clamavi ad te
Nearly half of living trans people–surviving trans people–have attempted suicide.
Nearly half of those of us who did not succeed in killing ourselves have tried.
Nearly a tenth of us will be murdered. Nearly half of us will be raped. Most of us will experience violence from loved ones and almost all of us will be denied homes and jobs. This is not hyperbole. These are the numbers as the world currently stands. But the most devastating one, as far as I am concerned, is that first one. Nearly half of the living have tried not to be. That is: let’s leave behind all the nearly. More than half of us have tried to end our own lives and many of us have succeeded. We are a heartbroken people.
This is not arbitrary. This is not a mistake. This is not for no reason. This is because we live in a world that has systematically forced into us the falsehood that we are unworthy of the basic consideration of humanity. This is because we–and we are a beautiful people, a powerful people, a beloved and phenomenal people–have been fed falsehood after falsehood until we were convinced that we were the problem, and not the campaign, from the institution on down to the individual, to erase, denigrate, break, and murder us. This is the failure state of the communities we live in: our families, our religious communities, our political leaders, our movements, our governments, our cultures. This is us–trans people–as a people–being forced to carry the weight of an entire world’s failure.
If we are so desperate to escape this world–if we see no other alternative, or worse, loathe ourselves so very much–it is because our communities have failed us. They can do better. We can do better. We deserve better. We are not so full of self-hate because something is wrong with us. We do not do such terrible violence to ourselves because that is what we deserve. We do not abdicate the belief in our own inherent dignity and worth lightly or easily. It is torn out of us, little by little, in daily, tiny murders. And every time we cringe and scrape and apologize for breathing, for taking up space, for speaking, for loving, every time we ask for forgiveness just for being what we are, every time we internalize story after story about how we are dead to our loved ones, ask to be brutalized, need to expect that what we are will merit every door closed in our faces, we are participating little by little in our own suicides.
I am no longer interested in sweet words about this. We convince ourselves we are the problem because we are taught to do so, and we are all taught this, minute by minute, even those of us who mostly don’t believe it. We are reminded every hour how low and vile we are despite our best efforts. If you have for an instant believed that you are unworthy of love, that you are wrong, that you are anything less than a person, it is very simply because your community has failed you.
When you have been told you are less than human–less than sacred–less than beautiful–your community has failed you. When you believe it, it is because your community has failed you. I do not intend to mince words.
If you are out there believing that you are less than other people–that you are unworthy–that those who love you are settling, or tolerating, or deserve your apology–that those you love are not lucky to have your love–your community has failed you. Your family has failed you. Your faith, if you have one, has failed you. Your leaders have failed you. If you or the people around you are using words that make you feel like a thing; if you are frightened to have basic bodily functions in public; if you talk about yourself like a disease, not a person; if you see nothing ahead in your old age but the bleakness of despair, isolation, and abuse; if your youth is a neverending desperation to get out and away to somewhere you cannot trust exists; if you are quietly taking your bag out from under the seat another has taken from you and moving on instead of asserting yourself; if you are telling yourself it is excusable for other people, even loved ones, not to afford you the basic respect of your own name; if you are believing this is the best you can do, they have let you down.
You deserve better. Because you are not the problem. You are not broken. You are not worthless. You are not a problem and you are not a mistake.
We talk a lot about principles and rights, but I am not talking about rights and don’t want to. Rights are the purview of politics and I don’t want to talk politics. I don’t want to talk analysis or discourse or theory.
I want to talk morals. It is a moral issue that our community is full of despair and self-hatred and self-disgust. It is not a matter of rights. It is not a matter of laws or votes or commandments. It is a moral issue. It is a theological issue. It is an issue of fundamental, basic human-ness. And I think sometimes we, as a community, especially those of us so proud to be radicals, forget that sometimes we rush ahead of the community, the culture, the people to whom we are connected, and want to talk about our rights before we talk about what we deserve and why we deserve it. We want to talk about protecting our own before we give each other reason to believe we are worth protecting. We want to jump in with both feet and spread the word about what we ought to have in society without convincing our people that we are worthy of not just full participation in society, civil or social, but of love. Of beauty. Of truth. Of basic humanity. Of self-respect.
This is not about self-esteem. This is not about self-help. This is a moral issue. This is an issue of the basic liturgy of human interaction–because it is our daily rituals that define the four corners of the world and the arches of the sky, it is our stories that tell us how to recognize our own faces, and we have been denied our place in the human liturgy for far too long and it is long past time to erupt up from the landscape that conceals us and demand, not just our rights, but the basic essential core of worth and decency that makes us people and therefore worthy of rights in the first place. We have been denied this and we have been told we are the problem. Those of us who are political, like me, hear often about ourselves as a cause. Those of us who are academic, like me, hear often about ourselves as a concept. But we have gotten ahead of ourselves because too many of us–leave alone everyone else, us!–have not heard about ourselves as people. We have been excluded from our own landscape of story and ritual. We have been ejected from our own moral universe. We have been torn from our own regard. And we are killing ourselves by degrees because of it. At eight years old I put a kitchen knife to my chest and pushed, and it was only a miracle that caused me to falter and fail. That eight year old child was not the problem. I was not the problem. A world that taught me that I had no place in it, that taught me to look away from my own holy truth and afford myself not even a scrap of the respect I agreed all other people merited, that taught me that nothing done to me could be wrong because my own moral universe did not include me–that world was and is the problem.
If for a moment in your life you have spent a breath or a thought hating yourself, looking on yourself with disgust and contempt, it is because people have let you down, and those people were wrong. You deserve not to submit to them. You were never the problem. If for a moment you thought your family, your friends, your lovers, needed to compromise to love you, thought they could do better and have a real person instead, it is because your community has let you down, from the top to the bottom.
If our leaders cannot tell us this–if we as leaders cannot tell each other this–we are fundamentally and profoundly abdicating our responsibility to our people, who are crying out for justice. If you run a church or a support group or a political faction or a newsletter or a website. If you speak to our people in public, if you guide young people or those just discovering themselves, if you are entrusted with the responsibility to guide any of us, and you do not make it clear that we are whole, we are real, we are worthy, we are beautiful? You are letting us down and you can do better. You can do better than letting that lie go unchallenged. Our people are hungry for the truth. We are starving. If you deny them that food, if you feed them garbage instead, it is on you.
This is not politics, or theory. It is a moral issue. We are under the arch of the same sky, and yet we are denied the sight of it, leave alone the hope that we might be virtuous enough to share in holding it up.
We are not the problem. We are not broken. We are not dirty. Wrong is not our name. We are not wrong. It is long past time to recognize that though we may lose much from truth-telling, when it all burns away, everything that is left is true.
Do not trust me because some great Word is in me. Trust yourself and the Word in you. Trust that you are brim-full of truth. Trust that there is a mighty and lie-less core within you that from birth has told you that you are full of what is good, and trust that the fact you cannot hear it ringing out over your landscape is because it has been buried by other people in a landfill of falsehood.
The fact that you can doubt the truth within yourself is because your community has let you down. And we can do better. We deserve better. We are better than that. We are not wrong.
I do not intend to mince words. Whatever there is in you that tells you that you are not worth loving, not worth living, not worth fighting for: burn it. Burn it down and dig for the truth underneath. Dig down through the ashes of all those lies until you hit bedrock and then, pushing off from it, rise up. We walk in places much too dark and terrible to deny ourselves this. In a world that sanctions and blockades our sources of spiritual nourishment, we carry too much already to weaken ourselves by collaborating with this enforced and unjust impoverishment. We deserve to rise up, and, even if only in ourselves, nurture revolution.
We are real people, beautiful people, and we deserve families, communities, movements, and cultures that honor us. I think we can have them. I believe we can make them. We are part of this human family, worthy, complete, pure, and mighty. And we ought to be able to say this out loud and to ourselves until we know that it is true.
Welcome to church.
Thank you, this is really beautiful and important.
Amanda in the South Bay
7 Nov 10 at 9:47 pm
Love this.
TalieC
8 Nov 10 at 12:04 am
Wow. This is beautiful. May I post a paragraph or so on my LJ and link back to this?
(Also, the teensy bit of Latin I know is failing me; what does “clamavi ad te” mean?)
Seamyst
8 Nov 10 at 4:58 am
It refers to psalm 130; it’s “I cry to you” in English. For me, it evokes the prophets crying for God’s justice and vengeance upon the rich and powerful for usurping the righteous lot of the poor and the powerless.
Carto
8 Nov 10 at 5:13 am
This was heartbreaking and breathtaking.
Seamyst: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_130#Words
interleaper
8 Nov 10 at 5:19 am
** cries **
This is so true, so absolutely true.
GallingGalla
8 Nov 10 at 6:16 am
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing.
Caren
8 Nov 10 at 6:26 am
I want to quote every part of this at once.
Jack
8 Nov 10 at 7:28 am
You always break loose a piece of something crusty and poisonous deep inside me. It always causes tears, and then I breathe it out, and then there is one less piece of poison in me.
You are powerful stuff, lady.
Marlene
8 Nov 10 at 8:19 am
Yes, this is an amazing piece of writing (like all the others). Thank you.
piny
8 Nov 10 at 11:10 am
Thank you.
Shannyn
8 Nov 10 at 1:26 pm
As usually LL, beautifully written. I must say, however, as someone who’s not nor ever been a Christian, I’ve never aspired to join a church nor does it seem like any kind of place of welcome.
ginasf
8 Nov 10 at 1:53 pm
“welcome to church” D: but that’s where my soul was left to die as a child…
sophi
8 Nov 10 at 5:43 pm
little light isn’t proselytizing for a religion, but for respect for our humanity and personhood, and worthiness as people.
What y’all are talking about wrt religion is the kind of failures that little light is writing about. :(
Lisa Harney
8 Nov 10 at 5:50 pm
I actually feel similarly to ginasf; the religious metaphors don’t resonate very well with me (like opening with a quote from a psalm and closing with “Welcome to church”). But even without that common metaphor, I can feel the power in this piece, and wouldn’t be the same way if it wasn’t being written in the writer’s strong metaphors.
TalieC
8 Nov 10 at 6:32 pm
To me, it calls to mind what religion should always aspire to be, rather than what religion so unfortunately often is.
Ivy
8 Nov 10 at 7:01 pm
I don’t think the phrase “Welcome to church” means welcome to a particular religion, or even to religion in general.
To me, this phrase means welcome to that community that honors us as (as LL says) “real people, beautiful people”.
It’s a community, a space that we create together. Not a religion.
GallingGalla
8 Nov 10 at 8:13 pm
I too was uncomfortable with the religious/spiritual language. As an atheist, nothing about me is sacred and I’m not blocked from spiritual nourishment b/c I’m not seeking it. I do get the point of the post and agree with the sentiment. It was well written and poignant. The metaphors in it just happen not to work for me.
EM
8 Nov 10 at 8:30 pm
I long loved you writing (I have “The seam of skin and scales” posted on my fridge). This is great as always.
P.S. I like the church metaphor, even though I’m a atheist personally it works for me despite the heaviness of the literal meaning. It was a big rhetorical risk you took in making the metaphor, I salute you for that as a writer.
P.P.S. Did you take the rhetorical device of “failed you” from the Bullet or the Ballot Speech (Malcolm X)?
poisongirl
8 Nov 10 at 9:53 pm
I agree with EM: “As an atheist, nothing about me is sacred and I’m not blocked from spiritual nourishment b/c I’m not seeking it.”
Joan
8 Nov 10 at 10:52 pm
Honestly–and I speak for absolutely nobody else at QT here–I *am* proselytizing for a religion.
I am proselytizing for the religion of coming home to ourselves and embracing a radical self-respect and self-love and then sharing it with each other. I am proselytizing a radical valuation of kindness, even when it does not seem to make sense, for others and ourselves. I am proselytizing for the religion of refusing to submit to recognizing ourselves as less or worse than other people, even if we have to live under a system that treats us that way. I am proselytizing for a religion of the churches we build within our own ribcages and the edifices we can build for each other and ourselves by joining hands. I have always done so. This has always been what I am saying: that there is truth and glory in us, and those who tell us otherwise are lying. This isn’t a provable or disprovable claim. It’s not a political ideology. It’s not a coherent, philosophically-supported, peer-reviewed, or logical academic opinion. It’s a statement of values. It’s a statement of my particular lens for looking at the world–that is, a theology, in the barest sense of a frame for deciding what I believe holds up the sky. I believe, more or less, that we do.
You don’t need a God of any kind for it. I do think that there is something pious about sufficiently-vehement humanism. There is an element of faith in believing in the goodness of people, and I think issues like self-respect can be called matters of spiritual nourishment without believing in anything like a soul; I don’t know how else to talk about the parts of us that need feeding and can’t be fed with food.
I am a religious person; I won’t apologize for that, and I never have, in all my writing. I am not a Christian–I am not even a monotheist–but I am a seminarian in the process of ordination. It is part of how I talk and write and move and breathe. I know this doesn’t work for everyone and I appreciate the kindness and benefit of the doubt with which many of you have pointed this out. Many of you are not religious or are atheists–that is great. I am married to a woman who is not religious, a huge number of the people dearest to me are atheists and agnostics, and I find their way of living and believing to be profoundly respectable. If these metaphors don’t work for you, I have other ones, but religious, mythological, and spiritual references are often the closest at hand for me, and I am sorry if they are not accessible.
Many others of you, like me, have been hurt by the religions or religious people you have interacted with or grown up in. I do not practice the faith I was raised in. Where I grew up, I was often harmed by people of faith who used faith as a justification. Religion has been used as a powerful weapon against us, whether or not we have religious beliefs of our own.
My suggestion is, if the church or temple or masjid or congregation you grew up with hurt you, devalued you, denigrated you–that community failed you, plain and simple. If the similar communities around you harmed you when you didn’t even belong to them, they failed you and so did the people who should have helped protect you. In pointing out this failure, I hope to suggest that we can demand they be held to a higher standard.
Many of us are not religious. For you all, I beg your patience and indulgence, and I warn you that you may prefer other writer’s work, and that is okay. Many of us are, and grapple with it. Many of us belong to traditions that have treated us with less than the respect that we deserve, and have told us we are the problem. I am sick of it and want it to stop, and I don’t think, in those cases, legal or logical or academic arguments will be enough. I think we have to grab onto the territory of morals and values and hold it. I think we have to fight on that battlefield if we want to win, rather than ceding all of that memetic ground to people who hurt us. Many of us who are people of faith are denigrated in faith communities for being trans and denigrated in trans communities for holding to faith, and end up feeling homeless. We’re told that we’re not allowed to use big Gothic-arched words like “holy.” I think that’s a fundamental devaluing of our personhood. We don’t *have* to use language like I used above, but I want us to feel we have the *option.*
I hope that is okay with everyone. I don’t expect everyone to agree. I have always been a religious writer, in my way, though I believe in emphasizing orthopraxy–how we ought to behave–over orthodoxy–how we ought to believe. I don’t know what’s in anyone’s secret heart. I can’t prove anything. But I know how we act. I know how we treat ourselves and each other. And those things, I have a lot of opinions on. For me, those issues of conduct are spiritual. I know they aren’t for everyone, but I have to tell what is to me the truth.
When I say “welcome to church,” it isn’t meant to be comforting to everyone. It may also mean, “welcome back to the fight,” or “welcome to that hard, scary place that let you down really bad and needs to be changed.”
little light
8 Nov 10 at 11:22 pm
Less longwindedly: I think if we can reclaim “queer,” we can reclaim “faith.” We are under no obligation to do so and I have the utmost respect for anyone who feels that is not a worthwhile endeavor. It is, however, an endeavor important to me personally, and it will show up again when I am writing and speaking, so keep that in mind.
little light
8 Nov 10 at 11:31 pm
@poisongirl: I hadn’t made the connection in my head to “Ballot or Bullet,” but you’ve given me a happy excuse to go back and reread Malcolm X soon. Here, I am most transparently riffing off of June Jordan, Howard Thurman–with whom I have been somewhat fixated lately, and whose writing I think should be required reading for activists, more on that another time–and the “Book of Coming Forth By Day.”
The “failed you” part came from the germ of this post, which was a frustrated outburst that came erupting out of me last Saturday at a gathering of community leaders who I felt were not sufficiently asserting our basic human-ness and worth as trans people. I may or may not have come to my feet and said large sections of this post out of…let us say “a sense of urgency” and leave it at that.
In the phrasing, I hoped to posit a basic responsibility of the people, institutions, and ideals in our lives to uplift our best selves, and thereby to assert that that responsibility is not being fulfilled and must be. It is one thing if the absence of these things in our lives is accepted as the status quo. It is another to suggest that the dishonor done to us as a people is a basic deficiency and abdication of important responsibilities. The fact that we’re holding ourselves in such low regard is an essential system failure that needs to be corrected.
little light
9 Nov 10 at 2:54 am
[...] Re this post from the consistently amazing little light: while those communities outside our own may fail us, we must always keep in mind to avoid we as a community failing our own people… [...]
the letter z
9 Nov 10 at 4:18 am
“Many of us who are people of faith are denigrated in faith communities for being trans and denigrated in trans communities for holding to faith, and end up feeling homeless. We’re told that we’re not allowed to use big Gothic-arched words like “holy.” I think that’s a fundamental devaluing of our personhood. We don’t *have* to use language like I used above, but I want us to feel we have the *option.*”
yes! this! thank you!!
MHS
9 Nov 10 at 5:58 am
Thank you for this.
I don’t have much faith, but this is the most appealing statement of faith I’ve seen in quite a while.
::hug::
mila roo
9 Nov 10 at 7:53 am
I just need to say:
I am trans, I am a person of faith, and I support the thinking and position that little light is laying out here.
This, so much. I feel that, by denigrating faith, by making faith seem old and musty and relegating it to backward-looking fundamentalist Christian churches and preachers, the US left has lost its foundation.
GallingGalla
9 Nov 10 at 10:06 am
The whole piece is wonderful, and so is your follow-up on faith. I always have felt that there’s something profoundly sacred about my sexual orientation and gender identity.
I wonder, little light, if it would be okay if I translated this piece into French to share (non-commercially and with attribution) with members of my community here in Montreal.
Ace
9 Nov 10 at 10:06 am
The last time I was in a place where few queers were, or could be, out was in 1992 in Southern Illinois. Code for the local queer bar (where the whole community shared space) was “church”.
Are you going to church tonight? I’ll see you at church. Have we met before? I think we go to the same church.
Despite, or possibly because of my devout atheism, I really like the idea that we are eachother’s church. That’s something I can believe.
Marlene
9 Nov 10 at 10:36 am
I don’t think I’ve read anything this beautiful in a really long time.
genderbitch
9 Nov 10 at 11:29 am
I know the religious terms don’t resonate with many of us, and my own spiritual beliefs are hard to nail down with mere words, let alone to find expressed in an already established belief system.
But yeah–this, a thousand times. We need our own moral force. We need to find our faith in our self-worth. We need a church–not a building for listening to dreary sermons, but a place where a community may come and celebrate its common faith and its bonds.
Thank you, little light, for shining so brightly.
Lilith von Fraumench
9 Nov 10 at 11:35 am
I do think that there is something pious about sufficiently-vehement humanism
I can’t say enough how intense this line is for me. Seeing this one line makes it all fall into place; it’s a piety that includes me, even though I wouldn’t describe it in those terms.
We must claim our human worth in, in any language we have. For you, this is the language of holiness, for me it’s more humanist terms. But it’s all the same fight.
Thank you for this.
TalieC
9 Nov 10 at 12:37 pm
This is so deeply moving. Thank you for writing this and for your further comments on treating our humanity as sacred. If I have any sort of faith or spirituality, it’s that we need to recognize and love the humanity in ourselves and in others.
Grace
9 Nov 10 at 12:57 pm
[...] post by little light at Questioning Transphobia is a deeply moving, powerful piece on the inhumanity of [...]
“We are real people, beautiful people” « Are Women Human?
9 Nov 10 at 1:52 pm
I am an atheist, but I am profoundly moved by this conception of duty to one another, as well as to the sacred we learn to see in ourselves. When I look at the way trans people have been treated by authority, I see theft of grace: an insistence that this community is a collection of bodies, crimes, or mistakes, rather than people. Children of no one.
And so I feel that this post makes some important connections.
piny
9 Nov 10 at 2:31 pm
Thank you for saying what I have been trying to say for months– that we must above all believe in and fiercely protect our DIGNITY as trans people. No more backing down when we have any choice.
Asher
9 Nov 10 at 5:17 pm
I am trans and an athiest, and I think this post is beautiful and evocative. Thank you.
Sky
9 Nov 10 at 6:07 pm
this is brilliant. thank you.
omi
9 Nov 10 at 7:50 pm
Beautiful. I’m posting a link from my FB and blog. Thanks for this. I cried the whole way through.
Jessica
9 Nov 10 at 8:31 pm
[...] look at this link from Questioning Transphobia. It’s an amazingly written piece and I just had to share [...]
clamavi ad te « Light Up My…
9 Nov 10 at 8:36 pm
I really wanted to post this to my facebook account, for it truly is a moving and striking piece. It really struck a chord with me
I especially wanted to suggest that my family read it – most notably those that participate in a great many of the wrongs mentioned.
When I tried, I found that the preview snippet – the thing that gives people an idea of what the article is about, said “Capitalism is an act of war upon the poor and the working class”… which obviously is a misrepresentation of the article (AND the purpose of the website), and nothing more…. Complete fail there! That’s actually going to cause people to think that I’m ranting on about marxism or something rather than the important message of this piece.
Krissie Pearse
9 Nov 10 at 9:42 pm
That’s Facebook’s fail, not ours. I can’t control how Facebook (as haphazardly coded as that thing is) decides to read text from a webpage.
It does relate to a lot of the blogging we’ve done recently, and is completely applicable to this website. I’ll change it because Facebook somehow thinks that blog subtitles are in any way related to linked posts.
Lisa Harney
9 Nov 10 at 9:59 pm
It’s to do with the structure of the page. Facebook looks at the first text content it finds on the page HTML – unfortunately, that bubble div is prioritised as the first content item in the page XHTML – simply moving it so that it appears after in the template should hopefully fix it in future.
Thank you, by the way.
Krissie Pearse
9 Nov 10 at 11:20 pm
“I do think that there is something pious about sufficiently-vehement humanism.” (Little Light) This.
” I am profoundly moved by this conception of duty to one another” (Piny) And this.
This whole piece is huge and holy and magnificent. Thank you so much.
Aishwarya
10 Nov 10 at 2:42 am
Well, I mean, the thing is a lot of pages have extraneous text in the style/theme (at least extraneous to the article) and it would do Facebook good to have something that chose the actual page content rather than theme content.
Anyway, not to digress all over.
Lisa Harney
10 Nov 10 at 2:53 am
Oh, Little Light, bless you and thank you for this. My man is coming out as trans to his father tonight. I’ve been praying for him, for Lisa and Emily, and for trans folks as a whole, and this:
“Trust yourself and the Word in you. Trust that you are brim-full of truth. Trust that there is a mighty and lie-less core within you that from birth has told you that you are full of what is good . . . ”
is what I need to pray for. Love.
Elizabeth
10 Nov 10 at 9:52 am
Also, I realize that my previous comment erases the burial of this all-important Truth “under a landscape of falsehood.” My apologies; this was my fault for trying to do two things at once (send an encouraging e-mail to my partner and leave a comment here). I am sorry, as the cultural liefill is, inarguably, one of the hearts of this piece.
Elizabeth
10 Nov 10 at 9:58 am
The truth is more important than the falsehood, Elizabeth. We know the falsehood just fine and the truth isn’t spoken enough. No worries.
It sounds like a fine and worthy prayer. I hope it went well with your partner and his family.
little light
10 Nov 10 at 3:04 pm
This is beautiful. Thank you so much. As yet another trans person of faith, your language really resonates with me.
Simon
10 Nov 10 at 4:15 pm
[...] can change the tone of the night from enjoyable to terrifying, know just how the world sees us (and how we are taught to see ourselves). The reality of being cis does NOTHING to teach you of what it is to be trans, even if being cis [...]
Why trans people should lead trans stuff « Binary Subverter
11 Nov 10 at 12:45 pm
You can also edit the text preview under the link in facebook. Facebook is terrible at picking preview text, so I do this almost every time I post a link. Just click on it and it should turn editable. At least, it does for me.
The link title does the same thing, too, but since html is good with titles, that’s less of a problem.
TalieC
11 Nov 10 at 2:52 pm
I really appreciate this as an atheist. I think you exactly described my philosophy. Our world is sacred . People are sacred and though I try to uphold the sacredness of all people, sometimes I fall down.
I wish I had something to add, but you’ve said everything that needs to be said.
alexmac
11 Nov 10 at 8:53 pm
[...] You need to read this now, whether cis or trans. This is not hyperbole. These are the numbers as the world currently stands. But the most devastating one, as far as I am concerned, is that first one. Nearly half of the living have tried not to be. That is: let’s leave behind all the nearly. More than half of us have tried to end our own lives and many of us have succeeded. We are a heartbroken people. (tags: suicide trans transphobia religion christianity) [...]
links for 2010-11-14 « Embololalia
14 Nov 10 at 10:02 am
[...] can I say for those who take their own lives because of what they [...]
I don’t want to be silent this day « Genderqueer 2 genderqueer's Blog
21 Nov 10 at 2:52 am
I was read your words here by an acquaintance at a Transgendered Day of Remembrance event at my schools LGBTQA group. I must say that while I cannot speak to the struggles of the Trans community, I must say, with the upmost respect, that this piece was truly moving. While I can not know, and do not wish to compare to the pain of others, I have at many times in my life struggled with depression, pain, hate, condemnation and such. This piece not only spoke to me, but breathed with me and cried with me. Your words here are certainly powerful, and moving. I felt I needed to seek you out, and thank you.
Stacie
29 Nov 10 at 1:45 am
Oh wow. This is the most moving thing I have read in a long time.
I’m not trans. But I am a minority in many other ways, and I have felt lost and denigrated and worthless and so close to just disappearing or dying because I felt like I was taking up too much space with all my weirdness and inability to conform. Too brown, too queer, not queer enough, not X enough, too Y. good god.
I would love to do a reading of this, but as I am not trans I didn’t think it would be appropriate. But I would love to hear this or see this on a video. Perhaps a collaborative project?
The spirituality you mention in your first comment is one that I perhaps have been subconsciously seeking for ages. I have gone in and out of religion and currently feel like I have been abandoned by any sort of “higher power”, that if there is a God that they don’t give a damn. It’s a very lonely heartwrenching position to be in. Many – including my super humanist boyfriend – have suggested I review my spirituality, but the sense of abandonment was making me confused as to how I could go about it. Your comment gives me some direction, some structure to what I need, the feed for the part of me that needs feeding.
thank you. thank you thank you thank you. love you so much. thank you.
Tiara the Merch Girl
3 Dec 10 at 4:22 am
I am queer, Jewish, and identify as cis (possibly erroneously, idk–I debate who I am on the inside a lot, and occasionally I feel like someone male–but since I’m outwardly so cis-femme, I have cis-privilege whether I want it or not). But for all I don’t know about ME, I do know that this post makes me feel whole in ways that I don’t often, and that I read it at a time when I really needed to. Thanks.
@Tiara the Merch Girl — I was really confused about G-d for the longest time, but in the Jewish tradition we don’t think of G-d as someone who has ever been human, unlike Christianity, and one Yom Kippur I had, I hesitate to call it a vision as that is too grand, but an intuition of sorts, a feeling, that as we were calling out to G-d, G-d looks to us, wanting to help, but not knowing HOW to, for, having set this process of creation/evolution going, G-d has created things in G-d’s image and the image of Ain Soph/Divine/Heaven that are not G-d or Heaven, and that G-d does not really know what to do, even though G-d wants to help, because G-d made something new and it doesn’t work quite the way G-d thought it would, and all the laws G-d tried to lay down and the prophets G-d sent made things both worse and better, because of this lack of understanding. So that G-d has not abandoned us–G-d looks on and cares and tries to help in small ways, but the thing G-d is most comfortable with doing is sending love and good will, because we confuse G-d, and to wipe the creation out, or to change it dramatically, would be to do further violence to it, when we have already proven so good at doing violence to it and to ourselves and at interpreting the words of G-d in the most harmful ways as well as the most helpful and beautiful ones.
(BTW, clamavi ad te is a Latin translation of a Jewish scripture that is used on Yom Kippur, as appropriated by the Catholic Church–all “Old Testament” stuff is appropriated from us without our consent and used by Christians in ways we would not use it and may or may not approve of, though I do LOVE this post *g*)
Now, a lot of this is tied into my understanding of quantum physics (observing things changes them) and science and maths (what is the most beautiful and elegant is also best and most functional) and Kabbalah (the world emanating from Ain Soph in four layers with nine spheres in each and mirrors and breakage) but ultimately it is a sort of Deism–not the careless bored Watchmaker god of the 18th century but rather a G-d who loves us, but allows us free will and does not violate our boundaries by interfering in our lives without our consent and sometimes even with our consent, because we ask for help but when we ask for specific helps, we don’t always know what we are asking for. So I believe that G-d is always with us. But that G-d doesn’t always help because G-d knows that to help *can* mean to violate boundaries, to set larger things in motion that will be worse, to damage our ability to help ourselves.
I mean when you think of the way charity is done for the powerless by the powerful, or the way that parents harm children they love sincerely believing that they are doing the right thing, you can see why G-d might have qualms about throwing the lightning bolts of justice around, even though sometimes maybe we could individually or collectively use a few lightning bolts?
I don’t think G-d has abandoned us. I think G-d is less omniscient than we as religious folks give G-d credit for being. G-d may know exactly what we do to each other and the planet, but G-d doesn’t understand why we do these things, and G-d can see how past interventions have caused more harm than good, and how whatever messages G-d wants us to hear get garbled when they go through human brains and are either messed up (because a lot of times the people who are able to listen/interested in listening to G-d are the ones who don’t understand this species either and lack human ties or have different brain chemistry) or twisted by those in power to suit their own purposes.
(I do wonder whether Christianity would have died out, or what forms it would take in the world of today, had the Emperor Constantine not been shopping for a religion that would make a useful emotional tool of colonialist conquest, and hand-picked the bishops at Nicaea from the Christian groups he found least threatening and most malleable to delineate which forms of Christianity would be acceptable to the new regime and which ones would still be subject to persecution, their scriptures burned and their people oppressed. Jesus was a Jewish prophet, probably a heretical one but possibly just a proselytising one, who started a new religion, and yet we really don’t know what that was about, because we only have what *some* of his followers said about his teachings, and those were the ones that the kyriarchy at that time found useful–and while we have fragments of the rest, we have no way to look at the whole picture, no way at all to know whether his intent was to start a new religion or open up the one he came from, no way at all to know which of the things he is alleged to have said by different groups were the real deal and no way to know whether he’d approve of any of those that came after, without relying on the words of the people who adapted whatever it was he actually taught for their own kyriarchical purposes. But that is a potentially not-useful and divisive digression.)
I guess what I want to suggest to you is that G-d can care without doing anything, particularly if G-d is coming from a place where G-d does not understand everything that G-d is observing, because being able to see how things are working doesn’t enable G-d to understand why G-d’s sentient creations make all the choices they make, and a place where G-d is conscious of the difference in G-d’s power and our power.
Tiferet
31 Dec 10 at 12:33 pm
Merci. Thank you.
Lucy
28 Jan 11 at 11:01 am
Incredibly powerful.
Kaitlyn
30 Jan 11 at 3:01 pm
This is utterly beautiful. Thank you.
Sally
5 Mar 11 at 12:37 pm
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