Ashes
Pride on the Page Day #13
Each of the mini-essays I’m publishing for the month of June are part of a creative challenge to share joy during Pride. You can find out more in the link below. You can even participate, if you’d like!
Wild Lion*esses Pride from Jay
13. Ashes
My local library has been a wealth of trans and queer books over the years I’ve now spent looking for them. Some were easy to find, others not so much. I stumbled on a book about transgender history, and by the halfway point in the book I felt like I was waking up from a generational slumber and opening my eyes to a history that had been silenced. How did I not know about Cooper’s Do-nuts? Why had no one told me that the mastermind behind Brown v. Board of Education, Pauli Murray, was a gender nonconforming queer person who likely would have been transgender in modern times? How many more of my transcestors were out there waiting for me to discover them?
Sifting through the ashes of a burnt, shunned, banned, prohibited history is a treasure hunt we should all explore. That’s our damn history. It belongs to us. Give it the hell back.
Your trans friend,
Robin
Robin — yes, yes, and again yes. You speak this so clearly: they tried to burn our history, to ban it, to silence it — and here we are, sifting through the ashes, finding the voices they couldn’t erase. That’s our damn history. It belongs to us. I feel this in my bones. Every book, every name reclaimed — an ember they couldn’t kill. Thank you for writing this so fiercel
Robin, it made me curious, have you come across some of these names in your search?
🌟 Kylar Broadus — trans man, attorney, longtime activist for trans rights and intersectional justice
🏛️ Dominique Morgan — Black trans and nonbinary policy advisor, honored in Congress yet still too little known
🎤 Andrea Jenkins — first openly trans Black woman elected to public office in the U.S.
🤝 Victoria Cruz — Puerto Rican trans activist and key voice preserving the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera
🎨 Eisha Love & Atlanta Drive — featured in Trans in America, both fighting for justice through the legal system