Chella Man: I Am Choosing Trans Joy Without Conditions

I wake up from the anesthesia and a black tide washes over me. The world seeps slowly back. A hospital room. The face of a doctor and two nurses mouthing something I can’t understand. 

This is not the first time I’ve woken up from surgery. The first ones I had gave me my cochlear implants. The last one I had gave me my chest scars. This time, seven new bolts of metal have been added to my left arm—I took a fall while bike training for an upcoming ride this summer with a deaf bike group from San Francisco to LA in support of the San Francisco AIDs Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.  

My best friend pushes open the door and walks toward me, her eyes soft. Gazing at her with heavy lids, I allow myself to fall apart. Anesthesia, I later learned, has a way of bringing your subconscious, deepest thoughts to the surface. 

“I’m having such scary thoughts,” I keep saying, over and over, between sobs. “You know how I can’t ever seem to imagine my future…” I hesitated. Saying it out loud would make it real. “It’s clear now that I was never planning to kill myself,” I admitted. “I thought someone else was going to.”

We exhaled together. Her expression remained unchanged, like she already knew something I was only now beginning to realize myself.

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I spent so many years being invalidated for being a deaf, trans person of color. I spent my last few years of high school listening to my peers chant “Electrocute the gays” and attach Trump stickers to every locker during Donald Trump’s first administration. I felt very stuck—I couldn’t vote because I was underage, and while I was out, I hadn’t yet realized that I was trans. I certainly didn’t feel safe enough to share that with my classmates, and I didn’t know how I could tangibly contribute to the fight against the hatred I was seeing around me. Every day, I was trying to do what I could to hold on to my soul—to survive.

Now, Trump is in office once again, but despite his full-scale assault on trans lives, something within me is different this time: I have a kind of joy I only felt as a young child—joy without conditions.

This concept is a bit new to me—it wasn’t always this way. For so long, I thought my joy had to be in resistance to those who want to erase me. Years ago, I had made a deal with myself: I made a choice to give my life to fighting for a just world. I wrote down, full of love for who I was and my communities: I am willing to fight until I die against the unfathomable injustices that pervade our society. I moved forward knowing I had set a timer for my own life,  anticipating that one day someone would be saying my name in memoriam.

That was the only ending I could see at the time. Not because of anything I did, but because of who I was: Deaf, trans, Asian, Jewish, and highly visible as these identities. Because people like me don’t survive the systems we live in. I never had a death wish. I just figured it was inevitable.

For years after that, I went to protests, sat on panels, and gave talks all across the country to universities and at brand headquarters. At various points, I imagined someone standing in the crowd and pulling a gun on me, making that day my last. But I showed up anyway because I had made my choice. 

In the end, I found myself in situations where my heart broke again and again. I fought so hard, thinking the world would change. I thought if I was a martyr—if I gave my life to the cause—it would catalyze the world I want to live in. 

That was the story I told myself. Until now. For the past few years, I’ve been making space to listen to my grief—letting it settle in my chest, listening to what it has to say. I’ve committed to meditation with relentless discipline. I’ve learned that stillness is a crucial part of our fight for liberation and is the balance that our movements need. I can’t offer authenticity to others if I’m not rooted in myself first. Showing up for myself isn’t a betrayal. It’s the only way I can truly show up at all.

Turning inward, I found myself sifting through thousands of diaries from the past two decades to jog my memory of who I was and who I’ve grown into. I see how much I endured for so many years, in part because I felt like I was in the dark for so long. No single person, place, or resource held the full truth of my lived experience. I found fragments of myself in different places. I had to be my own representation, my own role model, my own life-saving resource. I see why I had to fight so hard. I had to grieve that so many people did not know how to fight for my freedom, even if they tried. Unlearning martyrdom can be unsettling that way—but necessary.

Now, the moments that feel like the world is changing are unexpected: when I paint; when I scale a mountain on a bike; when I lose track of time in the woods; when I notice the leaves of the trees applauding me like they would in sign language, when I nuzzle into the people I love; Change is the peace I feel within, knowing what I want and where I need to be.

 The world is shaped, etched, and molded every day by people like me. People who are my neighbors, my peers, my elders. But true change starts with the world that exists inside of ourselves, first. On the surface, you may not notice the way things begin to shift. In the morning, for instance, when the light streams through my bedroom window, I used to slap on my cochlear implant immediately. Now, the silence allows me to tune into my inner voice. There is peace in welcoming transformation through stillness, knowing that change is inevitable–our lives are the proof.