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My Name Is Iden | The path of the fearless
- Published: May 5, 2023
It is a frightening time to be transgender or nonbinary in America. It’s a frightening time to love someone who is trans or nonbinary. The leadership of this country has been dividing us, training us to be afraid of one another, and in so doing, they have wasted a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to grow and evolve. When we act out of fear, we are choosing bullying over beauty, conformity over freedom, fear over love. It breaks my heart. We — and I mean all of us — do not have to allow ourselves to be manipulated in this way. We can choose a different path, other than the dark one we are being driven down.
Every day it seems I hear of, or read about, a new bill being introduced to limit gender-affirming healthcare or ban trans children from sports. I see people from my own county proudly protesting against institutions that support the trans community. It isn’t a situation I can ignore.
This isn’t a far-off place. This isn’t Afghanistan or even Alabama. This is Greene County, Ohio. I am transgender and I live here. I work here. I take my kids school-shopping here, and it hurts me deeply to know that there is a population of my neighbors who would like to see me, and people like me, have our very being legislated away. This is a real threat, and it can be very frightening. It’s that sort of fear that keeps transgender people in the closet. It is that fear that leads to suicide and self-injury. It is that fear that drives away those who are able to leave.
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Trans erasure is an absolutely tragic loss for us as a community and a nation. There is a real beauty to being trans. Being out and being able to transition has given me more than my life back. It has given me more than relief from the pain of my self-hatred. Transition gave me real freedom. The freedom to be fearless.
When I say “fearless,” I don’t mean to say that I exist in a permanent state of ease vis-a-vis the world outside of me. What I mean is that I discovered that it is possible to be afraid of something or someone, but to respond to them from a place of calm and confidence.
I had no choice but to find and be myself. Just being broke enough of the false beliefs I held about society, and my place in it, that I felt able to challenge everything. As trans people we have been given a blank check of sorts to explore ourselves and to change in any way that feels true and good to us.
That is freedom. That is the promise of America, full personal sovereignty. With that sovereignty comes the inevitable challenging of social norms, traditions and power structures. That is a powerful freedom to claim, and it is one that every person should have as a birthright. In America, we do have that birthright, but it is kept hidden from us.
The people behind this latest wave of hatred — and it is just the latest — don’t care about how I dress, or where I pee. They don’t care about who can or cannot join a basketball team. They only care about preserving the existing social hierarchy — a structure that stands on a foundation built of insidiously internalized self-hatred and shame, a structure that is maintained through fear and bullying.
If every citizen of Greene County woke up one day and realized that they actually are free to be exactly who they’ve always known they were, what would happen? What would happen if every American woke up and realized that what they had been taught as fact was actually nothing more than illusion? What if they saw that gender was merely another trick engineered to divide us and maintain conformity? What if we all could be shown an alternative to the fight or flight culture we’ve been given? Would it be the end of days that the fear peddlers tell us it will be? Would our neatly ordered society collapse into chaos?
Yes. Yes, it would, and it would be a beautiful chaos. It would be the chaos of wind chimes and wildflowers. The chaos of bird flocks and beehives and wind-blown summer seeds. All of us free from shame and embarrassment. All of us free from internal judgement. That life is real and possible. I know it is because I live it, and I have dedicated the past several years to helping others find and live it as well.
Trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people could be our country’s shining examples of what personal freedom really means. We can inspire through our stories and lead by example.
*Iden Crockett lives in Yellow Springs with her wife and three children. She is an artist, poet, writer and habitual over-sharer. If you would like to see more of her work you can visit her website, mynameisiden.com, or follow her on Instagram and Facebook: instagram.com/cdjunky/, instagram.com/my_name_is_iden/, instagram.com/beverly_chill_z/, facebook.com/cdjunky/, facebook.com/mynameisiden/, facebook.com/beverly_chill_z/.
2 Responses to “My Name Is Iden | The path of the fearless”
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Great write up
Well spoken! You know you are lucky, Iden. You live in a supportive community where people, apparently, understand that individuals truly need to be themselves to be happy & thrive.
I’d at least like to see all agencies that cater to the needs of elderly adults, senior centers and councils on aging, in Ohio to show support by putting a LGBT Friendly logo somewhere on their entrances so that older adults can at least feel welcomed to services they might need now or someday. Is that too much to ask? It’s easy to say an agency is “inclusive” in a brochure — but maybe harder to “display” it and/or mean it. It is a problem not talked about or addressed.