The cover photo says it all, Trump is a butthole. I posed for this picture at the end of June, days before publishing my first blog post on CoreyRae.com. At that time, the picture was a joke. It was an homage to Chelsea Handler’s (one of my idols) Instagram picture, and something I thought would be about the loser of the 2016 election.

Now we all know that Trump did win, electorally. It’s been pretty much impossible to avoid the large elephant (literally) in the room since the early morning of November 9th. Everywhere I go I hear people discussing the results of this year’s election. I have never loved talking politics, I actually loathe conversing about it. I am mortified that Trump has won, and I can no longer hold my tongue. Over the past few weeks I have found myself talking with republicans (which pains me) and democrats (which saddens me) to try to make sense of it all. Something that resonated with me was this: if Clinton and Trump submitted resumes for a job, would you even call Trump in for an interview? The answer: definitely not. We had a chance to elect the first female President of the United States, but instead we elected a heinous, bankrupt hotelier. When I woke up to Hillary’s loss, there was a big black cloud covering New York City. Everyone kept their heads down, and the city, for once, seemed to be completely silent.

As a young transgender woman I am scared. Not just for myself, but for my fellow trans-people, future trans-children, and for my own children to come. Our country is more divided than ever, or maybe we’ve always been this divided but it took this tragic event to open up the eyes of those of us who live in a major city, inside of a liberal bubble. Since the morning of what I’ve been referring to as “Doomsday,” I've been feeling Trump-like vibes from people everywhere; like they're going to be more open about their harmful and hateful feelings now (homophobia, racism, degrading women, sexual assault, etc.) and that's the problem. I worked the election party at my job and finally fell asleep around 5am. When I woke up and forced myself to go into work that afternoon, I could feel men violating me with just their eyes. I’m unsure if I was just sensitive at the time, or if my nightmares had really come true; straight white men have even more power now, and more of a green light to degrade women.

I now fear what the dating world will be like for transgender individuals. I’ve been on the dating app Bumble off and on for almost a year now. I’ve never had a disturbing message from a guy on an app who’s found out I was transgender, until this week. Here’s the conversation:

I wasn’t personally offended by what this kid said, I actually turned to my friend and joked “I hope he feels better about himself now.” What is scary though, is how he threw in Trump’s name, and used it as his final words in attempt to insult me. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t hurt like he probably wanted it to. “TRUMP MAGA,” Make America Great Again… is this boy implying that the transgender community is a detraction to this country? I can’t wrap my head around this. Isn’t the beauty of our country inclusion? That all walks of life can be here and be proud of their true selves and feel comfortable being themselves? America has a flawed history, but we were making progress. Now, I fear we are going to digress. The fact that this is what Trump brings out in people, and that Americans now feel it’s okay to say, think, and believe these awful things is an issue that needs to be addressed. We woke up in a different world on November 9th, and for most people I have spoken with, it's a scarier, unpredictable world we now face. Regardless of the hurt we may feel, or how much time passes by, we cannot run from this problem. We have to stay in our country and fight for what we want, for what is right.

I am disturbed, to say the least, by Donald Trump being elected the President. I feel if America could have re-voted the next day we'd choose differently and Hillary supporters and non-voters would have been more proactive about going to the polls. I think people were embarrassed about voting for Trump and the predictions were off. Our country, the Trump supporters, even Trump himself, assumed Hillary would win. Democrats are known to be lazy when it comes to voting, they assume it will be taken care of for them, whereas Republicans go to the polls guns ablazing. But if Hillary did win, would something even more tragic than a Trump victory have happened in our country?  Would she have been assassinated? Would republicans start burning women (this has actually happened this year), killing blacks and latinos (seems to always be happening), start a war on terror in our own country?

Everything happens for a reason, it has to. But how could a man so awful, so unqualified, so insecure, become the President of the United States? How is he now supposed to make all Americans trust him enough to have him represent us? The answer: he won’t. What’s going to happen is this: we're going to come together in opposition of his win and this period of doom in our lives over the next four years. We need to make this an era of true change due to the jarring results and behaviors that we’ve seen come from this election cycle.

To end this post I want to share what I wrote on Facebook after the election was deemed over:

Written by Corey Rae --- Edited by Emily Turner