Every now and then, an offhand something--a passing comment, a daily task, a clip on TV—tells you something deep and unexpected about yourself.  

​That happened to me early in April. During the tariff announcement in the White House Rose Garden on April 2, I thought I heard Donald Trump make a joke. And my heart fluttered.

As it turns out, the joke was lame. When holding up his chart of which country would get charged which tariff, he said, “I think you can for the most part see it, those with good eyes. With bad eyes—we didn't want to bring—it’s very windy out here. We didn't want to bring out the big chart because it had no chance of standing. Fortunately, we came armed with a little smaller chart. [Laughter]”

OK, they laughed. OK, not really funny. But here’s my point: My heart fluttered because it saw Donald Trump engage in one of the most fundamental acts of our species—attempting  a joke.

For one nanosecond, he seemed like one of us.

So why did my heart flutter? A little background here. My heart is exhausted. The tsunami-like overwhelm of the past three months—the hundreds of executive orders, the chaos, the dehumanization of immigrants and trans people and others—has left me wasted. I continue to stand in deep opposition to Donald Trump and nearly everything he does.

​But on a deeper level, I want our leaders to succeed, whoever they are. Deeper even than that, my heart is on the lookout for any shred of human I can find in even the most broken or difficult or malevolent people, because my heart really really wants to love. When it heard that Trump joke, it thought, at last, something I can work with.

I think love is what God wants too (however you conceive of God). Ever take a good look at who Jesus hung out with? From what I can make of the Christian Gospels, some of them were hard-core. At least one was a tax collector, a Jew regarded as traitorous for enriching the oppressive Romans. One was a zealot--maybe what we’d call an insurrectionist or terrorist. The name Iscariot, as in Judas Iscariot (the man who betrayed Jesus to death), might come from the Latin for “dagger man,” i.e., assassin. Jesus ended his life hung between two criminals.

And he took them all into his heart. No exceptions. Not one.

So I can’t make exceptions either. In spite of the fact that some people seem impossible to love.

The best I can do is baby steps. So when this tortured president makes a lame joke, and my heart senses a tiny bit of humanity, and it flutters, that’s a start. Good joke, Mr. President, I want to say. You can joke human; now lead human. Treat people with the compassion they deserve. 

​For a while now, I’ve thought about using this space to describe a day in the life of a gender-different person.

If all you know about gender-different people—trans folks, non-binary folks (like me), genderfluid folks, etc., etc.—comes from the internet, you might think we spend our days seeking out public restrooms to invade, joining sports teams of the “opposite sex,” and performing delicate surgeries without a license on incarcerated children at government expense.

You may not have seen us mowing the lawn. Or taking the car in for an oil change, even though I’ve barely driven it since the last oil change. Or filling out our tax returns. (Note to New York State Tax Department: that form for calculating the penalty for underpayment of estimated tax? IMPENETRABLE.) Or pushing our cats away, without success, when they insist on being fed one half-hour before dinnertime.

All by themselves, these added up to a normal list of daily tasks. But nothing quite raised them to the level of blog-worthy. Until two days ago, when trans journalist Erin Reed posted this deeply moving essay about the ramifications of her decision to transition. One paragraph in particular reminded me of other parts of my life as a non-binary person:

It wasn’t easy to be myself. From the moment I realized what I needed to do, I knew I would lose people. Family ties would fray. Friends I’d clung to would let go—or push me away entirely. Every transgender person understands this, and most have lived it in some form. That we still choose to transition should tell you everything about how deeply this truth lives in us. I remember saying once: I would rather weather every storm in my own skin than live safely in someone else’s.

Some of what Erin describes also describes things I’ve experienced, or believe I’ve experienced. (In cases where others have simply stopped communicating, it’s hard to tell.) And, especially, this: That we still choose [to live as gender-different] should tell you everything about how deeply this truth lives in us.

Over the years, I’ve looked deeply enough into myself to know how deeply this truth lives in me. Even now, via meditation and other means, its depth surprises me. It’s as much a part of me as my hair color. Which is why, in the face of a government that would like to erase all of that, is why I keep writing about it. 

It feels…strange.

(Note: this article has two parts, as you’ll see below. Just read the part(s) you need. If you’re up to date on Trump anti-trans measures, feel free to skip background on the threat, which starts in the next paragraph, and go right to the underlined subhead so back to the headline several paragraphs later.)

Background on the threat. Since Inauguration Day, Donald Trump has taken many steps to erase gender-different people—trans, non-binary (like me), etc.—from the American landscape. He appears to be doing this in the way he’s pursued many initiatives: take one step toward the ultimate goal, gauge public opinion, and if there’s not much pushback, take another step.

That ultimate goal is still obscure. But Trump’s initial executive order—to remove words like trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming from every single publication of the federal government—is sufficient foundation for others to push extreme efforts like those mentioned in a recent Erin Reed overview.

Because of this trajectory, I don’t know what the near-term future holds for gender-different people. Few people do.

Friends have reassured me that the federal government won’t come after me. That may be. Without a doubt, I am very small potatoes in this very large world. But even if the government doesn’t worry about average folks, it has emboldened others to think otherwise. I have no idea whether, somewhere in my town, there’s a Proud Boy with a Glock, looking to make his contribution to the cause.

So back to the headline.

What does it feel like, to live with all this day by day?

I’ve shared with you the steps I’ve formulated to continue living the life to which I’m called (read about it here and here). To review:

1. I will devote myself to living my life as it is.
2. I will try to devote precisely the right level of attention to Trumpworld: not an iota less than necessary to detect oncoming threats/needs for action, not an iota more than it warrants.

By and large, step #1 is holding up well. My writing time has been extraordinarily productive. I’m still seeing my people for spiritual direction. I’m ahead of the game on household tasks. My spiritual practice is an anchor.

Step #2, though, is trickier. I keep having to recalculate “right level of attention.” It is so easy to overTrump, which puts me in sensory overload. At the moment, I’ve realized I have only enough bandwidth to keep up on gender-different issues in depth and scan for other developments as they arise. Mostly I’m depending on two independent journalists to give me the depth and breadth I need. I don’t agree with them all the time, but I know their worldviews well enough to make good use of their excellent reporting.

Oh, and I’m trying, very hard, to stop scrolling Facebook, at least for a while. I may miss seeing friends, which grieves me. But the overall value of scrolling is so low right now, and the sensory overload so high, that my sanity demands it.

Back to the question: how does it feel? On certain days it feels deeply fulfilling. On other days, especially when I've overTrumped, it's darker. But the shadow of Trump's menace is always there. So a "good day" during the last administration feels different from a "good day" now, because the world is never very far away. 

One more thing for now. An awful lot of friends have sent me messages of love and encouragement. They’re wonderful. And…I want to make clear that, bottom line, blog posts like this one aren’t intended to be “about me.” I’m hoping that these glimpses of one non-binary person’s inner life will inspire more empathy in the world—and maybe give other trans and non-binary folks that wonderful sense that they’re not alone. 

Caught up on the executive orders? Got your cheap eggs yet? Found just the right balance of pharma, therapy, meditation, etc., to deal with all this?

Yeah, me neither. But I’m working on it.

In last week’s blog post, I shared my two-prong strategy for staying sane in the New Age of Trump:

1. I will devote myself to living my life as it is.
2. I will try to devote precisely the right level of attention to Trumpworld: not an iota less than necessary to detect oncoming threats/needs for action, not an iota more than it warrants.

What I’d forgotten to consider was Trump’s strategy of flooding the public square with so much chaos you can’t take it in. At 9:00, say, you read an article on an executive order, and it links to another executive order, and another, and by the time you’re done it’s noon and you’re overwhelmed. I’ve thought about limiting myself only to news about the Trump trans bans,* but even those are flowing thick and fast.**

As before, I’ve been working with all this in zazen (basically, Zen meditation). Last night, it dawned on me that I’m trying too hard with #2—the attention to Trumpworld—and ignoring #1.

So I’m making a shift: less Trump, more devoting myself to my life as it is.

I feel myself breathe easier every time I think about that. Moreover, living my life as it is involves my fundamental vocation: to tend sentient beings so they blossom. This vocation brings me bliss, and it can’t be bad for others either.

In a subtle way, living my own life is also an act of non-binary resistance. My life as it is includes me as I am: a non-binary person, living my non-binary life. My vocation has a non-binary cast to it because it’s my vocation.
​
So how have you navigated the past two weeks? Feel free to share if you like. In the meantime, I’ve got a poem to revise.
 
 
*Talk about fun words to see and say. Try it. Trans bans. Transbans. Trumpytransbans. In times like these, comedy is mandatory.
**In case you’re counting…oh my goodness, I can’t even summarize all the executive orders that target trans people. Here’s a link to one of Erin Reed’s recent posts. She’s a respected trans journalist writing about trans issues. She’ll clue you in.

​Ever since November 9, 2016—the first time the American electoral system slapped me in the face—I’ve been working with various ways of living in Trumpworld. A lot of it has felt like driving an exquisitely sensitive car: ease up on the fury just a little, give my latest thoughts a little more gas by posting them to my blog, let thoughts go, ignore this but not that, news blackouts/brownouts.

Things have changed since then.

For one, I’m now nine years into my Zen practice, which involves (for me, among other things) working with my emotions. A useful thing. For another, an executive order from yesterday effectively rendered me and many loved ones “not real” as far as American government is concerned.** A bad thing. This enrages me.

Yesterday I worked with that rage in zazen, and a new way of approaching the next four years arose.

1. I will devote myself to living my life as it is—tending it, and other people, so they blossom.
2. I will try to devote precisely the right level of attention to Trumpworld: not an iota less than necessary to detect oncoming threats/needs for action, not an iota more than it warrants.

This will not be easy. I have heard Zen teachers speak of life’s stiffest challenges as rich opportunities to practice. The next four years, it follows, will be one hell of an opportunity.

That’s all I’ve got so far. We’ll see how it works. What about you?
 
*Or the next eight, or 12, or whatever. Trumpworld might outlive Trump.
**Yes, the executive order refers specifically to transgender. But if you think Trumpworld will distinguish between transgender (including my trans friends) and non-binary (me), think again. 

Note: Some of my good friends don’t like cuss words, so I gave some thought to whether I should use the f-word in this post. There are alternatives--screw it, to hell with it, etc. But the desperation one feels at those moments—it’s intense—demanded the one word with enough good old Germanic oomph to get the point across with precision and force. Hence….

I don’t remember what exactly I had, illness-wise—it was senior year of college, after all—but it involved a lot of sniveling and whining and general misery. For days. And then more days. I couldn’t get myself to go anywhere or do anything. I just…sniveled.

Then one day I’d had enough. I sprang off my bed and started throwing things. (Pillows, mostly.) I swore and yelled and generally expressed every bit of anger with this never-ending blech.

After my fury had spent itself, I felt better. The illness had subsided. My health returned.

I’d had a “fuck it” moment—in which my deepest layers said, “Fuck it. I’ve had it with the suffering. I am so over this.” It inspired me to take action, and the action bore fruit.

I thought about this episode while reading one of the healing stories in the Christian gospel of Matthew (9:18-26). A synagogue leader asked Jesus to revive his daughter, who had just died. As Jesus walked toward his house, a woman who’d hemorrhaged for 12 years (presumably like having your period nonstop for over a decade—YIKES) touched Jesus’ cloak thinking that would cure her.

After pondering these stories a minute, I realized they had something in common. Opposition to Jesus among powerful religious authorities was fierce, so it took courage for the synagogue leader to step out publicly and ask him for a favor. Meanwhile, the woman who needed healing would have been considered ritually unclean and therefore shouldn’t have touched anyone (Leviticus 15:19-33). It took courage to reach out and touch this itinerant teacher.

Well it sorta took courage. Look closer, though, and you’ll see a greater motivator behind the courage: desperation.

The leader is desperate to get his daughter back. The woman is desperate to be rid of this life-sapping hemorrhage. I was desperate to get over my own illness, which had reduced me to sniveling.

And we all, in our own way, said “fuck it” and reached out.

To put it succinctly, “fuck it” is the cauldron in which the fuel of desperation becomes the fire of courage. Courage gets a lot of press; desperation deserves more, and so does the catalyst that turns one into the other.

I’ll bet you’ve had these moments, these situations. Feel free to share if you’re so inclined.
 

​

​Ever since November 5, I’ve been paying very, very close attention to my deeper layers, listening for any wisdom that will teach me how to live in Trump World. A lot of good, clear insights—sometimes sobering, sometimes liberating—have come to mind.

​One, however, has haunted me for quite a while: the fact that I may be in danger.

I first made the case for this in January. To summarize:

• I am nonbinary—which I’m sure Mr. Trump would label trans, though there’s a distinction.
• I write frequently about gender identity.
• Project 2025, the MAGA “promise to America,” has pledged to delete every mention of gender identity from every corner of the federal government (see page 5 of the Foreword).
• The rhetoric around gender identity has heated up to dangerous levels. The Trump campaign’s TV ad “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” uses caricature and out-of-context photos to persuade its audience that trans and gender non-conforming people are weird, repugnant, totally “other.” Project 2025 has conflated “transgender ideology” with “pornography” and the “sexualization of children” (again, page 5 of the Foreword). As I mentioned in my January post, Trump has proclaimed that “under my leadership, this madness will end” (00:55 of the video).

So how much danger are we talking?

I have to say the risk to me is low. This is a very large country—by area, by population, and by sheer social media volume—and it may be difficult for the Trump administration to even find me in all those layers. I am very small potatoes, so they may not care about me. You’d think that would keep me safe.

But low risk is not no risk. What’s more, my “low risk” does nothing to protect the trans and gender non-conforming loved ones I so cherish.

Maybe, maybe, I could get my brain to calm down about this. But then I read this Medium article from Dana DuBois, a writer who’s a parent of a gender-conforming kid. She writes way more about gender than I do. She has done her homework and assessed the risk.

She’s sounding alarm bells.

Now, I don’t consider myself brave. But I can’t imagine changing how much I write about gender, because I feel a calling to it (as to the other things in my life). Dana DuBois has pledged not to give up her writing.

This exercise is essential for many of us, I think. We can’t possibly know what Mr. Trump will do. One way we can be ready is if we pay very, very close attention and assess it all with a clear mind—without letting him fill our headspace in ways that damage our mental health. A tall order, I know, but I’ll be working on it.

Will you? Do you need to? It’s worth considering. 

​My morning prayer is a jumble of practices: silence, chanting/reading a psalm, contemplation of a sacred text, even journaling, all in the name of “gazing into God.” Anything could pop up and surprise the hell out of me.
 
Recently, that anything involved a passage in Psalm 44 that could have been ripped from today’s editorials. That wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was what I was asked to do with it.
 
The psalm begins with praise to God for help in victories, defense against enemies, etc. (I’m using Nan Merrill’s compelling version of the psalms in her book Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness.) Then the text takes a dark turn:
 
Without your saving grace, we come in conflict with our neighbors,
We fear all who seem different from us.
We seek to better ourselves at the expense of other nations,
We become arrogant and greedy.
Our spirit weakens as we attack others; we become deaf and blind
To the cries of those oppressed,
At the sight of those wronged.
 
Doesn’t this sound like America’s public square in 2024? Goodness knows, my adversaries “fear all who seem different.” Much of Donald Trump’s platform sounds like “we seek to better ourselves at the expense of other nations.” My God, we are a mess, all right.
 
But then a voice popped up in my head: That’s not good enough. You’ve got your own work to do.
 
So I went through the passage again. After each line I asked myself and/or God, How am I like this?
 
The answers weren’t hard to see. “We fear all who seem different from us”: maybe many MAGA folks fear others who aren’t white, Christian, or heterosexual, but I fear the MAGA folks. “We become arrogant”: I sure do, especially when trying to defend one of my cherished (and, naturally, correct) opinions. “Our spirit weakens as we attack others”: I’m reminded of that sense of needing a shower after a long bitchfest about “them.”
 
I didn’t resolve to do anything about these shortcomings. For the time being, I just want to hold them, look at them, as a deep reminder that I am part of the problem too. If that truth makes its way to my heart, just maybe I move a tiny bit further toward being part of the solution.
 
Small potatoes, yes. What if every American did this?

​One day recently, while reading the work of other writers, I ran across an essay that took my breath away. The vivid imagery, the flow, the use of language: it absorbed me from the start and wouldn’t let me go. The author’s bio noted she’s published in many top literary journals—way, way more “top” than I have.

I was so bedazzled I wrote her an email in praise of her writing. She thanked me for the note and said she was saving it “to read on the hard days.”

And my lizard brain thought, What hard days? She’s got it made! A major literary success!

This kind of thing ever happen to you?

So many of us, from what I’ve seen, are Jedi masters at comparing ourselves with others, evaluating our worth against theirs, the better to place ourselves on some arbitrary hierarchical ladder of quality. I do this and end up with a pile of worthless wishes: I wish my writing were as good as hers; I wish I had x credential; I wish I’d “made it” like her so the “hard days” wouldn’t happen.

But the hard days happen to everyone. (I know, no surprise. But I forget.) Every human being, if they’ve lived long enough, has endured loss, trauma, intense pain, tragedy, the dreck of life. Those things are hard—excruciating—no matter who experiences them.

Here’s why I’m writing this. We’re at a point in history where certain groups live with the legacy of unimaginable horror. Black Americans and Indigenous folks, notably, continue to endure the shadows of slavery and genocide. The resulting pain, and the pain of other groups that have lived with oppression, merit the utmost compassion and listening, always.

And, at the same time, what if we extend that utmost compassion and listening to everyone? What if we keep in mind that they, like us, have experienced the brutal knocks life dishes out? I find that when someone mentions the difficulties in their own lives, my heart automatically opens to them, and out flow empathy, love, all manner of good things.

Acting this way one-on-one is a tiny act of kindness. But what if we start tiny—and set our hearts to lead with compassion? What might happen to our world?

Yes, the systemic oppression and centuries of ingrained behavior need more than listening and compassion; they need resolution. But leading with the clarity that everyone has hard days, and years, and lifetimes: that’s something my tiny one-person’s self can do now. Perhaps it can even grease the wheels for the much harder, more relentless work of justice.
As always, I’d love to hear what you think. 

[I’ve made] a new resolution, to write these few lines [in this diary] every day.      --The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, May 30, 1937

​Dorothy’s diary jumps from August 1937 to June 1938.      —ibid., ed. note, 1938
 
In other words: Dorothy Day, one of the deepest, most beloved, most accomplished Catholics of the twentieth century, failed—more than once—in much the same way I do on a regular basis.

My failure lies in weekly church attendance. We love the 8:00 a.m. Sunday service at our local Episcopal parish. But Saturday is chore day. When I overdo the chores—which is nearly always—I exhaust what little energy long COVID allots to me. Therefore, zero energy for church.

I should just acknowledge this to myself, but I don’t. Instead, guilt is a regular feature of my early Sunday mornings. Maybe this week…I’ve got half an hour, and if I shower quickly…but I get dizzy when I walk around…but God wants me to go (I presume)…so let’s try eating breakfast…no, that didn’t help…

You know the gig?

Recently, during my daily prayer time, I ran across the editor’s note above in Day’s published diary, and I couldn’t help laughing. Dorothy’s failure tells me I need a new mindset. Enough with the useless guilt. I’ll get to church if I can. I won’t if I can’t. I won’t stop trying, because church is an anchor for me. Dorothy, though she often failed to keep a diary, never stopped trying. I know this because the editor’s note is on page 31, her diary is 700 pages long, and apparently that’s the abridged version.

If unproductive guilt is part of your landscape as it is mine, I hope this helps. Life’s too short for that. I know that productive guilt is actually a thing, and maybe I’ll write about it someday if I ever experience it for myself. For now, though, I’ll just do what I can, as best I can, and I welcome you to do the same.