Still Here
This time last year, I told the story of Rachel Crandall-Crocker, the founder of Transgender Day of Visibility, and the ways in which this day has become an act of resistance and joy in the face of the many challenges transgender people face.
This has been a year of watching anti-trans executive orders roll out, a year of hospital systems pulling back, of court battles won and lost, of friends and colleagues in the trans community navigating fear alongside their ordinary lives. And yet: here we are, another March 31, seventeen years of TDOV and trans people are still building art, community, families, and futures.
As I look for what trans visibility means this year, I find hope and courage. Bree Fram, a retired Space Force colonel who was kicked out of the military for being transgender, is now running for office. She did not disappear. She stepped forward.
In Florida, during the 2026 legislative session, Equality Florida and their community stopped four out of five anti-LGBTQ bills through sustained, relentless pressure, week after week at the Capitol. Parents testified. Advocates showed up. They won.
In November 2025, anti-trans political attacks failed at the polls. In Virginia, a candidate who refused to flinch from her values defeated opponent after opponent and $9 million in anti-trans ads and won. Abigail Spanberger is our new governor.
Sarah McBride continues to serve in Congress. Every day she walks onto the House floor, she embodies the fact that trans people belong in public office.
The New York Attorney General just won a lawsuit forcing Aetna to cover gender-affirming care for two trans women. Healthcare access, fought for and secured in a court of law.
I think about Martine on days like this. My sister spent her whole life looking for a place where she belonged. She found community in San Francisco, found people who saw her, found herself, in the last years of her short life. She did not have the language we have now. She did not have TDOV, or organizations like He She Ze and We or the San Francisco Transgender District, or the growing number of faith communities who understand that love is not conditional.
In the midst of the hostility of this political moment there are more allies, more advocates, more informed and courageous people standing alongside the trans community than at any other point in history. That is the ground we stand on.
Visibility is the act of saying: we are here, we have always been here, and we are not going anywhere.
Happy Transgender Day of Visibility.
Photo by Mike Newbry