Power, Reclaimed.
For years, I bartered away my power. A quiet exchange – a thousand transactions so small it was almost invisible. But I see it now.
Three years ago today, I came out as transgender. For the first time, I wasn't just surviving in my body. I was living in it. The dissonance began when I was three, drawn to the heroines in stories, roleplaying as a girl, preferring "girl clothes." The adults around me corrected, warned, erased. Sending me the message that acceptance is conditional. Safety has a price. I paid it in silence.
The absence of language felt like a prison—no words for the in-between, no vocabulary that could capture the bright, complicated truth of who I was. I tried to make do with what I had to work with: boy or girl, man or woman. Growing up, I was often told I wasn’t masculine enough. Yet when I embraced my true self and presented more femininely, I was told I didn’t measure up to womanhood either.
So, I built my own grammar. I began to think of gender not as a spectrum but as a universe—not two static poles but something broad and celestial, a deep space of possibility. This broke the heavy gravity of the binary, freeing me to understand my entire self.
The gatekeepers of language have always understood its power. That's why they police it, going so far as writing laws meant to keep certain words from certain mouths: Don't say gay. Don't ask. Don't tell. They strip us of the language that names us because to name something is to make it real.
This is why reclamation matters. Queer. Freak. Words meant to wound, their hate removed and turned inside out, made into armor. To take back a word is to take back a story—to shape a narrative before it shapes you.
You see, writers, designers, and artists—we are architects of language, builders of new worlds. We know meaning is fluid and malleable, and that the binary itself isn’t the trap—the trap is how we think about it. After all, binary code—just two numerals—can create entire universes in the right hands. In this light, the binary becomes not a limitation, but an opportunity: to create a society that honors the beautiful complexity of human identities.
In recognizing this opportunity, I also acknowledge that, as someone with education, resources at my disposal, and a loving partner and family by my side, I have the tools and support that many don't. With these privileges comes the responsibility to use language for liberation, not constraint. The work before us is to build bridges between binary thinking and infinite possibility, between those with a voice and those still searching for words.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'The power of love will overcome the love of power, and all people will stand together as equals.' This is the work of love—not the easy, sentimental kind, but the love that dismantles pain and hate, and builds something freer in its place. Love that refuses erasure. Love that restores power to those it was taken from.
May love lead us all to the acceptance and equality that all people deserve.
Happy Transgender Day of Visibility.
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Written by Ren Rigby with love and hope. March 31st 2025.