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I started medical transition from woman to man on January 23 – three days after Donald Trump was inaugurated. I never imagined that I would start this part of my trip during the most Openly anti-Trans president In history is in the White House.
Before he was even elected in November, Trump and his party were obsessed with Trans Folx – a demography that explains Less than 1% of the country’s total population. But, as I have already written, Almost half of pro-Trump attack ads In the presidential election, borne anti-trans mail. Since he took office, Trump has Signed several decrees Seeking to deny our existence via bureaucratic and cultural violence.
Before even being elected in November, Trump and his party were obsessed with Trans folxes – a demography which represents less than 1% of the country’s total population.
In May, the house controlled by the GOP adopted a tax invoice which Deny life strengthening care covered by Medicaid. And last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of refusing minors confirming care.
By reading this news a week after having undergone superior surgery, while I recovered and metabolia the depth of medical care confirming sex, I experienced a kind of devastation that I had never felt before. It was as if my surgery had broken a dam which had previously allowed a certain type of defensive desensitization to the cultivation of anti-transal hatred in this country. Now, this desensitization becomes more difficult to exploit day by day.
As I expected to arrive in a place where I go as a man, I fear travel and the complications that can come from incongruous documents with my presentation: we are currently waiting for the results of a Preliminary injunction on the Trump administration’s travel document rule To see if I will be allowed to change the gender marker on my travel documents from what was assigned to me at birth.
This moment is imbued with fear, and it is designed. And not only for trans people. For the poor, queer people, non -white folxes, women, immigrants, activists, disabled people … anyone who is not a man of means, white and not disabled.
However, the challenges of this moment are also in depth. In many ways, it would be easier to delay the transition. But I understood the chaos of this moment as an invitation to go inward. Yes, it can sometimes be terrifying, but the transition has provided a roadmap for resistance and joy at this moment, that which extends far beyond the trans experience.
This transition process, with its concomitant lessons, has, a little contraindicating, has made it the best year of my life so far. To be clear, this period did not lack sorrow, fear and sorrow. But the internal release that I acquired is immeasurable.
One of the most powerful dimensions of the transition came from the organic invitation to repair my break with what Audre Lorde calls “erotic”. In his famous speech from 1978 “Erotic uses: erotic as power», Lorde describes how oppression depends on this rupture, this disconnection:
There are many types of power, used and unused, recognized or otherwise. Erotic is a resource in each of us which is in a deeply feminine and spiritual plan, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or not recognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, each oppression must corrupt or distort these various sources of power in the culture of oppressed which can provide energy for change.
It is not lost for me that this political moment – rooted in multiple violence designed to terrorize those who question a vision of the world which favors and supports heterosexual patriarchy Cisgenre, white supremacy and kleptocracy – is in many ways around and subjected to the deepening of this corruption or this distortion. (This, of course, partly explains the Gop’s obsession for queerness and the deletion of it.)
I find my resistance and my vitality in the center of my link with the erotic, in the sense that Lorde wrote, by cultivating a daily practice of trying on it, even if many of my cross identities as a trans Muslim have become the focal point of political scapegoats and frightening. (To be clear, I am also protected by many privileges, as well as the intersectional character of discrimination and privilege.)
Creativity may be one of the most powerful ways to preserve erotic. And the transition, the creation of a new self in a literal and embodied sense, allows me to consciously integrate creativity into my daily life.
I learned that the transition highlights the universal experience of what it is to be alive: we are all Transition and transformation constantly, from the cellular level to our daily moods to the evolution of our ideas and our understanding of the world. Nothing is static; Nothing is fixed. And while I engage in this process of overlapping and unlocking of oneself, I was moved and surprised by how much it was also a deeply relational company.
When I embarked on this trip, I had an idea that it would be a lonely process; I had not fully grasped this to get closer to you is to get closer to the world. Both are not separated. Relations so often provide the containment necessary for creation. The parameters, after all, allow creativity to flourish.
I find miracles in my two ICs, male friends who taught me to shave me once my thatch started to pass seriously.
These moments of creation, this practice of creativity, in a climate designed to suffocate, appease, force and kill, are nothing less than miraculous. I find miracles in my two ICs, male friends who taught me to shave me once my thatch started to pass seriously. I find miracles in my group comrades, who create an album with me in which I harmonize with myself while my voice falls. I find miracles in the network of friends and the chosen family who have registered to take turns for meals and walk my dog for a month while I recover from superior surgery. I find miracles in the stamp of my voice, which deepens every new week.
I do not offer these miracles to obscure or spiritually bypass the horrors around us at the moment. Because there are many. But both things can be true. According to my experience, kissing these moments is the antidote to horrors.
If we choose thus, we are fortunate to be consciously in this continuous process of creation and recreation together, and all the wonderful that these possibilities bring to life. Despite the best efforts of those who seek to subjugate others and to exercise cryptofascic ideologies, our dignity – our divinity – can never be taken to us.
