Survive, However You Can
Recounting a harrowing night, Riley Black illustrates what survival means to her.
by Riley Black
“You are not dying here, not like this.” I said it out loud to better believe it. Left hand pressing the floor of the tent to make sure I had space to breathe, my right fumbling around in the fluttering mess, I concentrated as I groped for something that would register as zipper beneath my fingertips. I used the anxious moments to remind myself of the plan once I reached it; unzip, find the poles, collapse the tent before it’s swept off, then find my glasses, car keys, and clothes in whatever order they appeared. But first, I had to get out.
I’d dozed off on my sleeping pad a few hours before, nothing more than a light breeze passing through my tent. When I snapped awake, the side of my tent was bent at a strange angle and the floor in front of me was rising off the ground with each gust. A sudden and intense windstorm had kicked up in this patch of slickrock desert, just outside Moab, Utah, and had already pulled a few of my tent stakes free. The fact that the floor of the tent was beginning to lift me off the ground scared me most. If the wind caught, it would turn the tent into a sail that would send me careening into the night until something, like the large rock formations I’d come to search for fossils, stopped me. The hard sandstone would break bones, if not kill me.
I thought about calling for help. The rest of the paleontology field crew I was camping with were tucked away in their own tents around the washes and arroyos of our campsite. I wasn’t sure my voice would even be anything more than a lost note against the howling winds. But I was also afraid to call out to the rest of the team, an all-cisgender group who had been absentmindedly misgendering me since day one. I’d gone to sleep naked and I at least wanted pants on before I wanted them anywhere near me. I had to get out myself.
I told myself I had to get back for my partner, for our pets, and for my friends. But that wasn’t the source of the fight driving me. I had to live. I didn’t come out, transition, fight for my healthcare, and heal over and over again to bite it in the middle of the night because of a windstorm. I’d only had my last gender-affirming surgery four months before. After so much fight and trauma, from the fights with insurance to get health coverage to a bitter divorce from a transphobic ex, I’d finally settled into my body as I always should have known it. I would tear through the tent with my teeth if I had to.
I found the zipper and worked it back as fast as I could manage, flopping out onto the gravelly ground, collapsing the tent, finding all my essential items, and one by one shifting the entire contents to the backseat of my car, leaving enough room for me to sleep in the front seat for a couple hours before sunrise. I thought all the door slamming and rustling around would have attracted some interest from someone else in camp. No one came, and, when I blearily relayed what had happened in the morning, all said they hadn’t heard a thing. If I’d shouted, no one would have heard me. Sometimes I don’t like when my intuition is right.
The memory’s still fresh, from just this past September. I can feel the tension creep into my muscles when I remember how it felt struggling in the tent, how frightened I felt, but I also knew I could do something about it. It’s when I got back to pavement and cell service that I started to feel more helpless. Despite our protests, our art, our advocacy, our very humanity, we transgender people have been selected as a culture war issue that every ill-informed person on the planet has been invited to have an opinion about. Years of relentless pushing from white Christian nationalist groups succeeded in manufacturing a controversy around us, insisting that we were an issue to be talked about and handled even as our oppressors continually came up empty on evidence for any danger or harm we cause to anything other than their evangelical ideology. I know what to do in a backcountry emergency. I don’t know what to do when society itself starts to squeeze, nightly leaving me to wonder if I’m going to wake up in the morning with fewer rights than I went to sleep with.
And yet I still get up every day, feed the cats, shower, walk the dog, and think about what I want from the day. I keep going despite the fog of depression and acute pain of cPTSD, despite the constant flow of bad news, because whatever space I stand in, I’ll always be standing in it as myself. Transition was a matter of life and death, something I had to do because the only other alternative was letting depression take me into the void. I could take the pain if it still meant life. I want more of the life it took me 35 years to fully claim. I have books I want to write, meals I want to cook, movies I want to see, sex I want to have, so much mundane everyday stuff I’m only just now getting to savor in its full depth and color. I want all of it, the possibilities that come with more time, just as I want every other trans person to have the chance to pursue their wishes no matter how big or how everyday.
Uncertainty is difficult enough to face on its own. Uncertainty framed by the threats of transphobes and their authoritarian fans is even worse. So much of what we should be able to take as given, from housing to healthcare, has already been threatened, but we don’t yet know where the sword will fall and where. As we cope with this ominous outlook, I’m wary of platitudes that we can survive because we’ve already been through so much. I’ve lived through abuse that no child, no spouse, no person should ever have to know, the inspirations for flashbacks and intrusive thoughts that nip at me almost every day. And I can only even consider the term survival solemnly because of how many of our transgender family should still be here but are not, and how many we will be remembering next year. All transgender people have endured should be enough to make the rest of the world stop and take account of their hateful words and actions. I don’t think that will happen, especially when bigots and zealots take our suffering as a sign they’re winning a cultural war of their own invention. I do not have an answer for how to change that, or a handbook for where we can be safe until we reach the day I know must happen, when we are seen as the lovable and flawed and complicated people we are. But I can share how I feel, hoping that the spark I throw your way will help you make your own flame and keep it close.
Live. Even if it’s only for an hour, a day, a year, a lifetime, live and claim the feeling of inwardly-turned affection that belongs to you alone. Squeeze every drop you can out of the good days and believe in the fact that every bad day still has an ending. You can use all manner of fuel to keep going. Affirmation and trans joy are powerful, but so are spite, rebelliousness, curiosity, and even anger at all time stolen from us. However you do it, by whatever means, give yourself every possible second to keep being and to keep becoming, feeling the ground under your feet even as we walk through a world we can’t trust. Even if we never speak, I want to see you out there.
Riley Black (she/they) is the award-winning author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, When the Earth Was Green, and many other books about fossils. She's a regular contributor for publications such as National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Slate, and has regularly shared her expertise about fossils on programs such as All Things Considered, Science Friday, and NOVA. Riley has also worked as a science consultant for movies including the Jurassic World franchise and Mitchells vs. the Machines, and joins museum crews each summer in the search for new fossils.