Proud & Queer: Izzy

In the second month of 2023, I started taking testosterone injections once a week. There had been several years of hand-wringing and self-doubt up to that point. Was this the right decision? What if I regretted it (although few actually do)? What if I drowned in ass hair? 

Two years later, none of those things happened because—as it turned out—most cis people don’t spend decades of their lives feeling like Frankenstein’s monster. Sure, my body changed and much like the first time around, it was awkward and uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Second puberty isn’t what I would describe as enjoyable. But it’s also right. A correctness has filled my body and being in a way that I couldn’t even imagine before HRT. I used to see myself as a failed girl. Now, I know I wasn’t failing girlhood; I was just something else. 

My second-year “T-iversary” has not been a festive one. With a second Trump administration, we’re seeing an immediate rise in trans/homophobia via his executive orders. It’s only March, and already we’ve seen trans research and medical information scrubbed from government sites, including the CDC. Trans Legislation Tracker has already confirmed 25 anti-trans bills that passed in 2025. But more than 700 bills are being considered across the country that would negatively impact trans people. This includes a Texas bill that would make identifying as trangender a felony, dubbed “gender identity fraud.” 

While HB 3817 is unlikely to pass, it heralds a disturbing climax in a decades-long culture war against trans people. Social media is already being flooded with anecdotes of withheld and even destroyed passports. And as the noose closes around the necks of our trans communities, it is only a matter of time (in fact it’s already happening) before the trans detectives come for cis people. When the definition of acceptable narrows, the definition of gender fraud will broaden. Accusations and suspicions are already enough to incite violence; how long until being accused of being too feminine or masculine to possibly be cisgender is enough to land you in jail until a genital expert can prove you qualify as your state-assigned sex? 

As conservatives and fascists amass their various assaults, centrists and neo-liberals clutch their pearls and send donation emails. When February rolled around, I had plumb forgotten about what had previously been a celebratory date. I was too busy melting my psyche into a defensive chrysalis to notice something as unimportant as a calendar notification. And the more the future unravels in our collective hands, the more I find myself, like many of us, searching for historical parallels for some kind of answer. I was reading articles about twentieth-century fascism the same way someone might pick at a scab. And then I read about Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Sex). 

Believed to be the first trans magazine in the world, D3G was published from 1930 to 1932 in Berlin, at the beating heart of Weimar Germany under the watchful gaze of the German Reich. It contained medical articles, lived experiences, fashion advice, art, photographs—it was a compendium of transness being written from the belly of the beast. And it was the first. 

Izzy in classic Seattle plaid

The Evergreen Echo

It is easy to give in to despair and disassociation. It is infinitely harder to plod on, to build and grow and nurture and yes, even thrive, when the world is shrieking at you from the past, present, and future, telling you that the life that feels truest to yourself is wrong and always has been. Even those who aren’t your tormentors advise fear and festering. They’ve already given up in their hearts; why shouldn’t you?

But even in the dark, we live. The trans lesbians of D3G certainly did. Lotte Hahm, often featured in D3G, was an infamous gay club owner and activist who survived the Moringen concentration camp. She also co-founded the first modern trans organization in Europe: the Transvestite Association D’Eon. 

Of course, the only thing we really have control of in this life are the choices, however limited by circumstance, we make. Selli Engler, another D3G contributor, left activism to clout-chase after Adolf Hitler. And this is still the ruling class’s greatest power over us: the ability to turn us against each other in an attempt at self preservation. They’re united in the extermination of others; we need to be just as united in preserving each other. If you have the luxury of complacency, abandon it and do something else. Make art. Make a scene. Be a hearth in the darkness. Do anything but simply lie down. 

Our editor encouraged us to write open letters. While this article is more diary ramblings than letter, I would like to take these final few sentences to direct some of my anguish and frustration at the sources. 

To the simps, sycophants, and professional trolls in office who are driven by greed, and to all the frivolous privileged who only know how to bond over shared hatred: you’re living a half-life. You have abandoned the most beautiful parts of the human experience. Love, community, empathy, kindness, and emotional, spiritual, and intellectual growth are condemned in favor of a world composed only of two components: the devourers and the devoured. You’re in the grips of a soul death, and you are dragging the rest of the world down with you. In the words of the late David Lynch, fix your hearts. 

2025 marks more than tragedy. For me, I'm trying to remember that this year represents two years of resilience, of advocating for my right to be exactly as I am. In 2025, I am going to be unabashedly, unashamedly trans. I would rather live as a gender criminal. In fact, pretending to be cis would be the real gender fraud.