By Amy Cook
Midmorning, brutally cold, but warming. My hands are fucking freezing, even with the Hot Hands® tucked inside my gloves. Hundreds of people stand on the sidewalk in front of the United States Supreme Court. A picturesque pink sunrise has faded into a day that is pulsing with new rhythm. Of course, having set my hotel alarm for 4 a.m., I’m a little worse for the wear myself. Adrenaline and coffee are working overtime.
Inside the courthouse, the world has forever changed. Attorney Chase Strangio has become the first openly transgender person to argue before the Court. The case, having to do with Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, has drawn the attention of many. It has broad implications for the future of, well, all of us. The rally-goers stand in two camps, separated by steel barriers. One side stands rigid and motionless; our side dances.
I am working today. My job is largely administrative, but affords me the opportunity to stand on the sidelines of queer history, to witness and re-tell. I was at the Stonewall Inn, the night that we won marriage equality in New York and again the night we won marriage equality for the whole United States. Celebration is often joyous. Today’s moment is a little different. It points forward with a taut line.
Unlike dueling pianos, which operate in concert, the competing rally speakers offer dissonance, competing visions for who we aspire to be. The signs we hold are filled with affirmation, color, and joy. “Fight Like A Mother for Trans Rights!” and “Let Trans Kids Bloom!” The other side offers mostly fear: “Stop Transing our Kids.” Our next speaker climbs the podium stairs, puts her handwritten speech on the dais and instinctively brushes her fingers through her long, dark hair. She wears a stylish white coat. Perfect for winter.
The crowd leans in.
“Hello, and good morning to everyone.”
The sound of her voice echoes into the cold air, reaching out towards the Capitol.
She giggles, echoes of her recent childhood sneaking through her otherwise grown-up facade. There’s another speaker starting in the distance, but, for now, she pays them no mind.
“My name is Mila. I’m twelve years old, I’m in eighth grade, and of course, I’m a trans girl.”
Pitch perfect delivery, the inclusion of, “of course.” It sounds off the cuff—improvised. But I bet it’s not.
Outside the courthouse, the world has changed, too.
*
Twenty-five years ago, I stood on a similar podium—one a few blocks away, on the Washington Mall. I was twenty years old, and I was missing my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah to speak at the Millennium March.
The march, in the spring of 2000, was (we were told) part of a storied tradition of progress. It followed the marches for gay rights in 1987 and 1993. At the start of the new era, the AIDS deaths had slowed considerably. The same week as the march, Vermont became the first state to allow civil unions for same-sex couples. My speech, which was poorly written and sparsely attended, was part of the youth movement for LGBT rights. I can’t tell you what I spoke about. But I was very newly “out,” and what felt brave and courageous at the time feels sloppy and embarrassing now.
I did get to meet Tipper Gore. And I did feel seen. Affirmed.
*
Mila is being counterprogrammed by none other than Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is not by design, just interesting timing, but the contrast captures my attention. Greene has made no secret of her contempt for our communities, and she brings to the microphone a violent, vindictive tirade, filled with junk science and wayward conspiracies. It is as predictable as it is unremarkable.
Mila seems unbothered. “I have a normal life,” she proudly continues. “I have sleepovers. I have after-school activities. I speak four languages.”
Well, that’s just showing off. I am, at the moment, actively jealous.
Mila speaks not of the odds stacked against her, but of gratitude. Of life. Of her world that embraces difference and variation and the splendor of discovering and becoming. Of being surrounded by close friends. Mila is, by all accounts, popular.
“I have a loving family,” she beams, and that couldn’t be more clear. As she speaks to a crowd of supporters, a younger child, maybe a sibling, stays glued to her side, arms wrapped around and not letting go.
*
It is only in Mila’s pauses that we hear the other speech. Fragments of it, rather, an unhappy trumpet squealing through cold air. As the tenor of Greene’s speech dims, we shift and grow uneasy. Mila is unbroken, but she is comparatively tiny. Greene looms over her microphone, refusing to cede a scintilla of her crowd’s attention to the Americans she thinks of as less than.
I suppose I am one of these. The queer daughter of a gay man, who works in LGBTQ+ civil rights and chose to travel here today. I represent something scary. Something other. Something with rage.
And then, suddenly and simultaneously, we fight back. A wave of noise, static threatening Greene’s every note. A chorus of jeers and megaphone sirens erupt, protecting Mila’s speech. When Greene leans even harder on her mic, the noise erupts, a cacophony of resistance.
Mila gives a quick, furtive glance to the naysayers. Pausing. She doesn’t stop.
“Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, I’m hearing states are banning gender-affirming healthcare.” She describes the pain and empathy for those whose medically necessary care has been takena away. For those who are at risk. That one of the people responsible for this injustice is standing not twenty feet away is not lost on this brave girl.
*
A few weeks from now, the world will tilt on a new axis. In a slew of obscenely cruel Executive Orders, the new president will try to erase the existence of transgender and nonbinary Americans. He will propose to eliminate funding for schools that support trans youth. He will try to ban medically necessary healthcare for trans youth and young adults. He will deem gender-affirmation as “mutilation” and he will seek to remove transgender Americans from military service. He will demand that federal buildings ban transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with who they are. He will demand that federal employees remove their pronouns from their Outlook signatures.
He thinks he is a magician, and that it all just goes away. Real magicians know where things go when you vanish them.
*
And then. And then. In the distance, Representative Greene says something about protecting a child. We hear it in echo, the old mantra about controlling what you do not comprehend. Child, child, child. Like a big bass drum, but off-rhythm. Unsound. And that is the moment Mila reacts. She glances again, this time, rolling her eyes. The morning is hers now, and we’re just a part of it. Grinning, she turns forward.
“It’s wild that people… think that trans kids are a danger to society.”
She laments that no one (“no, not no one,” she changes her mind, ably wandering off script) takes her seriously because, as she reminds us, “I’m a kid.”
“You know what? In spite of all of that, I’m standing right here, in front of the Supreme Court, because I have the guts to make change.”
Mila gets loud. Louder than the sirens. Louder than the Congresswoman. Louder than whatever the hell detritus is written on the opposition’s signs. Louder than the voices of the cynics and the so-called experts who see an enemy instead of an equal. Louder still than the bills and the laws and the rhetoric that shrinks a country—that makes us seem petty. and that makes the country inhospitable to life, liberty, and the pursuit of self-love.
Concluding, Mila shouts, “They will never take away our existence and our pride!” She turns to climb down the stairs, and then stops. She raises her speech, triumphantly, into the air, the loopy scrawl of a young girl’s handwriting now transparent in the sunlight. Soon, the oral argument will be over, and our fate will hang in the balance, likely until next June.
Things heat up.
*
January comes. Another Executive Order. And then another. Claims of “radical indoctrination” and “anti-American ideologies.” Very little of it is immediately enforceable, and it remains to be seen if any of it will go unchallenged. My co-workers and I, stunned but not surprised, gawk at the links in the Teams chat, holding each other up merely by witnessing. My dear colleague calls it, “patently unconstitutional nonsense.” And it is. But it’s static, in a world that doesn’t need more static. We could use a pep-talk, by a young woman in a white winter coat.
Amy Cook was a 2024 finalist for Tablet Magazine’s inaugural First Personal Essay Contest. Her essays and poems have been featured in more than two dozen literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Anti-Heroin Chic and the Los Angeles Review. Her lyrics were most recently performed by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. She is an Editorial Assistant for the literary magazine, CRAFT. Rainier Writing Workshop (MFA pending, 2025).
Joanie Rae Wimmer, a transgender woman, argued and won a case in the U.S. Supreme Court, Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, 528 U.S. 562 (2000), and came out as transgender several years later.