I love being trans, but Pride isn’t mine to claim in a world where queer and trans youth hate who they are.

The shame of a recent past spent in internalized transphobia translates into the dissonance in knowing that while I embrace my transness, someone is at risk of dying as someone to be erased.

There’s the tired and overdone trope of families grieving trans people’s inaccurate gender imposed on birth – a sugarcoated way to say that parents reduce their children to anatomy everyday.

I’m grieving too – for everyone who dies, is dying, is dead before they feel comfortable in their skin.

How do we live in this graveyard, where the possibility of being is killed before we become?

I’m thinking about Arvey and Annanyah. I’m thinking about what it would be like to become friends over coffee rather than siblings over death. I’m thinking I wish I didn’t know them at all if it meant that we are co-existing without crossing paths. I’m thinking about everyone else who’s death isn’t sensationalized, but is dying without being known.

What do we do with this grief of living in love – of knowing that love comes at the cost of the remnants that survived despite the ending of many selves; that love exists in a continued death that cannot be counted, only felt.

What do we do with the consistency of leaving someone behind as we become ourselves?

How do we claim Pride when our queer and trans youth and siblings drown in institutionalized shame, violence and negligence?