The Grief of Thomas: A Sermon for Trans Day of Remembrance

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands 

and put my finger where the nails were, 

and put my hand into his side,

I will not believe” ”

The Gospel of John 20:25

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At this is the time of the academic year, my students are turning in their second essays and revisions of their first; and before they submit their critiques, I repeat one of my axioms: write as though your audience is in pain, because most likely they are. I believe in this. Preparing my sermon for tonight, I was certain of it. Personally, I’ve felt triggered for months and every time I feel like I begin to catch my breath, another trigger goes off. It keeps happening and I can’t make it stop. For trans persons experiencing dysphoria, we exist in a constant hum of discomfort and pain, unable to settle in our bodies or environment. We have more bearable seasons, as well as seasons where its really unlivable. A year ago this time it got really bad for me. I remember 3 A.M. on election night weeping into my partner’s arm because I knew that my friends at the Trans Lifeline were overloaded with suicidal callers. November 2016 was the busiest month in the Lifeline’s existence, fielding 2,700 calls, most during the night and days following the election. Since then, a trans person has been killed every month in the United States. Then there are the perpetual government threats to exclude us from the military, bathrooms, schools, health care and civil rights protections. I think of the rash of sexual abuse and harassment claims. I think of all the trans people whose bodies are touched and investigated without cis people realizing that what they are doing is sexual harassment; how my partner, a pastor, gets asked questions about my genitals by community members. I think about the police stopping me while I was walking with my kids or sitting outside with my mom as half dozen police surrounded me with guns drawn. I think about all those who have not lived to tell such stories. I think about all the harassed, traumatized, abused, triggered, and even the dead must do to train others on how they should and should not touch our bodies. I think about all we do to reclaim these bodies. I think about the resurrected. I think about the sainted. I think about Lazarus’s tomb and Thomas’s doubts. I think about remembrance. I think about those in pain, as I write.

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Lazarus

For those who devote their lives to saving the life of others, especially those in the trans and non-binary community, the transgender day of remembrance is a testament to our failures. I feel a bit like Jesus of Nazareth when he arrived at the house of his friend Lazarus only to be told by those grieving that he had come too late. Jesus is told that if he had been there for his friend, then his friend would not have died. I can’t help but wonder if Jesus felt this too as he stood weeping on the road. But then Jesus does something miraculous. He tells them that Lazarus is not dead but only sleeping. Arriving at Lazarus’s tomb, he calls out, “Lazarus, come out.” Then from apparent death, Lazarus emerges from his tomb. On this day, I wish I had the power to bring back the dead. Each and every name listed today deserves that. We crave that. But none of us here have that power. Yet, I think about the famous movie line that goes, “there is a big different between all dead and mostly dead.” All dead, there is nothing we can do, but “mostly dead means partially alive and that we can work with.” In that case, I believe there is something we can do.

Because I do feel we have a Lazarus present here tonight; someone who feels like they are dead but may only be asleep, someone whose spirit wanders away from the body but who yet might live again, someone whose body may have become a tomb awaiting the call, “Lazarus come.” I dedicate this sermon to any Lazarus out there, someone who has come to the tomb today to be awakened from your death and slumber, to be resurrected and remember what it is to be alive. The work of resurrection is hard and will not be accomplished in one night but we may consider the ways in which our bodies are taken, the ways we may remember and return to those bodies, the ways we survive and embrace bodies that have been broken, and finally the ways that those who have passed beyond the vale and cannot be called back, those sainted dead, might still be speaking to us through their relics and stories to share the power in which they now rest.

I know there is at least one Lazarus here, because on the trans day of remembrance I often feel a sense of surprise and the thought, “I am not dead yet.” Whereas pride or shame would focus on the “not dead,” the emphasis in my own heart is on the “yet.” That terrible word, “yet,” is a weariness felt in the heart of many oppressed peoples. That word speaks of an expectation and a surprise at our own perseverance that is not our own but has found its way into our hearts. We learn this word, “yet,” from a world that expects this list of names each year. I hold back from saying that the world demands this list of names each year, like a quota. Because even if is true that in various ways the world DOES demand our non-existence, I cannot fully accept that reality out of a resistance to cynicism. What I can fully believe is that this list of names is something the world expects insofar as our deaths are accounted into the yearly breakage spreadsheets. Transgender death is part of the accepted cost of doing business, keeping this corporation of gender binaries, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and classism going.

This measurement of one’s own existence in relation to “not dead yet” is a sign of what is called slow-death. Slow-death describes populations that we actively or passively expect to die. Now, of course, we all die. But except for the more depressive or Goth among us, we don’t regularly expect most people to die. We know it but we don’t expect it. We don’t expect a white able-bodied cisgender child to die. We expect to varying degrees the elderly to die, even those who aren’t sick. We expect the sick to die. We expect the disabled to die, even those who aren’t sick. We expect the poor to die more than the sick. This doesn’t mean we want them to die, but we aren’t surprised when they do and may be surprised when they don’t. This is slow death. Death is only one of the worst outcomes of slow-death. The other danger is not death but unlife or undeath, the state of being the living dead. Slow death creates undead by killing the soul even while life persists, like Lazarus asleep in his pit, yearning for remembrance and resurrection.

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Thomas

When we struggle with our bodies and remembrance, I think of the story of Thomas and his need to not just see the Risen Christ but to feel him. John recalls how Thomas, one of the Twelve, was not there when Christ first appears to the disciples after the resurrection. Thus when others tell him, “We have seen the Lord!” Thomas cannot process this. Thomas gets called the doubter, assuming him to be a sort of empiricist or materialist when he says, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” But maybe Thomas’s demand for touch is more than this. We are not told why he is not there. Maybe Thomas was like Lazarus, asleep in his grief, dysphoria, and slow death. He might have been physically present but not all there. When grief or dysphoria has taken us from our bodies, we may need positive touch to recall and remember our bodies.

Scientists have learned what victims of abuse and oppression, as well as those who’ve experienced systemic abuse, the inherited trauma of slavery, the horrors of the holocaust have long felt, that prior to our physical deaths, our brains shut down, our spirits leave, to avoid that hurt that would do more than kill us, it would obliterate our souls. These are incredibly hard moments to remember because there is a reason that our spirits fly away from it, there is a reason we feel like living ghosts, because the pain of those moments are so great that our minds shut down. In the face of these deaths and stolen bodies, when our friends say, “We have seen the Lord,” our hesitancy may be a refusal of platitudes. When we grieve, it may not be enough to say, “they are alive in heaven now.” Because more than wanting to be told, we want to feel them in our arms, to hold them again. Thomas is missing his friend Jesus and nothing short of embracing his friend again will do. Amidst grief, trauma and hurt, it is not enough that our minds recall events, our bodies must be retrained and the connection between body and soul reformed.

Like Thomas, touch as a form of remembrance is important to me, especially when I feel myself pulled out of my body. This feeling is called dysphoria. Dysphoria occurs the gender folk assign to me conflicts with my gender identity. My family has been trained to notice when something triggers my dysphoria. Someone at work keeps calling me “he,” and I may not correct them because mentally I may not even be in the room. My spirit has begun to wander somewhere else out of self-defense. It happens nearly every time I take a flight. It is a fact that the TSA as a collective party has touched my genitals more than most of my lovers. I don’t want them to touch me but others depend on my traveling for work. And so, they fondle my body while meanwhile my mind is floating somewhere outside the flesh. I don’t know how this looks from the outside. Do my eyes glaze over? Does my body sag without a spirit to hold it alert? I don’t know because I’m not there. Each time my soul wanders, it takes effort to pull it back into my body.

It took years of intentional and intense effort to begin to feel like my body was a home for my spirit. In this work, touch has great power for remembrance. Thus, I have a need to write, take photos, and collect little trinkets. When my brain can’t hold all the information, objects hold the burden of remembrance for me. What are the objects that recall you back to yourself when your spirit wanders? Is it a certain skirt or sweater? Is it a bath bomb or candle? Is it a teddy bear or a beloved pet? Is it your partner squeezing your hand or your child crawling into your lap? For many of us, the work of remembrance is done by an assortment of objects and people, images and practices. In times of crisis, many of these will no longer be enough. In times of death and dying, we may find ourselves driven to find new and greater kinds of touch to remember us to our bodies. For Thomas, this meant being able to touch the friend he grieved. Some call this being skeptical, I call this being hurt. I call this an expression of a need that may sound silly to others but to us is the difference between life and death, remembrance and oblivion.

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Posted by Leelah Alcorn 12/22/2014

Captioned: "Transitioning. I Love How Literal This Is 

and How You Get a Sense of the Pain It Takes"

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The Resurrected

What happens, however, when those who are hurting need help from those who are hurt? What about the trans persons working the Trans Lifeline? What about tonight? This is the model of love that Christ offers in response to Thomas. “Peace be with you!” says Jesus on his next return, and then to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” On the surface, this is an object lesson on the resurrection of the body. But when one considers grief and death, the act takes on an intimate tone. Christ has just suffered dying and death. Christ retains the material remembrance of hurt. When Christ approaches Thomas, he is not only making his life and resurrection known to him, he is making his death and pain known to him as well. Christ models for us what it means for those who have come out of the tomb to help others remember life by making ourselves available and vulnerable for one another, to let others touch our pain so we may overcome our dysphoria and divisions.

Why we need the resurrected to help us resurrect us, why Lazarus and Thomas needed the words and touch of Jesus, is evident to the trans community in these times of remembrance. I remember friends in the trans community walking away exhausted and raw from online and offline conversations after another name gets added to our list for remembrance. I remember how in our hurt we sought each other out and how in our hurt we sometimes hurt each other. This is what it means to be in a traumatized and abused community. We must be very tender with each other because we ourselves are very tender. I recall the trust and vulnerability we share. I think about “the Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch: “You had a way so familiar, / But I could not recognize, / Cause you had blood on your face; / I had blood in my eyes. / But I could swear by your expression / That the pain down in your soul / Was the same as the one down in mine. / That's the pain, / Cuts a straight line, / Down through the heart; / We called it love.”

Love is dangerous and love is powerful. Love is a risk that may bring resurrection or death. Christianity has learned this lesson. Christianity is full of traditions that involve materially and spiritually of the broken and dying communing with the broken and dead: drinking the blood and eating the body of a dead and resurrected God, touching the bones of saints, washing in the waters of baptism as a sign of our collective death and rebirth, holding hands as we say millennia old prayers. Christianity is a religion of touch. This is why abusive touch in the Church is such a crisis. Because if we cannot trust to touch, then we lose a critical point of access in our faith. By touch we might resurrect the dead, but by abusive touch we might pluck souls from the flesh as we steal their bodies. Those who are wounded may not be in a place where they can help heal others, indeed, we who are hurting may hurt others. But there is a saying in ethics, “anything with power is dangerous.” Touch has the power to steal souls and resurrect them.

Our need and offers for material remembrance must be made with greatest care and love. We must appreciate what we ask of one another, when we ask for vulnerability. We must write and speak as though our audience is in pain, because most likely they are. We must also appreciate what we ask of one another, when we make ourselves vulnerable. The instruction, “put your finger here; see my hands,” or “reach out your hand and put it into my side” may be a gift which brings about resurrection and remembrance. Such demands might also cause further harassment and trigger our traumas. Love is a dangerous game that can mean the difference between life and death. This is the game Christ plays again and again. This is the game Christians are asked to imitate. When someone asks for healing touch like Thomas or someone asks on their behalf, such as Lazarus, this makes themselves vulnerable. This offer may be a form of consent but that position of power may quickly be abused. In this work, remembering our deaths may make us more compassionate and careful as we help others remember their life.

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The Sainted

To conclude, I return to those I started discussing when I referred to the difference between the mostly dead and the all dead. I ask, is there really nothing we can do for those who are all dead? What about those who don’t walk out of Lazarus’s tomb or into Thomas’s upper room? How might we care for and remember our dead? In my work on death and dying in the trans community, I’ve seen many ways that people respond to the death of our trans siblings. I see people cut the hair of trans girls and bury them in a men’s suit. I see people put a trans boy to rest under a stone engraved with their deadname. I’ve also seen people tell the life story of the deceased, using names and pronouns they demanded in life. I’ve also seen people make icons of the deceased, decorated with wings and halos, emblazoned with inscriptions like “His Name Was Zander” and “Rest in Power.” What is the difference between “resting in peace” and “resting in power,” I wonder? I think of these icons and how as a medievalist I can’t help but imagine saints.

People often misunderstand and misuse the word saint. I think about the powerful but misleading lyric from Hamilton, “death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it just takes and it takes, and it takes. But we keep living anyway. We rise and we fall and we make our mistakes. And if there is a reason [we] are still alive, then I’m willing to wait for it.” This sentiment that saints are somehow opposed to sinners I think is wrong. Saints were human with human faults. The word saint does not signify those without sin. The word saint means to set apart. One does not become a saint by choice, one becomes sainted by others. A saint is someone set apart by a marginalized society, targeted, alienated, isolated, even killed. A saint is someone who was discarded by the world but has been remembered and reclaimed. Death does discriminate against a saint like it discriminated against Mesha Caldwell from Canton, Mississippi on January 4th, 2017 or Jojo Striker from Toledo, Ohio, on February 8th, 2017.

Death does discriminate and saints teach us that remembrance can discriminate as well. According to reports, Ally Lee Steinfeld is one trans sister whose death on September 21st 2017, in Licking, Missouri, makes clear the connection between our murders and our erasure. Her killer took such pains to make the world forget her that I cannot but help but remember her: “Ally was stabbed, including wounds to the genitals. Her eyes were also gouged out. Her body was burned in an attempt to conceal evidence of the crime, and some of Ally’s bones were put into a garbage bag placed in a chicken coop near the residence.” Some people try to forget our trans family by taking away the means for awakening and material remembrance. Death and oblivion does discriminate and so life and remembrance must as well. We must remember those who are told to forget, including people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, the aged, and those victims from other countries or parts of our country marked by isolation and poverty.

Death does take and take and take, and that’s why we can’t just keep living anyway. Life and love has to keep taking and taking, reclaiming and resurrecting the dead and forgotten. We cannot merely wait for a reason that we are still alive, by remembering our fallen trans siblings, we begin to feel the difference between resting in peace and resting in power. As Hamilton also says, we may, “have no control, who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” But we may have control whose stories we tell, whose lives we tell, whose deaths we tell. Because even now, I know what it means for someone else to tell my story, describe my body, imagine my life and death, in ways I cannot control. I know what it means to trust someone else with my body, my hurt, my memory, and my story. Remembering means re-membering our community as we lose our members to dying and death. We reach into death and oblivion to reclaim our saints. Re-membering means taking up the membership and flag of those who have fallen. Remembering means sharing each other’s pain and so also remembering and sharing each other’s power.

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This sermon was delivered by Dr. Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

from Case Western Reserve University

as part of the Transgender Day of Remembrance 

at the Connecticut Conference Center of the United Church of Christ 

on 20 November, 2017.

#TransLivesMatter

The Trans Lifeline
877.565.8860

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LGBT Champions of Change: Transliterature at the White House

"Many transgender and gender nonconforming Americans 

have braved tragedy, discrimination, and violence 

simply for being who they are"

President Obama
Transgender Day of Remembrance

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Transliterature 
Goes to Washington

On November 23rd, 2015, I attended the White Houses's event to observe the Transgender Day of Remembrance and to honor LGBT Champions of Change in the arts. I was contacted earlier in the month with the invite in recognition of my scholarship, particularly my work with Transliterature and the Transform Talks. Despite numerous official documents being sent my way, it was not until I passed through the second of two security check-points, twice body-scanned, and twice interviewed that I began to believe that the White House was really allowing me - even inviting me - to enter. The security guards gave me a green pass-card with the letter "A" emblazoned on it in black. The card had a metallic chain that allowed it to hang around my neck so everyone could see at a glance whether or not I was welcome inside our national locum sanctum. As a transgender woman, I often am made to feel unwelcome in many places but here, today, this green card was an affirmation that I am accepted at the White House. I was invited to attend the national transgender day of remembrance and to celebrate those LGBTQI Champions of Change working in the arts. Until recently, this meeting would be unthinkable. It was not until 2015 that the word "transgender" was even spoken publicly by a U.S. president, much less would there be an event at the White House with the word prominently posted on it and named as the target demographic of those invited, remembered, and honored. This meeting was one powerful sign that the "Change" President Obama promised back in the 2008 election is underway. The change was not complete. Nor was the change embodied in a single candidate. Rather, change was being invited to the White House. It was brought in the present collection of activists and artists.

Ahead of me in line to enter the White House was members of the cast from Amazon's Transparent. The crowds shifted and I lost sight of them, unable to make out particular persons as we were shepherded down hallways and through locked doors. I began to fall back, not wanting to wander the halls of the chief executive building alone, I mingled in with those who were the next in the door. Behind me, I gathered, were producers of the Danish Girl. Only later would I come to realize how intermeshed the creative talents are making these groundbreaking pieces of transgender media. The drive to reclaim transgender stories and tell the untold histories brings together film and TV makers to share resources, struggles, and successes. With goals beyond merely entertaining an audience or profiting a production company, people are eager and willing to work with anyone who can help further transgender discourse and justice. I learned all this in our conversations on upcoming media and scholarship. I also learned this as we burst through a door into a coat-check area and I almost fell right into Jeffrey Tambor, the lead actor of Transparent (2014-), a show on Amazon Prime based on the true life story of a trans parent who transitioned later in life and her family's reactions. As soon as I walked in and found an empty space to stand, he acknowledged those I had entered with as colleagues and then came over to me. Hand extended, he said, "Hello, my name is Jeffrey. Honored to meet you!" In the discussions and meetings to follow, the openness to affirm and collaborate with the work of those present was evident.

During our conversations I was thrilled to discover that the production team for Transparent aimed to further the penetration and integration of trans creative workers into the TV and film industry by designating that at least 20% of their hires would be from the transgender community. This included writers, actors, and producers but also technicians, set builders, lighting experts, and assistants. "Many trans people have a desire to work in film but aren't given the entry level or advancement opportunities required to make a living in the industry," said one of the producers. "That is why we make it a point to hire, train, and promote trans talents. We want to make sure that they leave our production team with experience that will serve them as they continue on in their careers." This is the sentiment of artists and activists who understand that social justice is not just about changing narratives and representations but the systematic structures that determine what bodies are allowed to succeed financially, socially, or politically. Each of the speakers for Transparent and the Danish Girl echoed the intersectional and systematic calls for justice of the other speakers. Throughout the day, the LGBT Champions for Change demonstrated that society will never be able to fully affirm #translivesmatter without also affirming #blacklivesmatter, without crip allies, without intersex siblings, without straight, cisgender, white women, without men of privilege stepping from secure places of authority to redirect their power towards collective justice. Change is antithetical to polite politics as usual. Change means that the safe and familiar may have to pass away in order for a better world to be forged from the remains.

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Championing
Systematic Change

After an hour of coffee and mingling, the official event began as the group filed into seats for a series of panels where guest speakers recounted the histories, literature (including film and TV), and activism currently being explored in LGBTQI politics. While the panels were framed by official and mainstream projects, including a beautiful rendition of the National Anthem by Alex Newell who played the transgender woman of color, Unique, on Glee, nonetheless, the content of the event pushed radical and intersectional social justice agendas. Among the most radical calls for justice was a thread that ran throughout the day on reparations for oppressed minorities. The discussion began, as it should, with the still pressing need for reparations for African-Americans to further the realignment of society after the nation's violent history of chattel slavery. The White House continues to stand as one of the countless American institutions built on the backs of slaves who are yet to be properly compensated for generations of exploited labor and abuse. Echoing a theme of the event, social justice demands more than representational concessions but seismic structural reforms that forever changes the map of cultural powers in the country. It is not enough to affirm, like, or speak support for #blacklivesmatter. Rather, society needs to shake ups in police protocols, hiring practices, and cultural orientations. The White House's Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, a transgender woman of color recently hired to direct outreach and recruitment for the Office of Presidential Personnel, noted the ways the White House affirms the call for systematic changes through strategic hires and training for members from across marginalized communities.

Aditi Hardikar, the LGBT Liaison to the White House, stressed the intersectional scope of the day's discussions in her opening remarks on the use of the term transgender and LGBT in the event's title, which she admitted represents in limited language an eye towards a wider discourse on other queer, gender non-conforming, and intersex communities. Indeed, the call for reparations was taken up later in the day by intersex activists seeking justice for the innumerable intersex children currently and historically surgically altered by doctors at birth. Such doctors follow an intersexist belief that a child must match expected ideals of cisgender male/female embodiment. As a result, doctors have and continue to alter the genitals of children born with non-normative intersexual embodiments in order to bring them back in line with norms. In the process, doctors make decisions about the gender expression that child should be raised to emulate. This surgical alteration and cultural limiting of intersex children's lives can cause significant gender dysphoria and other anxieties about the body - in many cases resulting in depression and suicide. A keystone of intersex activism is the demand that such medical practices be stopped immediately and children allowed to develop outside the gender binary and to chose their own gender presentation. Furthermore, the champions for change called for reparations from the doctors and hospitals who surgically altered the intersex children's sex and gender - often causing a lack of sexual sensation and trauma for the rest of their lives. By holding the medical industry financially responsible for these systematic malpractices, the intersex community can rebuild lives and the place of non-binary persons in society. Throughout the day, the concept of reparations was reimagined as a way to reorient cultural narratives and power.

While remarks and promises were fairly measured from the official representatives of the White House, notably Senior Advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Julian Castro, there was an evident ownership and pride in hosting scholars, activists, and artists to say the things that need to be said, to point where we need to go, and to provide the muscle to get there. Jarret spoke on the President's recent observance of Transgender Remembrance day and the specific emphasis was given to the tragic stories of trans women of color being killed at an accelerated rate. As Castro concluded in his address, America needs to stop seeing people of color as a problem for the LGBT community and instead see people of color as an undervalued, underutilized source of power where LGBT change can erupt. Of the many statements that summarized the radical statements not only said in the White House that day but the statement that the occurrence such an event embodied, Alexandra Billings perhaps put it the most succinctly, "I think we need to be really mindful," Billings said. "This is not only historic, all of us in this room, but this is divine intervention at its most astonishing. I am of a generation where this would not only be impossible but illegal." Indeed, for all the flaws and failures of government, an African-American President of the United States, the first in the office to utter the word transgender publicly, to support an event where artists and activists called for radical change, solidarity, and reparations is significant. Yet Billings reminded everyone present to remain vigilant. "I think in order for us to continue to change the world," Billings added, "we need to remember there are people on the outside who need to be comforted, educated, and honored; especially the voiceless." Even as we remember our fallen and celebrate our champions, we must ever press forward into the margins.

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A Day to Remember

Beyond the formal meetings and panels, the event kept to the goal of remembrance, bringing people working along different ends of art and activism to weave together the disparate threads of transgender history. With Jeffrey Tambor, I discussed family. As the lead in Transparent, Tambor plays Maura Pfefferman, a transgender woman who transitions late in her life after having three children, who call her Moppa. The show is not only about Maura but rather - as my own mother has observed - more about her family as they experience the transition together. Transparent understands that no trans person's experiences, no life, occurs in complete isolation. Even the points of conflict and separation demarcate another place our lives take shape. We become like life-sized statues, brought into shape both by what is preserved (highlighted) and what is removed. Tambor's family lives in New York and is awaiting the upcoming winter. He asks about my family. I tell him about my partner and our two young girls. We talk about the difficulty in raising children who recognize and value their queer, trans family in a world that does not reflect their lives back to them. Art is often more of a mirror than a window and raising children with so few representations on TV or in the movies that allow them to reflect back on the particularity of their family can be difficult. This is one reason queer, femme, trans, crip, people of color are often better at creativity and understanding metaphors in literature, I often say. We know the world is not built for us and does not tell our story, so we must always translate things for our own use and contemplation. In this way, the lives of children with a trans parent at once suffer a loss but also gain an acute power that will allow them to better understand and transform the world around them. At the end of our conversation, after I shared about the girls, my voice was cracking. Stepping forward, embracing me, Moppa gave me a big hug.

In another moment, I got to have a conversation walking down the halls of the White House with Bradley Whitford about transgender politics and the history. Whitford is well known for these "walk-and-talks" from his role, Josh Lyman on the West Wing. But today the discussion progressed through a shared interest in the erased pre- and early modern history of transgender. "This is nothing new," Whitford said. "I just saw a great production of Twelfth Night and I kept on thinking, 'this is nothing new.'" That is interesting, I replied. I pointed out that Shakespeare not only imagines those assigned women bucking the system to live as men, but specifically had Viola call themselves Cesario, "an eunuch." Shakespeare's London was no stranger to trans and non-binary genders. Castrate and effeminate boys were a staple of the London theater, playing primarily female roles. Then again, there were the trans men of London, such as Moll "Cutpurse" Frith who was so well known that nearly every other major playwright included him or referred to him in their productions of London Comedies. But in creating roles such as Cesario, Shakespeare pointed to the many trans masculine personas that filled his world and creative environment. Eunuchs and other castrates, while different than current day trans women or men, constituted a unique gender - physically, socially, legally, and theologically. Cesario the Eunuch is a singer because while London knew few eunuchs in person - they may not know one by sight - the eunuch/castrati voice was a staple in English theater to such an extent that plays included the stage direction "eunuchs play music off stage" without the audience needing to be told it was eunuchs singing. "This is nothing new," I agreed with Whitford. In so many ways, what we do on this day in the White House is not the forging of a new path but the remembering of an old, long, hard fought road.

At the end of a day that seemed to occur all at once in some kind of temporal ball of yarn, I felt the weight of histories many crossing trajectories leaving me floating as others flew off in diverse directions. Time is sprawling, time is deep. Henri Bergson called the inconstant lived perception of time "duration" to distinguished it from the ordered clock-work of measured time. We punctuate our lives with moments, progressions, and cycles. The repetition of events occurs through rituals, where we are brought back again and affirm a shared experience with others from different points in history. Together, across time, we endure.  We call such temporal quilting points where disparate threads of life are woven together "days of remembrance." On these days we passively remember - we bring the forgotten parts of our past back into lived memory. On these days, we actively re-member - we bring the discarded, lost, and erased members of our community and our bodies back together. In our search for that which has been cut off and rejected, we become like Chaucer's Pardoner, digging through the trash heaps of history and society to reclaim and re-narrate the forgotten parts of the past back the world. Some may call this literary dumpster diving, selling trash to an exploited market, but by rebranding the discarded and refused, these projects in historical activism set a new value for lives in the present. In this way, the restructuring of time becomes a critical project of activism. The front line of our activism may be in our past, marking the endurance of lives and imagining a history for a people too often isolate in and by the time of a hateful world. On such occasions when we get to momentarily step aside from our timelines to remember, honor, and observe, we come to recon how much comes into being out of and remains interdependent on relationships to create, sustain, and resurrect them. Another way to say this is: all things endure or fade behind the walls of time's oubliettes because of love or the lack of love.

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"I think we need to be really mindful. This is not only historic, all of us in this room, but this is divine intervention at its most astonishing. I am of a generation where this would not only be impossible but illegal. So I think in order for us to continue to change the world, we need to remember there are people on the outside who need to be comforted, educated, and honored - especially the voiceless"

Alexandra Billings

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The Hanging Tree: Remembering the Transgender Community

"Are you, are you coming to the tree,
wear a necklace of hope,
side by side with me?"

The Hanging Tree
Suzanne Collins

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End Times

On the last day of Transgender History Month, I wake up early to the scripture set for Sunday, November 30th, in Catholic and Congregational churches is the Gospel of Mark 13:1-37. In it, Jesus prophesies the hard days ahead. In particular, the author of Mark is living in the wake of the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem by the Roman government. But Jesus's words extend further. "Be watchful! Be alert!" he warns, "Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes from place to place and there will be famines. These are the beginnings of the labor pains."  (Mark 13: 8-33). These are chastening words to hear in November as the Liturgical Year is coming to an end. Indeed, the final days of the Christian cycle always dwells on Apocalyptic visions. This is not for reasons of despair but to remind those who have heard the scripture throughout the year that the revolution of values proposed means great difficulty for all involved. These endings are also new beginnings, "labor pains." When this month is over and Advent begins, the tone shifts from despair to hope and anticipation. "Woe to pregnant women and nursing mothers in those days. Pray that this does not happen in winter," (Mark 13: 17-18) strikes with palpable warning of the destruction that comes before the story resets with the birth of Jesus at Christmas and the restart of the Liturgical year.

Revolutions must be prepared for divisiveness, those who will set "nation... against nation and kingdom against kingdom." A radical collectivity, such as the community Jesus modeled in the 1st century CE calls us not to give in to such divisions but to always seek out the other, the poor and the marginalized as our kindred . These mounting deaths and systematic violence can feel impossible to overcome. “They will hand you over to the courts. You will be beaten in synagogues. You will be arraigned before governors and kings because of me, as a witness before them," Jesus warns (Mark 13:9). The places where the law is read, justice is carried out, power is ordered can all be turned against us with the aim to divide and conquer. These are the Hanging Trees of Myers, Cleveland, Ferguson, Panem and we might add Jerusalem and Golgotha. When Mark is writing his Gospel, he knows not only how the Jewish and Christian communities will be split and fragmented but how Jesus, who he writes speaking these words, will soon find himself on a "hanging tree" of the Roman government. Jesus hangs on his tree and calls for others to follow him. This may mean hanging side by side with those we are told are criminals, boundary crossers, revolutionaries, but they are our fellow victims of a system which opens wide to hang us all. It is this "hanging tree" (the Cross/Crucifix) that becomes a symbol for hope but one that does not hide the scars of those who have died before us.

Getting out of bed on this day, the Transgender Day of Remembrance, can be that much harder when reading literature that claims that "It Gets Better" only after it gets much much worse. Yet by considering such days in context provides a reason and an impetus for action. Apocalyptic literature is a genre defined by endings. By its structure it asks the question I am asking: how do we move on when the past and the future is filled with destruction of all the things and people we love? When all things come to an end, our systems, our communities, our own lives, will it mean anything? The challenge to remember the trans community is to work for a world that we may not see. We may never reach the promised land, the utopia at the end of the revolution, and that stresses how important it is that we do not work for ourselves. If these are "labor pains" then it is possible and likely many of us will not live through the birthing process. Even more, transgender narratives teach us that things often do not become themselves until some time after our initial birth. The future requires rearing as well as midwifing. Remembering the trans community may mean that those who inherit the world that we build may look radically different than us and those who have come before us. "Be watchful! Be alert!" Transformation demands nothing less than an act of love without predetermining or categorizing or fixing what and who our beloved people may become and what or who may be included.

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Re-membering Transgender

Can you remember Yaz'min Shansez? Pictured below, Yaz'min was a thirty-one years old trans woman of color who lived in Myers, Florida. If you were walking down a particular alley on June 19th, you would have seen her body laying behind a garbage bin, filling the private drive with the smell of burning flesh. If you were there a little earlier, you would have seen her body being set on fire. Can you re-member that? Can you bring back a member of the trans community? Are you, are you going stand in her place?

The month of November has been marked as Transgender History Month, with Nov. 20th set as Transgender Remembrance Day. Now that this period has come to an end, I ask, what did we remember? Remembering seems to suggest that we are bringing back something that we have forgotten. Certainly the lives and deaths of trans persons around the world go duly unnoticed, buried under the more accessible headlines of cisgender victims. For the intentionally transphobic, there is an active practice of dismembering or misremembering the trans community. There are those who actively pull the trigger, strangle the throat, or burn the flesh. Then there are those who passively accept the death of trans persons as the natural consequence of transgressing boundaries. These are the systematically transphobic; no special feeling or thought is required to participate in this mode of diminishing the membership of the trans community. The less that is done or thought, the more effective the erasure.

Can you remember Betty Skinner? Pictured below, Betty was a fifty-two year old disabled trans woman, living confined to a senior assisted living complex in Cleveland, Ohio, where she was found dead. Unable to leave her bed during the attack, much less the violent environment, Betty's life ended when her head was bashed in. Controlled, bound, and alone, no one was there to help Betty nor to identify her murderers. The police have no leads or suspects. Can you re-member what so many turned their back on? Can you re-collect the divided and secluded members of the trans community? Are you, are you able to feel the chains of disability?

Remembering is not merely about intentionality. It is not about a special feeling or thought. It is about re-collecting fragments of a divided and erased history. It is about re-membering a community that is decimated on such a daily basis, that the reported deaths of transgender persons this year come close to matching number of days in 2014. Suddenly, such a systematic remembrance may appear impossible. How do we re-write a history that has not been written? How do we resurrect those denied a livable life? Many of these wounds will never heal. The best alternative we have may be to help them scar. We can do this by being the voice of the forgotten and being the bodies of the dismembered. This does not mean standing in the spot light and speaking for a vulnerable community (and the dead are in many respects particularly and politically vulnerable). This means re-directing the spot-light to those who need it and standing in the shadows, in the margins, in the place of the forgotten. It means remembering the transgender community by becoming an active member of it. This does not necessarily mean transforming ones body or gender presentation, but it does mean changing one's relations and one's politics. It means not viewing the oppression and violence as something that happens to "them" but as the potential for power and resistance that happens through "us."

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Are You Politically Trans*?

This November was more than Transgender History Month, it saw the return of two revolutions, one real and one imagined. The Transgender Law Center remembered, as the protests flooded the streets after the Virginia Supreme Court washed its hands of the blood of the murder of a black youth, "What’s happening in Ferguson cannot be understood outside of the deeply troubling context of systemic oppression in policing in the United States. Nearly half of Black transgender people have been incarcerated at some time, and only 35% of trans people report that they feel comfortable seeking police assistance... It is clear that these realities are not just a few problems with a system that otherwise works" (Transgender Law Center). What we read in these words is the work of a alternative mode of history. By recording the intersection of violences, a critical solidarity grows. This does not conflate race and gender, but rather acknowledges a shared political community founded on shared positionality and power. We hear this multiplicity, an existence between and across boundaries of identity that characterizes a critical trans politics, echoing through our imagined communities. We hear the drums in hearts of Myers, Cleveland, and Ferguson, providing the rhythm to music in "The Hanging Tree" from The Hunger Games: the Mockingjay Part 1, released November 19th (right before Transgender Remembrance Day). Sung in a fictionalized future for the United States, the song recollects the histories of lynchings that have brought together disparate communities to stand against not only the ideas but the physical systems that works to divide interconnected lives into more easily managed sections, often tracing along and encouraging perceived differences in gender, race, ability, and class.

"Are you, are you, coming to the tree?" the song begins, perhaps not merely repeating a plea to its audience but directing its plea to more than one audience. "They strung up a man, They say who murdered three," the song continues. Again, the use of repetition, the reference to an unnamed "they," emphasizes not only the many actions of an actor but the plurality of actors. This is about a system, a system which claims to speak for justice but casting a shadow of doubt at what "they say." "Strange things did happen here, No stranger would it be," concludes the first stanza, "If we met at midnight, In the hanging tree." Yet again, repetition uses rhythm to destabilize what we think we know about the invoked "strange" or "stranger." What has happened before, history, seems to continue to play itself out, perhaps forecasting our own future. This turn from "a man" to "they" and finally to a "we" brought together by a shared "strangeness" creates a formula for the movement across differences in time and identity towards a collectivity. Even if one feels alienated by the distinctiveness of the events of one lynching, in the fullness of time the system may just as well swallow us all. The logic of the "they" that seems to generate its own justifications.

The operation of the song is to produce a sense that "the Hanging Tree" is not the plight of any one "man" or the weapon of any one "they" but collectively "Our Hanging Tree" where systems devour its own operators. This flipping of the script potentially cuts both ways. Not only might be find ourselves at times the victims but at other times the victimizers. It's all a matter of time and rhythm. The danger and the power lies in collectively (but unequally) being tied up together in the tree. We each "wear a necklace of rope" the song confessions in one place and "wear a necklace of hope" in the dubbed rewrite. Sexism, ableism, and racism create inequalities in power, unique privileges and vulnerabilities which form the architecture of the systems of employment, enforcement, and encounters that grow outwards and upwards like a great hanging tree. It is by redirecting this power and sharing positions on the tree that we can finally begin the process of transforming the system itself. Systems predisposes our relations and by resisting and redefining those relations, we our trans politics can remember our community by looking not only behind (to the past) and forward (to the future) but sideways, to all those who stand "side by side."

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In a system of violence where each of our deaths are interconnected, no list of those politically trans bodies we lost this year can possibly be exhaustive, but in a critical act of calling for the remembering of a community that cuts across all lines and allegiances, we might remember a few who lived and died beside Yaz'min and Betty, even if they never knew each other existed.

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