Trans People Were Made To Fight Fascism (Whether We Like It or Not)

From Adrian S. Costello of They're Powerless to Turn the Trees Against Us

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 with 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 on and off for weeks, though I’m starting to get better at finding my footing. At times though it almost hasn’t felt survivable. But we are needed on this Earth, urgently, maybe more now than ever, 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 for my daily series, Tiny Poems To Survive the Apocalypse, and being with (and photographing) the trees in Green-Wood Cemetery. 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. 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.

Gender is so much more than the small superficial way it’s generally talked about. It cannot be reduced to parts and roles, much as our world likes to try (not to mention certain biologically clueless executive orders). 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 something in 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.

Mosaic

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.

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

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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.