March 31 Is a Day To Celebrate Trans Folks. Let’s Write About Visibility!
This Trans Day of Visibility, I’m Thinking About Gloria Hemingway and Names
As a gay, neurodivergent man raised in the South, I’ve known what it’s like to exist on the fringes
It’s Trans Day of Visibility today, and I find myself reflecting deeply on this notion of existing, of being seen — truly seen — not just in the present, but through time. To be remembered is to exist, and yet, in our complicated and often unforgiving society, remembrance itself is a fight.
I’ve always thought visibility was a strange thing — powerful but fragile and fleeting. Growing up, I learned early that history was most often a carefully curated narrative, one written by whoever happened to be holding the pen at the moment.
As a gay, neurodivergent man raised in the South, I’ve known what it’s like to exist on the fringes, always just outside the neatly drawn lines of society. Growing up, I rarely heard my own story told back to me. Instead, I lived surrounded by half-truths and silences, my own narrative written between lines that never quite spoke my name.
In that world, visibility was conditional. Acceptance was conditional. Even existence, in a strange way, felt conditional. You could be there, standing in the light, breathing the same air as everyone else, and still somehow be erased.
But erasure isn’t new, and the idea of it certainly isn’t mine alone. It has long haunted the transgender and gender nonconforming communities — a systematic forgetting, a quiet but insidious silencing.
A Weapon of Erasure
Not that long ago in a not-so-distant past existed something called the “.” It wasn’t widely known, but its impact resonated for generations to come.
In the 1950s and ’60s, police could — and routinely did — arrest anyone they perceived as “cross-dressing.” The standard? You had to be wearing at least three pieces of clothing matching your assigned gender at birth. Anything less was cause for arrest.
The rule was arbitrary and cruel, yet its damage was anything but random. It sought to define trans and gender nonconforming people as inherently criminal simply for existing authentically.
Mugshots from this era — their eyes daring, their postures defiant — were often the only lasting records of these brave lives. Lives lived with courage, punished by ignorance and fear.
Looking back, I realize those mugshots are also monuments of resistance. They document the fierce beauty of people who refused invisibility. They captured moments in history that someone, somewhere, would rather we forget.
And yet they remain — painful but powerful reminders of a fight that we’ve all inherited.
Even after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, when the LGBTQ community rose up in defiance of this oppression, echoes of the three-article rule lingered in policies and practices that continued to marginalize trans lives long afterward.
We May Have Moved Past Those Days — But Not Really
Today, in 2025, this fight for visibility still continues. Just this February, , bowing to pressure from federal directives. Important narratives simply disappeared, as if those lives and struggles never mattered.
It wasn’t isolated or coincidental — it felt deliberate. It felt familiar.
I think often about how easy it is for the past to be rewritten, for the truth to vanish into obscurity. Executive orders explicitly aim to redefine gender, strip away healthcare protections, and ban trans athletes from sports, rendering trans people not just invisible but actively erased.
These orders send clear signals that trans existence, trans rights, and trans memories are not just dispensable — but something to be hidden as if we are an offense to the “family” values they purport to uphold.
We are family, damn it!
Growing up in the South taught me about memory and forgetting. Certain histories were whispered at kitchen tables, others buried under polished monuments or locked away, forbidden from discussion.
Gaslighting was normal, forgetting the expected.
If something uncomfortable or inconvenient could vanish from memory, then those in power could pretend it never existed. I learned that those who control memory hold power over existence itself.
As a child, I met people whose very presence shifted the air, whose authenticity refused to be forgotten. I saw how powerful visibility could be, how naming and remembering wasn’t just an act of defiance, but one of survival.
Yet, if you asked me to name those who first taught me what courage looked like — the faces and voices who showed me authenticity long before I even understood what it meant — I couldn’t.
Their names erased before I even had a chance to learn them, quietly pushed into the shadows by families, schools, and churches determined to keep life forced neatly into familiar, narrow categories.
Growing up in the Bible Belt during the 1970s and ’80s meant that even the bravest among us often lived invisibly. I saw only glimpses of their truth in small gestures, in whispered rebellions, and in the dignity of their silence.
The Stories We Almost Lost: Gloria Hemingway
In the years since, I’ve often thought of Gloria Hemingway, whose complex life as Ernest Hemingway’s youngest child was largely overshadowed by her father’s legacy.
Gloria, who had previously been known publicly as Gregory Hemingway, faced constant challenges around her gender identity, exacerbated by personal battles, including alcoholism and emotional turmoil.
Her story, pushed to the margins, reminded me that history rarely remembers complexity. Complexity challenges simplicity. It resists the neat binaries that society insists upon.
Today, as I write this, visibility means more than just being seen right now. It means fighting for our place in history, insisting that our stories — the rich, courageous, and even the complicated stories — are heard, preserved, and told again and again. Visibility means claiming our right to memory.
Naming is remembering, and remembering is existing.
So today, I name the quiet censorship of PBS. I name the cruelty of executive orders stripping rights from trans communities. I name the lost lives, the brave survivors, the erased and forgotten. And by naming them, I insist on their permanence.
I write now because I want to be remembered, too — not only for my presence but also for my voice when it mattered. I write because every story I tell, every truth I dare speak aloud, carves space in history for others who come after me.
I write because we deserve to exist — not as footnotes, not as mugshots tucked away, but as fully seen, fully remembered, fully human.
Visibility is not just for today. It’s for all the tomorrows that follow — for the generations that will grow up seeing their reflection clearly in the pages of history.
It’s for the child who someday won’t have to search desperately for signs they matter.
Because to be remembered is to exist — and we deserve to exist forever.
📣 If This Resonates With You…
Please share this piece so these stories — and the voices behind them — are never forgotten.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, “March 31 Is a Day To Celebrate Trans Folks. Let’s Write About Visibility!”
