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Throughout the long, troubled history of humanity, there have been powerful stories of resistance: Rosa Parks staying at the front of the bus, Jews praying when it was forbidden, people refusing to fight when drafted for war鈥攔esistance is defined, in part, by a refusal to accept an oppressive rule or reality.

For the LGBTQ+ community, they鈥檝e come for so many parts of our lives: our ability to gather safely at gay bars and queer spaces, our ability to perform and enjoy drag shows, our ability to get married or adopt children, and, for transgender people, our ability to access life-changing and life-saving medical care to help us find home in our bodies.

There is an all-out war targeting everything that brings our community joy in the hope of making us feel so beaten down, hopeless, and joyless that we just quit fighting back. This means that laughing, dancing, celebrating, and being joyful are direct acts of resistance.

When we talk about ways to celebrate and have fun even in the face of challenging situations, these aren鈥檛 just coping strategies to get through those moments and protect our mental health鈥攖hey鈥檙e ways to take back our power.

I Love Myself As I Am

For trans folks, self-esteem can be a bit of a minefield. Our bodies can be major sources of dysphoria; our personalities often differ from the norm and can be sources for bullying or harassment; even our basic humanity is often up for debate.

In terms of our physical confidence, medical transition (or lack thereof) can obviously be a make-or-break for some trans folks. I knew I was not really going to be able to feel confident until I had my top surgery because I so strongly hated the way I looked and the way clothes fit my body. Some of that was unavoidable, but there were ways I could style clothes to emphasize or deemphasize the parts of my body I liked more or less.

There is also so much more to self-love than just loving our bodies, and there is so much more to us than just the bodies that carry us through the world. Our personalities, our passions, our creativity, and our brilliance鈥攖here are infinite things to love about ourselves if we know where to look.

Others Love Me As I Am

Being loved by others encapsulates so many layers and so many 鈥渟teps鈥� that come before it. Before someone can love you as they are, they need to see you as you are. I am joyous when I am regularly called 鈥渟ir鈥� or other masculine terms by strangers.

Once someone truly sees you as you are, then they have the ability to love the true you. This means not just a begrudging acceptance or loving someone in spite of their identity, but loving them because of it. There are lots of ways this might show up, and there are so many different types of love. Romantically, many people want to know they are worthy of being loved and that it is possible to have someone fall in love with them.

For a long time, I accepted subpar treatment from people who loved me in spite of my trans identity, largely because I had never seen an example of a trans person being loved in a beautiful and authentic way in real life or in any of the media I was consuming.

When I eventually fell in love with someone who loved all of me for who I was, it was revolutionary. Realizing that I deserved and was capable of love in the same way my cisgender peers were鈥攚hich sounds like it should be obvious but wasn鈥檛鈥攚as incredible.

I Am Not the Only One Like Myself

Positive representation can make a world of difference for someone. Seeing someone else just like us be loved, be funny, be cool, go on adventures, and do whatever else we aspire to helps us realize and remember that it鈥檚 possible for us too.

Community is an extremely powerful armor against loneliness and hopelessness, and there are so many reasons why. Seeing people who are actively going through the same things as us means we have people whom we don鈥檛 need to explain things to and people who can give us advice or insights from their own journeys.

It also shows us that if someone else has and is surviving through what we鈥檙e going through, we can do it too.

I Get to Have Dreams About My Future

Growing up as a young trans kid, I didn鈥檛 have the language to even begin to dream about my future. I had a giant blank spot where my career, wedding, family, travels, and appearance were supposed to be. Because I had seen literally no examples of trans people growing up beyond the age of 22, especially trans men, I didn鈥檛 bother dreaming about my own future. It simply didn鈥檛 feel real.

Then I saw an off-Broadway play that featured a transgender man playing a trans character who had a happy ending, and my mind was blown. I was so excited, and I spent the whole show sitting in my seat planning out everything I was going to say to him after the show.

When he came out from backstage after the show, I was all ready to give him my spiel. I took one look at him, opened my mouth, and just started sobbing. I couldn鈥檛 get a word out, but he saw me and came right up to me and started crying too. He pulled me in, and we just stood there crying in each other鈥檚 arms, not saying a word but understanding everything we needed to know about each other.

After a few minutes, he stepped back and said, 鈥淭his is it. This is why representation matters.鈥� And he told me the story of how the exact same thing happened to him the first time he saw a transgender person on stage, 20 years before, and the difference that made for him. That moment opened so much for me in how I could imagine myself growing up, growing old, finding love, succeeding, finding joy. That moment is largely what inspired me to become the speaker and advocate I am today.

I Can Experience Ease and Pleasure in My Life

The underlying sentiment behind this type of joy is just having the reminder that not everything is going to be a fight, and that the fights we are in now will not go on forever. It will not always be this hard to access health care, pick out clothes at the store, or find somewhere to work or live.

I Am Taken Care of, and I Can Take Care of Others

This type of joy comes from being actively involved in the love that flows through a community, on both the giving and receiving ends. It鈥檚 crucial to find a balance here: No one wants to feel like a burden, nor do they want to feel like they spend all their time taking care of others.

This doesn鈥檛 mean you need to quantify how much care you鈥檙e doing and make sure you鈥檙e hitting net neutral at the end of the month, nor does it mean you need to make sure that the type of care you receive is the same as the type of care you give. It simply means knowing that where possible, you can ask for what you need and know that others can ask you for support in return.

I love to cook for people. One of my favorite ways to take care of people is to feed them good food that鈥檚 perfectly aligned to their palates. Cooking for a huge dinner party or making portions and dropping them off at friends鈥� houses can be a grounding ritual for me that helps me decompress after a long day or big event.聽

I don鈥檛 need these friends to cook for me in return (and between you and me, I don鈥檛 really want some of them to cook for me, if you catch my drift). The type of care I often need is time where I can turn my brain off鈥攓uality time where I can forget about everything bothering me or scaring me or making me angry and just play a board game or lose at Mario Kart.

I Can Give Love to My Inner Child

There is a knowledge among queer people that aging and time work a little differently for us, for a variety of reasons. Many formative young-person experiences are not ones that we have access to. Whether it鈥檚 because we were consciously excluded, were too uncomfortable or dysphoric to join, or were told we have to grow up and be very mature to advocate for ourselves, we feel the impact of losing 鈥渘ormal鈥� childhood experiences in many unique ways.

On a factual level, I didn鈥檛 grow up as a little boy. My parents didn鈥檛 have an extremely gendered parenting style, and it鈥檚 not like I couldn鈥檛 have access to 鈥渓ittle boy鈥� things if I asked for them at home, but at school the teachers and other students all followed a preexisting social order that I fit myself into. 

Part of the order I fit into involved things I liked (playing with Webkinz at recess was a delight until I hit fourth grade) and other things I resisted (princess dress-up parties, makeup, talking about boys), but each thing that I resisted or that fell outside of the order was an exception, not the rule. For trans women, this type of exclusion often shows up as having missed out on the formative and quintessential experience of a girls鈥� slumber party.

In my teenage years, after I came out, I continued to miss out on things. Dating as an LGBTQ+ person in a small town meant the pool was extremely limited, and I received no education on what a healthy relationship looked like, so in college, I made dating choices that more closely resembled those of an irresponsible teenager because I hadn鈥檛 had the chance to be an irresponsible teenager and learn the lessons that come along with those mistakes.

I also avoided anything that might resemble youthful rebellion because I was focused on being as acceptable as possible. My job was to become perfectly patient and a perfect educator, which meant that I entered my adult life with very few boundaries. As I say in therapy, I was a bit of a doormat.

Another unexpected way this shows up is through learning household tasks. The division of household labor is often very gendered, and many trans folks get to adulthood not knowing anything about cooking, or cleaning, or home repair. Though I鈥檓 an advocate for everyone being well-rounded and competent rather than encouraging you to just teach them 鈥渢heir new role,鈥� it can still be joyful to make specific time to teach them skills they might have previously missed out on that they鈥檙e excited about.

Use these tips as starter ideas to help you develop your own joy practices. Remember too that joy exercises must fit into a larger allyship strategy to make a meaningful impact; both are pieces of an overall strategy to make sure the trans people in your life, particularly trans children, feel seen, supported, and loved exactly as they are.

This excerpt from appears by permission of the publisher.

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