Transfem

DOGE having social security records does give the potential to target people who have changed their gender marker - and the federal government can do the same with passports. There are many ways the government can and will surveil and target their enemies & scapegoats - so don't get me wrong, risks clearly exist.

But getting your medical needs taken care of is a high priority, and doctors are even finding different diagnostic codes (and even deleting patient records) to protect their patients. There are also options like DIY HRT.

Regardless, we don't know where this is going or how long it will take for concrete risks to finally surface.

I don't know if you remember what it was like when your egg cracked, but when my egg cracked it was an extremely vulnerable and scary moment - definitely not a time when it would have helped me to have someone's anxieties about the political situation shared.

I was already scared enough to transition for so many other reasons, it is always very hard to make the decision to transition and there are very few supportive voices advocating that people get the help they need (or even framing transition as helpful, so often it's reduced to "expression" and about "living authentically" - the medical consequences being entirely stripped from the context).

Obviously OP has some hard choices to make, and it's not obvious what the right answer is for them. If they live in the U.S., the state they live in makes a big difference in how safe it is to transition and whether their medical care will be protected or not, for example.

Whether they have supportive people in their life to help, whether they have a spouse and kids, and so many other factors will play into what steps they feel they can take - but I want to be careful and not send the wrong message.

What we know, empirically, is that transitioning is the only clinically feasible option, that it is low risk and has great outcomes, and finding a path to medical and social transition is important for a trans person's health, even in times of oppression.

Even as recently as the 1970s there were laws criminalizing crossdressing in this country; trans people have been transitioning for a long time under objectively worse laws and criminalization. It's important we support one another, and that we provide the evidence and reasoning in favor of transition to counteract the default transphobic social context. The pressure to be in the closet is already very strong, as a matter of harm reduction it's important to arm people with the facts about the clinically preferable alternatives.