This was originally written as a letter to the editor for my local newspaper, but it was never sent in. Still, I’m quite fond of it even if it has a couple of rough edges.

Fear.

Fear is invasive.

It creeps in, quietly, nagging at your anxieties and insecurities.

Fear is cancerous.

It grows and spreads and expands from one region to another.

Fear is the enemy.

Burdened by fear, we are separated and rendered impotent.

“The only thing to fear is fear itself” — Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I am afraid. Why?

Because others are afraid of me.

While I identify as fairly moderate in the grand scheme of things, especially as compared to people from other nations, here I am a liberal. Here I am a leftist, whatever that term means. Here I dare to believe in things like equality, the rule of law, and the idea that everyone has a right to the foundations of a good life.

I believe that we descend as a nation and as a people from Enlightenment ideals, and that while we certainly have not always done those ideals justice, the concept of them itself is worthy and should be pursued.

But it’s not enough that I’m liberal, although that alone should have me scared for my life if commercials from the NRA are to be taken seriously.

I’m also transgender, which puts me on the fast-track to be considered deviant, disgusting, and sub-human.

Some of that is because of terrible pop-culture references being all most people know, and I have faith that, in time, that will change.

Some of that is also because of fear. I’m different, and while I personally happen to think that is a good thing, a very vocal minority is terribly afraid of difference.

Because I brought it up, I have a writer’s duty to — briefly — explain myself.

I choose to pursue how I identify. I feel a strong sameness and compatriotship with the gender opposite of my birth, and, personally, I always have ever since I was very young.

It’s an innate sense of being, and I choose to embrace who I am rather than live a life of misery fighting it every minute of every day, like a great many of my fellow trans brothers and sisters who feel it is unsafe to exist in today’s world. These people choose to deny themselves out of fear that they will not be welcomed in society – that, in fact, they will be spat upon, stoned, and decried for the rest of their lives.

And maybe I will be, as well. But I also choose something else. I choose to believe that, on average, that silent majority won’t be silent forever. I choose to believe that tomorrow is a brighter day, and that within my lifetime, my being trans will matter no more to 99 percent of people than the fact that I have a mole on my shoulder, or that my hair is brown, or that I like to listen to metal.

This letter isn’t about my status, though.

This letter is about fear, and I can use myself as an example to better catalyze my point.

What ever happened to the Golden Rule?

You know, “treat others as you want to be treated.”

We’re all stuck on this floating rock together; we’re all human. That’s the fact of the matter, contrary to what fear and insecurity can tell us — a dehumanizing, delegitimizing factor that makes some people separate “us” against “them.”

Why do things like race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or economic status seem to matter so incredibly much to some people?

Who you are as a person should be much more important than what you are as a person. I care far more for essence, for soul, than I do for labels.

I feel both that this is a controversial stance in today’s society and also that it should not be such.

Consider the Veil of Ignorance.

While that may sound like a great name for a rock album, it is in fact a philosophical concept by contemporary American philosopher John Rawls.

The Veil of Ignorance is a thought experiment wherein you are asked to make political decisions without knowing where you, yourself, will end up in the social order. Slavery is perhaps the easiest way to understand this concept.

Imagine a society in which 50 percent of the population is a slave.

Now imagine that you do not know anything about your own position in this society. Essentially, you have a 50 percent chance of being a slave, just as you have a 50 percent chance of being free.

Do you endorse slavery, in this context?

Overwhelmingly, people will say “no.”

The same concept can be expanded across almost any dimension of political thought: race, sexual orientation, gender identity, economic status, disability status, religious belief, healthcare, and more.

Overwhelmingly, people desire a just, equal, peaceful, happy society.

The question, then, becomes why we don’t live in one, and what we can do to work for a brighter future.

I’m going to choose to not address that head on. I could dive into Marxist theory (not Marxism, they are different!) from my collegiate days, about how capital is a living entity which seeks coalescence at any cost. I could also dive into current events, and rail against perceptions of neo-Nazism running our government.

Instead, I choose this approach:

I grew up watching recorded re-runs of Star Trek. The original one, where William Shatner over-acted every scene he was in. The one that dripped with camp.

You know, that one.

But underneath all of the cheesy acting and dialogue, underneath all of the impressively awful-by-today’s-standard visual effects, there was a sense of greatness. There was a sense that this is the future we should be working towards.

While time has not been particularly kind to Gene Roddenberry’s vision — today’s population adores “dark, gritty” takes of corrupt Federation officials and generally tarnishing the notion of humanity as a whole ever being a force for good — I think there is still a lot of merit in that original series, and a lot we can still learn from as a society.

I’ll close with a pair of quotes. The first is from H. P. Lovecraft, who authored some of my favorite works despite being kind of an all-around awful person: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

Against that fear, though, Roddenberry tells us what to do: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”