Charlotte Fosgate Is Not An Unperson

I’ve been trying for days now to understand why I’m as shaken as I am by the death of local trans girl Charlotte Fosgate, who chose to die by suicide from somewhere along the span of the St. Johns Bridge, above the Willamette River.

If you’ve only seen the local news coverage, you wouldn’t know anything about Fosgate except that after being reported missing earlier in the month she was found dead at its end. Elsewhere, however, you’d have learned that she was a prominent modder in the Sonic the Hedgehog community and that—surely a central piece of her story—she was trans. Nor would you know that her final social media posts were met with unrelating hate from the worst that Twitter and other websites have to offer.

Such agonizingly inhumane treatment has extended to the makeshift memorial for Fosgate on the bridge itself, where real, fresh and blood people have been printing out hateful memes and leaving them there amongst the flowers and other trinkets. Other real, fresh and blood people have been taking it upon themselves to clean up in hate’s wake.

Let’s get a necessary disclaimer out of the way: I am a middle-aged, straight, cisgender white guy. This is part of why I’ve been struggling to explain why I’ve been struggling with Fosgate’s death.

Part of it, to be sure, is proximity.

This is my bridge. This is my neighborhood’s bridge. This is our city’s most beautiful bridge, and indeed—as Fosgate said before her end—it has such a pretty view. It’s difficult not to wonder if Fosgate simply wanted to be in one, final beautiful place before choosing her own ending. Fosgate’s actions, of course, do not sully the bridge. The bridge stands beautiful still—but there’s a stain there now nonetheless. One put there by too much of the world in which she lived.

Part of it, to be sure, is political.

Since mid-January, I’ve been abjectly frustrated over the almost complete lack of interest on the part of the Democratic Party establishment to engage with the fact that one of the very first actions the Trump administration took was to issue an executive order that amounted to the beginning of a literally Orwellian effort to unperson trans people. I know most people haven’t thought about 1984 since high school, but this isn’t hyperbole. That the President of the United States would engage in an effort to unperson an entire class of people should have been the beginning, middle, and end of any hand-wringing over whether or not to meet the Trump administration with opposition and obstruction.

Too many people want to push trans people out of existence, and not enough people are pushing back.

Charlotte Fosgate, in a personal and political environment of too many people saying she didn’t belong here and too few people saying that she did, chose something agonizingly close to doing the work of hateful people for them.

Still, I can’t readily find within myself the reason why this entire thing makes me so incisively, viscerally upset. I’ve been visibly shaken, at times, as I’ve been posting to places like Nextdoor and Reddit to make sure my neighborhood shows up for the candlelight memorial being planned (I’m not involved) for June 14 in Cathedral Park, with the shadow of the St. Johns Bridge looming overhead. I’m visibly shaken right now, as I try to write all this here.

I guess it comes down to the simple idea that we can’t continue to live this way. We can’t continue to live in a way that leads any trans kid to think that they can’t continue to live at all.

Charlotte Fosgate, in her life and in her death, was and is not an unperson. She was real and she existed as she was as best she could, like any of us. She is remembered, I’m sure, by those who knew her, as she was. She is remembered now, by more of us, for (some of) who she was. Her life is over but it is stricken from neither record nor thought.

That is, of course, simply not good enough.

What would be good enough would be for us to insist and to demand that the world in which all the Charlotte Fosgates live—a world in which we, too, live—is one where this does not happen anymore. It’s not acceptable that we leave people like Charlotte Fosgate with the feeling that the only way out of the struggle is to come to an end.

We know that the only way out of the struggle is through, and the only way through is together. None of us get out of here alive, but the point is to make of “here” a place where Charlotte Fosgate would have been able to stand on the span of the St. Johns Bridge, post about the pretty view, and then simply return home to the friends and family who knew her.