nothing useful to take away from someone’s existence. Sometimes a person is simply living their life, and I want there to be enough room in the way we understand trans people for that life to matter, too.
Trans people deserve to be boring.
*Ash Lazarus Orr is a trans journalist, photographer and communications strategist from rural Appalachia, the creator of Conversations Across Borders, and the named plaintiff in Orr v. Trump.*
A beautifully written essay! This is exactly how I experienced my life, and I am now 80.
I am boring 95% of the time.
Just living normal unremarkable days