When I clocked into work, the first email I opened was from upper management with some slight corrections on flyers I’d submitted a week prior. A few months ago, they’d never even bother to check what I would post on social media to a following of under a thousand. Now, everything is a surveillance state.
The email told me to change only a few things, but those things, in fact, were very important. The words “Trans” and “BIPOC” were to be omitted, I was told. Limiting participation violates some “discrimination prohibition.” These safe spaces I’ve so earnestly worked to create over the past years, gone.
Has our existence become so controversial it can’t be spoken out loud? “TRANS,” “MIGRANT,” “PEOPLE OF COLOR” – the very buzzwords you loved to flaunt for your DEI scorecard, now trigger-words as you scrub your website clean and deny you ever served people like us.
It’s to preserve funding for the agency, they tell me. To keep the community safe, though. Right. I understand it.
Right.
Yet when the language to describe us disappears – it disappears us. We disappear. TRANS and MIGRANTS and PEOPLE OF COLOR. We disappear. Then, who do you serve?
My hands shook as I backspaced on the words. Because it felt wrong to delete the word “TRANS.”
Because deleting it is deleting us.
In the end, I sent out no flyers.