How Do I Tell You — Rhys Allison

I am sick I am tired I am angry And I do not know how to tell you how those feelings have drilled into my bones Engrained like sand into the very fabric of my being How do I tell you? Yet another time I open the news and see another dead face staring back at me Another request for funding for the funeral Another name for the list I am tired of seeing that there is another dead trans woman When Black trans women have a life expectancy of their mid 30s I think of Marsha P Johnson, our foremother Dead in her 30s Her body floating in a river But we remember her We commemorate our dead on a day every year The hundreds killed in 365 days around the world All because they’re trans I do not know how to tell you how sick I am How tired I am Or how angry I am Because how do I tell you how I hate to see the news debating whether I exist Whether who I am makes me sick or makes me crazy Whether people like me deserve to be alive Because it isn’t who I am that’s the problem When it’s their attitudes killing the most vulnerable of us How do I tell you the betrayal of families turning on us? Their hearts broken because I am me? I am sick I am tired I am angry And I hate the screams trapped inside my soul As the states do their best to outlaw us To deny us medicine or the right to our gender The right for our bodies to match how we are 32/50 states cracking down 13 of our own dead this year, one dead trans person a week It’s not new It’s not special This is every day Every year Wondering how many of us go unremembered, unrecognized Because they were still trapped inside Or their families denied who they were even in death And yet I should be happy Because my state has banned the trans panic defense, only the 12th And things are doing better here than they were before While I worry for my trans siblings in Arkansas and North Carolina and Dakota As their rights are stripped bare How can I be happy? When all I feel looking at the news Is sick Is tired Is angry How Do I Tell You And how can I tell you that? Rhys Allison

Content Warning: transphobia