I’m giving up on changing hearts.

It’s been a little over a month since the election. That night, I was full of nervous energy. I stopped by the Black Hart to say hello to friends, chatted with some people, and then met some other friends at a different bar. Seeing the results roll in brought up the too familiar anxious feeling of panic rising in my stomach, so I said yes to a hook up on Grindr and disappeared to a hotel room for an hour. By the time I got back home, my friend had texted: “It’s not looking good. Get some sleep.”

The next morning, I woke up to the same news everyone else did. My world just got harder to live in, though not impossible. I disappeared into a depression for a few weeks, starting a new farm on Stardew Valley, and spending my days huddled on the couch. This feels like loss because it is. There is a grief in knowing that my community - the trans and queer community - is at risk of having our medical care and our access to public spaces taken from us. There’s grief in knowing that my undocumented neighbors will face harsher scrutiny. There’s grief in knowing that those in precarious financial situations will likely go over the cliff once the incoming administration’s completely bonkers economic policies take effect.

I’ve also found my tolerance for bullshit on a very short rope. When I first came out as trans, I wanted to spend time engaging in arguments or “debates,” hoping that I could somehow convince someone to consider how their actions affected me. After all, it had been mildly effective in feminist thought - pointing out to the neoliberal bros that women are affected by their policies and that reproductive rights are important to them, too, often got some to reconsider. But in trans issues, I met a brick wall. People insistent that the evidence wasn’t good enough, that the drug trials needed to be double blind - an impossible standard when considering drugs that literally change the contours of your body - and insistence that we just don’t know enough about transition care to support it.

Hope in changing things has waned for me.

Wait, not hope. Rather, alongside that hope, righteous anger has grown tenfold. Upon meeting that brick wall, upon beating my hands bloody against a door that will not open, I have found nothing at the end but rage. Rage that cisgender people believe it is their place to question my medical care. Rage that the misguided and misplaced fear of cis white women is leading to violent assaults on my trans sisters. Rage that no matter how many trans people open a vein and spill our blood out onto the page, the needle has not moved.

I have a lot of trans joy. In my day to day, my mood is stable, I’m happy with where I’m at, and I’m really happy in my gender. But right now, that joy is buried beneath a boiling rage at knowing that acceptance for trans people has been set back by a massive ongoing propaganda campaign that tells cis people that I and my friends are the primary threat to children in the world.

When researching for Body Phobia, I delved into the work of Billy Graham, a famous evangelist who was responsible for what was basically a fourth Great Awakening in America. His prayer rallies were frequently a diverse cross section of America, and in a world where the Southern Strategy and white backlash against the civil rights movement reigned, Graham was famously “accepting” of black and brown voices.

But his acceptance only went so far. Contemporaneous reports tell us that Graham consistently urged his friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., to tone down his disruptive rhetoric, that Graham believed change could only happen when hearts changed, not laws. Graham believed that we could not resolve inequality until God had the chance to change men’s hearts, and that would only happen through a revival throughout the country. This, of course, discounted that Martin Luther King, Jr., himself was a preacher, and likewise sought change on a governmental level as the result of his faith spurring him to action.

In reality, Graham’s focus on heart change was an excuse to avoid accountability and responsibility to stand up and put his own career and life on the line for his friend. Outsourcing justice to the almighty washed Graham’s hands of responsibility for doing justice in the here and now, for using his authority with his white brethren to change laws to better protect those he claimed to love.

What I’ve realized over the past few years of living out and openly as a trans masculine non-binary person is this: hearts are very hard to change. Laws, however, are a bit easier. And if the law protects marginalized populations, heart change becomes easier. Trans people currently live in this liminal state where we are not recognized as humans under the law, and therefore, the State can do whatever the hell they want to us. Changing that status quo is still work, but it is work with a defined product and end result.

My goal is no longer to change the hearts of those who hate me or to hope I can convince them in some way. That was, realistically, never going to work and was just a dopamine button when I was depressed. My goal now is to ensure that the harm these people do is mitigated as much as it can, and that requires digging in to my local community, digging into mutual aid, and digging in to strategies that shore up my rights as a trans citizen.