This is a first-person account of how an anstroturfed campaign of anti-trans hatred affects actual transgender human beings. This is my story. I'm not sure the impact it'll have on you, but I hope you'll listen.

I’m a community college teacher; many of you already know that. I talk about it a lot, because I love my profession.

What I don’t talk a lot about is the particular grief I carry into this moment. I don’t talk about my embodied knowledge of how quickly, how efficiently, a crowd can become docile, suggestible, and even active converts in the project of scapegoating.

This is the part where I tell you that I’m also the only out nonbinary trans professor on an eight-campus system in the Midwest. Indeed, I was the first out transgender professor to earn tenure at my university.

I’ve won national awards for my research and community service, but I’m proudest of my twelve commendations for teaching (all student-nominated). I tell you this not to roll around in my accolades but to mention the reality many marginalized faculty confront: that we have to do four times as much, only to be taken half-seriously— half of the time.

But let’s get into what matters more to me. I’m known, both in my field and in my community, as a person who centers connection and practices solidarity. I’m also fierce advocate for transgender, BIPOC, disabled, femme, and neurodivergent students.

Since I was hired, I did the job I was asked to do, and it took some doing as an “institutional only.” I had no mentors, but I did get a lot of sideways looks and invasive questions. I took it on the chin, every day at work, knowing that I was most likely the only trans person most folks had ever met. When it came to me, personally, I bit my tongue.

Hurt me all you want, but not my students.

As you can imagine, in this particular role, especially in this political climate, I had cause to stand up for my students, and for other marginalized faculty and staff, owing to the DEI work I was explicitly asked to perform.

But when I took that part of my job seriously, I suddenly shifted from “trans token” into a “trans problem” in the eyes of my “betters.” My career imploded, catastrophically so, the moment I began to advocate for trans students’ right to an education free of harassment.

Though my union acknowledged that transphobia appeared to be at play in my situation and that our collective bargaining agreement had a non-discrimination clause that included trans people, they claimed they couldn’t stick their necks out for me because I was “the only trans faculty member” in the bargaining unit.

At the time, I was serving as my campus union rep. Not too long after, I resigned. Solidarity, as it turns out, isn’t forever— or for everyone. I still pay dues though.

Anyhow, I ended up standing alone, even though I was scared and knew I’d get clobbered— because I knew my students would be left standing alone if I didn’t.

Eventually, a friend of a friend in the rainbow community found someone who could represent me “on contingency,” which was helpful, because I make a bit less than a high school teacher.

The case built slowly: discovery, motions, other legal stuff.

In the meantime, the wheels fell off. I was living my own personal “soapbox derby,” where life unravels downhill. Somewhere along the way, my wife and I got divorced. My mother died, and my familiy’s collective pain bubbled up along with it.

Life is, indeed, relentless. Particularly mid-life.

What were once looming legal depositions became a deluge.

I was deposed thirteen hours in total. Much of it feels like a blur now.

But what I will never forget is my College of Arts and Sciences Dean referring to me, in her deposition, as a rodent she was trying to clobber. The turn of phrase may have been common enough, but it chilled me to the core. She was so clinical, so obviously unaware of the dehumanization, when she uttered it.

I sat through what was, in practice, a rhetorical annihiliation. I don’t know why I was surprised when my character was maligned, through outright confabulation and other skullduggery, but I was. Some innocent part of me really hoped when they looked at all the discovery they’d say: “Oh, we see this mistake. We can fix this.”

Alas.

Instead, my eyebrows climbed into my hairline, as I was called a mentally unstable “bully” of white women— with anti-Christian overtones. It was kafkaesque.

In a moment that felt like an episode of Candid Camera, I was told, by my university’s lawyer, that “cis” was a slur. When I explained, calmly, that cis is a Latin phrase for “on the same side,” he looked right through me as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

The gaslighting threw me for months afterward. Friends reminded me, on patient loop, that a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. I resolved to put my boots on.

Given how the legal system typically treats transgender people, I tried to manage my expectations of the outcome. I told myself that even if I didn’t win, I’d at least get it all on public record.

I tried to be brave, even as I was also falling apart.

The case went on. Painfully so.

There was some moment when my university’s lawyer appears to have realized that his case, if it relied on the evidence, was pretty indefensible, behind its wall of DARVO.

I tried to be hopeful that they’d acknowledge the harm and move to make it right.

Alas, once more.

Instead, my employer’s lawyer requested another deposition. I refused. The judge had given him his allotted eight hours to depose me, and I had given my answers. It wasn’t as if my lawyer and I were allowed to ask for more witnesses— that was limited by the judge from the start. So, when I said no, the lawyer went back to the judge, who granted them even more time to depose me.

I was, in the end, coerced into a third deposition.

At this point, it felt like more like an inquisition than a deposition.

I walked into the meeting room, on the second floor of the school library, where I’d once studied dutifully as a Masters student. Inside, I saw my College Dean, a School Head (also named in the lawsuit), the university’s general counsel, and their defense lawyer, sitting on one side of a large wooden conference table— each with tabulated binders in front of them.

Our side of the conference table was empty. They offered me no such binder, no mutual exchange of exhibits. The asymmetry was palpable.

As it turns out, those binders held five years of my personal counseling notes.

Submitting them is a demand made of all plaintiffs who claim damages. I tried to hold my center. My lawyer had assured me that, so long as I hadn’t gleefully announced I was fleecing my employer, there would be no reason to worry. I reminded myself of that: There’s nothing in there to see.

When their lawyer began asking me questions about my personal life, I objected, as it wasn’t relevant to the case. He threatened to call the judge if I didn’t comply.

I relented.

He then began to read my counseling notes at me, page by page— my employers’ avatars turned, page by page, right alongside him.

In lockstep, a silent jury.

When he asked me about my mother’s death— with pupils so dilated his brown eyes turned black—I left the room in tears. My mother had only recently died, and because of my complicated family situation, I was unable to attend the funeral. It was complicated grief, and this was such an obvious violation.

My lawyer eventually found me in a corner office, face blotchy, with wads of toilet paper in my hand. He ran to get me tissues, then asked what he could do.

I requested that my workplace harassers would, at the very least, leave the room and give me some privacy. I asked him to remind these individuals that they’d get a read-out of my answers, either way.

Both refused to honor my privacy.

These colleagues were the very same people who expressed a fear that I would “erase women,” an offshoot of a common transphobic narrative that trans people invade cisgender women’s spaces. My colleagues did not object, however, to putting me, as a trans person, under a microscope.

I asked my lawyer what my options were.

He said I could go in there and answer their questions, or we could drop the case. Per the Republican judge’s orders, apparently, my university’s lawyer could ask me anything he wanted— even if it wasn’t germane to the case.

“They’re just trying to wind you up,” my lawyer said.

I reentered the conference room, feeling an upward, churning energy of revulsion.

Their lawyer continued to read my counseling notes at me, while the women who refused to honor my privacy thumbed through the pages of my once-private life.

At one point, he even had the inhumanity to make me admit, under oath, that my father sexually abused me when I was a child. Not only did this have nothing to do with my case, but this happened to be the first time I had ever acknowledged this fact outside the container of a counseling session.

This didn’t feel like a personal invasion. It felt like psychological rape.

They kept turning the pages.

There was an odd moment when their lawyer pried me to talk about writer’s block I’d been working through on a book project. The project focused on 2SLGBTQIA+ teachers and their allies navigating the intersection of homophobia, transphobia, and Evangelical antipathy toward queer and trans life. When he implied that I may harbor anti-Christian bias, I countered that my research examined how framing 2SLGBTQIA+ people as a “controversial topic” opened the door to our dehumanization.

I sat there for four hours, watching privilege center itself and losing contact with the sensation in my body.

At the end, my university’s lawyer submitted five years of my personal counseling notes as “evidence” in the federal case. Just for kicks.

The cruelty was the point.

And every bit of it was enacted with your tax dollars.

Not long after the deposition, the weight of what happened in that room began to unfold. After forty-odd years of radio silence, a small child inside of me whispered that I’d die because “I told on” my father.

Every survivor of childhood sexual assault, it seems, has a version of this dormant fear.

For weeks after that, I couldn’t leave the house. I’d get vertigo when I’d try to walk the block at night. The terror clung to me, just as it had when I was a little kid.

I even put a swing-lock on my bedroom door, hoping to quell the fears of the child I’d once been, who genuinely believed that telling that truth would mean the annihilation of everyone they loved.

Life went on in stops and starts.

I eventually sold my house, with a garden I adored, because I was terrified of running into my colleagues at the grocery store. I was also scared I’d run into a member of my immediate family, because I had said the thing aloud that I was never allowed to say.

I moved five hours away, living with my then new boyfriend (now husband).

I doubt it ever occurred to my colleagues how much harm would cascade from their desire to dodge accountability. Sometimes, I’d imagine having the guts to communicate the impact of their cruel choices.

But I didn’t have the guts.

I didn’t want to jeopardize my case.

I was also afraid that my truth, once more, would get me branded a “toxic bully.”

So I kept my mouth shut.

I built flower beds for my boyfriend’s concrete patio. I took up running and yoga. I tried to work on a different book project but wondered if, in the end, any of it mattered. I kept on reading and taking notes anyway.

Life went on. The herbs in the garden box bolted.

The federal judge assigned to the case, who insinuated from the outset that my lawsuit was not “serious,” dismissed it, claiming I hadn’t sufficiently proved any harm.

He didn’t even deem my First Amendment claim worth acknowledging.

Once more, it’s like I’d never spoken at all.

It seems the real boogeyman of “transgender for everybody” is just a convenient vehicle for using invented grievance to disappear the voices of everyone but white cisgender men.

My life, my gender, my lived experience, my access to civil rights rendered into a silent scream. I guess we’re all transgender now.

We appealed the dismissal.

Then, in the wintry weeks before Trump got in office a second time, both the DOJ and DOE reached out to my lawyer and committed to file amicus briefs on behalf of my case. I felt a glimmer of hope that they’d been monitoring it and found the serious enough for intervention.

Those offices are now eviscerated, and my legal support evaporated right along with them.

I was suddenly trans, in the dockets, and at the precarious intersection of AI, fascism, and white Christian nationalist antipathy toward trans people.

It seems worth highlighting that, on page 5 of Project 2025, trans educators are singled out as criminals who should be jailed as “sex offenders.”

To say my world has become a one of chronic tailspin is an understatement.

My colleagues actively stalk me online.

I have deleted every single social media account with my name on it, cutting ties with dear friends to avoid further stalking.

Mysteriously, around the time when everything became public record, a Koch brother’s funded news-rag just so happened to smear me in exactly the same way my university’s lawyers had— chapter and verse.

Though I am no Mx. Marple, this appears to be an attempt to both discredit my character and distract from damning public records.

The worst part is that it’s impeding my ability to find a job. That hit piece has attached to my name like a heat-seeking missile, and I suspect that was the point.

I’m constantly monitored at work; my university’s lawyer drove that point home during the thirteen hours under which I was deposed, put on trial for having the audacity to speak up.

I can’t tell you what it feels like, at a cellular level, to have your economic survival hinge upon someone abusing you with impunity.

When my university found out recently (through a Google alert) that white Christian nationalists had run me out of my home, as a consequence of my being in the federal dockets, they began making moves to fire me— in spite of my tenure, union, and ADA protections.

There was no institutional concern communicated as to my safety. No one called to check in, after reading the news story. Instead, they held a private meeting and worried over the phone about how the news story would make them look.

The story wasn’t even about them.

It was about fascism, about an ordinary trans person getting run out of their home.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t a person to them, at all.

At the time of this writing, my husband and I have been living out of suitcases since April. We miss our community. My husband misses his job. I grieve for my books, my plants, and my dog’s ashes, still sitting on the altar I made for him in my office.

I still occasionally cry over the black stray cat, Friend Cat, who regularly visited us for food. I hope he’s ok.

I think some part of me is writing this story, because I worry I might be disappeared before getting to tell it. But above all, I’m writing this to tell you:

I miss feeling like a human being.

There is a human cost to trans antipathy that rarely gets articulated from a first-person narrative. Mainly, we get obituaries, where we are misgendered.

I want to live, even as the walls are closing in.

Trans people are still here. Trans students are still here.

And, even if it costs me, I refuse to stop speaking up, because this moment is too important to remain silent about what matters.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit muppetgender.substack.com