In the wee hours of Nov. 6, Volta Tran was up watching the election returns. By 2 or 3 a.m., it became clear to her that Trump was coming out ahead.
“It felt like a repeat of 2016, of course,” she said. “I felt, not numb to it, but I felt … I felt familiarity.”
Tran is a 29-year-old trans woman, a writer and community health advocate. The election didn’t go the way she hoped. After that night, she said she thought she would feel more scared or panicked.
“I definitely feel the urgency,” Tran said. “However, I can’t say that even since November I’ve been surprised by anything.”
Trump has promised to defund institutions that provide gender-affirming care, to punish teachers for acknowledging transgender children, and to ask Congress to pass a bill that affirms there are “only two genders.” But even before Trump was reelected, Rhode Island had seen five failed attempts to pass anti-trans legislation at the state level.
And over the past few months, Tran says she’s noticed an uptick in hostile behavior directed at them due to their trans identity. Before the election, Tran said someone was posting pro-Trump stickers in conspicuous places outside her home in Providence, which she shares with her partner who is also trans. Tran said she would remove them, but they kept coming back, sometimes reinforced with gorilla glue.
“I think my partner … took it with a lot more fear than I did because he’s a therapist whose face can be found online,” Tran said.
Since the election, she’s been making preparations for what she expects to be a difficult next four years – including updating her passport with a new headshot and gender marker.
“I’m not sure what kind of executive orders might be coming down the pipeline that might restrict whether or not trans people can get their gender markers changed on their passport,” Tran said. “So that is a priority for me before Jan. 20.”
She said she doesn’t want to leave Rhode Island. But she feels a need to be prepared for what she called the worst case scenario, “if we’re expecting something similar to Berlin during the Weimar Republic, when people needed to escape and flee,” Tran said. “And my parents are refugees from Vietnam.”
“There’s nothing in my body that tells me I want to run away right now. It tells me I want to be closer to my community,” she said. “I want to be closer to other neighbors, and I want to be closer to other people who are struggling.”
I spoke with several other trans community members and advocates in Rhode Island, who expressed a similar sentiment – that they’re deliberately seeking out and finding support through community.
Another theme in all those conversations was a concern about access to healthcare. While Rhode Island has some protections for gender-affirming care – the state has had gender-affirming care covered by medicaid and medicare since 2016 and in 2001 it became the second state in the country to enact non-discrimination protections for the trans community – Tran is especially concerned about Trump’s promises to ban Medicaid and Medicare insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, as well as to withhold federal funds from hospitals that provide the care.
“DIY hormone therapy, for example, continues to be prevalent for many people, and perhaps there’s a greater interest in DIY hormones now that there are real restrictions against formal access throughout the country,” Tran said. “I kind of liken this to an adage from the reproductive health movement, which is that we can’t ban abortions, we can only ban access to safe abortions.”
Tran said she’s also thinking about other groups that may be targeted, and the importance of cross-community solidarity. To her, she said, issues like access to trans healthcare are intrinsically linked with other issues like housing, immigration and reproductive rights.
“We’re not alone as a demographic group in facing those disproportionate attacks. I think it’s going to be critical to extend and work in solidarity with undocumented people, with women and other people who are worried about their reproductive rights,” Tran said.
Despite these concerns, she has been focused these last few weeks on trying to stay calm.
