Trans rights are under attack. These trans elders say they ‘aren’t afraid’

When Renata Ramos was 5, she stood in front of a mirror, squeezed her eyes shut, and prayed that when she opened them, she would see a girl looking back at her. “I’d go to the mirror, I’d look, and I was still a little boy,” she said. Ramos, 64, says she has been transgender for as long as she can remember. She didn’t begin living openly as a woman until her 50s, suppressing her identity because she feared she’d lose her career as a model and actor. When she finally came out, it felt “like walking on clouds,” she said. For Pride Month, CNN spoke with Ramos and other trans people over the age of 60 about their lives and what they’ve learned from watching the decades-long battle for trans rights unfold. Many spoke with pride and wonder about the strides the trans rights movement has made in the 21st century, with access to gender-affirming health care more accessible than ever and trans people protected from discrimination by laws in several states. But they also spoke about the anxiety and dismay provoked by the flurry of executive orders from President Donald Trump that target trans people – including declaring that there are only two genders, banning transgender women from participating in most women’s sports, and barring transgender recruits from the military. The orders make good on Trump’s campaign promise to crack down on “gender ideology” and build on a wave of anti-trans laws passed largely in Republican states over the past few years. After decades of progress to protect trans rights, the current moment feels like a step back, some said. Still, the older trans people with whom CNN spoke emphasized their resilience in the face of anti-trans legislation – a resilience that has persisted throughout years of trans activism. “No one can erase our identities,” Pauline Park, a trans activist and organizer, said. “They can certainly try to take away our rights and undermine our ability to live openly and freely. And we need to resist that, and challenge that. “But they can’t erase our identities.” ‘We’re not afraid:’ Renata Ramos, 64 For Ramos, the latest attack on trans rights is just one more fight in a series of battles the LGBTQ community has fought in the past decades – and won. “I don’t give a damn” about the latest executive orders, she said. “We’ve been overcoming one battle after the other all our lives.” The model and actress lived through the height of the AIDS crisis. After rallying for government action in Washington, DC, and attending countless friends’ funerals, she saw the disease go from a death sentence to a survivable condition. And she witnessed same-sex marriage go from a dream to a mundane reality across the US. “These young people are not used to it, which I completely understand,” she added. “But we, from the old school, we’re not afraid.” Ramos was born in Soca, a small and conservative city in Uruguay, where even coming out as gay “scandalized” people, she said. She immigrated to Rhode Island alongside her family when she was 7. Although she was certain of her transgender identity from childhood, she thought she would never succeed as an actor if she came out. Most trans women she knew in her youth were pushed into sex work due to the lack of work opportunities for trans people, she said. Instead, she lived publicly as a gay man for decades, fantasizing about the day she would be able to retire and live as her true self. She worked as a Spanish-language interpreter while also racking up acting credits: She appeared as a “drape” in “Cry-Baby,” the 1990 film by iconic queer director John Waters. She finally began taking steps to medically and socially transition at 56, after a winding career that included stints in Washington, DC, Arizona, Miami, and New York, as well as an extended period of chronic illness followed by a stroke in 2014. Transitioning “gave me comfort in my own skin,” she said. “It’s so beautiful.” She added that despite the current setbacks, acceptance of transgender people has increased significantly in the past years. It’s only “in the past decades, that you could be transgender and admit it,” she said. She emphasized the diversity of the trans community, despite stereotypes like those that link trans women to sex work. “They only see one side of the transgender community,” she said. “But there are many of us that have lived our dreams that are out there.” ‘We live freedom every day:’ Criss Smith, 64 Criss Smith’s gender journey starts in the sweltering heat of Jamaica – with a group of rambunctious boys and Go-Karts. Smith was seven years old, playing Go-Karts with his brother and friends. The other children – all boys – took off their shirts in the heat. But when Smith did the same, he was rebuked. His brother said, “’You’re a girl child,’” Smith recalled. “Oh my God, it was like he stabbed me in the heart.” “I cried for two days because I did not want to be a girl child,” he said. It wasn’t until Smith moved to the US and attended college at Skidmore in upstate New York that he met other queer people and came out as a lesbian, finding confidence in a masculine self-presentation. But even though he was part of a burgeoning queer community, his identity was still fraught by the aftereffects of his conservative, religious upbringing: “I was so worried that the first time I had sex, I actually thought that God was going to strike me down,” he said. When he came out to his mother, she stopped speaking to him for a year. “It was heartbreaking,” he said. Smith can still remember the first time he met an out trans person, a bartender in New York who was pursuing top surgery (a gender-affirming mastectomy) in California in the 80s – at a time when the gay rights movement was nascent and transgender rights were on the extreme periphery. He was “blown away” by how the bartender “was living so freely, and being so expressive,” he said. His own transition – which started when he was 52 after deep soul-searching and years of “feeling like he was wearing a mask” – gave him the same sense of freedom. “I felt like I was reborn,” he said. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I was being truly me.” It’s the same freedom that he hopes can be a lesson from trans people for the rest of the world, even as trans people face “horrible” attacks on their freedoms and rights. “Trans people teach the rest of society that freedom is real – because we live freedom every day,” he said. “We live authenticity every day.” Being trans has been the ultimate expression of self-love, he added. “That’s our superpower, is that we love ourselves so much that we’re able to make a choice that is for us only,” he said. “That’s the highest form of self-love.” ‘There have been people like us since the dawn of history:’ Pauline Park, 65 For Pauline Park, attacks on transgender and queer identity are more than just repressive. They also directly contradict a long and rich history of gender variance across the world. “There have been people like us since the dawn of history,” she told CNN. She pointed to transgender traditions like the hijra community in South Asia and kathoey in Thailand, as well as Guanyin, a figure in Buddhist mythology who is often represented as genderless or as shifting from male to female. “It’s important to recognize that, in the larger span of history, we have existed, and we will continue to exist,” she said. Park’s own coming out went hand-in-hand with her work advocating for LGBT rights. Like Ramos and Smith, Park had long known she was trans – but adopted from South Korea into a “Christian, fundamentalist household” when she was less than a year old, she “knew instinctively” that her gender identity wasn’t something she could discuss with her parents. Even same-sex marriage was “inconceivable” when she grew up, she said. A career pivot to LGBT activism brought her to lead the campaign for a transgender rights bill in New York City, and she came out and began living as a woman full-time shortly after. “Actualizing my transgender identity has been instrumental in my ability to bring about social change,” she said. Park cofounded the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy and has helped advocate for trans rights across the state. Park has led hundreds of transgender sensitivity trainings, she said, where one of the main goals is to help participants “realize that when you’re talking about transgender, you’re actually talking about everyone,” she said. “Not that everyone is trans, but the issues that transgender people face are issues that are rooted in structural oppressions,” she explained. “We have to think about society as a whole – and whether we want to make it welcoming and inclusive or not.” That work is particularly important right now, when “the community is now under unprecedented attack, from the highest leadership in the land,” according to Park. She called transphobia “one of the last generally acceptable prejudices in our society.” She added that anti-trans legislation will have the most devastating impacts on trans youth. Restrictions on gender-affirming care, she said, won’t stop trans youth from pursuing that care – but they might mean that they turn to black market solutions instead of gender-affirming therapy overseen by a doctor. “People will actualize their identities if they want to, even in the face of legal and structural impediments,” she said. “The effort to try to eliminate gender-affirming care is going to fail, but it’s going to harm a lot of people,” she said. “It’s ultimately both futile and morally reprehensible – and it won’t work.” ‘I know who I am:’ Justin Vivian Bond, 62 For Justin Vivian Bond, the Trump administration’s attacks on nonbinary identity reflect “willful ignorance” more than anything else. The 62-year-old cabaret performer and actor grew up in the 60s and 70s, when even same-sex marriage seemed a far-off dream. As a child, they were terrified to come out to their family. Today, they’re a trailblazer in nonbinary representation and something of an institution in New York City’s music and theater scene. “Some people are so resistant to anything that they don’t know that they’ll never know me – because they’re just too ignorant,” they said. The concept of trans or nonbinary identities might be new to some people, they noted. But “constant change, constant evolution, is part of being alive,” they went on. “Otherwise you might as well just, you know, hang up your hat and go home and never leave again — or, in other words, drop dead.” A Maryland native, Bond’s own career is a testament to the evolution of queer art and culture. They started their career in San Francisco, performing in trans playwright Kate Bornstein’s “Hidden: A Gender” before developing the legendary character of Kiki, “a 60-some-year-old alcoholic lounge singer with ex-husbands and children,” one half of the “Kiki and Herb” cabaret duo in which Bond performed in drag. The over-the-top, enraged character was forged at the height of the AIDS epidemic, through a palpable sense of anger from “the knowledge that the people in power literally wanted us dead.” Since then, Bond has built a flourishing career as a solo artist, maintaining a years-long residency at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater in NYC and receiving a 2024 MacArthur “genius grant” for crafting “performances that center queer joy.” Bond’s gender, like their artistic practice, is “constantly evolving,” they said. After decades playing with gender and performance in their on-stage work and life, they started taking hormone replacement therapy in their 50s. “Still to this day, I don’t like being trapped into any identity, because it’s just not something that is fixed,” they explained. Bond’s own response to the newest waves of attacks by the Trump administration was one of exasperation and frustration: “Why do we have to go through this?” But the queer community has survived worse, they said. “All of our rights were fought for,” they said. “We’ve always had ways of working around these patriarchal nimrods, and living our lives and being happy and enjoying each other’s company and dancing together and partying together and living together and sleeping together and cooking together.” “That’s not going to stop just because they say we should be unhappy.” ‘The best thing that ever happened to me:’ Dawn Melody, 61 Dawn Melody realized that she might be trans later in life – after her son came out first. In 2012, her 12-year-old told her he was transgender. Melody, trusting her children to “tell [her] who they are,” quickly affirmed his identity, supporting him as he cut his hair and came out to friends and family. “Watching that young person go on to bravely be who they are” was “inspiring,” she said. And a few years later, it inspired her own soul-searching. Melody had long harbored an ineffable feeling that “something was different.” But growing up in an Irish Catholic household in Westchester, New York, being queer was off the table – and “the idea of transgender, that was like being from another planet,” she told CNN. In her 50s, Melody, still searching for the source of that constant feeling of “difference,” sought out women’s clothes and a wig to test-drive presenting as a woman at home. That first trial felt “miraculous,” she said. Melody said that she had ultimately been inspired by her son’s “steadfast” commitment to his identity. “This is me taking the cue from my child that that if you’re brave enough to do this, so am I,” she said. When Trump first began signing anti-trans legislation in January, she felt “nausea.” “He declared it during his inauguration speech that I don’t exist,” she said. “That I’m undesirable.” Melody framed the executive orders as “frantically trying to sweep back the sea when the sea can’t be swept back.” But “there’s no way to stop progress,” she said. And despite the attacks, being trans is “the best thing that ever happened to me,” she added. “I’m glad that I am this way, and I wouldn’t change it for all the tea in China,” she said. Living as a woman feels like “swimming with the current” after decades of fighting to swim across it, she said. She added that she hopes trans youth today can keep faith in themselves despite a wave of anti-trans sentiment and legislation. “It’s not without its moments of horror and fear, but life is such a gift – and it’s way too short.”