What happens when trans folks die

CW: Death, suicide

I saw Gemma Stone write a piece on this for a writing competition. I won’t link it, partly because I’m taking this in a different direction to the way she was talking about transphobia, the way people sneer over dead trannies and enjoy for themselves the way administrative bureacracies compound the usual humiliations of lives extinguished with registering us incorrectly as male or female according to the needs of the state rather than according to the reality of our lives.

I don’t want this to seem too much like a dig at Gem’s sentiments which are hers, or how anyone else feels about the beautiful and sadly shortened life of the trans woman she was talking about. But I do want this to maybe offer a different narrative frame.

I’ve tried to kill myself, twice, when I was very young. Many of us have. Many of us have lost close friends to suicide, or to innocent drug overdoses, or to HIV related illness. This is painful. These are deaths that result most commonly from being starved of comfort in life. It gives me a boiling rage in my heart to think about it. I’m not sad I’m mad as hell. I’ll reserve my anecdotes about my mate who I just lost because they’re mine and I’ll take them to my grave, but I’m mad as hell that so much beauty in the world is destroyed by callousness.

In many of the cases of queer people I know who have died untimely deaths, their families have lied about them one way or another after death. One did not, but still the factors that lead them to being in a situation where they could see no way out; people around them in the aftermath still need to find ways to cope and grieve and maybe turn a little blind eye to some of the culpability. Death is a shit like that. You’re dead, you don’t have agency. The living have to survive you, which is somehow hard, despite being by far the better option.

I don’t care what happens to me when I die. So many of my trans and queer siblings were disrespected in death, I am no better than them and I guess I have no qualms about sharing that fate with them. When the state registers my corpse as male on its records that’s fine. Why should I care about what a violent bureaucracy I’ve resisted my whole life has to say about it? I hope it doesn’t hurt too many people I know. I hope they know if I could I’d be laughing at the wretchedness of a system I reject wholesale and unflinchingly.

Life isn’t hopeless. Life is a world of hopes waiting to be snuffed out. We have to live it and make the decision to cling on. We’re not powerless, we can’t be stripped of dignity while we still have it. Giving up hope is giving up life. It’s too precious to give that away.

x.