You Are Not Seeing Things. You Are Seeing Change.

‘Trans’ is very broad and it is a construct, and I am grateful to learn from this

Looking up at a leaf. My neighborhood in Bogotá, Colombia, April 1, 2025. I took this photo.

Yesterday was Trans Day of Visibility. I observed the day by reading stories others wrote about what trans visibility means to them right now.

I never seem to be able to write to this theme — not when the appointed day comes. In some ways, the concept of trans still feels like a blank to me. Making trans visible feels like a Challenge of a High Order. This visibility is perhaps a paradox.

Trans feels blank to me in part because it is very broad. I don’t put limits on who is validly trans. The only condition is that a person is trans if they say they are. Thus I understand trans as a matter of consciousness. Its definition is that which its members collectively impart to it. It hasn’t got a particular way it behaves or appears. It isn’t, after all, an “it,” as we find anew each time we invite ourselves to grasp it.

Trans feels blank to me also in part because many trans people do not want to be trans. Not every day, anyway. Maybe not most days. We want to change what we are: not this, that. Or not that, this. Or just not — we’d rather not be anything, please. Unless we already are the thing we wish to become. (That’s pretty trans, too.) Anyway, when…