Taking Up Space: Finding Our Place in a Hostile Galaxy (or Maybe Just Escaping to a Safer One)
I used to think “taking up space” meant being loud, confident, and unapologetic. The kind of woman who walks into a room like she owns the lease and possibly the moon. Turns out, that version of bravery is optional. Some days, especially lately, bravery looks like getting out of bed. Some days it looks like taking your kid to daycare while scanning your surroundings, faces, and vibes…running background threat assessments you never asked to be certified for. Some days it looks like wanting to pack a bag, grab your family, and quietly evaporate into another country, another timeline, or universe where trans women aren’t treated like a political threat.
Being afraid does not mean you are weak. It means you are paying attention. I don’t have the luxury of abstract fear. Mine is logistical. It’s calendar-based. It’s the kind of fear that asks, “How fast can we leave?” and “What does safety look like for my child?” and “How visible is too visible right now?” The world keeps telling us that bravery means staying put. Standing firm and never backing down. Never leaving. As if leaving is cowardice or somehow a moral failure.
That framing is bullshit.
Fear is information. Fear is your nervous system doing math faster than your conscious brain can. Fear is the part of you that loves yourself and your people enough to say, “Something is wrong here.” When fear hits our nervous system, we only think that the 2 types of common responses, fight, and flight, exist. Turns out, just like the gender binary, that’s false. There are actually multiple common fear responses; fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop (or shutdown).
Fight mode comes out as anger, arguing, defensiveness, or pushing back to regain control. Flight mode is the urge to escape to avoid the situation, over-busying yourself, procrastinating, or disappearing emotionally or physically. Freeze mode can feel like getting stuck: your mind goes blank, your body won’t move, and words don’t come out. Fawn mode is about staying safe through connection; people-pleasing, apologizing, agreeing, or becoming extra “easy” so conflict doesn’t happen (especially common when someone has experienced trauma). And flop/shutdown is what happens when overwhelm hits a limit: numbness, dissociation, exhaustion, or collapse. Your body essentially pulls the plug to protect you when it feels like there’s no way out. Knowing these other types of responses exist in my body has helped me get over my struggle with giving myself ‘permission’ to currently survive while I look for the exit.
We are taught that leaving means shrinking. That fawning is a form of weakness or complicity. But always having to face your fear isn’t what makes you brave. Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is what you do while fear sits next to you, tapping its foot, reminding you that the stakes are real. Sometimes, you get to choose how to respond to that fear sitting next to you (see response modes above ☝️).
We typically only hear about the folks that stay and fight. History books only write about the Marsha P Johnson’s of the world. It instills this guilt in me that says I have to stay and fight for a better future here. But historically, marginalized people have frequently survived by moving. By adapting and finding safer ground. By choosing life over symbolism. Like black Americans moving away from the Jim Crow south to other cities like Chicago, LA, NYC, or my hometown, Detroit. Or, the current migration of over 400,000 transgender people moving to safer areas. I should preface that safety doesn’t have to mean physically moving to another location. There are many of us that do not have the privilege to be able to pick up and move their life somewhere else. Safety can also be smaller, like leaving a relationship, a church group, or just choosing to stay home today. There's this pressure in queer communities, especially trans communities, to be visible all the time. To be activists all the time. To never back down, never hide, never compromise. While I agree that visibility saves lives and that representation matters, I also believe that safety allows us to take up more space. No matter how big or small that safety may be, you can't take up space if you're not safe. Or more accurately, you can, but you'll likely destroy yourself in the process. When you are safe, you can breathe. When you can breathe, you can build. And building is one of the most radical ways to take up space there is. You are not abandoning the fight by choosing safety. You are preserving yourself so you can exist long enough to continue the fight for the long haul. Safety allows us to stare fear in the eyes and say “You don’t get to end me”.
Safety isn't cowardice. Safety is strategic. Safety is how you survive to keep taking up space. When I choose not to wear my brave pants every time I leave my house, I'm not disappearing. I'm calculating. I'm making sure I live to plant my flag another day. Astronauts don’t prove they are brave by taking off their helmet in the vacuum of space. That’s not bravery, that’s suicide. Bravery is calculated risk-taking. It’s knowing when you need protection and not being ashamed to use it. My trans siblings who are moving to safer states right now? They're not running away. They're taking up space somewhere that will let them breathe. My friends who are going stealth for their own safety? Still taking up space! We all don't all have to be martyrs to matter.
My Coping Mechanism Involves…Aliens?
Honestly, I have a love/hate relationship with sci-fi. It can either captivate me or have me arguing at the screen or book. When I walk into a book store, my first instinct is to find the biographical section…not fiction. But more recently I have been feeling the gravitational pull from the sci-fi section. Even if a book or a show is a dud, I will tend to see it through now. I think that reason is becoming more clear now as I am searching for the exit. My default coping mechanism in times of intense stress is to mentally eject myself from the current reality. Give me a spaceship, a warp drive, a hoverboard…anything to help me escape to some galaxy far far away. But back here, on Earth, in this particular timeline, the reality is shifting my interests. Every single public interaction feels charged. Do I speak up? Do I stay quiet? Do I correct that misgendering, or do I just let it slide to avoid a confrontation? The internal calculus is exhausting. And sometimes, "taking up space" feels like a dangerous proposition. It feels like putting a target on your back when all you want to do is blend in, to become a ghost in the machine, to make it through the day without incident.
Sci-fi is an escape, yes. A way out when reality feels too sharp, too loud, and too hostile. But it’s also something else. It’s a rehearsal. A type of thought experiment. A place where difference is not only expected, but necessary. In sci-fi, the crew is typically never one thing. It’s rarely one species, one culture, one body type, one way of being. Everyone is strange to someone else, and somehow that’s the point. Survival depends on collaboration across difference. Progress depends on letting everyone exist fully, not just the ones who fit neatly into the dominant narrative. Every alien. Every android. Every augmented human. Every being that doesn’t quite belong anywhere else. They are all taking up space. Sci-fi lets us imagine a future where our existence is not debated, legislated, or explained away. A future where being different is not a liability, but an asset. A future where no one is asked to disappear for the comfort of others. When the present feels unbearable, imagining that future is not childish. It’s survival.
There's also something deeply appealing about the idea of wearing a protective barrier between you and the hostile environment trying to kill you. Space will literally make your blood freeze and your lungs explode. It is fundamentally incompatible with human life. And yet we looked at that and said, "Bet. Let me just build this really cool helmet and go anyway." That's what being trans in 2026 feels like to me…and we are only a week in! The environment is hostile. The atmosphere is toxic. The pressure is trying to crush you from all sides. So you build your helmet. Your helmet can be your community, chosen family, a therapist, HRT, or your chosen name, all of it creates this protective barrier that lets you survive in places that weren't built for you. Helmets are not a weakness. They're technology. They're innovation. They're how you take up space in impossible places.
Space is the ultimate metaphor for both distance and belonging. The moon is far away. Untouchable. Safe from a lot of the nonsense happening down here. And yet, when we planted a flag there, it wasn’t about ownership. It was about presence. About saying, “We were here. We did this. We exist beyond the limits we were told to accept.” An astronaut is anonymous. You can project yourself into it. Or not. It can be aspirational or comforting or quietly defiant. It doesn’t demand anything from you. It just reminds you that there are other worlds, other possibilities, other ways to exist in order to take up space.
We’re All Astronauts Now
If you are like me, reading this and feeling scared or torn about staying or going, you are not alone. If you are planning to stay, I hope you find strength, community, and moments of joy that remind you why. If you are planning to leave, I hope you find safety, relief, and the space to exhale fully for the first time in a long time. Every trans person, every queer person, every marginalized person trying to exist authentically in a world that doesn't want them…we're all just astronauts wearing our helmets, breathing our own air, surviving in hostile environments. We're all planting flags in impossible places and saying, "I was here. I existed. I mattered." And yeah, sometimes we need to retreat. Sometimes we need to get back in the shuttle and return to base, catch our breath, remember why we're doing this. The astronaut who ignores their oxygen levels doesn't win; they just die. The astronaut who monitors their resources, who knows when to retreat, who takes care of themselves, that's the astronaut who gets to plant more flags.
If you're exhausted from being brave, if you just want to escape for a while…I see you. Your survival is still resistance. Wear your helmet when you need to. Retreat when you must. Find your Starship, your rebellion crew, your TARDIS…whatever vessel carries you through the hostile environments of daily life. We are allowed to imagine futures where we are safe.The universe is vast and mostly empty, but we're here, filling it with our messy, complicated, beautiful lives. We are allowed to choose ourselves. Even if we have to go to the moon to do it.
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