Finding Hope And Spring On Transgender Day Of Visibility

The past three months have been brutal for transgender people—but if there’s one thing our community knows, it’s how to travel through darkness to find spring.

Photo by AJ on Unsplash

Six years ago, during one of the hardest and darkest winters of my life, I found myself again. I remember it vividly—facing a divorce and watching my world fall apart, I had nothing but time to sit with the pieces. In that stillness, something long-buried stirred. The person I had known myself to be as a child—the woman I wanted to grow up to be—rose gently back to the surface. Just a few months later, I was sitting beneath the pink cascade of a cherry blossom tree in Maryland, holding my first estrogen pill. The winter had ended. Spring had arrived.

It wasn’t easy to be myself. From the moment I realized what I needed to do, I knew I would lose people. Family ties would fray. Friends I’d clung to would let go—or push me away entirely. Every transgender person understands this, and most have lived it in some form. That we still choose to transition should tell you everything about how deeply this truth lives in us. I remember saying once: I would rather weather every storm in my own skin than live safely in someone else’s.

It turns out that it is a lot easier to face the toughest fights when your light is on inside.

Today, six years later, we transgender people have found ourselves in winter once more. These are dark days—our existence is being erased from federal websites, and companies and organizations treat us like pariahs to protect their funding and government contracts. Even the history we helped shape at Stonewall has been rewritten, reduced to a sanitized narrative of “LGB rights” on a government-approved website that omits the trans people who stood at the front lines. And now, we hear politicians say the quiet part out loud: that these laws are meant to make us disappear, to push us back into the closet, and erase us from public life.

Just like I did one winter long ago, the community is finding itself—and its voice. A recent Gallup poll shows that America is queerer than ever, with one of the largest recorded increases in LGBTQ+ identification happening during the dark year of 2024. That so many people looked at the world around them and still said, “This is my time. This is my place, and it’s time to be myself,” speaks volumes. Our numbers continue to grow. More people are getting to know us not as headlines, but as human beings. And despite the laws designed to push us into the shadows, they have failed. As transgender writer and activist Gillian Branstetter put it: “Every living transsexual is a Republican policy failure.”

If that is the metric, they’re failing harder than they’ve ever failed before.

Now, six years after my transition, it is spring again. Today marks Transgender Day of Visibility—our first in the Trump 2.0 era—and it coincides with peak bloom for the cherry blossoms. In Washington, D.C., the pink petals fall as a quiet but certain sign that the seasons are changing. Despite winter’s effort to strip the world bare, the blossoms are everywhere—carried by the wind, suspended in the air—and even if you tried, you couldn’t avoid them. Today, they fall alongside thousands of transgender people rallying in the district, refusing to disappear, refusing to go unseen.

Every transgender person has known their own personal winter. We know how dark it can get before we find our strength. And we know that becoming ourselves didn’t make our problems vanish—but it made us more capable of creating change, the kind that often feels nothing short of miraculous. We know what it means to take the invisible and make it visible, and the power that comes with doing so. In that way, we also understand the promise of spring.

This Transgender Day of Visibility, I’m thinking about how, even in the depths of this long winter, we are still here—still gathering, still loving, still refusing to be erased. We are louder, more visible, and more defiant than ever. New activists are rising, new voices are joining us, and across the country, we are planting the seeds of a spring that cannot be stopped. No executive order can silence a movement built on truth. No cold season can outlast the people who have already survived worse. There is nothing this world can do to us that’s more devastating than the life we’d live if we stayed hidden. We know who we are. Today we are visible. And spring is coming.