Trans Day of Visibility, 2026
Being myself is apparently political now.
I'm a trans woman. I'm a Staff SRE, an open-source contributor, a KubeCon speaker, a community organizer, a homesteader, a neighbour. I grow things. I build things. I love my community. And somewhere in the halls of power, people who should be in prison have decided that I am the problem.
Project 2025 made it official; a coordinated, billionaire-funded blueprint to dismantle trans rights, erase us from public life, and make our existence a political football. It is being enacted, piece by piece, right now. Trans Day of Visibility has never felt more urgent; visibility is an act of resistance when powerful people are trying to make you invisible. So I must say some words.
I expected transition to be joyful. That's actually why I finally did it; I had been dreaming about it for years, chasing something I could feel the shape of even when I couldn't name it. Joy was always the destination.
What I didn't expect was how long shame would keep me from the door. bell hooks wrote that shaming is one of the deepest tools of patriarchy, because shame produces trauma and trauma produces paralysis. I had been wearing that paralysis so long I'd stopped noticing it; biochemically dissociated from my own gender dysphoria, numb to suffering that had become background noise. Embracing my true self felt terrifying precisely because it felt real. It took wanting to die to finally give myself permission to chase the thing I'd always wanted.
And then I did. And it was everything I had dreamed it would be; scary and liberating and mine. That confidence grew and grew until, at KubeCon EU, I got up on a stage and sang. In front of a crowd. As myself. (Yes, there's a YouTube video. Yes, you should look it up.)
That's what transition gave me. Not just survival; a life worth living.
Which is why I find what's happening right now so enraging.
In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that "woman" under the Equality Act means biological sex. This did not happen in a vacuum. It was the result of years of organized, well-funded campaigning, and one name sits near the centre of it: J.K. Rowling. She bankrolled organizations like For Women Scotland. She used her enormous platform to reframe trans women as a threat. And when the ruling came down, she posted a photo of herself with a cigar.
A cigar. Celebrating.
I want you to sit with that image for a moment. A billionaire, celebrating that people like me lost legal standing. That's not someone caught up in a debate; that's someone who wanted this outcome and worked to make it happen.
I visited the UK not long before that ruling. I'm glad I did, because thanks to where things are heading, I'm not sure I'd be able to use a public bathroom there safely now. I got to see the country. I got to pee in it. Small mercies.
I could let the anger be the whole story. I won't.
Because here is what I know: trans people have always existed. We have survived worse than this. We have survived eras with no language for who we were, no community, no visibility at all. And we built those things anyway; in the margins, in the underground, in letters passed between people who had never met but recognized each other across the silence.
Visibility is not just about being seen. It's about making it easier for the next person to breathe. When I am out at work, in my community, in my professional life, I am holding a door open. I know what it meant to me to see out trans people in tech, in leadership, in life; I am trying to be that for someone else.
The current moment is frightening. I won't pretend it isn't. Legislation targeting trans people is accelerating across the US and UK. The cultural machinery that produces moral panics is running hot. It can feel like we are losing.
But I also see my community. I see the mutual aid, the organizing, the people showing up for each other with a ferocity that takes my breath away. I see people coming out in the middle of all of this, choosing themselves anyway. That is not the behaviour of a movement in decline; that is the behaviour of people who know exactly who they are and refuse to be erased.
I am still here. I got to sing on a stage. I am not going anywhere.
If you are trans and reading this: you are not a problem to be solved or a debate to be had. You are a person, and your life has weight and worth and beauty in it, even on the hard days. Especially on the hard days.
Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Be seen if you can. Be safe if you need to. Either way, we see you.