I Am Transgender, I Want to Live
After a near death experience, Zinnia Jones is more resolute than ever before to survive.
by Zinnia Jones
“If you are transgender you have to live.” You may have heard this saying exhorting trans people not to commit suicide no matter how hopeless things may seem. After the election, it’s more relevant than ever. We all know what we’re up against and we all know this is existential. But I come at this from a different direction now, because when I came close to death I saw what it means not to live – and I desperately wish to survive more than anything.
I went kayaking with my wife, Heather, on her birthday in 2022. I’m autistic and I’ve never been able to coordinate the motions of swimming despite years of lessons. That wasn’t supposed to matter – the winding central Florida river was calm and supposedly only two feet deep, so if the double kayak tipped over for any reason, we could just stand up and climb back in. We had to ask for life jackets and were not even required to put them on as we launched. Everything about it was made to seem like a safe and relaxing outing for people like us without any experience kayaking.
Throughout the morning, we drifted through the deep green of the forests, watching the light glint off the water and passing by several small alligators sunning themselves on a log. Halfway through the nine-mile run, the current of the “lazy river” unexpectedly began to pick up speed. An early afternoon thunderstorm rolled in, dropping more rain on top of the recent heavy rainfall. We soon found that the river was pushing us into branches jutting out from the riverbank, and we weren’t skilled enough to maneuver the kayak away from them. Before we knew what was happening, we slammed into a tree and tipped out of the boat.
As my chest sank into the river, I really thought everything would be okay, right up until the moment the water went over my nose and mouth and I realized my feet still weren’t touching the bottom. There was no bottom. That was when it hit me like the simplest equation: No swimming plus no life jacket plus water over my head equals dying. The burning water flooded my eyes and throat.
Throughout my life, I was always accompanied by some low level of passive, vague suicidality – never anything acted on, never anything planned, yet so often tilted towards feeling like the days were something to be endured rather than eagerly anticipated. I felt like I was living life to get it over with. I always wondered if the end would be a relief from the incessant burden of everything.
Something unexpected happened in that river. Black walls slammed in on me impossibly fast. I was being pushed into nothingness. There was no more time or space left for experience, thinking, action, choice, perception, the very passage of the moments that constitute life – it all crashed to a stop. This was no journey through the light, this was a hard shutdown. There was barely time to think of all the drafts I would never get a chance to post to Gender Analysis, and all the trans people I would never get a chance to reach. My life felt like all 33 years had been something so brief and insignificant, as if I had just sat down in a theater and the projector burned out right as the movie started.
As I was being pressed into the endless black, every part of me recoiled in shock and horror from the seething, eviscerating dark. Death is total annihilation, the complete loss of everything, a nonexistence incomparable to anything in our experience, and I saw no refuge or relief there. I’ve always been an atheist and assumed there was no reason to believe any claims of an afterlife, but there’s a difference between rationally understanding this and actually seeing the edge. It is so impossibly bleak and so much more sinister than I ever thought. This was the most frightening moment of my life.
My body flailed instinctively and fought back, with no conscious awareness, kicking out until my foot hit something on the riverbed hard enough to propel me to the surface. Heather, a skilled swimmer who was not in danger, said I was only underwater for a few seconds before “popping up like a cork”. I remember frantically trying to stay afloat, grabbing at the life jacket that drifted toward me, coughing until I could choke out a weak cry, slamming into a half-submerged tree and locking all my limbs around it. I was barely thinking at all – I was an animal fighting to live and nothing else. Once I cleared my throat, I screamed a piercing, siren-like wail. I screamed like I was about to die. Heather floated by and tossed another life jacket around me.
Since that day I’ve never again felt like ending my existence. I haven’t once felt like giving up. I don’t ever want to die, for any reason, for as long as possible. The truth is you don’t get anything but this, and the alternative is horrifying. Death is not a door – there’s nothing there. This is your only opportunity to live. I can also tell you that your body will fight back to protect itself whether you consciously want to live or not. When you’re pushed to the edge, you might discover that something inside you is stronger than you ever expected. You might win.
Zinnia Jones is a trans blogger whose deep dives into topics relating to trans public health and medicine live on genderanalysis.net.