She had just been a person, in a room, with other people. And that—that small, ordinary, radical thing—was what community felt like.

Samira: “I walked past a group of teenage boys without crossing the street. My heart was slamming, but my feet kept going.”

Leo went first. “I called my congressperson about the bathroom bill. They hung up on me. So I called back. Left three messages.”

“You must be the new one,” said a person with kind eyes and a name tag that read Jax (they/them) . “We’re the Trans-Generations group. Every other Thursday. You’re safe here.”

The oldest in the room was Leo, a silver-haired trans man in his sixties who had driven two hours from the rural county where he lived alone with his cat. Next to him sat Kai, a nonbinary teenager with lavender hair, who had taken three buses to get here because their parents thought they were at the library. And across from Marisol was Samira, a hijabi trans woman in her forties, who worked as a paralegal and kept a photo of her wife in her wallet.

“We don’t have an agenda,” Jax said. “We just talk.”

Marisol, three months on estrogen, three weeks out to her family, three days into being ghosted by her old college roommate, sat down. She didn’t cry. She was too tired for that.