This week, I want to talk to those casual readers who may not be transgender themselves. To my trans readers, perhaps consider passing this along to your friends and family who need a hand grasping what it is to be trans or nonbinary in 2025.
The other day I retrieved an envelope from our mailbox. I quickened my step with it to bring it home, then cautiously opened the envelope. I knew what it was, but I was worried.
You see, it was my renewed driver's license. My birthday is in a couple of months and, with that, it was time for a new license. I sliced the envelope open carefully, and extracted the new card. I quickly checked it over, first seeing that it was still a Real ID card, then that it still had the correct gender marker. Thankfully, it did.
The next time I fly within the country, should I need to, I'll opt to use it over my passport. I figure my driver's license has less likelihood of being confiscated and invalidated as I pass through a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint.
Yes, this is a possibility.
I did update my passport in late 2024, even though it had a couple of years left on it. I wanted to make sure I had a decade to go before it once again needed an update – just to hedge my bets a little. Now it and my driver's license do not need to be renewed until the 2030s, a time distant enough into the future that I am not even sure I'll still require them at all by that point.
Being transgender in 2025, you see, means having to plan for all sorts of eventualities like this. In addition to fears about identity paperwork, I also am carefully stockpiling my medications, taking just a little less than I have by prescription, just to make sure I have something spare for the months ahead. I know many others who are doing the same, and others who are finding ways to acquire their hormone replacement therapy in other ways.
This is important, as the federal budget proposal passed this month in the House of Representatives bans coverage of hormone replacement therapy specifically for transgender people of all ages via Medicaid and, potentially, the Affordable Care Act. (The budget bill now heads to the U.S. Senate.) With the GOP-controlled Congress, as well as President Donald Trump and a conservative U.S. Supreme Court, it feels more than unlikely that trans care will remain as accessible in the coming months.
Harkening back to the issue of passports, the current administration – thanks to Trump’s executive order issued on January 20, his first day back in the White House – has also declared that there are only two sexes, and that these are wholly immutable. Hence, the concerns around identification paperwork, and raising the specter of any sort of other sex segregated places from restrooms to police searches.
I'll admit, if the ghouls in our government did take away the "F" on my paperwork, it wouldn't change who I am. When I transitioned, I wasn't able to get it changed for many years, and I survived. I suspect I could again, if I had to.
Yet, that letter on my paperwork designates, legally, who I am. That's mine, and no one should be able to take it away.
I want to provide a little thought experiment that I hope the non-trans readers who have stuck around will take a moment to consider. Let's say that the government decides you are a different gender than you currently are. How does this change who you are innately; how does this change your day-to-day life in society, and what do you do in response?
Take it seriously, and really consider how this might affect your life: how do you keep your job, and how do you do all the things you need to do in your day? What might this do to the quality of your life?
This is the fresh hell every transgender person is going through, every day, in 2025.
I've said it before: people do not become transgender. People are transgender. We don't so much transition but, rather, we reveal ourselves. We've always been trans, but we had to come to that understanding within our lives.
The thing I want to impress upon those who are not transgender is this: transgender people like me and nonbinary people have likely spent a large part of our lives feeling like something about us is – to put it simply – wrong. Transition is the means of making things right, and it is something that trans people can feel on a very core level.
Just like you might feel if everyone tried to force you to be a different gender.
For you today, your heart doesn't skip a beat as you timidly open a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Your big fear might be a bad photograph, while mine is having to defend my very being.
Likewise, your time in a TSA line is an annoyance but is unlikely to stop you from boarding. Having your ID confiscated, ending up in custody, and so on, is not in the forefront of your mind.
Imagine if your very self was up for continual public debate, and the general consensus was that – at best – you weren't worth the trouble to defend.
You may be rightfully concerned about what is happening with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and if vaccinations will be available. Now, imagine if you were barred from life-saving medication expressly because of who or what you are.
This is our reality, today, and this is what every trans person is up against right now.
Gwen Smith wears a size 13w. You can find her at www.gwensmith.com .
