Why "Pride"?

On costs, burdens, and the future.

June 03, 2025

As of a few days ago, Pride Month has started in the US. While my local Pride celebrations won’t be until July, this current Pride month is quite loud and I would rather join the chorus if I’m to write something about it.

I am a transsexual¹ woman. I began my gender transition over a decade ago, socially presenting myself as a woman since May 2014. I’ve even legally changed my name over a decade ago by this point. On top of this, I am also a lesbian².

I don’t usually write about this subject not out of a sense of shame, or stigma, or that it might come back to haunt me. I simply avoid it because it just isn’t that interesting to me anymore. My gender transition is largely something that is behind me at this point. Even the memory of the most turbulent parts of my transition feels distant. Today, I simply am. Indeed, I am quite proud of this—and for good reason!

It took a lot of work to get where I am today. In 2013, when I had sought to start my transition, doctors were ignorant of how to get their patients to gender affirming care, only being comfortable to refer any such patient to a single clinic in Toronto with a famously long multi-year waiting list. Many who would have wanted to transition simply did not bother because all extant documentation said it was essentially a lost cause here. It was only by serendipity that I got into contact with a doctor willing to prescribe feminizing hormones by means of informed consent—that being, I show an understanding of what the medication does, reasonable expectations as to its effects, and that I consent to treatment.

The informed consent model is the standard model of gender affirming care today in Ontario, where I still live. Many like me had to navigate an information vacuum, get outrageously lucky, push back against belligerent bureaucratic hostility, and somehow survive all to simply be able to live authentically as themselves. I faced down and bypassed dozens of self-styled gatekeepers each of whom dictated that I was not worthy, and I survived. I had to work hard to even be heard by supportive care staff. I had to go out of my way to make this happen, and I had to put a lot of effort into it.

A decade ago, I had reasons to be proud of surviving such a demeaning and demoralizing process. Unfortunately, some don’t have the privilege of survival.

Yesterday, Jonathan Joss³ was murdered by his neighbour. According to his widowed husband, an incident between the three escalated to homophobic rhetoric directed at the men, which then further escalated into a violent altercation that left Joss dead. There was a long history of homophobic harassment directed at them from the neighbour in question. Joss and his husband were unarmed.

Today, the San Antonio Police Department ruled that the murder was not a hate crime. Unusually for a suspected murder, a bond was set for the suspect—he will be released if he posts bail.

Among countless others who left us far too soon, Jonathan Joss will not see the start of another Pride Month. Joss' death, however, is just a footnote in the coming wave of targeted violence.

Transgender people—and transgender women in particular—are a priority target for the current U.S. administration. They are quickly taking steps to put an end to transgender public life, as outlined in Project 2025. The UK’s supreme court has recently ruled that transgender women are not legally considered to be women. Gender affirming care is under attack in some of Canada’s provinces. This wave will continue to radiate outwards unless it’s stopped—and it’s quite easy to stop it.

In 2016, the NBA announced that they were moving their upcoming all-star game away from North Carolina explicitly because that state had recently passed a “bathroom ban” against trans folk—again, mainly targeting the women.

There was a brief period where public opinion was on the side of allowing trans people to maybe sort of participate in public life.

Those times are over.

We are rapidly regressing back to the 1970s—where gender affirming care existed, was understood to be vital to the survival of any who desired it, and was viciously withheld from all but the most societally palatable transsexuals. The vast majority of folk who have happily transitioned in the past decade could not hope to have done so back when—to give one example—being a lesbian was seen as grounds to deny a transsexual woman her gender affirming care.

During those times, girls like us did still manage to survive. Some of us even thrived. But many of us felt well and truly hopeless, unable to do anything but rot away until nothing was left. Some even died without the words to explain why they felt so awful trying to live on terms that weren’t theirs.

Today, just as much as the old days, every transgender person, every gay person, every lesbian, every bisexual, all who are genderqueer, -fluid, asexual, or any other label I’ve neglected to mention here, is a survivor. Pride is the celebration of survival against odds that have been stacked by people, humans with beliefs and the power to enact institutional violence.

Those with power have spoken of the wave of the incoming atrocities they will inflict on trans folk. Those who can easily oppose have largely not voiced any opposition.

Happy Pride.

To surviving ‘til the next one,

Victoria