Trans People Were Made to Fight Fascism
Whether We Like It Or Not (Plus: Subversiveness & Spells!)
I wish I could beam all the love in the world to all my transgender/non-binary/genderqueer and otherwise gender expansive siblings right now. Currently in the U.S., we are being targeted and scapegoated, in a time that would be scary enough in all the destabilizing chaos of our government and infrastructure being wrecked. But to have to endure, in addition, this chronic mean-spiritedness, dehumanizing rhetoric, intrusive efforts to control the most intimate aspects of our experience, is—to put it mildly—extremely overwhelming. The accumulation has been hijacking my nervous system for most of the last week, though I’m starting to find my grounding again. At times this past week though it almost hasn’t felt survivable. But we are needed on this Earth, urgently, and I am determined not to let them drain the life from me.
Part of what has kept me going since the election—the life force I have found amidst despair—has been in writing poems and being with (and photographing) the trees in the cemetery nearby. I’m sharing below some of the poems I have written with trans people in mind, in celebration of us and in defiance of the psychological warfare we’re being subjected to. While very little in my life is binary, including this, I like to think of many of these little poems as fitting into one of two categories: subversiveness and spells. Desperate times require a bit of rebellion and a bit of magic! I’ve also chosen photos of trees that feel to me in some way transcendent, full of energy and expressiveness, much the way gender can be.
I see gender not so much in this small superficial way. It cannot be reduced to parts and roles, much as our world likes to try (not to mention certain biologically clueless executive orders). I believe gender is more than just an identity, more than the body, more than these sort of clunky generalizing concepts of masculinity and femininity. It is a deeper confluence of internal essence and outward expression than words can adequately capture. An intricate web of specific and endlessly varied modes of feeling, being, experiencing, and expressing. A powerful creative force. It is social, cultural, spiritual. It is deep knowledge of oneself. The attempt to interfere in our relationships to ourselves and how we interact with the world around us is such a violation.
But it is no wonder that authoritarians attempt to constrain gender identities and expressions. If you can control expression in this way, if you can suppress it so that you cause people to censor their very gestures, silence their outer expression of their inner worlds, then you have contained and broken the human spirit. All the easier to manipulate and maintain power over your subjects.
It starts with trans people, but of course it's never meant to end there. They come for us first because we are breaking the rules the most obviously (and perhaps the most exquisitely). We can be held up as the example of what happens to those who disobey. We color further outside of the lines and in so doing, we are a challenge to authority. A threat to the supposedly natural order. We stir something in some people that distresses them about themselves. Our existence reveals some deeper truth about the unfair concessions we are all (even cis people) asked to make in a world that oppresses through social control and separation from one another.
But in some way it is a fool’s game to come for us first. We have been resisting these efforts to restrain us throughout our lives just to be ourselves in a basic way. We have already been fighting this. We have had to be so attuned to ourselves that—though the world has told us over and over in countless ways since our birth that we are one way—we have come to understand who we really are contradicts all this, with little to no road map for doing so. Our knowledge of ourselves is pretty unshakable or we would not be willing to take so much risk.
Maybe in some way we are the best equipped to light the way in fighting fascism, at least the part of it that is about owning us from the inside. If we–and I mean all of us–are to survive this, we cannot allow them to separate us from ourselves, from one another. Our human spirits must remain ours. We must remain woven in to one another. We must remain honest, present, expressive: our full human selves in all our endless iterations.
Be unbreakable, or if you’re already broken make of yourself a mosaic. Let them lacerate themselves on your broken pieces for daring to lay hands on you.
Impervious Good luck containing our fluidity and our shine. We spill out beyond your grasp. We are practiced at existing, unlikely grass pushing through concrete. We defy your notions of gravity, glittering everywhere to spite you and in spite of you.
Enough! I’m letting go of the part of me that thinks it’s helping when it hurts me before anyone else can. As they argue over whether we are human enough for indoor plumbing, I vow to insulate myself with—instead of cruelty—there’s more than enough—the luminous warmth of my own tenderness.
To the Big, Strong Cis Men Who Bully Trans People on the Internet Oh! Did you think you were the template? But your fear is founded; I am here to infiltrate manhood, rewrite it from the inside until the mark of a true man is the capacity to weep without shame at the beauty of a sunset, to gather the strength to hold the world in kindness.
Lunacy Oh, honey. Call us whatever; we can’t unland on the moon. You can’t unsparkle the stars.
Trans Substantiation You say God does not make mistakes. So what if the mistake is yours? Mistaking form for function, insisting on immutability as impermanence unfolds before us all. What if God wants this transformation, not just mine, not just the miracle of becoming–truly–in this body with a kind of holy gratitude. But also the turning of your illusions inside out, to better see your own face, no longer blind to your superimposition of meanings–not God's–but man's incurious failure of awe, reducing life to the body without the animating soul.
Emanation They are a barren spigot hollowed out and harsh with rust. All the spinning of their knobs will get them nowhere. They cannot bear that we are flow and pulse and fire. So they try to shroud us in the dark abyss: but we are light we are light we are light
Supernatural Are we the witches of our day, seemingly too fluid, too transcendent? We know too much, refuse to color within the rigid lines they’ve drawn for us. As we make them shudder at the beauty of our intimacy with truth, we collapse their house of cards.
Thank you for reading and viewing this post. May you find the strength and joy to hold onto your human spirit in these trying times.
