You can call me a coward, and you may be right. I often struggle with how much I need to confront people’s ignorance, indifference, and sometimes bigotry about transgender issues. And figuring out whether someone is being ignorant, indifferent of a bigot is sometimes hard. Most of the time, it is simply ignorance. But even educating someone who is being ignorant can be time consuming, difficult, and even painful.

The truth is I could do a lot better. I could educate people more. And I could confront those who should know better. Sometimes I take the heat and do it. Sometimes I don’t. I feel like a coward when I don’t. It sounds cliché but I even have trouble sleeping at night when I look the other way. And then there is the question of whether pushing too hard or holding people accountable for their actions will end up leaving you burned. Chances are that most don’t want to be educated on transgender issues and most don’t want to be held accountable for the things they do that are hurtful to transgender people. They may even go so far as to attack you in your workplace for trying to educate them or hold them accountable. Hard to believe that someone would attack you at your job for holding people accountable for their actions against transgender people, but it truly does happen. Really. In fact, it happened to me just this week.

And when the transgender community has such shocking rates of unemployment and underemployment, you think twice about jeopardizing your job.

While I continue to push myself to be stronger and more courageous, fortunately, some transgender people are more courageous than me. Police Commissioner Theresa Sparks is one of those people. I remember when she was first appointed to the Commission. The night before her appointment, I was stopped by a police officer on my way home for a broken tail light. If you don’t know this, let me educate you. Most, if not all, transgender people live in fear of the police, of being arrested and of going to jail. I have yet to meet a person who either has not been harassed by a cop about their gender or doesn’t have an underlying fear about it. Obviously there are cops who are fine, but that night when I was pulled over by a Police officer, I spent 35 minutes answering hostile questions about my gender as if I had committed a crime by being me.

I couldn’t go to sleep when I got home. I literally paced up and down the hall for hours. I was so angry. I had done my best to get out of the situation and didn’t confront him like I should have. I did my best to get out of the situation for fear that he would take me to jail. But I felt like a coward for not confronting him.

But the next day, I got an email from the San Francisco Sentinel telling me that Theresa’s appointment to the Police Commission had been forwarded to the full board. The relief and happiness I felt that a transgender person was appointed to the Commission is hard to put into words. Having transgender representation on a Commission of a Department that has so much power over my community is profound. And I don’t even have it so bad. Most of the transgender folks who are harassed are mostly immigrants and people of color and face much more oppression.

Another reason I was thrilled at her appointment was that Theresa actually had a history of work advocating on police accountability. During her tenure as a Human Rights Commissioner and on the Transgender Implementation Task Force, she secured new protocols that profoundly changed the way the police treat transgender people for the better. That’s why Chris Daley from the Transgender Law Center, Shawna Virago from Community United Against Violence, and I all supported her appointment to the Police Commission. And when she was appointed, our community got a tireless advocate who is not afraid to call the question, educate, and even hold politicians accountable to our community.

Last winter, I wrote in leftinsf about how Theresa stood up at the Human Rights Campaign dinner and called the question on their indifference and ignorance towards the transgender community. On the national level, there had been quite a debate over whether the ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) should include gender identity along with sexual orientation. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had come out in favor of protecting transgender people from discrimination, but the Human Rights Campaign had not.

I had never gone to a HRC dinner, but I went to the Human Rights Campaign dinner in San Francisco last year because Theresa was being honored and I wanted to be there to support her. Many of us have boycotted the dinner for years because they wouldn’t include gender identity in ENDA.

I think Theresa and I were the only trans folks in a room full of hundreds of lesbians and gay men from San Francisco. When Theresa spoke, I truly choked up. In a quiet, steady voice, she called the question. She talked about how on the Equality California, the statewide equivalent of HRC, had done the right thing and truly included us in their agenda by moving legislation that protected us from discrimination in employment and housing. Everyone in the room just kind of sat there. That night, she made the audience understand how important it is for HRC to care about transgender issues.

HRC changed their policy shortly afterwards and while there were hundreds, if not thousands of trans activists who made the difference in moving this issue for many, many years, my friend and hero Theresa had the guts to stand up and say and do the right thing in a critical moment.

So I may or may not have the energy to confront ignorance or indifference on any given day, or I may not even have the courage to confront bigotry but fortunately we have at least one LGBT leader who is willing to hold people, even politicians, accountable–who is willing to defend transgender people when other LGBT leaders either are afraid to do it, don’t care enough to do it or just don’t see it in their self-interest to do so. I am honored to have her as a friend and I truly love her. She is my hero, my sister and I will always, always defend her and have her back. I may not have the courage to stand up for myself, but when someone attacks her, watch out. I will definitely not be a coward.