An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Mr. President,

I did not ask for my life to become a policy. You decided it would be. You have used the power of the office I am a citizen under to sign orders that declare, by decree, that there are only two sexes; to push people like me out of the military we volunteered to serve; to make the care that keeps trans people alive harder to reach. You made “gender ideology” a punchline from behind the seal of the presidency. I am not an ideology. I am a taxpayer, an engineer, and a constituent of the government you run.

Here is the miscalculation. You think you are signing documents. You are actually sending a message to every frightened kid in a state that already scares them: that the most powerful man in the country finds them disgusting. They hear it. I heard the quieter versions of it when I was that kid, and it did not make me stop existing. It only made the road longer and lonelier than it needed to be.

I have spent my career fixing systems that fail, so let me name the failure mode plainly: you have mistaken cruelty for strength and a minority for a threat. People like me were keeping the infrastructure of this country running while you called us a danger to it. We will still be here, doing the work, long after this administration is a chapter in a book. I am not writing to change your mind. I am writing past you, to the people watching, so they can see someone address you without flinching.