Sunday was Transgender Visibility Day. This day was also Easter, a holy day for many people.this a coincidence of coincidences (Transgender Visibility Day has always been on March 31st, and this year Easter just happened to fall on that day.) This is a case of paranoid right-wingers who believe that Christian holidays are being desecrated by provocative transgender people. gave rise to conspiracy theories. But for me personally, this day provided an opportunity to reflect on the spiritual aspects of my experience as a transgender person who recently began transitioning with the help of gender-affirming hormone therapy. It was a time when this treatment, and the very existence of trans, was necessary. It has become intensely politicized.
The connection between gender, specifically transgender identity, and the sacred has always been present for me. Before I saw my true physical gender as nothing more than a twinkle in my eye, I felt it as a hum. I felt this more directly in my childhood, but over the years the pulse became weaker and stronger again in early adulthood.There’s a lot of hate directed at transgender people, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand it, but I don’t understand it. All the way Because I know the sound of that hum, I know its goodness, I can feel how subdued, innocent, clear, and free it is.
I don’t think this is unique to the transgender experience. What I feel is, in part, a desire for something to simply exist as it is. For example, for a tulip to be a tulip. Or a velociraptor becomes a ferocious little biting velociraptor. Tulips are not hyacinths, so you don’t walk around the garden or step on them. You don’t tell a velociraptor to become a frog. You just have to trust in the unique beat and flow of life and its beauty. If you are a gardener, give each flower the water and light it needs and appreciate it for what it is.
Before I could see my gender on my body, now I could see even the slightest trace of it in the sand swaying in the wind. I told myself that my gender was just “wind,” perhaps to avoid saying “female” before I was ready. It was invisible, but it was a force in motion. You could hear it, feel it and know it was real.
I often felt my transgender identity most clearly in the non-human world. It’s partly just being away from the social hustle and bustle of people who have identified me as male all my life, which creates noise in my brain. However, in addition to the tranquility of escaping humans, being “in nature” also provided a sense of self-understanding through the recognition of one’s interconnectedness with the web of life. People often focus on the “social” aspects of gender, which most often means the human world. But I think of my transgender identity as ecological. Because that’s what was most clear to me: identity within this vast diversity.
For example, when I went alone to Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rainforest last winter, I spent the whole day seeing almost no one and sat for a long time at the base of a waterfall surrounded by mountains and ocean. Green’s. As I struggled with my gender, I had a moment of deep clarity and quiet. There, I was able to feel authentic and trans by feeling like I was part of the ecosystem around me. And to honor and care for this aspect of ourselves with the seriousness and fidelity it deserves.
At such moments, you can hear a humming sound. teeth I see it connecting with the more-than-human world around me, creating a rational resonance. This song reminds me of the lyrics of Kurt Cobain’s “All Apologies”. “Under the sun, I feel like we’re all one…Everything is all about us.”
It is an experience of wholeness. In other words, I’ve been so divided in so many parts of my life that the contrast became especially apparent. And it’s not just wholeness within yourself. The realization that this hum does not begin with me, but rather is moving through me like the wind, and that only if I allow this to happen can I actually make contact with the world around me. .
For me, that is the most painful “sacred thing.” It is the fact that our deepest inner beings are wrapped in a wider fabric that extends across time and distance. It’s really about finding one’s place in the flux of change and transformation, and repeating what one knows to be true and known again and again in countless ways in what is astonishingly new and different. This is a contradiction in what I have seen and recognized over and over again. Leaving the shores of faith in an act of surrender that offers no clear and logical promise of safety is the courage required to even begin to step into this issue. Every time I see the word “heaven” these days, I think of the word “heaving” and things like effort, lifting, vomiting, things that the ocean does that are mostly out of your control.
That is why transphobia seems to me to be, above all, a spiritual crime so often committed by petty fanatics in the name of religion. In a direct material sense, transphobia is dangerous to me, my family, and millions of transgender people around the world. It is also a pointless waste of the precious gifts that life has given us. Transparency is an expression of life’s restless creativity, its explosive beauty, its rich diversity, its mystery, and perhaps its love.
Trump and MAGA and transphobes are clearly unable to hold onto this truth and are therefore in a self-righteous panic attack over this year’s coincidental overlap of Trans Visibility Day with Easter. House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a post to He declared that with this “abhorrent” action, Biden appears to have “betrayed a core tenet.” Easter’s. ”
Other than the fact that Biden did not ban any traditional Easter activities or set a date for Trans Visibility Day, which has been held on March 31st for the past 15 years, here are the most important and overlooked The truth is that transgender people have always been part of society.human family in every culture As long as our species exists on this earth. The fact that Johnson and his ilk, out of ignorance and facile piety, believe that transgender people pose some new and imminent threat to their spiritual values is breathtaking. It’s such a hypocrisy.
In fact, in recent years, the right-wing stepped up rhetorical and legislative attacks Opposition to transgender people is at a fever pitch, with hundreds of bills moving through Congress each year aimed at stripping transgender people of their legal recognition, life-saving medical care, and their right to go out as teachers. submitted (and in many cases successfully passed) (not to be outed as a student) and generally have the right to exist and be safe within society. This is an institutional attempt to enact what Daily Wire contributor Michael Knowles called for at last year’s CPAC. “Eradicating transgenderism” (sic) from a public place. ” In his own attempt to escape from this ring of telephone genocide, Knowles also said, “I don’t see how you can commit genocide against transgender people…They are not a legitimate category of being.” He also said.
The results of this hatred have been devastating in many ways. Percentage of transgender people who have attempted suicide It rose to a whopping 42%. Many on the right, and even some on the left, do nothing to make things even more painful and deadly without recognizing that reversing this crisis is the moral thing to do. trying to do anything.
Transitioning power in the midst of this brutal political climate can often feel like walking into a house on fire. But I feel like I’ve come home. And what I’ve realized over the past few months as I’ve started transitioning is that I’m definitely not the only one transitioning during this difficult time. Many other transgender people have embarked on their own transition journeys, motivated by the common human instinct to connect with our true selves, despite terrifying headwinds.
I’m not a Christian anymore, but for the past 20 years, Easter has mainly meant chocolate for me. But the core tenets of my own spiritual system lead me to celebrate the human quest for authenticity and connection, no matter how each of us finds it. And this has led me to believe in a society where people are supported and loved, while searching within themselves for points of harmony where they can show up to the world as their richest, happiest, most vibrant selves. It gave me the motivation to work towards it.
