Shortly before President Donald Trump returned to the White House, I had a dream in which all transgender people in the United States were forced to get tattoos of nine pieces of broken rock on the backs of our necks. The broken rocks represented how trans people were “shattering the bedrock of society.”

Since January, Trump has indeed done his best to try to brand trans bodies and bully trans people. To deny gender-affirming care to trans youth. To ban trans people from the military, claiming we do not have “the humility and selflessness required” to serve. To forcibly medically detransition federal prisoners, and throw trans women in men’s prisons. To force us to carry legal documentation with the wrong gender marker imprinted on it. To rescind guidance that helps educate people on how to treat trans and nonbinary students with empathy and understanding. To erase all trans representation from curricula. To ban dozens of terms, such as “transgender,” “non-binary,” “LGBT,” “gender,” “he/she/they/them” (and dozens more that erase anyone who is not an able-bodied white cis man) from federal research proposals, publications, and public health information. To proclaim that, throughout the land, there are only two genders, and trans identity is inherently invalid, as well as a danger against which society must be protected.

To justify this massive assault on our human rights, these orders contain graphic, dehumanizing, violent rhetoric and disinformation that cast trans people as a “corrosive” moral and physical threat. Trans organizers and allies have responded courageously with protests at clinics, lawsuits, actions at sites from Stonewall to state capitals, letter-writing and call-in campaigns, public comments decrying the executive orders, and much more. In addition to these essential mobilizations, we are taking the action of simply living, as trans people: affirming our right to self-name and self-recognize and exist as ourselves, regardless of what the state says.

I have an “F” on my passport, for female, which is accurate, but I still have my old name on it. I’ve been legally advised not to try to change my name at this point, even though I want to, because trans people who try to renew their passports now may find their gender markers reverted to, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt threatened, their “God-given” marker. (Leavitt’s invocation of religious rhetoric emphasizes the fact that it is bigoted theology, rather than biological reality, that underpins the administration’s scientifically inaccurate proclamations regarding gender identity.)

Similarly, I had an appointment last Friday at the Social Security office to change my gender marker there, but just three days prior to my appointment, the Social Security Administration, under Trump’s orders, stopped issuing gender marker changes, and I was barred from making the switch.

Trans people deserve to be legally recognized for who we are, and hopefully this civil rights abuse will be blocked in the courts. But regardless of what it currently says on my Social Security card or passport, my name is Willow, my pronouns are she/her, and I’m a transgender woman.

Current Issue

May 2025 Issue

I changed my name about a month ago. It was really easy. I just told people my name is Willow, and now everyone in my life calls me that. My friends, my family, my colleagues, everyone I actually interact with on a daily basis. Most importantly, myself.

Just as Trump does not have the power to decide what my name and gender are, he does not have the authority to do much of what he is pretending he can do. And it is essential for anyone who cares about human rights, democracy, the planet, public health, and scientific reality to fight back right now in as many realms as possible, including at the level of language.

Fascists will go as far as they can to try to shape public perception and create oppressive realities by manipulating language and symbols—don’t let them. Trump wants to call Denali “Mt. McKinley”: Call it Denali. He wants us to say “Gulf of America”: It’s the Gulf of Mexico. He wants to censor dozens of words he deems related to diversity, equity, and inclusion: Say them often and loudly. He wants to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in poisoning the airways with demonizing and disparaging transphobic propaganda, and to instruct federal bureaucrats to spend time, energy, and government resources to misgender, deadname, and erase trans people: Speak up on our behalf, call us by our actual names, say that you see us.

Transness is pancultural and transhistorical. It is a natural expression of human biological diversity, and, I think, a pretty cool one—a state of being that brings about unique perspectives and insights, and harms no one. You can no more declare that it is not a real thing, or that it is just some trending “ideology,” than you can declare that livers and lungs are unreal and just some nefarious organ-based fad to be stamped out.

It’s as if you are looking at a garden with many different types of brilliant flowers, and someone says, “I proclaim that there are only two kinds of flowers.” Their words don’t change the fact that there is a full, diverse garden of many different flowers, and they are beautiful, and not going anywhere.

There is so much beauty under threat right now, including but not limited to trans lives. The forces of ignorant destruction can hit us in overwhelming, terrifying, and heartbreaking ways. But for that reason, it is more important than ever to use our language in ways that honor the beautiful and generative diversity of the world around us, and to insist on our ability to see and name the world with the fidelity that such beauty deserves. In the face of this Orwellian linguistic coup, we all need to find ways to be creative, anarchic, and, when possible, loud. We need to keep alive a language that emerges and gains its currency from compassion and truth. Doing so will keep many people alive in the process.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that dream of the tattoos of the broken rocks. Part of me wants to get the tattoo myself. But in my version, there would be a willow tree growing out from the rocks and into the sky, surrounded by pink, blue, and white butterflies—the colors of the trans pride flag—to show who I am, to name myself.