So, here it is, five years later. It's 9/11/06 as I write this, and I certainly do not feel any safer than I did five years ago. In fact, I feel less safe now than I did then.
I feel like more of my civil liberties have been stolen, removed, or generally abridged.
Particularly as a t-girl, and especially as a transsexual.
But that isn't what this is about. That's an article for another time, but not today. Today I want to stop and look back at that horrific day five years ago.
I remember the sense of surrealism. The sense that, no, this was just incredibly bad luck. It had to be…people just didn't blow up buildings on U.S. soil. I remember
looking up into the skies, and not seeing airplanes. I remember giving blood-I have a fairly rare blood type (AB+, just so you know). I remember that we all wanted to do something, anything to show the world we stood unified. Dammit, the is the United States of America. E Pluribus Unum and all that. You just don't take us on and not
expect us to get pissy about it.
What happened to that?
It's called, “Life goes on”, in one sense.
Let's be real here, girls. In some ways, life changed forever that day. We couldn't keep doing things the way we did. We needed to fix things, and quickly. The poorly
named, and worse enacted Patriot Act-which has given us stateside girls migraines-was part of that chaotic time. I don't have to like it-I don't, quite frankly, it still
stinks, and much of it needs review and fixing-but it's the law, and if nothing else, the hearts of our elected officials on both sides of the great divide were in the right
place…even if their brains were not.
In others, we have moved on. We had to. We didn't have a choice. We needed to move past the horror, the surrealism of those days. We have had to show the world
that we are not going to let cowards win this idiocy. We had to move past it all, and get cranking again.
We have, by and large. It's what has made America a great place to be a t-woman these days. And the UK. And Spain. And Canada. And a number of other places, I
am quite sure. We refuse to let crazy people win the battle of terror.
The “So, Mina, get to the trans part of this article” is this: I live as the transwoman I am, because I live in a place that I can that life…even if it isn't easy or perfect. If my
SO were to finally grasp the extent of my womanhood, I could still live and work here, because there are certain (albeit weak, imperfect, and frankly somewhat lame)
laws in place to protect me. If I get outed as the woman I am, I won't be thrown in jail and killed, or whipped, or one of any number of other things. Things will be messy…
but I will still be Minako, at the end of it all.
Not a corpse.
So, as much as I beef about stuff, this is still my home. (I don't like to refer to it as my homeland…smacks of Nazism!) I'll take it, warts and all.
