holding on
I believe in trans people.
Not because we are magically insightful. Not because we are full of arcane shapechanger wisdom. Not because we are more or less great or holy than anyone, in our way. We have among us wonderful people and people who do and say terrible things. We have our crooks and our hypocrites and our abusers and our traitors, same as anyone, right alongside our heroes and champions and grand examples of high character. We are a mixed bag, you and me and you and you and you. We don’t have any more or fewer secret Mysteries in our blood, wherever it bleeds from. We’re people, with our tiny daily mistakes and triumphs, our hopes and our hopes for forgiveness.
I believe in trans people.
Not because we have suffered, though so many of us have suffered. We have hurt in ways that have transformed us as individuals and communities, and we’ve talked about that. I’ve talked about that plenty. We all know the numbers and the statistics and the terrible stories, these days. We pass them around as something that’s a little bit heartbroken hagiography and a little bit campfire scare gossip. We know who has sneered at us, and who has shut the doors. We know all of this. You certainly know this about me, by now, where I’ve left blood to sink into the dirt, where I’ve looked into same dark you’ve looked into, where I’ve gotten lost, where we’ve all felt alone.
The thing is, we’ve defined ourselves in those terms. Justified ourselves in those terms. Believe we are here, we say, showing our scars and fresh cuts. Believe we are real. Believe we matter. Believe that we are people because what we have been through, people do not deserve, and I hope you see we didn’t deserve it. We have aligned ourselves, symbolically and narratively, with our suffering: our dysphoria and abandonment and grief and martyrdom. And all of those things are true, and they will stay true, at least until we change this society and go to the grave with it, ceding the field to happier generations. But I want to propose an alternative–and not the alternative that has been offered before, either, the carnival-glam alternative that presents us as the glitter-crusted disco-ball jesters of a new postmodernism. That’s true for some of us, too, and I won’t deny that. I just want to suggest something simpler.
I want to suggest that we believe in us because we, as a people, are marked above all by our integrity.
There is not much you can say that describes all trans people. We are a broad and heterogeneous bunch. But you can say this: contrary to what the cheap punchlines and propagandists, the frat boys and the Womyn’s Landers, the sketch comedians and the murder defendants would have you believe, we are not united in a grand campaign of deceit. We may not be magical, or magically virtuous, but we are, as a people, astonishingly honest.
You look at those numbers we’ve let outline us–the grief and the blood and the hurt, writ vast and cruel–and that is a truth. But I believe the greater truth is us: we looked at that world–that heartless world that tears us up and turns us away from every hearth-fire–and we looked at the option of deceiving it into letting us in, the option of pretending to be something we weren’t in order to survive, and we said, to a person: no. No, we will not lie, even in the face of starvation, of isolation, of loss, of torture, of death. No, even to escape the risk of a world that will never treat us right, we will not lie. We will not pretend. Not today. Not again. At some point, if you are here, and reading this, and calling yourself a trans person or something like, no matter how many compromises and illusions you had to throw up in front of you to make it to today alive, you eventually said “no more.” You refused to lie, even if only to yourself.
I believe in trans people because, above all, we know something about the great and terrible worth of the truth. Not because we have paid that price–it has hit some of us harder, and some of us have come through nearly unscathed. Not because whatever we have suffered has made us more special than any other person. Because each of us is a person who looked out at a very dangerous, risky landscape and chose, eventually, to travel through it because the truth mattered most. We know something about the truth. We know what it is worth. And we, as a people, surrounded by those who do not believe us and want us to pretend for them that they are right, chose that truth knowing it might cost us everything.
Even if it didn’t. Even if it never does. Today, here and now, we as a people are a people of astonishing integrity. Integrity! How many times have you heard that word and trans people in a sentence? How many times have you heard us defined not by our dysphoria, not by our danger, but by our integrity? I believe that is what this boils down to, though. Our integrity. We are people who have chosen, in the silence of our hearts or shouting from the rooftops, to cultivate integrity no matter the cost. We are people who insist that our internal worlds must be married to our external worlds. That we will be true to ourselves even if we are the only ones who know it is the truth. It’s not that we’re somehow inherently virtuous or upright beyond anyone else’s gifts. It’s that we made choices. Good choices. Brave choices.
They say character–integrity–is who you are in the dark. Well, I have been in the dark for a long time. Many of us have. And we have discovered, in the end, not our weakness, not our vileness, not our artificial dishonest infection-on-the-world failure to be real people, but the quality of our character. And we have made choices since then. Some of us are cruel and dangerous people who take from others and reproduce pain. Some of us are paragons of kindness and hope. Most of us, like me, are somewhere in the middle, some of the same mix of choices and mistakes and wicked joy as anyone else on the street, scattered and various as the birds of the air. But all of us, mean and glorious, made that choice, once, that choice of radical integrity, that choice to love the truth and commit to it, dark or bright, hell or high water. That cannot be taken from us. Any of us, the killers and healers and thieves and parents alike. It is more than our losses and more than our gains. It is more than the families we do or don’t have, the ideas we espouse, the places we stand. Somewhere, deep inside, we will always know that one day we chose the truth knowing that that truth might not be kind to us, and we held tight to that truth while it burned on and on.
I believe in trans people. I believe in us because we have been honest, at least once, in a way few people on earth have been asked to be. I believe that is what makes us so frightening. That integrity is written all over us. You can see it in the dark. There is no avoiding seeing in us that choice to hold onto the truth even if no-one else would stand with us and do the same. That is enormously threatening. It is no wonder that so many people and communities claim that admitting us among their number might destroy the foundations of everything they know.
Integrity is contagious, see. It is hard to look at the way we know the truth and not be tempted to look at your own truth, and that truth’s consequences. It is hard to pretend, with us in the room. It is hard to make excuses for your own lies and compromises and little self-betrayals. So people try very hard to make us the liars. To make us the fakes. To push us out of the room so we don’t hold mirrors up.
It’s not that we’re special. It’s just that, every one of us, whatever we did before or since, we made a choice. We believed. We committed. We moved. With everything mobilized to erase us and keep us from truth-telling, we had the strength of spirit to choose truth anyway.
I believe in trans people. I will believe in trans people until there is no more believing to do.
In tears. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Andy
24 Feb 11 at 1:20 am
Thanks, this was really beautiful.
Carto
24 Feb 11 at 3:12 am
In tears as well! This could not be more timely for me; this week I had meetings at work, with my management and HR, about transitioning, and have sent letters off to my family – ones with whom I have contact but who live several states away – informing them of my transition. I did all of these things knowing what price I could be forced to pay for them.
D W
24 Feb 11 at 4:50 am
Yeah. This. I teared up at the end… thank you. I have to keep reminding myself when I think I’m weak or a coward, I did this. No one can take that away from me.
Susan
24 Feb 11 at 5:16 am
I am so glad that there are others out there who look to define us not by our pain, but by our strength. Each and every one of us is tempered by our inability to accept a lie, or boundary, placed by other on our very being. The strength to stand up and leap that barrier, to cast off that weight, is immeasurable. Every day we hear more stories about how we are reviled and spat upon. Every day we hear of cases of discrimination and of violence, and yet still we come.
Some of us are scared beyond reckoning, and with good reason. Some of us stand defiantly, calling people out, making ourselves a voice, demanding recognition of our very humanity. Regardless of our respective paths, of our trials and tribulations, each and every one of us made a choice, as you said. That choice was to live a life that is genuine.
Thank you so much for those eloquent words. You show immeasurable kindness by giving hope to those that read your words.
Valarissa
24 Feb 11 at 6:06 am
This is just beautiful. Thank you.
Terra
24 Feb 11 at 6:18 am
Thank you.
Thank you for writing that. I’m almost in tears myself, and I want to shout this to the world.
Just thank you
Jessica
24 Feb 11 at 7:23 am
Crying here too.
Jack
24 Feb 11 at 8:10 am
[...] February 24, 2011 by Diana_W I’ve been in a quiet mood lately, and it doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. But if I’m not going to write anything I might as well pass along a link to something I wish I had written. It’s a wonderful essay called Holding On. [...]
Today’s Inspiration « Salad Bingo
24 Feb 11 at 8:13 am
Thank you for your beautiful essay.
xoxo
Natasha
24 Feb 11 at 8:24 am
Crying here as well. More than anything because until I read your words, little light, I’ve never even thought that I had integrity. But you’re right. I’ve suffered a lot of losses (though nothing compared to those who’ve paid the ultimate price for their integrity), and I would not take the worst parts of my life back if it meant that I had to lie to myself.
My prayers right now are with trans folk who have been martyred because they refused to lie to themselves, and with every trans person that we may come someday into a society where our integrity is respected and honored by all.
GallingGalla
24 Feb 11 at 8:46 am
Tears in my eyes too! We all know so many non-trans people who’d rather see us as *anything* but bearers of truth. And we all know so many transfolk who’ve broken under their burdens. The truth is often harsh and the haters are many. I’ll keep this to remind me (and whoever I come across) that there’s an overwhelming reason WHY we walk the path we do. Thank you.
thaniel
24 Feb 11 at 9:37 am
Thank you ever so much for crystallizing something I’d always had a feeling of but had no idea where to begin expressing it. You are very wise.
Ace
24 Feb 11 at 10:22 am
Thank you.
aaskew
24 Feb 11 at 10:58 am
Perfect.
Cigfran
24 Feb 11 at 11:52 am
This is beautiful and exactly what I needed to hear.
TalieC
24 Feb 11 at 2:34 pm
Absolutely right. Thank you, little light, as always, for your powerful honesty and integrity.
Kerrick
24 Feb 11 at 4:26 pm
Holy crap. Thank you for saying this, and thank you for saying it so beautifully. ♥
Katie Sparrow
24 Feb 11 at 10:14 pm
This is a wonderful piece of art. Thank you for writing this. It is people like you who will help the paradigm shift this world so desparately needs for every human being to be recognized as who they are on the inside, who their soul is, and for the world to recognize that we are all one. I hope in my lifetime to see a world where all racism and phobias vanish, judgment is set aside, and we feel our connectedness to one another, knowing we are really all one family. Kudos to you for writing this beautiful piece. I have bookmarked your site.
Lyric
25 Feb 11 at 6:49 am
Wow all I can is wow
John
25 Feb 11 at 6:59 am
Thank you so much!!! You have me in tears right now. I hope you don’t mind if I pass this Essay to others
NikkiAnne
25 Feb 11 at 9:30 am
I feel as though I’ve just been to the keynote for the first national Transgender Spirituality conference.
Thank you.
I shake your hand.
Noach Dzmura
25 Feb 11 at 10:34 am
Wow. Wow!! Oh, yes, tears of joy and release! Thank you so, for articulating so well this one essential commonality! Integrity is such a big word, but telling the truth after lying for so long is worth all of it. Many of my friends have congratulated me on my bravery in coming out and I usually mumble something about the 45 years during which I was not so brave. And you have made clear that all the time we may have waited in fear simply makes that final choice all the more poignant, all the more brave. I’ve had it relatively easy, I think, just because I waited in the dark, while so many went before with torches bright to light the way for the rest of us. And as each of us steps out we make it that much easier for those who follow.
Jeanie Beth Wallenstein
25 Feb 11 at 10:39 am
Also, would you consider presenting this essay to “This i Believe” on NPR? http://thisibelieve.org/submission/#_EssayForm=first
I’m not sure it will fit the guideline, but I sure would like to see it there!
Also, would you mind terrible if I read this out on my Yt vlog? Giving you all the credit, of course and gladly. (And I won’t do it if I can’t read it without blubbering)
Jeanie Beth Wallenstein
25 Feb 11 at 11:10 am
More tears here from the mother of a very fine trans son.
Thank you.
Aleksa
25 Feb 11 at 12:37 pm
Lady, I am about as un-religious as anyone can get, but I would come to church to hear you every week.
Marlene
25 Feb 11 at 4:11 pm
I have tremendous respect for you…and yours. Thank you so much for so beautifully expressing, and exposing the issue.
It reminds me a lot of what was going on in the gay community about 30-35 years ago, people I learned to love partially because they were so clear about who they were and so enjoyed it.
Amber Rae
26 Feb 11 at 2:33 am
I Believe…Knowing the truth about ourselves is the nature of our successes as a whole. I believe in me and I know who I am. Being Trans isn’t an abnormaility. I believe…Trans people are genuinely gifted with a spirit for life. We deal with all the negatives sterotypes unlike no other. For those that know their truth… We will survive and we will maintain and everlasting fight for the dignity and respect we deserve.
Billie
26 Feb 11 at 3:06 pm
I sent this to a friend – you saved her life. Seriously, you saver the life of my friend who thinking about suicide – thank you more than you will know.
laughriotgirl
27 Feb 11 at 8:09 am
In my quest and rush for completeness and acceptance from the outside world, I turned my back on my friends, allies, and even my enemies. Thank you for reminding us what our priorities could/should be.
lisalee18wheeler
27 Feb 11 at 9:10 am
you may have saved mine too, thank you.
*hugs*
Ellie
27 Feb 11 at 9:36 am
I think you seriously just redefined everything for me with this writing. That’s the sort of gift that words are simply not adequate to express thanks for. But thank you anyways.
Kinsey Hope
27 Feb 11 at 10:49 am
I struggle with this every day.
jayinchicago
27 Feb 11 at 10:55 am
Thank you, beautifully expressed.
sean enloe
27 Feb 11 at 11:19 am
Thank you. After a day of listening to my anthropology professor (white, cis. liberal feminist who seems to have trouble acknowledging her own privilege) use dehumanizing language (and repeating that it wasn’t her intent when I respectfully talked to her about it after class), this was badly-needed.
Rowan
28 Feb 11 at 4:48 pm
Thank you for that.
John
1 Mar 11 at 11:32 am
I… wow.
Show this to the world.
Thank you so much. I salute thee.
Lukas
1 Mar 11 at 4:54 pm
I got goosebumps reading this! Cheers! So well written!
Hayley
1 Mar 11 at 5:24 pm
You’ve nailed something I’ve felt for a long time but haven’t been able to articulate. Thank you.
Candy
1 Mar 11 at 8:54 pm
This is so beautiful. Thank you so much for writing. <3
whatthepork
1 Mar 11 at 10:18 pm
[...] holding on I believe in trans people. [...]
foxfetch
5 Mar 11 at 12:05 pm
As I like to say: It’s society that has gender dysphoria, not us.
Leah
5 Mar 11 at 6:51 pm
[...] On From: Questioning Transphobia I believe in trans people. I believe in us because we have been honest, at least once, in a way few [...]
Holding On « manicsquirrel.com
5 Mar 11 at 9:35 pm
That was such an eloquent essay you wrote. I was deeply moved and impressed by the “fire in the belly” the article displayed. If you’re intreasted reaching a broader audience I have a trans woman friend who is an editor on the Montreal Gazette. She has a blog on the paper and at the very least she’d put it there. It’s so good though she may be able to run it as a feature. If you’re intrested I’d be happy to put you in touch with her :-) Joanna
Joanna Wagner
5 Mar 11 at 9:47 pm
They say that deep truth speaks itself eloquently.
This is very eloquent truth.
Thank you.
-Sandy
Sandra Louise
6 Mar 11 at 6:19 am
[...] on 7 March 2011 by The DV8 Thanks to Autumn Sandeen for calling attention to an essay called “holding on,” written by an author called little light and published on Questioning Transphobia. Today, here and [...]
Trans Integrity. | The DV8
7 Mar 11 at 12:04 pm
[...] light wrote a piece over at Questioning Transphobia about believing in trans people and about integrity, and it is a [...]
“Integrity is contagious, see. It is hard to look at the way we know the truth and not be tempted to look at your own truth, and that truth’s consequences.” | Special Communion: The Blog
7 Mar 11 at 6:14 pm
Very well written, excellent!
Veronica
7 Mar 11 at 6:21 pm
A wonderful thought beautifully put. May I use this article in our monthly AgenderNZ Newsletter?
Ellen M Hughes
9 Mar 11 at 4:42 pm
Thank you so much for your post; it brought tears to my eyes. Radical integrity is a rare commodity in today’s world, and I agree that transfolk have that quality in abundance.
I too, believe in trans people.
Christine Johnson
11 Mar 11 at 12:34 am
This is beautiful, and brought a little bit of solace to me at a time when I needed it. You really are a gift to the trans* community, Light.
Jack
12 Mar 11 at 12:43 am
Thank you so much for this – in the face of so much anti-trans or cissexist sentiment every day, things like this keep me going.
dsd
16 Mar 11 at 1:28 pm
My partner recently came out as trans in all public domains, and the major comment has been “How Brave!” – something in that statement for me felt incomplete; your comments on integrity fill the picture. Exactly.
Miriam
17 Mar 11 at 9:32 am
[...] there lives, every trans person I know, who knew at childhood, suffered years of silence, of fear, knowing they couldn’t speak their truth, I suffered that, and now I think god, there are people out there who wont suffer like that, there [...]
Mummy when you talk about me, use she. « Genderqueer 2 genderqueer's Blog
21 Apr 11 at 9:20 pm
[...] despite our differences, despite our fighting one another (for the wrong reasons for some), I believe in trans people too. As much of a possible pessimist I may be, I would rather believe in little light’s view of [...]
From surprise to horror in about 30 seconds « the letter z
28 May 11 at 12:15 am
Beautiful words.
A lot of what you’ve written that gets filed under ‘radical love’ has been a light to me. When I need to remember why it is worth the fight, I read these. It resonates and reminds me.
Jesse
8 Jul 11 at 12:10 pm
Very well written! I never linked integrity to transgenderism before I read this. But really, integrity has always been the most important thing to me. In that, I am like an alien in society. Nobody else I know values integrity over popularity, or even convenience. Comparing me with the population as a whole, I am more standard deviations from the mean in integrity than I am in gender. That’s something to chew on.
GinaDouglas
13 Nov 11 at 12:00 am
[...] women). It is a lie that calls us deceptive, and so it is a lie that projects itself onto us, a lie that tears us down for our honesty. It is a lie that needs to be destroyed. It is a lie that has been bought hook, line, and sinker by [...]
A Lie the Patriarchy Told « TAL9000
24 May 12 at 5:31 am
What a powerful post. I am truly humbled, not to mention in tears. Thank you! Laura xx
Laura Catherine
25 Aug 12 at 4:02 pm