The photographer asked me how it felt to be skating on the road usually crowded with tourists behind the White House. “Surreal,” I said, but I didn’t say why: https://twitter.com/AriDrennen/status/1259668487305334785

As a trans woman, dancing on wheels for an hour near the stronghold of a regime that has focused on making my life difficult, if not impossible, since the beginning of their time in office made me feel like a zebra watching the lions creeping by me in the tall grass.

The Trump administration has protected the right of providers to deny medical care to people like me, and the right of homeless shelters to deny us housing. They’re fighting in the Supreme Court to defend the right of employers to fire us for no other reason than who we are.

Yet men passing by me after their day at work in that White House kept smiling at me, reaching for a reason to strike up conversation as though in every moment I’m not pleading with them for my life.

It makes my stomach drop to think about these things. I’m just one woman, perhaps taller and louder than average, but not powerful or wealthy in a way that would allow me to stop their work.

But I have my body - for the moment - and it brings me joy, and so I twirl and leap and glide, one eye on the lions and the other on the blue sky. #WontBeErased