Let’s face it: the news is a grim read for trans people right now. Every day we hear about some new executive order or piece of legislation targetting us and trying to strip us of our rights, and we have damn few rights to begin with. Whether it’s sports bans as in one of Trump’s EOs or the just failed bill in the US Senate, or whether it’s Texas House Bill 3399 which wants to ban all gender affirming health care for all people, the things being reported in the news are the stuff of nightmares for trans people and can cause us to become seriously depressed if we aren’t careful.

After the US Presidential election in November I myself went into an emotional tail spin where every day just made me feel worse. It seemed that my country had voted for fascism. (Note: it did.) After that, the hits just kept coming, day after day as the news reported more of Trump’s cabinet picks and plans for EOs and legislation. By the time his innauguration came I was extremely stressed out, so much so that the tiniest of things could set me off. The breaking point came one day when I was cooking. I accidentally dropped the lid of a pan on the counter and I lost control of myself for a moment. I took a metal ladle and smashed the glass touch controls of my oven.

After that I realized I had to do something, so I got in the most politically oriented Discord server of mine, where I was an admin, and I let the other admins know that I would be taking a break for my mental health. Then I muted the whole server. I muted the political and news channels in every other server I was in. On my Mastodon account, I set up a masssive filter for keywords associated with negative things so that I would not see them automatically any more. That last actually hid more than half of the posts I was seeing.

I spent a week just completely avoiding all news and only letting myself see positive things. And it worked. I started feeling much better. I became calm again. I did have to replace the oven, but c’est la vie. Life began to return to normal for me. After that first week I started allowing myself to see LGBT related news once more. The negativity was still there, but I was feeling better now, and not getting nearly as much negative news as before, so I was able to handle it.

And that’s where I am today. I let myself see LGBT news, but rarely peek at the news in general. I do see a bit of it since I took up my Discord admin and mod duties again, but now I look in those channels much less often and prefer to wait for someone to complain that the conversation is getting heated and needs a moderator to step in. I’m better able to do that now that I’m not on the verge of screaming and crying all the time.

So to everyone out there struggling to deal with the news, I suggest you do something like I did. First, just take a break from all the negative news of any kind. Give yourself time to decompress and let go of the stress. If something extraordinarily urgent happens, your friends will tell you. Anything else can wait for you to be in a better frame of mind.

Then, when you are ready, pick one topic of news that is most important to you and start following that, while still avoiding the rest. You need to take on only as much negativity as you can handle without the stress eating you alive. Maybe later still, if you are handling things well, you can do a weekly check for the general news and get a whole week in summary. Having only part of one day be stressful is better than having lots of stressors that continually recur day after day.