For most of my life, whenever anyone wanted to compliment me, they would call me “strong.” It was the go-to piece of praise, from everyone — parents, partners, bosses — and I got sick of it. I wanted to hear that I was smart, funny, kind, insightful; “strong” wasn’t a compliment. It wasn’t even a choice.

When people called me “strong,” what they seemed to mean was that if I decided something was bearable, I could bear it; if I decided something needed doing, I would get it done. “Strength” like that isn’t strength. It’s pain tolerance. Lifting that couch will fuck up my back, same as yours, but I’ve decided that it’s okay for my back to get hurt. Addressing this conflict will hurt my feelings and make me sad, but I’ve decided on sadness, because the alternative is putting up with bullshit. Both outcomes are bad. I get to choose which one I prefer.

Anyone could be strong that way, if they chose to be. Everyone would be strong, if they had no other options. If you are presented with a life-threatening situation, your choices are to be “strong” or to die, and most people will do what it takes to avoid dying. I did what most people do. I lived.

Being trans in the United States is a life-threatening situation. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Look at the landscape: J.K. Rowling is tweeting probably-faked stories about “detransition” to millions of fans. Lia Thomas became the first transgender woman to earn a national swimming championship, and suddenly everyone cares about national swimming titles just enough to say vile things about trans women who win them. A bestselling author blames trans people for unfairly denying her of literary prizes after she told them to shut up about transphobia in her friend’s novel. Texas is trying to take trans children away from supportive parents; Idaho is trying to put trans health care providers in prison for life; these are just two of the many, many anti-trans bills being put forth in U.S. state legislatures.

This is one week. Less than one: It’s one Monday morning, which will be Tuesday by the time you read this. Being “strong” doesn’t feel like enough for these circumstances. What I’ve been calling “strength” is a selective deadening of feeling, a decision to endure whatever I need to endure for however long I need to endure it. Toughening up and powering through will not sustain me. What gets me through will be my capacity for joy.

I’m not going to claim this as a fresh insight. Writers from Emma Goldman to adrienne maree brown have covered the role of joy in the struggle against oppression. “Trans joy” is such an established Thing that it has inspired holidays and anthologies. I’m not pioneering any new concepts here.

What I am doing, though, after a lifetime of gritting my teeth and getting through things, is realizing what those concepts mean. In the quiet moments of my life, when I am at peace with myself, I have begun to feel a tremendous power — not the fight, but the thing worth fighting for, something potent and alive and very, very threatening to any worldview that depends on my suffering.

There is a reason that I am good at staying numb. I was told, from an early age, that I did not exist. In the place and time where I grew up, trans women were visible — visible as monsters, visible as jokes; visible in a way that only ever made them targets of hatred — but trans men were simply not discussed, ever. I had no words to describe myself until I was an adult, and by that time, I had been so inundated in shame and fear that I didn’t use them.

What do you learn, in that context, if not how to stop existing? I became an expert at cutting off and freezing any part of myself that interfered with my proper functioning. I withdrew. I drank. I daydreamed. I became so painfully shy that, to this day, I am uncomfortable speaking to anyone outside of my immediate family. I was a nation of one, living inside my skull, and I was not in pain. I wasn’t anywhere you could find me.

Joy yanked me out of my head, into my body. Cutting my hair short, borrowing a boyfriend’s clothes, watching the pictures that floated up in my mind when I got turned on; all of them, eventually, led me to impossible conclusions. I tried not to follow, but joy is insistent. Once you get even a bit of it, you need more. Our bodies pull us toward what we need, with or without permission: The way you need to sleep when you’re tired, the way you need to eat when you’re hungry, is the way I needed to follow that happiness where it led.

Now I exist inside joy, after a lifetime spent walking around the perimeter. I used to think of life as a burden, a weight I had to carry around; I now want to live, with an intensity that scares me. It takes so little to make me happy: Rubbing the stubble on the back of my buzz-cut skull when I’m stuck or frustrated. The way my shoulders are starting to fill out my shirts. Sitting on my front doorstep, knees open, holding a cup of coffee between them; no need to hide or disguise my posture, just taking up the amount of space that I take. My husband calling me “mister.” My kid yelling at me to shave when I rest my cheek on her head.

The fact of being in a body feels good to me, these days, in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. Food tastes better. I enjoy feeling my weight on the ground when I walk. These are such simple, stupid pleasures, the kind I wouldn’t notice if I hadn’t once gone without them, and their very simplicity and stupidity makes it seem all the more horrific that the state is willing to kill or torture children in order to prevent them from ever having them.

It’s not that I want to evade the injustices of the world by focusing on my own happiness. Nor do I want to portray myself as more oppressed than I am; I’m a white, middle-class guy in a blue state. I have more advantages than disadvantages. Joy is not an option for everyone, not now, and I know that.

Yet the possibility of happiness is what makes the injustice register. Suffering matters more now that I know it isn’t mandatory. I used to tell myself that no-one was happy; that the world was a hard place, and no-one ever got everything they wanted. You can reconcile yourself to deprivation that way. Everyone is strong when they don’t have options. Everyone can go without when the things they want aren’t real.

What if it’s all real? What if the joy we’re capable of feeling, as trans people, is what our bodies are supposed to experience? What if joy is useful information, a sign that we’re doing something right, and our needs are “impossible” only insofar as a patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist culture is built to deny them?

I’m not telling you to be selfish, to be greedy, to hurt people or exploit them or step on them to get ahead. I am asking: If it were possible to be happy, what would make you happy? If you could have exactly what you wanted, if I could reach behind my back right now and hand it to you, what would you ask for? If joy is only out of reach because someone is keeping it from you — if there are laws being passed against your joy, lies being told to scare you away, rape and murder being deployed to destroy the people who have it — would you not do everything in your power to fight those people? Does the fact of joy not require you to change the world?

Again, I’m hardly the first person to have this insight. I might be one of the last; it’s taken me time to get here. What I know is that my joy is a more potent motivator than my ability to keep my head down and push through adversity. One of those responses was designed to help me exist in a context of adversity. One of them is an implicit demand for change.

I am committing to the demand in my joy, the power of knowing that I have something real to live for — that all trans people do, and that we could have it, here and now, in this lifetime, if the world would get out of our way. When that joy bubbles up in my chest, I am feeling something that millions of people have tried and failed to take away from me. That our joy still exists, even in a place and time this dangerous, is how I know we’ll win.