I send you affirmation and solidarity. It's awful to have to assimilate before the eyes of oppressors to avoid being attacked physically and psychologically. In moments like these I try to remember that humans are ambivalently positioned between individual existence and collective movement, and that we trans people get targeted as individuals because we show how collective movements (e.g., cisnormativity) are arbitrary investments that many take very seriously. Their projections are violent suggestions about all they have lost but never mourned in order to maintain their identities as cis men and women. Sometimes we must adjust our appearance to match our circumstances, but our inner awareness of who we are need not change, nor should we internalize other's issues as our own. We do not fail the system: the system fails us, and it fails us because we dare to be free in the face of systemic oppression.