Trigger warning. (A link explaining what “trigger warning” means.)

Earlier this week, Little Light posted is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / or is it something worse. The post is now behind a password but I did have a chance to read it before it was password protected. The thoughts behind password protecting the post are here, and no, I don’t have the password, and don’t know how to get it. I’m going to write about the post anyway, as  best as I can remember. I apologize if any of the details are wrong, but the general gist is accurate.

The post was about someone Little Light knew, a trans woman we’ll call Alice, who suffered a serious injury and was hospitalized. Alice had been on hormones for a few years, and was living full time as a woman. She had not undergone The Surgery, but was happier for living as Alice, as herself. After being injured, Alice ended up partially paralyzed, unable to care for herself, and unable to communicate without extreme effort.

Alice’s doctors decided – despite clear evidence that Alice identified and was presenting as a woman – that forcing medical staff to use ‘she’ around someone with a penis would be too confusing. They instead used ‘he’ and Alice’s former, male, name.

Likewise, Alice’s family decided – despite clear evidence that Alice identified and was presenting and as a woman – to take her off her hormones.

For those of you who are trans, or familiar with trans issues, you probably know what that means in the physical sense: stubble reappeared on Alice’s face, her skin became less soft, and (over time) her body fat and muscle would start drifting back toward ‘male.’

That’s a really simple sentence, but I actually had a bit of trouble writing it, because the implications are so vast.

Apparently, in the days after the accident, Alice had been showing significant improvement day after day. After her family decided to stop her hormones, after it became clear the people around her were going to continue to use the incorrect name and pronouns, Alice’s health began to slip and deteriorate.

I’ve thought a lot, over the years, about what my “worst nightmare” would be. Whenever the idea of “fears” comes up, I usually imagine something around transitioning: being outed, being prevented from transitioning, transitioning and still being unhappy.

This – what Little Light described happening to Alice – blows all of those fears and nightmares and horrors out of the water.

Because, in spite of popular culture’s view on transitioning, hormones aren’t only about physical changes. I feel better on hormones than I did without. They don’t magically make me happy, but they remove a weight I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying, allowing me to feel my emotions – positive and negative – more purely and truly. (And when I was depositing sperm, I had to go off hormones for a few months so I know exactly how miserable the return of testosterone makes me feel.)

I keep telling myself that something like what happened to Alice could never happen to me. That my parents support what I’m doing, and my family understands how important it is. That my friends would fight tooth and nail to prevent it from happening. But it’s easy to come up with unlikely, contrived scenarios where the people closest to me aren’t able to fight for me. And I end up just like Alice, trapped – literally, rather than figuratively – in a body that I would rather die than be forced to inhabit again.

Coming out of Little Light’s post, someone created TransProtect, a site that (eventually) will host information on legal steps to safeguard the sanctity of trans individuals bodies. I’ll definitely be speaking with my lawyer (read: my dad) about putting together a living will, but it’s a miserable feeling to be reminded of how precarious the things we hold dear – our very sense of self – can be.