The word pandemic is now a central element of our vocabulary. COVID-19 has made sure of that, hasn’t it? Since its unwelcome arrival, this pandemic has taught us so many life lessons, among them the need for precautions, safety measures, and, we hope, empathy. Calvin Bales is here to implore us to extend these important lessons to those among us who face other intimidating threats in our lives.
Calvin Bales, an Oregon native and Clark University graduate, is a Ph.D. student in physics at Brown University.
When the pandemic first began, just like most of the rest of the world, I learned to get accustomed to “the new normal”. I learned to put on a face mask before I leave my house, to wash my hands often, and to be careful about where I find myself in public and who I spend time with. But, it wasn’t until I saw a tweet about how unreasonable it is to expect people to return to work without providing COVID safe restroom access that it hit me why all these changes felt so familiar. I’ve been taking similar safety precautions for years, just to protect against a different sort of pandemic.
I’m transgender and since coming out and transitioning, I’ve learned to take extra precautions before everything I do. Before having surgery, I made sure to always bind my chest when I left my house, even if I was just running to the basement of my apartment building to do laundry. I research doctors, dentists, hair salons, bars, and clubs, to make sure I’ll be safe and treated with respect. I look up laws when I travel to make sure I have legal protections and will be safe in my final destination and any places I pass through on the way. I’m careful about the people I surround myself with, because I know that knowledge about me being transgender in the hands of the wrong person could be fatal. And I very rarely have access to restrooms in which I feel safe.
I know that transgender people aren’t the only group of people who do things everyday to make sure we stay safe from a world that doesn’t want us to exist. It’s my belief that people who haven’t ever had to fear for their lives when leaving the house before the pandemic can learn from this experience and gain empathy for those of us who have faced these same fears for years before COVID and will continue to face them everyday when the pandemic is over. Think about the fear you have of you or your loved ones getting COVID and use it to understand the fear that my loved ones and I feel around me existing in this world as who I am. Transphobia is a pandemic and it kills. And just like COVID, it’s going to take work from all of us to end it.
