What is Trans JOMO?
And who exactly is trans enough for Trans Day of Visibility?
If you’ve never towed a 27 foot Airstream Flying Cloud along the winding mountain road between the beaches of Morro Bay and the 101 Freeway on the coast of California, it might be hard to conjure the appropriate full-body panic I hosted within me just a few days ago. Imagine, if you’re able, pulling a tin can worth more than my parent’s first house up the side of a cliff, but pepper in hairpin turns, unannounced 100 foot drop offs, and an ever-narrowing one-lane road, which will steadily stack with impatient weekenders in hatchbacks trapped behind your shiny metal ass.
It’s an environment that, strangely, was only the second most stressful thing on my mind that morning.
This is because my husband and I, two trans men who recently embarked on a major shift to living full time in our trailer Chapel Roamin’, were heading north, and we just realized we would be in San Francisco for Trans Day of Visibility.
In the Beginning…
If you aren’t familiar with Trans Day of Visibility (or TDOV, pronounced “Tee-Dove” by very cool and interesting transgender people across the globe), its brief history goes something like this:
In 2009, a trans woman by the name of Rachel Crandall-Crocker rightfully noticed that trans people only had one day where other people remembered we existed: Trans Day of Remembrance (or TDOR). And because being primarily defined by our suffering isn’t as fun and helpful as it sounds, she started a campaign for a day where we were recognized for our accomplishments, our joy, and our existence as a whole. She chose March 31st pretty close to “at random,” and a queer holiday was born.
TDOV started to find its footing internationally around 2015 with the rise of some prominent social media attention, and Joe Biden became the first president to recognize it officially as we rolled into 2021.
Then in 2024, TDOV fell on Easter Sunday. Fox News had a meltdown.
In a very brief aside, I want to say that last year’s TDOV/Easter debacle has become one of my favorite examples of manufactured anti-trans nonsense, as it cuts right to the heart of the “drowning in a centimeter of water” of it all. Easter, as you may have heard, is classically known as the moveable feast, as it falls on a different part of the vernal quadrant of the Gregorian calendar every year. So, between the years of 1600 and 2099 AD, TDOV and Easter will share a date a whopping twenty two times.
A calamity.
But still, in February of 2025, Trump issued an Executive Order to address this super duper important problem, and he called it “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” In it, he proclaimed that “the Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sought to force Christians to affirm radical transgender ideology against their faith” and “The Biden Administration declared March 31, 2024—Easter Sunday—as ‘Transgender Day of Visibility.’”
The day was removed from federal lists of commemorative dates.
When I first learned about TDOV, it seemed like it was billed primarily as a strategy for affirming our personhood to other people. It was visibility for the purpose of building empathy from the “cisgender majority.”
I think most of us feel that the community is more visible than ever, and yet I don’t feel particularly overwhelmed by the empathy of the cisgender majority. In articles like these, I used to follow up statements like that with lists of anti-trans legislation to drive home my point. But today? I think if you need a list, you won’t read it if I give it to you.
The point is that it has, for the most part, been kind of a bummer to be trans lately– especially in the US.
Even before the recent horrors, TDOV’s founder saw the ways in which Trans Visibility had started to sour. In a 2021 interview with Them, Rachel Crandall-Crocker said “Since I made Visibility Day, many transgender people have pointed out that visibility can be a ‘double-edged sword.’ I agree with them — and I’m sad about that… Honestly, if I had to do it again, knowing what I know now, I’m not 100% convinced I would create the International Transgender Day of Visibility.”
Visible to whom?
But the answer can’t be to default to Trans Invisibility, can it? Much of the argument in our circles now seems to come back to this central question: to whom should we be visible, and why?
Over the last few years, my relationship to this question has changed.
I used to believe very strongly in “visibility” for its own sake, even when it hurt. After a while, that belief wore out its welcome within me. As the (almost) only transgender person working as a teacher in my school district, the slew of horrifying things that happened to and around me were often reframed as “teachable moments” for others. My existence (and more frequently, my pain) was used to teach someone else – parents, students, colleagues – “tolerance” for me and my trans siblings. This was the “bright side” of the years of harassment I faced, and did very little to slow the quiet, creeping abuse from my community that grew louder year to year.
Near the end of my time in the classroom, I straight up resented existing for the benefit of someone else’s education. I would need a whole new take on TDOV if I didn’t want to tap out completely.
Since then, my favorite new perspectives have come from community-focused trans activists like Tuck Woodstock, whose podcast Gender Reveal did a lot to deepen my own understanding of my relationship with gender, especially at the beginning. Tuck has a mutual aid microgrant project he promotes as a companion to TDOV called Trans Day of Staying In and Having a Nice Snack (which, as I research a bit for this, I’m seeing has an alternative this year – Trans Day of Going OUT and Having a Nice Snack). Another comes from artist and fashion icon Mars Wright, who popularized the phrase “Trans Joy is Resistance” and whose take on trans visibility is also rooted firmly in community care.
Community visibility made sense to me. Yes, it was finding each other – sharing visibility and purpose together that would give me meaning in perpetuity for TDOV.
But then I was forced out of my home.
And then I found new families for my chickens and my dogs.
And then I bought a house on wheels and hauled it up the side of a mountain.
And I was starting to get tired.
“We should probably be somewhere,” I said to my husband Xilo, as he scrolled through his phone in the passenger seat. “San Francisco is the Queer Motherland. We should find something for TDOV, yeah?”
He raised his eyebrows as he listed our options. Workshops about trans survival. A leather bar hosting a celebration brunch. A cyber rave. A black tie gala put on by the HRC.
“I don’t want to do any of this,” I finally admitted, the mountain squarely in our rearview mirror. “Do we have to?”
“We don’t have to do anything,” he told me. “We can just be. Embrace the Trans JOMO.”
The Trans JOMO.
The Joy of Missing Out.
Of course.
In our new quest for community and safety, I’d let myself get pulled back into “shoulds” in the way I used to. I’d accidentally paved a new pathway for self abandonment in a time when I needed to lock down self preservation. I’d missed the JOMO right in front of me.
Like the cozy and comfy Danish “hygge,” trans JOMO doesn’t have to mean just one thing. It could be skipping the family functions you used to dissociate through, or finding peace in nature instead of socializing in large and unfamiliar groups the way you think you’re “supposed” to do.
For me, trans JOMO asks: where does “what is expected of me” meet “what is best for me?” and “what do I actually want and need?”
Flipping Trans Visibility
Because all parts of me are trans, not just my physical body, and not just my suffering. There is not just one single way to celebrate and honor what it means to be “visible.”
What if I flip my visibility inward?
What happens when I make a real effort to “see” myself?
When I dig into the most honest corners of my heart, my Trans Day of Visibility looks less like a block party or a gala, and a lot more like rest.
So what do I want to do for TDOV?
I want to meditate and drink tea and paint.
I want to watch windsurfers as I dodge sea spray on the beach.
I want to nap with my cat and listen to the sound of the ocean mix with the hum of the traffic from the Pacific Coast Highway.
Because I’m trans as I do it all, and learning to listen to and trust myself is what visibility means to me right now.
And though I won’t be physically present with my community today, I feel connected anyway. And I can’t help but think about a conversation I had recently with a nonbinary friend of mine as they puzzled through their own complicated relationship with “being seen.”
“I don’t know if I see myself as trans,” I remember them saying. “I don’t have to go through it the same way. I can – could – hide if I wanted to.”
I think about that a lot – how many of us hold our identities up to an invisible meter of suffering – as we decide who has a “right” to be trans.
Because there was a period of time when I was very “clockable.” It was after I started testosterone, but before my most dramatic voice drop. This was when servers still did double takes and didn’t quite know what to do with me after effortlessly choosing “sir” or “ma'am” for the rest of the table. When I held my breath before shouldering the men’s room door. (I still do this, but for olfactory reasons now).
Was I at my most trans then? Is that how we measure it?
Or was I trans at that neighborhood birthday party, in my mom’s leather jacket and short black hair, when the other kids held me down and made me tell them if I was a boy or a girl?
Was I trans at my first wedding, when they said “husband and wife” and I could feel a hot and blotchy rash spread from my chest to my ears?
Will I be more trans later, when every sign of softness and femininity has been worn away by time? Will that day ever come? I hope not.
Am I instead trans in every part of it?
I could ask those questions.
Or, I could ask myself questions that are only for me.
Like, when did I start to really see myself?
When did I become visible to me?
Because to me, that discovery is trans. The act of finding myself again and again and again is what feels the most trans about me.
And on this TDOV, Trans JOMO means to live doing the opposite of what I’ve been trained to do, and to instead listen to and trust my sense of myself.
If you think you’re trans, you’re trans. You don’t need anything else. And being visible to just yourself is more than enough.
So while you (and I) should appreciate and lean in to your community when and if you can, it’s also more than alright to embrace the Trans JOMO too, and ask:
Who would I be, and what would I be doing, if I was only here for an audience of one?
This was great. You are a really good writer. I am a 72 year-old lesbian artist. I remember getting married to a man in 1972 and walking down the aisle thinking that I only had to serve this prison sentence for a couple years and I could get a divorce. Every day, I am grateful for voices like yours in mine because there was nothing in 1972. I to write a newsletter on Substack and it is an enjoyment for me. So different than the visual art I practice. Thank you so much.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Thank you.