What it feels like to teach through an era determined to erase trans lives

In my twenties, I attempted suicide twice. Not because I lacked strength or intellect. I was already becoming the scholar I would later be. I was teaching. I was building a life. But I was living inside a world that had no language for me, no structure to hold me, and no place that felt possible to inhabit without fracture.That is what erasure does. It does not always arrive as violence you can name. It arrives as absence. As distortion. As the steady message that you are not meant to exist in full.I survived. And I did not survive quietly.For years, I carried that absence with me: the absence of language, recognition, and any evidence that a future was possible. Survival became political long before I had the words to describe why. Simply remaining here — continuing to learn, teach, and build a life — felt like a refusal of the messages I had absorbed about who was allowed to exist and who was not. That absence shaped the educator I would become. I entered teaching with a simple conviction: no student should have to navigate school believing they are alone. No young person should have to search for evidence of their own humanity and find nothing. Schools can wound, but they can also heal. They can become places where students encounter possibility rather than erasure.I became a teacher. Then a professor. I was the first openly trans academic in teacher education, beginning in 2005. Since then, I have worked in classrooms across this country. I have witnessed trans students in moments of brilliance and celebration, as well as moments of panic that arrive without warning. I have seen joy that feels expansive and fragile at once. I have seen students calculate risk before speaking their own names. At some point, witnessing was no longer enough. I decided to intervene. Not symbolically. Not rhetorically. Structurally.Schools are not neutral spaces. Teachers are not neutral actors inside them. What educators choose to do, and what they refuse to do, shapes whether s