Back when I had a Facebook, I used to hang around weird FB and join a bunch of groups. It got to the point where random trans women would send me friend requests, and I’d sometimes send out random friend requests to them if we had some mutuals. Dani, Adeline, Natalia, Maia, Lucia, Mara, Alex, Thale, Alexa and many others. I talked to a few of them, exchanging words here and there about gender, group drama, sometimes arts and culture stuff. Most of them I’d just see on my feed, shitposting, arguing with one another, complaining about gender dysphoria, posting selfies, trying new outfits, dating each other, living together, breaking up, making memes
Nowadays I’m off facebook, and the only time I hear about them is when they die. Every couple of years I’ll find out that another died. First it was Adeline, a popular shitposter and the creator of the meme page gayvapeshark I remember we had a weird interaction about race before she transitioned, and I remember following her, seeing her change her style up, seeing her with her child and her ex-wife every now and then. She vaped, posted gay dbz memes, talked about kratom, and had a bunch of tattoos on her arms. She was a part of a couple of meme exhibitions and did a show with adult swim. Then I heard she died.
I’m thinking about her tonight because one of the other trans women who hung out on weird fb, maia leonardo, died. we never really talked, but i remember her profile pic, and i remember her arguing with some of the more “pickme”/”not like other girls” trans women. she, and so many others were regular fixtures on my newsfeed.
when trans women die i always wonder if they killed themselves. apparently 41% of us attempt suicide, though that number sometimes seems low when i think about the people i know.
i wondered if addy did and i’ll never know if maia did. None of my actual friends know who these people are. there’s not really anyone to talk to about it. it’s not even really supposed to be a loss, and it feels weird to grieve a person who i never really knew. It’s all parasocial connections to the trans women in my vicinity — “she’s just like me!”
If there is a trans community, and a trans culture, death is front and center to it. Struggling to survive, not caring about survival, begging for money fron strangers, being put out on the streets, being killed, watching others die. Doing it to ourselves, hoping that death means the end of it and yet grieving deeply when others die. wishing that no one else would die, by choice or otherwise. Maia was my age. I’ll get older but she won’t.
I’ve wondered how I’ll be remembered. I’ve seen the way that some trans people are memorialized by unsympathetic family that cannot bear to recognize anything other than the “son” or “daughter” they decided their child must be. Pronouns that did not describe the person I saw. Names that were not the names their friends or lovers called them, nor the names I knew them by. No mention of the things they cared about most, the communities that they called home. Would that happen to me? If I were to hydroplane out late one night? If I went out for a bike ride and was hit by an indifferent driver? For all the time we’ve spent together, my parents might be the least equipped to tell the story of who I am, but they’re the ones that the world has given the most authority to do so.
Even before I knew I was trans, I used to have dreams about my own funeral. A third person perspective floating distantly over a hill, looking down as mourners come to grieve me and bury my body. I’m never close enough to tell who’s there, but I assume it’s at least my family there and my lifeless self. The illusion always breaks when I reflect on the fact that there’d be no way of perceiving anything if i were dead. Then I imagine myself packed in earth, but not even able to perceive that, not even able to feel the dirt piled in on all sides, not able to smell, not even able to know that i was trapped, not able to feel my muscles turn to a slurry and fall from my bones, not able to blink my eyes in fear, or to know that they were closed forever — not able to see the black all around me, not even a thought or a feeling
