Living in Muncie for 14 years taught me that the aspects of my identity that are most important to me are not necessarily the ones that most impact my everyday life or where I live.
For me, I am only child. I am a partner. I am a friend. I am an academic. I’m a writer. Perhaps that one most of all.
I’m queer and have struggled with how exactly to identify within the LGBTQIA+ community. Bi-sexual, or sexually fluid are the best descriptors, but the umbrella queer suits me just fine. While I think I’ve always been attracted to more than one gender, the specifics have been more fluid. I’ve outwardly been a part of a heterosexual marriage and a part of a lesbian marriage. It’s a part of my identity, one that took me time to find, but it also doesn’t feel quite as core as other pieces.
And yet, here I was, in Muncie, thriving as an academic and writer. Being a good partner, friend, and daughter. The identities that mattered most to me.
But I realize now that Muncie was never a good place for me because of those other identities—queer, married to a transwoman—the ones that felt out of place in everyday life in Muncie.
Since fleeing to Boston—this was a move we absolutely felt was necessary to ensure our survival—it’s eye-opening to see what it’s like to be a diverse person in a diverse city. My new therapist was curious about the queer community I was leaving behind, and I was like, sure I knew some other queer people, which was nice, but I wasn’t really in the community.
When we came to Muncie in 2011, people assumed we were a straight, cisgender couple. When my wife transitioned, we were supported my many wonderful people, for sure. But we also struggled here as she transitioned. It wasn’t often outward discrimination, though slurs were sometimes yelled our direction. It was microaggressions1, and macroaggressions.2
Some people stopped talking to her when she transitioned. Suddenly wait staff assumed we’d split the check. We were more often mistaken for sisters even though we look nothing alike. In Muncie, we bought a pride flag but never felt safe putting it out. I amassed a small collection of pride shirts I didn’t wear except to specific locations. My wife was misgendered multiple times a week. One time, when we made the mistake of a quick kiss in public, we were leered at and hypersexualized by a man at the gas station. We didn’t hold hands in Muncie. We stopped answering our door on Halloween in case the neighbors with the Trump cutout down the street accused us of being groomers, or in case they came back with a gun.
On the macro scale, there was the time my wife took one jujitsu class when they tried to pass bathroom bans in the state. There was the time she woke up screaming in pain but couldn’t go to the local hospital because they wouldn’t know what to do, and after all they had denied care to a trans heart attack patient years ago. Sure, they’d had training since then, but how many doctors did I have to call around to that wouldn’t even see a trans person as a primary care patient even if they weren’t the ones doing the actual gender affirming care? A surprising number.
Microagressions eat at you, but they were just everyday life in Muncie, more so for my wife than for me. In the end, it was the denial and the gaslighting that broke my heart. The friends who after years of worse and worse policies told me they didn’t really think it would affect anything in Muncie. It was the president of the university claiming business as usual when republicans were gutting our educational system. The same president that EVERY SINGLE YEAR would greet us as “Ladies and Gentleman” even after being told it wasn’t inclusive. It was the people at the university who framed my leaving as a harm done to them or even as a victory I had achieved and not a necessary for the coming years of violence or as the culmination of the ones already endured.
Ultimately, it was state violence that pushed us out. Gender affirming care was banned for minors in Indiana and the way this issue was discussed at the Supreme Court, it seems clear that care for adults will be close behind in states like Indiana. Gender affirming care (found only in Indianapolis not Muncie) saved my wife’s life. We can’t take that risk. Already there have been 17 anti-trans laws proposed in Indiana in 2025. There are worse laws in Florida and Texas, but Indiana has started copying their legislation. And really, systemic harm isn’t a “one up” sort of game.
We are still scared. But less scared in Boston because everywhere you look there is a pride flag, and everywhere a queer couple. We can hold hands for the first time in public in the first time in our 11 years of marriage, and it feels daringly normal.
Which of my identities are important to me seems to matter little when society has determined what identities are important to it—when queers are only queer, when trans people’s identities are erased as people and professionals, seen only for their transness.
Maybe I’m searching for queer community in my new home, but maybe I’m just searching for a community where queerness is just one part of my everyday life.