I'm An Outsider Living Deep In MAGA Country. This Is What Most People Will Never Know About Life Here.

The morning air smells like wet rust and cigarette smoke. I balance my coffee on the porch railing and watch a woodpecker hammer against a dead tree. Down the road, an ATV roars awake. Someone’s rooster is late to the party. Out here, noise is how you remind the world you’re still alive.

They call it a holler, but most days it feels more like an echo.

Sound rolls through these hills and comes back smaller, thinner, as if even the mountains are tired of carrying bad news. Down here, the creek never stops talking, unless it dries up from lack of rain. The frogs don’t care who’s president. The trees whisper things older than prayer. And me — I’m still learning how to listen.

I live at the bottom of a hollow in Dickenson County, Virginia, where the mist hangs low and the past never really leaves. The dirt road winds down like a scar, the kind that healed wrong but still holds. Out here, everybody knows your business before you do. They remember what your mama said in ’86 and who you dated in high school, and they keep track of both like Scripture. Appalachia can love you, sure — but it also never forgets what it thinks you are.

These days, they call me Maya. That still surprises a few folks, though it’s been over five years now. Sometimes I imagine the gossip spreading like kudzu, growing wild in the dark corners of convenience stores and shuttered diners. I came out as a transgender woman at 44, in the middle of the pandemic, in one of the reddest counties in the state. The world was falling apart on TV, and I was falling together at home.

When I told the truth about myself, it wasn’t fireworks and parades — it was quiet. The kind of quiet that presses against your ribs. I had already spent decades pretending to be someone who could survive this place easier than I could. I was the funny one, the dependable one, the man who never quite looked right in his own reflection. Then the world shut down. Masks on faces, silence in streets, time thick as syrup. For the first time in my life, there was nowhere to run from the mirror.

It happened like this: I looked at my reflection one morning, unshaven and tired, and decided I’d rather be hated for the truth than praised for a lie. I told my daughter first. She smiled, said she understood, and hugged me so hard I cried. I told a few close friends next. They didn’t all stay, but the ones who did became the spine of my new life.

Coming out here wasn’t an act of rebellion. It was an act of survival. The hollow has a long memory and short mercy. I knew what I was risking — my safety, my social life, my sense of belonging — but I also knew the alternative was dying quietly, piece by piece, in plain sight.

And then there’s my leg. Below the knee, gone. It’s been over seven years, but I still dream about the weight of it sometimes — the continual phantom ache, the itch that never ends. Losing it taught me what the body can survive. Coming out taught me what the soul can. I joke that I’m part machine now, but the truth is, the prosthetic feels more honest than the man I used to pretend to be. It’s not original, but it’s mine.

The hormones didn’t just soften my skin, they softened the world. Everything I’d been numb to started to feel again: grief, joy, even boredom. Especially boredom. I used to fear it. Now it feels like breathing. Rebirth isn’t a single moment. It’s a process of continuous combustion. Every time I tell my story, a little more of the old me burns away.

Living as a leftist trans woman in MAGA country is like speaking a language nobody wants to admit they understand. People here are complicated — God-fearing and gun-loving, kind and cruel in the same breath. They’ll pray for your soul on Sunday and vote against your existence on Tuesday. You learn to read body language fast: the too-long stare at the grocery store, the clerk who won’t meet your eyes, the neighbor’s wife who suddenly finds something fascinating on the ground when you walk by.

There’s the maintenance person who works on my house for an incredible rate, but won’t say my name out loud. The cashier who whispers, “You look nice today,” like it’s contraband. The estranged family member who follows my author page in secret. Every kindness here comes wrapped in camouflage.

I remember one afternoon at the Food City checkout. A man in a camo jacket looked me up and down and muttered something about “men in dresses.” His wife smacked his arm without looking at him. She just said, “Don’t you start.” I’ll never know if she meant it as protection or embarrassment, but either way, it worked. I got to keep my groceries and my dignity.

That’s how it goes here — precarious kindnesses, accidental mercies. The same guy who once called me a slur might still pull my car out of a ditch in the snow. Nobody talks about it later. Reciprocity is a language older than politics.

People are struggling out here. Coal’s practically gone, jobs are gone, hope’s on clearance at the Family Dollar. But there’s always a flag in every yard — bigger than the porch, brighter than the future it pretends to promise. I ride past “TRUMP 2024” signs and think, you can’t eat patriotism. The same folks who can’t afford insulin are cheering billionaires who’d step over their bodies on the way to a tax cut.

Still, I love them. Or maybe I love the version of them that used to be before fear became the dominant religion. I want to believe we can find each other again, somewhere between the wreckage and the redemption.

Courtesy of Maya Fisher

When the world feels small, I build new ones.

I paint. I write. I build tiny battlefields for my Warhammer armies, painting lava and smoke onto plastic that will never breathe but somehow feels alive. My Tyranids are volcanic nightmares, all obsidian claws and molten sinew. My Salamanders wield flamethrowers and glow like the forge itself. I’m not religiously affiliated. Creation is how I pray. Paint, glue, story — it’s all resurrection in different forms.

I’m part of a small mutual-aid art collective called Patchwork Kinfolx. We make art, trade food and share warmth. We don’t have much, but we have each other. We raise money for queer folks who can’t pay their rent, run pop-up art shows in borrowed buildings, and host the queerest family reunion on the planet, where laughter fills the air like incense. It’s not utopia. It’s survival made beautiful.

We sit shoulder to shoulder at Pride events, our work on display, while snacking on chips and eating pizza on paper plates. Someone’s painted canvases; someone else, a series of Pride bricks. The radio plays, and it’s perfect. For a few hours, no one’s scared. We’re just color and noise and belonging.

In a county where the library’s funding gets cut and the arts are seen as frivolous, we’ve made our own temple out of paint-stained tables and folding chairs. Our currency is compassion. Our economy is care. When someone’s heater breaks, someone else shows up with blankets. When someone’s out of groceries, we share what we have, no questions asked.

All of us are queer, trans, or otherwise “other.” We’re the town’s invisible artists, its inconvenient miracles. The collective is where I stop feeling like a curiosity and start feeling like a person again.

When we gather, there’s music, laughter, and cheap coffee strong enough to dissolve grief. I paint off-camera during our meetings. Most recently, I painted a dragon — its wings outstretched, the tips singed, and its mouth glowing. My partner said, “That’s you.” Maybe she was right. I’ve been burned and rebuilt so many times that rising feels like muscle memory now.

But for every night of laughter, there are 10 nights of silence.

There’s a certain loneliness that comes from living where your truth feels like a foreign language. You learn to carry your own echo. I scroll through social media, see the bright swirl of queer life in cities, and wonder what it would feel like to just be — to walk into a bar without bracing myself, to hold my partner’s hand in public without calculating escape routes.

Isolation isn’t just physical here. It’s cultural. It’s spiritual. You start to shrink your gestures to fit inside the silence of others. You stop correcting people when they misgender you because exhaustion wins more often than hope.

One night, I almost deleted it all — every page, every painting, every trace of myself online. I thought, if the world wants silence, I’ll give it silence. But then my phone buzzed. A message from a young trans kid I met in Pikeville, Kentucky: “Your book made me feel real.” I sat there crying in the dark, the holler humming like a lullaby. I didn’t quit.

Some nights, I sit on my porch, cigarette glowing like a signal flare, and listen to the creek. The loneliness hums like a second heartbeat. I think about the friends who drifted away when I transitioned, the family who still won’t say my name or even speak to me after three years, and the strangers who’d rather I didn’t exist. It’s a strange thing — to be both invisible and too visible at the same time.

People call me “resilient.” They mean it kindly, but I sometimes hate the word. It sounds like something indestructible. I’m not. I’m soft and stubborn, stitched together with nicotine, hope, titanium and paint. Resilience doesn’t mean strength. It means you keep breathing even when no one tells you to.

Courtesy of Maya Fisher

They say Appalachia is dying, but I don’t believe it. It’s just evolving, the way I did — slowly, painfully, beautifully. The same stubborn spirit that raised me won’t let me go, no matter how much it hurts. These hills are harsh, but they hold me. When the sun hits them just right, everything goldens — the rusted trucks, the kudzu, even the broken glass in the ditches. Beauty doesn’t need permission to exist.

I’ve learned that the hollow isn’t empty. It’s just waiting to be filled — with laughter, with art, with defiance. Every time someone queer or trans or disabled or different decides to stay, we plant a flag of our own. Not the kind that waves on porches, but the kind that says, I’m here, and I’m not leaving quietly.

I’ve been called many things: sinner, survivor, miracle, mistake, authentic, abomination. But mostly, I’m a storyteller. And stories are how we outlast the silence. Every time I speak my truth, I make space for someone else to do the same. That’s what living in the hollow really means — it’s learning to send your voice through the mountains, hoping it finds another voice to answer back.

When the sun drops behind the ridge, the creek starts talking again. I light another cigarette and listen. The echo comes back softer, but it always comes back. Maybe that’s what survival really is: learning to answer yourself.

I still don’t know if I belong here. Maybe belonging isn’t the point. Maybe the point is to exist so fully that even the ones who hate you have to admit you’re alive. Maybe the hollow is less a place and more a lesson: that life, like sound, doesn’t stop when it meets resistance — it just echoes.

So I stay.

I stay because someone has to keep telling the story.

I stay because the creek keeps talking, and the mountains still listen.

I stay because every time I look at this place — scarred, stubborn and still standing — I see myself.

And that’s enough.

Maya Fisher is a transgender author from the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Her debut novel, “Reborn in Shadows: From the Ashes,” won Best LGBTQIA+ Fiction in the 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards and was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress. She is the founder of One-Legged Woman Publishing LLC, dedicated to uplifting underrepresented voices. Her work centers resilience, queer identity and truth-telling rooted in Appalachia.