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.