I never had a dream wedding built-up in my mind. I didn’t plan the flavor of the frosting on my cake, even though I dreamt about eating everyone else’s food.
Maybe it’s because the ability to get married is such a new right for me. Gay marriage has been legal for less time than it takes me to do my laundry. But under Donald Trump’s presidency, who knows if I’ll still have this chance?
If your response to this is saying he can’t actually end same-sex marriages, you are missing the point. You aren’t noticing how terrifying it is that there are people afraid of losing their most basic rights.
Even bigger, you’re not seeing how these two candidates were the same. Both candidates didn’t care about me — that much is obvious. With Hillary Clinton, I could have pretended, and that is a privilege in itself.
I went to class numb the day after the election. It’s not because of who won this election, but how this election broke my illusion that the world had changed.
Now I can say white people generalize and are racist, because look at the statistics. The majority of y’all voted for this racist, misogynistic, xenophobic Cheeto. So.
What really gets me is that people said they didn’t support Trump, but they voted for him. Wasn’t the message from the Holocaust that silence is also oppression? You may not hate me for being gay, but you don’t care about protecting me, either. You may not hate me for being black, but you don’t care about my life, either. Christian voters wanted to preserve their views so badly they didn’t mind letting everyone else suffer. And that’s what hurts.
Do you even know what conversion camps do? Did you research anything? Is white supremacy so fragile that you will shoot yourself in the foot to make sure I’m still worse off than you?
I wasn’t allowed to dream. I know people are looking at this as just another election; they’re waiting for us to accept the results and get over it, but I can’t go through this quietly. I can’t just accept the fact that I may not be able to marry the person I love. I may not be able to do what I want with my body. I may never be safe here, because I wasn’t born a cisgender white man.
But then again, this election didn’t tell me anything new. It just made those who hate me for being brown, a woman and a queer take their hoods off.
I was prepared to hate Clinton, because I know the past. I wasn’t prepared for the rest of the world to hate her, too. White liberals like to pretend she didn’t do all the damage she did to communities of color, but we don’t have that privilege. It should tell you something about the two-party system if both candidates fall short.
Now I’ll just have to find it in myself to not be scared. I want to ride the bus next to a person in a Pence shirt and not worry about gay-conversion camps. I want to sit next to the girl with the “Make America Great Again” hat and not think she’s wondering what race I am and whether I lied about my sexual assault.
What’s terrifying is that I don’t think it’s possible. It’s hard to go to sleep when you know half of your country decided you weren’t good enough for human rights. It’s hard to breathe when they have told you so obviously that you don’t matter. And now y’all want to turn and work with those same people.
Brooke Henderson is a UF international studies and journalism sophomore. Her column appears on Mondays.
