15 years ago being trans in America felt so different to me. While I can hardly fathom that its been that long, it has still been a relatively short time in the context of social justice and civil rights. It’s not at the threats to our economic, social, and living freedom are absent or mitigated now — especially against trans women of color or with disabilities. No, those experiences are lived daily. It’s not that historical oppression and marginalization is a thing of the past, or that police brutality, rape, gendered violence, and hate crimes are gone — even from my own life. Those experiences are the reason why men and women just like myself have begun inviting the world into our lives and hoping to create change in our lives and in the most marginalized lives among us.

What is different, in 2013, is that we are on the precipice of great changes in our movement, great changes that finally are beginning to uplift our voices more than ever before. This change that we’ve seen in the last three years is no accident, this change is created by each and every one of us who have found the bravery to call out and be counted as part of the trans caucus. To call out and say, “yes I am trans” has begun as a rallying cry and has made it harder and harder to ignore us categorically as a class.

But with these moments comes a choice, because our voice is being heard not just as a squeak in the dark, but as a whisper. And that whisper — justifiably so — is angry over years, decades, and centuries of marginalization through institutional, economic, and social means. We’re unhappy about having our voices, our faces, our bodies, our movement, our votes, and our truth co-opted, colonized, and bargained with for the sake of incremental “justice.” And we are tired of decades of lip service, for the sake of political self-aggrandizement.

We’re tired of the past, and it can be so so easy for us to drown in our own oppression, and marginalization. It can be so easy to ache in pain over our present. And it can be so hard to ask for a future.

I ask that we make the hard choice in this moment. I ask that we never forget the past — because in the past we find the context for which our present is and upon which our future will be built. The past, where trans women of color like Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson fought tooth and nail for gay and trans rights and liberation screaming “Gay Power” from the rooftops. I ask that we work in the present — because now is the time and there are lives to be saved today. The present, where a woman like CeCe McDonald is incarcerated for defending her life against a white supremacist and anti-trans hate crime. The present where countless men and women fight for their lives literally and metaphorically, even here on our American streets. But I also ask that we live and dream for the future.