I understand the betrayal of a flag that James Baldwin describes—this way that you can live in a country and have the profoundest sense that it wishes you did not live there, that it even wishes, perhaps, you lived in the undiscovered country, where no one lives at all. I know it as a person of color, as a woman, as someone who grew up in another country, and, above all, as a transgender person in a moment when I am told—casually, by a leaked memo, which says that the Trump administration wants to create a legal definition of sex as “a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth”—that our government believes people like me should not exist.
