Waking up after election day, I stared at The Associated Press election results map and felt like the world was ending. I looked at the red on my screen, seeming to jump out and grab me by the neck, and immediately awoke my girlfriend to confirm that Donald Trump was elected as our 47th president. 

You will never understand the fear, the anxiety that has gripped me since that moment. I am female-bodied, visibly queer and I use they/them pronouns. I deleted my pronouns from my social media on Wednesday morning because I am scared. I am scared of becoming a target. “Visible” queerness is a debated subject. It is hard to define and ultimately too difficult to accurately determine someone’s sexuality based on the clothes they wear or the way they present themselves. But all my life, no one has ever had a hard time guessing I’m a lesbian or nonbinary.

You will never understand what people of color, LGBTQ+ people and women go through during a Trump presidency. In 2020, the FBI reported that hate crimes rose almost 20% during his last term. After Trump became president in 2016, he immediately removed any mentions of the LGBTQ+ community from the White House documentation and website. In 2017, he issued an executive order to ban Muslim individuals from entering our country. He also banned transgender individuals from serving for our country. Thousands of women in those ranks get raped by their peers, and so many have died due to abortion bans without exception and the fear put into our medical professionals — you will never understand. 

On the state level, the amount of anti-trans legislation will only keep rising, alienating and beating down those communities even further and causing elevated suicide rates by transgender youth. I fear the freedom some governing bodies will withhold while rolling out more of this oppressive and limiting legislation. 

The problem is, people with hate feel empowered by this. They feel nothing is stopping them from hurting us or killing us. This is not real to you, but it is real for so many others. The U.S. showed that this is not a dealbreaker this election: fear, hate, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, rape charges, felony convictions —  none of it mattered in the end. 

Professionals and legal experts explicitly stating that this man is not right for the job can not change the minds of those who do not care about facts. These people are flooding social media commenting “Your body, my choice,” being degrading to women and celebrating the probable coming of forced mass deportations. Additionally, Black St. Louisans and other Black citizens across the U.S., have been targeted with racist messages asking them to report for cotton picking after the election. Trump supporters celebrate taking away the backbone of our country, our unity and spreading fear through marginalized communities. 

 Have you ever used the bathroom of the gender you were assigned at birth and then gotten followed around a gas station by a woman wearing an American flag across their back? Then, have her walk up to her husband and whisper while staring and pointing at you for simply existing? Then, when you went to your family waiting outside in a panic, not knowing if the couple would decide to take action even though you kept your head down and were as quick as possible, get told that “it’s nothing”? 

Have you ever come out to a close group of friends, only to have them turn around and tell other peers? To out you to their parents? After, have another father walk up to yours and ask, “What’s it like to have a gay daughter?” as if your identity is some piece of hot gossip? And months later, when you finally got the courage to tell your parents, they already knew. Have you had to see people you used to know devolve into Evangelical homophobes, sending you voice memos over Instagram of scripture to turn you to God? Have they proclaimed their ideal world of snuffing out people like me in the name of some higher power?

Have you ever, as a young girl playing soccer — wearing a uniform a little too tight for your liking, clearly showing your female chest — been questioned about your gender for having shorter hair? For being a bit taller than the other girls on the team, obviously revealing the great scam that I was a boy there to destroy the opposition? Has a family member you are not out to ever grilled you about an alleged transgender girl participating on another high school bowling team, even though they didn’t even compete against one another? Made you the spokesperson, when they do not even realize they are expressing hate about your own identity? Asked you to explain, with venom in their voices and furrows in their brows, “Why can that even be allowed?” What, for that person to exist?

I’ve identified as nonbinary since the summer of 2022, sort of. For a long time before that, I had used they/she pronouns to still allow some leeway for self-exploration, but that summer I realized I did not identify with being a woman and felt much more comfortable staying outside that binary. I did receive a lot of support from my close friends and some family members when I asked people to start referring to me strictly by they/them pronouns. But, I still haven’t found the courage to be able to correct people on my pronouns when they misgender me. 

Even though I have my pronouns pasted everywhere — my Instagram, my Discord, my LinkedIn, my email signature — so many people I interact with daily still do not get the hint. You will never understand having to ask people to respect you, to do the things that are plastered in front of their faces. You will never understand having to cringe when someone uses “she” because of my biology, my voice, my face structure, because that fits better into their perception of the world than respecting my identity. Because at the end of the day, I know who cares and who doesn’t. Maybe it’s a blessing to know, maybe it’s a curse that it’s so easy to find out. 

 In 2022, Saint Louis University held its first on campus drag show. I felt very passionate and thrilled, as this type of outward support for the LGBTQ+ community, especially from a predominantly religious school, is somewhat rare, even this far in the 21st century. A lot of hate was spewed around that event because right-wing news sources publicized it outside the SLU community and blasted it as the worst thing to ever happen. When @slu_official posted about Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the day after the drag show, conservatives flocked to criticize SLU and show their disdain. Like many other students, I pulled up my bootstraps and argued back in the comments section about how queer people deserve to exist. 

That day, I got told “Get some help for your mental disorder. You are not a they/them” along with “oh God we have a they/them in tha house… Are you so desperate for attention?” 

I was not even speaking about my gender identity, but simply defending something that is not wrong — defending our right to express ourselves, love our community and enjoy the talent at an event for college students that obviously did not brainwash us all to be drag queens.

You will never understand being shamed for who you are and what you look like, for simply not falling into a box that the world has decided is the only place humans should fit. You will never understand that people will hurt you for existing this way, they will hate your resistance to their form of “normalcy,” which is just a construct made up by the narrow-minded human brain. 

You will never understand having to be the butt of the joke, being called “those they/thems” as if we are a subhuman species that doesn’t even deserve a spot at the table. Cisgender people will happily throw something they could never hope to grasp under the bus because they will never get it, and think it is hilarious. “I see pronouns i know i’m about to step into a world of delusions, insanity and irrational behavior” another person commented to me in 2022. Again, I did  not even mention my gender identity, yet this person purposefully checked my profile to somehow use that as a trump card, as if my identity was so blasphemous and ridiculous I should not even get the time of day to defend myself and others I love. 

I hope now and in the future heterosexual and cisgender people can reflect and know how much you all will never understand. This election unfortunately confirmed a lot of what I have experienced, and what so many marginalized people have and will continue to go through. 

As a white person, I would like to acknowledge my privilege there. I will never understand the sort of discrimination and hate people of color experience, worse than most of us can ever begin to fathom. To queer people of color, all I can say is I’m so sorry how horribly we have failed you. It all comes down to the inability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. To understand what at the end of the day Trump and a lot of the right wing stand for: hatred and division. 

We can even see it on the liberal side: the spike of hatred toward the Arab community for the results of the election, people again trooping to social media to proclaim they can now return to Starbucks and McDonald’s. Previously, due to both of the corporations’ support of Israel, a boycott of the products was ongoing. Even with my own hatred and pain with the Trump re-election, I could never imagine asking someone to vote for a candidate who is part of a government supporting the genocide in Gaza. Taking our anger out on another beaten-down community can not be the answer. 

I hope in the coming days, weeks, months and years those of us under fire can band together. They may tell us it is not a big deal, that those things would never happen, but I know many of us fear and dread the worst. Even if it is all worst-case scenario options, the reality of our brothers’ and sisters’ rights being taken away even being on the table is horrifying. We watched millions of people turn their backs on basic human rights this election. The only people we can rely on are those we trust. I believe that we are all in this together, and together, we can bring hope back. 

Community is most important in times of crisis, and to all my friends: we are people with power. We will overcome this, and come out on the other end. Existence is resistance, and even if I’m taking a break from shouting my identity and truth on the rooftop for a few days, I will not allow myself to become beaten down. We deserve to exist, we deserve to thrive.