Your Greatest Protest is Living

Trump won. Hate won. This is always how this election was going to play out. To be clear, the hatred, racism, misogyny, transphobia, and bigotry that has always existed in this country made itself especially apparent in the wake of this election cycle. This is who we are. This is what America has always been.

Throughout my life, I have become accustomed to a certain kind of pain — a particular brand of grief, anger, and frustration about the world we live in.

I believe the greatest weapon we have is our minds and our ability to form community, even as we are ostracized, marginalized, and oppressed. I am a trans woman who found herself in the drag community, but I discovered little joy in dancing to mix tracks by other artists. Those forms of drag weren’t feeding my joy or expressing myself in the way I’d hoped, so I started writing my own music. I’ve created work that expresses my trans identity, wrote a parody about “bringing chubby back” as I learned to love my body. I released a song earlier this year about trauma and sex, and just recently put out a song declaring that I am, in fact, a goddess, celebrating how sexy, wonderful, and beautiful it is to be trans.

I express myself as the drag artist Thirstie Alley to protest, to embody everything the world told me not to be, to share my love and art and joy and pain and humor and fear and…