Even If My Voice Shakes

By Mateo Sánchez Morales (they/them)

My name is Mateo.

I am the eldest child of immigrants and a transgender person learning to speak in a world that wasn’t built with someone like me in mind.

My first language is Spanish.
My first job was as a translator.

I didn’t always understand the weight of that responsibility when I was younger, standing next to my parents as they tried to navigate a country that was not convinced they belonged here. I learned English fast because I had to. In just a few years, I became the voice that adults listened to while my parents stood beside me. I interpreted at restaurants, parent-teacher conferences, hospitals, and government offices. I said words I didn’t always understand, but somehow, they still carried consequences.

As an adult, I’ve seen six-year-olds still doing the same work; interpreting at levels far beyond their years, filling in the structural gaps this country chooses to keep open. I recognize myself in them. Little kids trying to make their voices sound older, more mature. Voices that shake.

Mine still does.

Public speaking gives me a lot of anxiety. People are often surprised by that because my work requires me to speak, present, advocate, and connect. But anxiety doesn’t erase purpose; it strengthens it. Every time I speak, I do so even while fear sits beside me. My voice shakes, but I still speak. 

My anxiety shows up in small moments and in big ones: staff meetings, community events, funder calls, and often, even when I’m asked to introduce myself. My hands tremble. My voice feels tight. My heart races. This is only exacerbated if what I have to say is considered controversial or adversarial, which, as a trans person of color advocating in spaces that don’t always accommodate or welcome my perspective–it often is.

Communicating my identity when I realized I was transgender, was the first time I had to translate for myself. A majorly controversial decision in itself, venturing to explain to the world who I am over and over again, is an ongoing anxiety-provoking experience.

And yet, I keep speaking.

Because silence has never protected people like me.
And invisibility has never saved us.

Today, November 18, is my birthday.
It falls during Transgender Awareness Week and exactly on Transgender Immigrants Day.

I think about that often, how my life poetically coincides with these dates. To exist openly as a trans person from an immigrant family is to defy generations of erasure and state violence. It is to claim a place in a world that has repeatedly told us there is no place for us. My existence is a form of resistance. Not because I want it to be, but because survival itself becomes political when the world tries to make you small. My voice is imperfect, but it is necessary.

I am still learning to speak.
I am still practicing taking up space, demanding to be heard.

This year, my birthday wish is collective:
May every trans, immigrant, anxious, resilient person know that their voice, shaking or not, is powerful, and sacred. 

For as much as I am anxious,
I am still speaking. Even if my voice shakes.