The year was 2011, and I was 19 years old when I read an article in Guernica magazine stating that the average life span of a trans person was 23 years. The “Trans Tipping Point” had not yet happened, and trans people were still considered in mainstream culture to be an almost mythical fringe of the queer community, rather than the targets of an international hate campaign as we are today. I had only recently started to identify publicly as trans myself, and the article confirmed for me what I had suspected all along: I was going to die young, so I’d better make the most of the time I had. 
 

There were so many poems to write, boys to kiss, adventures to find. I wanted to finish my novel and I hadn’t yet. I wanted to fall in love with someone who was in love with me too, and I hadn’t done that either. These were my deepest longings, the top of my list of things to do before I died. I only had four years left. I had to squeeze all the sweet life that I possibly could out of those years.
 

In 2015, I was 23 when my first paid writing assignment was published: a personal essay I wrote for xoJane about murdered trans women, starting hormone therapy and wanting to stay alive, titled “Someone Tell Me That I’ll Live.” The essay referenced the Guernica piece and how it felt to be trying to outlast my supposed expiration date while other trans women died around me. It was the decade of identity politics and starting a career by oversharing about your personal life on the internet was sort of a trend among millennial trans writers.
 

It was right around then that it occurred to me that I might live a while longer after all—a prospect that felt frightening and deeply mysterious. How much sweeter could life be? How much more bitter might it get?
 

By 2018, I was doing some research for a writing project on trans cultural workers in Canada. There was one person in particular, a cultural figure whose work had made an enormous impact on me, and on much of queer community in the country, who was no longer active. She seemed to have disappeared. Though she’d been famous for nearly a decade, people didn’t seem to remember her name when I asked about her. I later found out what had happened to her. It wasn’t good. That this story could be about any number of prominent trans women over the past few decades makes it worse. 

 

I can’t tell you how many times this has happened, how many trans trail-blazers and elders make their mark, give the gift of their brilliance and their wisdom to queer community, and then fall through the cracks. They struggle with impoverishment and homelessness. They disappear, apparently forgotten by community.
 

Now, it’s 2025, and I’m in my mid-30s. In a handful of years, I’ll be middle-aged. As an abstract concept, that feels fine. Age is just a number, after all, I tell myself, and anyway, a lady shouldn’t be ageist. 

The hard moments are when younger acquaintances will speak to me in Gen Z or Gen Alpha slang (how is Gen Alpha old enough to have their own slang?!), and I realize that I don’t understand what they’re saying. This is shocking to me. A few months ago, I bent down to pick up my phone from where it was charging on the floor and pulled a muscle in my back. This is also shocking to me. 
 

I wasn’t really planning on reaching the ‘age of retirement.’ Almost no one I know has been. 
 

In these moments, the reality sets in: Soon I will be a middle-aged transsexual, and most of the transsexual women I know who have lived that long seem to a) abruptly die, b) develop severe mental illness as a result of living through unspeakable trauma, c) become university professors or d) some combination of the above. With all due respect to the trans lady professors out there: I never really saw myself in academia. 

So where does that leave me? And, on a more collective note, where does that leave any soon-to-be-middle-aged transsexual in a society that is growing more actively hateful toward trans people by the day? In a society that doesn’t really show any queer person a positive vision of how to age? 

As I reflect on what aging will look like for me, I can't help but remember that there was a time I thought my life would be over by 23. How many bonus years am I going to get? I can’t decide whether it’s more frightening to think about dying young, or living longer than I expected. Marsha P. Johnson, famed trans woman of colour activist, passed away at 46 years old. Sylvia Rivera, another iconic activist contemporary of Johnson’s, died at 50. I wasn’t really planning on reaching the “age of retirement.” Then again, almost no one I know has been. 
 

Very little research has been done on trans people’s experience of aging and older adulthood. What does exist, however, suggests that queer and trans people face particular systemic challenges and barriers when it comes to aging: Discrimination in healthcare and elder care, in particular, is a significant concern for many. Social isolation and neglect are another. 

Queer and trans people, often being disconnected from our families of origin and generational wealth, not to mention subject to disproportionate housing, healthcare and employment discrimination across our lifespans, face heightened vulnerability without the privileges and protections that heterosexuality and the nuclear family model tend to provide. 
 

All of this is set, of course, against the backdrop of a world in which government austerity, vast economic instability and the climate crisis are making life harder for everyone. Homelessness and poverty are increasing across the board, and particularly for elders. The world is grinding through end-stage capitalism thanks to the short-sighted greed of a handful of rapacious billionaires, and the outlook is grim. 
 
Am I supposed to be thinking about the things my cis straight thirtysomething counterparts are at this stage in life? Am I supposed to have a baby? Am I capable of jumping through all the hoops and surviving all the potential heartbreaks that a trans woman of colour has to go through in order to try? Should I be trying to plan for “retirement?” Is that something that will exist for anyone when I am 65? What will old age and flagging health look like for me, how will I take my transsexual body through a medical system that tends to be confounding at best and hostile at worst toward trans people? Will healthcare be accessible at all, or will it all be privatized by the billionaires in the next 30 years? 
 

So the year is 2025, I’m approaching mid-life and there’s a part of me that can’t stop wondering: What was the point of living past the projected 23 years if everything seems to be going down in flames? Do I really want to witness all the suffering that’s about to happen? I don’t know how many more trans sisters and siblings I can watch disintegrate beneath the weight of a world that despises us. I don’t know how much longer I can take not knowing when it will be my turn.
 

Am I strong enough to keep trying to figure it all out, to make a world where trans people at any age have what they need to thrive? 

As I try to answer this question, I keep returning to the words of queer disability justice writer and thinker Mia Mingus, who writes: “We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached [...] of who we were, who we thought we were, who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live.” 
 

I suppose that this is the point: When I was 19, I read an article that told me I shouldn’t expect to live past 23 because I’m trans. When I was 23, I wrote an article begging for someone—anyone—to tell me that I’d live, and more crucially, that I’d have a life worth living. For the record: I have had a life worth living, even with all the painful things that I’ve seen and gone through while living it. I’ve had not one but two weddings, and they were both amazing. I’ve written so many poems and kissed so many boys and fallen in love so many times—sometimes even with people who’ve loved me back. 

There’s been sweetness in my life, and I believe there will be more, no matter how bitter it gets. I hope some 19-year-old trans kid reads this and feels like a sweet life is possible for them. This is my evidence.
 

In her last published essay, “Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones,” Sylvia Rivera wrote: “Before I die, I will see our community given the respect we deserve. I’ll be damned if I’m going to my grave without having the respect this community deserves.” I don’t know how Sylvia felt about this when she died, but I do know that my own life is better for every breath she took. I know the same is true for Marsha P. Johnson and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and all the rest. 

As for aging? Maybe I won’t figure it all out. Maybe I’ll finally snap and go insane like I’ve been threatening to for years. Maybe I’ll do the unthinkable and become a university professor. Or maybe both. Maybe all of us only need to figure out a little bit of what it means to age as queer and trans people, to leave a little more wisdom behind. This is what I’m hoping for. May my last breath be a strand in the web that stretches across generations. May that web lead to liberation—for all who came before, and all who are coming next.