I'm tired of being a target.
According to Merriam-Webster, a target is "a place, thing, or person at which an attack is aimed." On Sunday, more than 300 people were the target of a terrorist attack by a religious fundamentalist in the worst mass shooting in American history.
He took his hate out on an LGBTQ nightclub, and he certainly wasn't the first to do so. New Orleans, 1973, comes to mind for some, though I'm thinking something more recent - like last month.
In May, North Carolina state leaders signed legislation to "protect" children from "molesters" - aka transgender people. Ted Cruz has said letting transgender students have equality in schools is "inflicting" them on other people.
Attacking us as an infliction on society, deviants to be feared: These words and deeds make me and every other transgender person a target. Screw Donald Trump. He wants me to be afraid of Muslims? Cruz and his kind have caused more devastation for transgender people in this country than ISIS ever has, even now.
The Orlando shooter is dead; Cruz lives on.
Even on my best days I feel as if the rest of the world has their sights on me, and perhaps rightly so. I am statistically quite the aberration - that's just math. We are biologically programed to notice things that are different than the norm. That's how gazelles keep from getting eaten by the lions.
It happens every day, and part of me has gotten used to it, I guess. Stares at the park when my daughter calls me "Daddy" from the swings. Second glances when they see that the face at the drive-thru pick-up window doesn't match the voice that ordered at the speaker. Their eyelids tightening just a bit when the male name on my credit card doesn't match the female one I made the reservation with.
In this sense, I am a target, though I'd be lying if I said I usually thought of it that way. I came to accept long ago that I will always be the subject of others' questions unasked yet still internally answered in their head. A target because I am different and obviously so.
Logically, I know most of them do not hate me. There are worse things than being a target for people's never-ending curiosity. A student and a teacher, both in spirit and in title, I know that education is what moves us forward.
Cruz does not want to be educated - and he is not alone.
Donald Trump calls Mexicans "rapists" and people applaud. Mike Huckabee wants Islamic mosques monitored for possible terrorist activity and people applaud. Spewing hate and ignorance, they prey on the weak and the powerless to feed their followers.
For it's not just that the governor of North Carolina wants children to be protected from molesters - he wants to them to be protected from ME. A man and now woman that has spent three decades of my life working with and defending children, and because I've chosen to transition I'm suddenly not fit to be near children.
Screw you, Governor McCrory. I've done more for the youth of this country than you ever will.
But this is what makes me wonder if I am a target. The goddamn governor of North Carolina wants kids to be afraid of me. He wants they and their parents to see me coming and wonder if I'm going to molest them. Do they?
Those people that stare at me, the ones with questions behind their eyes: Which ones process my existence as yet another difference in the sea of humanity? And which ones believe the hate coming from the likes of Trump, Cruz and Huckabee?
Muslims? Catholics? Baptists? No, it's not that simple. I know too many people of faith that have kept theirs with me. Although I guess in some ways that does make it simple: I don't know who I can trust - none of us do.
Every damn person I meet for the first time I have to wonder if they're just curious, or if they're truly taking aim at me metaphorically - or literally. It's a terrible way to live, whether you're transgender or not.
For this is about far more than just being transgender: It's about everyone who's been a target for all the demagogues and hate-mongers that want to justify their ignorance with manufactured fear. Mexicans, Muslims, anyone that's different. So many of us across the country: labeled, pilloried, targeted - and Sunday shot - for the crime of being different.
According to the Department of Justice, there are more than a quarter-million hate crimes in America every year. Every day nearly 700 people across this country are attacked or brutalized because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.
Their blood, the blood of every human being shot in Orlando is on Cruz and Trump's hands, as it is everyone that supports their brand of hate. They made us a target.
They are the ones that make - indeed want to make - transgender people, minorities, and anyone who is different afraid to leave their home. All of us, forced to wonder if this will be the time the slander, lies, and hate and actually lead to violence.
Maybe this is the arrogance of my old straight, white male privilege leaking out, but I had that right - and I want it back.
And I plan to take it.
Last week I was feeling tired - and today I still am. Today I am also feeling angry - and tomorrow I still will be. But what I will not be - what I will never be again - is scared.
Last week my odds of dying in a terrorist attack were one in 20 million, and today they still are. I will not be afraid of a lunatic with a gun, nor of those that use hate and lies, instead.
I chose not to be scared. But it's more than that; I will not be silent, any longer.
On my very best days I am what I aspire to be: funny, erudite, poignant, and all those other things that people tell me I am. I want to be that woman, because that woman is what has gotten me this far and I am loathe to lose her.
But I will no longer try to justify my existence to those that who would deny it to me. I am tired of people's suppositions, hate and and ignorance being submitted for fact.
I will never pick up a gun. I hate them; Columbine, Newtown and now Orlando have only made that loathing more certain. But there are other ways to fight, other ways to retaliate against those who would conspire to take my humanity from me.
Whether you want to call it the mightiness of the pen, or consider Mark Twain, who advised never to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel, the simple truth is this: I will not be a target.
It's time I started firing back.