yesterday was Trans Day of Visibility and it was also Easter. this confluence makes me smirk, thinking of all the Christians who have decided that trans and queer people are an abomination. these months and days about visibility and history annoy me because they feel disingenuous. But, as far as i’m concerned, both days yesterday were and are about rebirth, a willingness to change, to ask if what you feel aligns with what you’ve been told and to shift in light of the answer. then, to ask again. *trans*formation.
i was so taken by the ‘testimony of spring’ that brontë velez offered yesterday, on the occasion of Easter as the state of Israel enacts ‘The Worst of What Humanity is Capable Of.”1 Amidst their dogs and sheep and the grass and wildflowers on the hillside, velez meditated on the legacy of Jesus and Dr. King. they spoke about the “different agreement to time and life” that both were guided by, how Jesus’s work—his gospel, couldn’t die even when he was murdered by the state. Dr. King’s gospel couldn’t die either, they spoke of his “being courageous enough to be at the mercy of entanglement.” Both people practiced an “obedience to the unenforceable.” Dr. King spoke with “a grammar of generosity” that did not register to white people, to the white supremacist state. and yet, the invitations that these two prophets made endure, beckon us still, insist on a fierce, disruptive, expansive love. a love like ceasefire, like use which ever bathroom, like safe children, like safe adults, like how remembering our mortality teaches us how to act.
examples like these three help. i need help. earlier that day I’d read, “The idea that we need to be saved, and that we cannot save ourselves, strikes me as so profound as to be obvious. “Enthusiasm,” in its religious sense, implies intense devotion. It is from the Greek for “possessed by a god,” and a certain fear of possession, of losing oneself, is still embedded in the word.”2 I fear being possessed because I already am. I fear losing myself because I already have. Possessed by and lost to this grammar of violence and culture of domination. And, the enthusiasm of those obedient to love reaches me, reaches you, across space and time. it finds me and it helps me find me.
“I’ve picked up the hammer every day / and forgiven myself. There is a new / language I’m learning by speaking it.”3
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/28/gaza_msf
Eula Biss, Notes from No Man’s Land, 40
Trans Is Against Nostalgia, Taylor Johnson https://poetry.lib.uidaho.edu/poems/trans-is-against-nostalgia/