In life, we often face moments that define us — moments of deep struggle, unexpected triumph, and transformation.

It’s morning, New Years Day, 2030. After a night of revelry, Americans are waking up to a dancing hologram, by now familiar, floating over their beds. Donald Trump’s three-dimensional image gyrates enthusiastically if irrhythmically to the dreaded YMCA song, tiny fists boxing the air as everyone grabs the covers. Swinging a flyswatter, throwing a shoe or spraying disinfectant at the specter does nothing; running is equally pointless as Trump’s hologram dances right along into the bathroom.

Early this morning, a body covered with a white sheet lay on the sidewalk next to the Publix parking lot. Apparently, a pedestrian was hit by a car. I don’t know the person’s age, but I assume they didn’t wake up thinking that today was the day they would die.

In recent years, millions of LGBTQ+ fans of the Harry Potter series have watched with dismay as its author, J.K. Rowling, has become a prominent figure in anti-trans activism.

Since 2012, the U.S. Dept. of Justice has defined rape as “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object … without the consent of the victim.” To be redundant, no penis is required. 

As LGBTQ+ people, many of us grow up alienated from our biological families. In the bad old days before PFLAG, most of us hid our sexual orientation and/or gender identity from our parents or grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, or cousins. Often, when our family members did find out, they rejected us for being who we are. Since marriage equality is a recent phenomenon, most of us lived our lives without the benefits that legally-sanctioned, opposite-gender spouses take for granted. Instead, we in the LGBTQ+ communities created new forms of relationships that were for us what biological families, heterosexual marriages, or parenting were for others. We call those relationships families of choice, as opposed to biological families we were born into and grew up with. Queer authors and activists have written extensively about this topic, most notably Kath Weston in her dated but still-relevant book Families We Choose (1991). In it she writes, “Gay (or chosen) families dispute the old saying, ‘You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relatives.’ Not only can these families embrace friends; they may also encompass lovers, coparents, adopted children, children from previous heterosexual relationships, and offspring conceived through alternative insemination.”