I Dare To Dream

On this eve before Pride Month 2026 begins, we cannot celebrate our pride, community, equality or successes in the face of the increased oppression targeting our trans community. Yes, "pride is a protest" is a nice aphorism that simultaneously is true and de-fangs the bite that is pride. This Pride must be a protest - righteous, uncompromising anger. It must be resistance and civil disobedience. It must stand with trans folks and all oppressed people and declare: we are not going back. We will not be pushed into the closet or into the margins of invisibility. We will not let anyone disappear us again.

This Pride and World Pride, I dare to dream.

With the UK and US becoming increasingly hostile to trans people, I am finding myself at a loss. Online, I see some outrage. I see some fighting. I see some light calls to resist, to action. But mostly, and I say this with the exhausted honesty of someone who has been paying attention, I see nothing that feels like movement. Instead, I see infighting. I see respectability politics around neurodiversity, transmedicalism, and transsexual separatism. I see no coordination, no visible solidarity, no organization. Just a mix of sadness, anger, and apathy.

To be fair, I get it. I recognize there is nothing I can do. I am powerless, and there is no good reason to listen to me. I am also just tired. Tired of everyone wanting change but not doing any of the work in creating that change. And I get that there absolutely are people doing the work. But no one sees it. No one knows it. There are no updates or progress to report. We only see regression. We only feel the boot press harder, the world get meaner, the space get smaller.

We don't have a Dr. Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X. We do not have an Angela Davis or Audre Lorde. We do not have a James Baldwin or a visible movement. We have no one person whose name we could circle around, no single voice that the world would have to reckon with. And maybe that is not what we need. But right now, it does not feel like we have anything - and that feeling, true or not, is paralyzing.

We don't have a lunch counter protest, a strike, a moment of visible resistance that cannot be ignored. We have innovation. We have people trying. We have people reading, commenting, and then nothing happens. Because you cannot build a movement out of individual effort when there is no solidarity to hold it together, no shared vision pulling it toward something greater than ourselves.

I am not the writer or the thinker the movement wants. I am not the voice people are waiting for. And I am unable to marshal any kind of collective response because there is nothing to marshal - not because people do not care, but because isolation makes it impossible to care together.

Somewhere along the way we have traded the courage it takes to survive in this world for the fear of being visible in the face of oppression. We traded our resilience and strength for factionalism and respectability. We stopped standing up, showing up, and fighting for each other and started fighting with each other. We call it discretion, we call it strategy, we call it survival - but it is surrender dressed in caution and pragmatism.

We seem to just accept it all as unavoidable and inevitable. And that means we are already lost and defeated before we even begin.

We can be brave enough to exist, but not brave enough to resist.

I will not accept that.

I will not make that trade - not the one whispered in the dark that says dreaming is naive, that hope is a luxury we cannot afford, that we should lower our eyes and our expectations and be grateful for crumbs. Because if I accept that, then I accept that we are truly powerless. And I know that is not true, even when it feels true.

I look back at those who came before us; King and X, Davis and Lorde, Baldwin and so many whose names we do not carry but whose work we inherit. They dared to dream when the world was actively, visibly crushing them. But I do not invoke them out of nostalgia or borrowed legitimacy. I invoke them because the tools used to break them are the same tools being sharpened against us. Pathologization. Criminalization. Surveillance. Respectability politics. The demand that we be acceptable enough, palatable enough, compliant enough, non-threatening, and invisible enough in order to deserve basic humanity. They refused that bargain.

So must we.

And here is the truth we must say clearly: Black trans women, trans women of color, disabled trans people, and non-binary folks are bearing the heaviest weight of this same system. The same forces that historically targeted Black communities for medicalization, incarceration, and sexual violence are now targeting all of us—and they are targeting our trans sisters with lethal intensity. In the past 11 weeks, 11 of the 13 murdered have been trans women, and 9 of the 13 were BIPOC. Their liberation is not separate from ours. It is the foundation of ours. When we dream, we dream in the footsteps of those who dared before, and we dream for those whose stakes are highest.

I dare to dream of a future where my daughter is free to marry her girlfriend. Free to participate fully in society without fear of prejudice, fear for her safety, or fear of using the ladies restroom because she buzzes her hair short and does not exude the correct amount and type of woman expected by people who have never earned the right to expect anything from her.

I dare to dream of a future where I can use a public toilet free from assault, free from shame, free from harassment, free from the crushing fear that someone will do something untoward to me, or incite others to do so.

I dare to dream of a future where my identity, be it through my name or my pronouns, are respected as a matter of course and recognized and accepted without apology or debate.

I dare to dream of a future where my non-binary siblings are not forced to choose between boxes that do not fit them, where their identity is recognized in law and in life without apology.

I dare to dream of a future where my disabled trans siblings are not treated as tokens or disposable, where our medical needs are centered, and where we are not left behind because our needs are deemed too complicated or too costly.

I dare to dream of a future where I can determine what happens to my own body. Where my transition-related healthcare is treated as the basic healthcare that it is and not politicized or sensationalized, not experimental or cosmetic, but simply medicine as freedom, as the unremarkable right to determine what happens to our own bodies.

I dare to dream of a future where dignity is not something I have to earn or prove. Where I do not have to perform respectability or suffering for anyone. Where I do not have to minimize myself, my joy, my queerness, my Blackness, my transness, my disability, my non-conformity, or my love to make room for people who were never going to make room for me anyway.

And in recognizing ourselves in these particular dreams, we dare to dream of something larger.

We dare to dream of a future where trans folks are not judged by our appearance or our transition status, but by the content of our character. Where we all, trans, non-binary, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, hold these truths to be self-evident: that we are all created equal. That who we are, who we love, what we are, how our bodies work or do not work, does not make us different or lesser than any other. That we are all worthy of the same rights, dignity, and respect.

We dare to dream of a future where our rights are not something we beg for or negotiate downward. Where trans identity is not treated as a medical controversy to be debated by people who do not live it. Where our rights to exist, to transition, to be recognized in law and in documentation, are not subject to the whims of politicians or the comfort of the cisgender public. Where these protections are enshrined legally, constitutionally, and irrevocably; not as special accommodations, but as basic human rights. Where we do not have to fight for the same ground every four years, every election cycle. Where our existence is not on the ballot.

We dare to dream of a future where diversity is our strength, where solidarity is our foundation, where our love and hope for our peoples and our future generations bind us together as one.

We dare to dream of a future where all of us are free from oppression because we became united and left no one behind. Because we took seriously the truth that none of us are free until all of us are free. Not just free from violence, but free from the constant calculation of how much to hide, how much to shrink, how much to perform for survival.

We dare to dream of a future where all of us are safe and free from the dangers of the cis white hetero person who sees us all as targets for their hate and fear. Particularly Black trans women. Where we are not the statistical target, where we are not the ones most likely to be murdered, where we are centered in our own liberation rather than serving as cautionary tales, tokens to be spent, and political footballs to be kicked around.

We dare to dream of a future where women's reproductive healthcare and our transition-related healthcare are treated with equal seriousness and without political interference. Where medicine is medicine, and no one's body is a battleground for politics.

I know that right now, this dream feels impossible. I know the weight of it. I know what it costs to hope when everything around you is designed to make you give in to hopelessness.

But I am telling you: I dare anyway. We dare anyway. Because the alternative, accepting that we are already lost and defeated, is a choice we make every time we stop dreaming together.

And that is a choice we do not have to make.

But dreaming is not enough, and I want to be honest about that too.

A dream without architecture is just grief with better lighting. The future we are describing, the future we dream of, where dignity is not earned or negotiated, where our most vulnerable are centered rather than sacrificed, where no one is sacrificed or left behind, that future will not be built by movements that compromise their foundation to make themselves palatable to institutions that were never going to invite us in anyway. Every time we have shrunk the coalition to make the argument more acceptable, we have ended up smaller, weaker, and facing the same opposition with fewer people standing beside us. The architecture of our liberation has to be built on the same terms as the dream itself: unconditional, inclusive, and refusing to treat any of us as an acceptable cost. Respectability politics has never built a tent big enough to protect us all. Solidarity has. The dream demands that we build accordingly; not because it is easier, but because it is the only thing that has ever actually worked.