that once and future thing

Folks, I am not dead!

A lot has happened over the last few years. 

I stepped back from writing online for a while, for a lot of reasons.  One reason is that I was seeing more and more people use my work for profit--by reading it at events, teaching it in classes, putting it on mirrored websites--without any of that coming back to me, often without even seeing citations or credit.  I put this work here and elsewhere online for free because I believe in giving what I have to serve my community, and because I want there to be more resources for us, not fewer.  Some of this was done at considerable risk--the writing I've done here and elsewhere, at places like Feministe and Questioning Transphobia, brought me deluges of hate mail, death threats, and harassment from transphobic feminists, Men's Rights activists, racists, old stalkers and abusers, all sorts of people.  To take that punishment in order to offer this work to others, only to see people lift my work and make money off of it while I had trouble paying my rent or budgeting for groceries, cut deeply.  I started thinking about ways to do this work, to continue to give to the community, that didn't make me quite so vulnerable and weren't quite so open to exploitation.  It seemed like it was time to step beyond Taking Steps.

In the time since my last post here, I've been able to do work I'm proud of.  I've done a lot of live readings and performances, including co-running an amazing five-years-running show with the National Queer Arts Festival about queer women's community and healing the rifts between cis and trans women, called "Girl Talk."  I've performed with incredible groups like Mangos With Chili and the Queer Rebels of the Harlem Renaissance.  I've been privileged to travel the country doing workshops, educational offerings, and conference keynotes including the Queer Students of Color Conference and the Power of One Conference for queer and trans youth.  I helped found a roundtable for trans religious leaders with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Pacific School of Religion and organize for trans liberation on an inter-religious level, meeting with teachers, clergy, and theologians to change how they understand and support trans lives in their communities.
I've been in a social-justice-focused seminary program for the last couple of years, working toward a Master's degree that will give me the resources to keep working and fighting for my people, even though it's been taxing.  Woven through all of that has been a roller coaster of personal events, life changes, cross-state moves, and more.

And now, all of you who are still checking this site every day, you ought to know I think it's time I came back.  I've got some amazing writing opportunities coming down the pike--as a regular columnist at sites I really respect, and, finally, for a book.  I'm going to be appearing at Seattle Trans Pride this summer and I'll be back at the Allied Media Conference for the first time in five years.  I'm working steadily toward my ordination and I am more committed all the time to this fight for justice.  I'm here making new life happen.

And in the meantime, with all these irons in the fire: money is tight and my health is poor.  I've been through a lot, lost a lot, called in a lot of favors.  I walk with a cane now, and I'm still learning to manage my post-traumatic stress.  I've gone into a ridiculous amount of debt to pursue my education.  I want to hit the road and see all of you.  I want to make all this happen, take the time to craft new work, and at last get that book on shelves.  Do you have a college, church, community center, that would benefit from a workshop or presentation from me--on decolonization, on trans liberation, on justice-focused theology?  Do you have an anthology that needs this sweet-talking monster to tell some stories in it?  Tell me about it.  I'm in. 

Beyond that--I know we're all strapped--if you're feeling flush, and you remember me and my work and felt it did you some good, if you feel it was worth dropping something in my tip jar, I would welcome any donations, big or small, toward helping me get all my ducks in a row.  This comeback is a long time coming, and I appreciate any help I can get. 

You can reach me, as always, at takingsteps at gmail dot com.  I'll be seeing you soon, troublemakers.


Elena Rose, "little light"

throwing some love

Folks, I know I've been quiet, but plenty of folk haven't, and we're all fighting in our communities in the meantime. One person with an online presence whose on-the-ground community activism consistently leaves me in awe is Cripchick, whose work organizing people with disabilities, especially people of color and queer people with disabilities, I have been privileged to see a little of myself. This woman creates community wherever she goes, and her deep care for her communities is obvious within moments. It is no wonder that organizations that do amazing work gravitate toward her. And right now, one of those organizations, the Disabled Young People's Collective, is in need. All you have to do is check out their site to see the influence and impact they have had in bringing people together in solidarity to improve their lives and futures, without apology or rancor. Cripchick details some of the financial difficulties the group is having here.
I cannot think of a worthier cause to support. The Disabled Young People's Collective is making such a difference for so many people marginalized by extreme, often intersectional oppression, and they are doing it with beauty and joy and love. If you can help them out, please do, even if it is just by spreading the word. Go have a look at the work that's happening, the community that's happening, and try not to feel joy, I dare you.

one of these things is not like the others

Comrades and gentlefolk, it has come to my attention that I have apparently been nominated for Lesbian/Bisexual Woman of the Decade. I am not even kidding. To this, I say: I am extraordinarily flattered to be on that list next to a pile of women I look up to and admire, and to have specifically been nominated as a representative of the trans community, and I would like to say thank you to whoever out there thinks so highly of me as to suggest I go on a list that includes Gloria Anzaldua, Ani DiFranco, and Julia Serano. I also say: this is a silly Internet poll and I am not pretending that it is the Nobel Prize or something. It's getting a lot of talk and publicity, and I think that's really cool, if nothing else because I think the women on that list need to be recognized for their accomplishments and anything encouraging conversation about who we consider exemplars and role models in our communities, and who and why we consider important, is positive. It's a great idea for bringing attention to all of the extraordinary queer women out there and getting people talking. (Well done, Arwyn! Hi!)

So: go forth and nominate people, go publicize this poll, and if you actually do believe I belong on that list, go forth and tell them why. (Let's see if I can keep up with Margaret Cho, yeah?) Have fun with it--and then go have a conversation with someone you know about awesome queer women and who your heroes are! You never know what you might learn or who you might inspire.

i'm so heavy tonight

So here we are, everyone, at the beginning of another decade. This seems bigger to me than many of you, I imagine, because this has only happened to me a couple of times.
I am twenty-seven years old. Now, people keep talking, at this time of year, about looking forward and looking back. They say, let's check in with what I thought a year ago, what I planned and promised and was. Let's check in with who I was ten years ago.

Ten years ago I was a frightened seventeen-year-old kid living in a small town, trapped and, above anything else, feeling utterly hopeless. I never planned on making it to twenty-seven. I didn't think I'd get the chance. So last night, as I lay there having a quiet evening in with my partner, I found myself wishing I could just...take a picture. Take a picture and send it to that kid, because I already have the postcard from teenage me. Just--listen. Kid. Hold on. Hold on.

I came out at seventeen, sort of. I came out as queer, anyway. I didn't know anything about trans issues, leave alone possibilities, beyond the occasional article about gender a long-distance friend sent me, which I read feverishly at four in the morning, terrified I would be found out. I would lock myself in the bathroom at two in the morning and stare into the mirror full of shame and disgust and fear and try to will myself to change. I knew one trans person, though I didn't know how to talk about it, and her very existence frightened me because something in me kept waking up and banging desperately on the walls of my skin and I had no idea how to respond. I couldn't connect right to the people around me, because I wasn't really there. I was isolated, and scared, and never, ever thought I would know any other way to be, and I bruised and burned myself trying to exorcise...hope, really. Trying to banish any inkling that there was another way to live, because I knew that once I acknowledged and trusted that truth, everything would fall apart, everything would burn. Hope was a danger, a false seducer that would lead me to destruction.
I was right. I lost almost everything I knew or was. My entire life came apart, not long after that. Thank every God Who was watching.

There is very little I have in common with that kid--we don't look the same, or know the same people, or do the same things, our plans for life are completely different, we live in different places with different families and different politics and different heroes and different dreams. We don't even have the same name. I have a future; that kid, or that idea of who I thought I would be, anyway, didn't. She ended up trying to dig for the truth, and ended up losing home, family, career, friends, with no guarantee that any of it would come back, nothing promising that she would be able to rebuild and make a new life, which seemed stupid at the time and now seems, to me, to be pretty brave. I wish I could send that kid a picture. Sit down and say, look, sweetheart, things are going to get ugly. You're going to watch the democratic process betrayed, you're going to see wars started and suffering people abandoned and cities underwater, your friends are going to jail and so are you and you know what, honey, the cops are not your friends and you will see things you can never unsee. You will see loved ones die. You will nearly die yourself, of violence, of sickness, of the brutal hazards of doing dangerous work out of desperation, leave alone being refused care and shelter. They will stop calling you "promising" and they will stop jabbering about your "potential." Your teachers will not believe in you and they will not give you gift baskets. The things you think are sure aren't and what you believe is safe is killing you. You won't be able to come home again, sweetheart, I want you to know that, and the people you think will stand by you through thick and thin, the friends so dear to your heart you don't even know, they'll go, too, and some of that will be entirely your fault. You will tear yourself apart at the cellular level, and reconstruct all of it from the ground up, you will learn your body in ways you can never at this time comprehend, you will discover alcohol and coffee and cigarettes and sex and gods know what else, and it will not make you into a bad person like you're scared of, but it won't make you interesting, either. You will find your love cracked and your body violated and everything you thought you could rely on, it will vanish like shower steam on the mirror and leave you still desperately looking at your own face for answers you just don't know. All the promises will be broken, and what survives will shock you. You will fight, and fight, and fight.
And you will grow up, sweetheart. You will become the kind of woman you never dared hope to be, a grown woman, an adult who takes her place in her community and behaves, through all the mistakes and missteps and foolish choices, with strength and integrity. You will make it. You will make it through pain you never imagined possible and you will find yourself not in a new world, but a new perspective on the old one. You will not find the place you magically fit in. You will not start belonging and you will not be whisked away to a different place where your special destiny redeems you. You will spit at destiny and make something new. You will hurt people, by accident and design, but in the end, you will have actually saved lives, and done work that you know is worthwhile. You will go farther than you knew the road extended. You will end this decade, with its wars and crushed cities and burning skies and shattered economies, with its dot-com whimper and stolen votes and constant, oppressive fear, knowing who you are, proud of your color and your love and your heritage, proud of your community, proud that you have made it, with comrades and friends whose fierceness and beauty your storybooks never predicted for you. You will end this decade without the family that raised you, with kind words from the family that chose you, instead. You will end this decade, my dear, in the arms of a woman you haven't met yet--not that girl you took to the prom, my dear, but someone far better for you, someone who surprises you every day, who helps you grow by the moment, who looks at you and likes what she sees. You will complain that she leaves tea bags in the sink because something has to distract you, now and then, from how ridiculously gorgeous she is. You will look in her eyes and be full to bursting with the wonder and awe you feel every time you remember that she actually said "yes."

It will not be easy, sweetheart, I wish I could say to that kid. But look. You know how nobody has those brick-sized cell phones except rich people and drug dealers, and computers take up a whole desk, and twenty years ago took up a whole room if you wanted them to really do impressive things? You will write this up on a laptop computer you can carry in one hand, and people will read it from all over the world, and you know what, they have computers like this in public libraries for everyone to use, I swear. The phone in your pocket has the computing power of the box you grew up with, and it was the cheapest, most basic one they had at the store, and it costs less than the kind that plugs into the wall and you will grumble that all it does is send your words out into space and into other people's phones instantaneously, plus being a clock, calculator, and e-mailer, like that is nothing. In ten years, the machines around you will become boring, slow, outdated, and orders of magnitude more advanced than anything you have ever seen and they will make Star Trek look clunky, I am not kidding about this. So if that's the case, please believe that the technology of your hope, of your basic humanity, will evolve and advance far more than you can think of. Your adulthood will be nothing like you imagined it. Nobody will come to rescue you. The music you are listening to right now, you will cringe at. And guess what:

You will be grateful, every moment, that your prayers will not have been answered. For the trials and struggles and losses. I won't pretend it won't hurt, kid, because it will tear you to pieces. But here you will be, and you will be okay, and you will be moving forward, and you have no idea what you want yet, or what you can truly have.

Now excuse me--I have an appointment with me from ten years from now, and I think she is going to school me in all the things I cannot imagine yet and will never in a thousand years predict. Go ahead and laugh now, because when she shows me a picture of the next world, I think my face will be priceless.

Sweetheart, hope is dangerous, and it is exactly what you need. Here. You can borrow a little of mine.

See you soon.

ordering chapbooks

I've already started getting some online orders for "All Of Them With Teeth: Monster Hymns and Sermons," and the most streamlined way to maintain a sliding scale was to create a Paypal button. I am asking for US$10.00-15.00 per chapbook. Please add US$2.00 to your order if you are ordering from overseas, to help offset shipping costs, and send me a mailing address I can send zines to as well as how many you'd like. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, difficulties with the sliding scale, want to order bulk, or don't want to use Paypal, email me at takingsteps *at* gmail *dot* com and I will work something out with you.

greatly exaggerated

Good morning, my darlings. I am not dead.

Let me explain some of where I have been, because it has been a while and I have had some very sweetly worried e-mails. To begin with, well, life exploded. As any of you who've been reading me for a while can imagine, I have been dealing with a lot of trauma--from rape, abuse, police brutality, and more--that I am finally, finally biting the bullet and working through. That takes a lot out of me. Add that to twelve-hour workdays and six-day workweeks, local community work, school applications, and actually showing up for a committed relationship, and it's all I can do to squeeze in time to write or the emotional energy to handle the Internet. I mean, last time I posted, I actually had someone berate me for espousing hope, because nothing is worse than hope. Some time around then, I just decided it was time to take a little break from this world where I get hate mail for statements like "you are lovable" and "hope is okay" and "sometimes things hurt and nothing is wrong with you." So there's that.

So let me tell you some of what I've been up to, given that:

I'm currently applying to attend a social-justice seminary program. It is time, even in these scary economic conditions, to be brave and stop wasting my energy and hope and time on a day job that doesn't let me use what I have in the service of my community. It's time to actually put my money where my mouth is and follow a calling toward greater opportunities for service. (I don't know where the money's coming from, of course. As Zhu Xi said in the Song Dynasty, "If in your learning you don't progress, it's because you're not bold.")
I'm getting married in July, which, as you may imagine, takes up a lot of space in my head. The secret magic bridesmaid roster includes Internet People who you may know. Together, we are resisting the wedding-industrial complex as fiercely as possible, and I have derived a certain amount of comfort from Offbeat Bride.
I have been hustling. I participated in the keynote at this year's AMC and am now busy working to make next year's even better. I did amazing shows in San Francisco, Seattle, and the East Bay alongside truly incredible writers and activists I admire, like Gina de Vries, Elaina Ellis, Julia Serano, Ela Barton, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz, Nalo Hopkinson, Miss Cherry Galette, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Nomy Lamm, and many more. I got to learn from some of the best out there and really grow as a writer and performer, and spent a lot of time on planes and trains with my pen out, squeezing in words wherever I could and finding new loved ones everywhere I went.
I made my first chapbook, a compilation of some of my work on monstrousness, resistance, and dangerous love, and it has been selling enough that I may need to do another print. It's called "All Of Them With Teeth: Monster Hymns and Sermons" and if you'd like your own copy, get in touch with me!
I'm also making my magazine debut in February. I will keep you posted, everyone.

So with that laid down, I want to emphasize: it is time, for me. I am available for speaking and teaching engagements, for commission, for publishing, and for showing up and preaching wherever you feel someone needs to hear it. I have heard over and over that my work is being read in classrooms around the country, in conference keynotes and resistance actions, written on skin and taped to mirrors. If you want me and my voice there to do that reading, let me know and I will do my best to show up. It's time for hands in hands and voices raised.

That is: "lately" has been frigging exhausting. But moving forward, and moving up, and moving through. For those of you still out there, I've missed you, and I hope this time has been one of growth for you, too.

I'll be back when I can. I am, as always, available at takingsteps *at* gmail *dot* com.

the worth of human life

Repre-fucking-sent.
Mabuhay, hermana.

The world keeps moving, everyone, and the upwelling of truth is everywhere. Take a listen.



(embedded video of Filipina trans activist Sass Rogando Sasot seated at the assembly of the United Nations, speaking passionately about human rights. I don't have a transcript, but if I get or make one, I'll post it here.)
(thanks to a commenter, transcript can be found here: http://www.rainbowbloggers.com/2009/12/un-speech-reclaiming-lucidity-of-our.html)

consummation

This piece was debuted last night at the National Queer Arts Festival show, Girl Talk, in San Francisco. Thank you so much to Gina and Julia for putting the show together, to everyone who came together for an incredible set of performances, and to everyone who came out to support us. It was a pleasure and an honor.

The day they took the silver spoon out of my mouth and replaced it with a gun barrel, I learned a lot about hunger. And hunger taught me far too well.
I came out at nineteen and lost my family when I began transition, lost my way home, my plans, my everything. No small-town hometown, any more, no talking Family Business shop with Mom in the kitchen. In an instant an entire childhood with full cupboards changed, and I was a nineteen-year-old girl whose parents cut off her food supply, who couldn’t even get a job washing dishes, and at the same time as they started refusing to tell me they loved me without qualifiers and started with “you can never have a family,” I learned that the garbage is a pretty decent place to get a bite to eat.

Sometimes we are ghosts in orbit, too afraid of burning up on re-entry to ever go home, unwilling to abandon the sight of it for the cold vastness to which we turn our nervous backs. Circling around each other, stately, flash-frozen at the moment of grief, we wait for gravity to make the choices for us; we pretend we don’t know what else to do.
Bitterness is a waltz.
It’s easy to end up lost in the upper reaches of the air when the ground goes out from under you, you know? When the road you planned crumbles away and, brave Fool, you just walk off into the airy emptiness instead.
Sometimes that bridge you bought is under your feet after all. Sometimes you just join the wind-skating dusty dead, out at the edge of the atmosphere.
We’re all up here, the ghosts and strays, needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until we have mouths enough again for a meal. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss.

Family was where the food came from. It was where the love came from. And I lost both, and had to learn, in only the way someone who hasn’t already had to grow up without these things must, where to get nourishment on the fly. The poor little rich girl got an abrupt education in what she thought she was entitled to before, and what could be substituted when all that plenty went away.
In all the things I didn’t used to think were food, or love, that I could take because I suddenly discovered I needed them.

It is no mistake that I learned to eat the scraps from other people’s plates and make ugly compromises for handouts in the same season I entered a relationship where I lost count of the times I was raped. I learned what I was good enough for. I learned to settle for what I could get. What I could digest. What I could endure, in order to have someone touch me and say they wanted me, in order to get a full belly. Food poisoning and abusers both reach a fist into your guts and pull out what they want, after all, but you don’t see either one coming when you’re so hungry you can’t think.
The things we learn to survive are just that: survival. They keep us surviving, for better and for worse.

The thing is, if you go long enough scrounging, snapping and snarling at the edge of the lamplight, it becomes part of everything you do. You learn to hoard every little bit you can get right now, even if you don’t want it, because you don’t know where your next meal will come from. Better to gorge yourself on way too much discarded bread, half of a stranger’s sandwich, or enough abandoned bacon to make you sick, and store it up in case there’s nothing but a carrot, an egg, and hot water tomorrow. It doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, or whether or not it’s any good; it’s something, and the just-in-case justifies everything. Discriminating by quality or desire is a luxury, and when the emotional Dumpstering starts—when you start believing that solidarity’s scraps are enough to make it on, and give up on thriving—you start to packrat every touch you get, even the violent ones, you beg even the friends who degrade you to stay.

I have a steady paycheck now, enough to put food on the table without worry, with no kids to feed and tastes made simple by the school of make-do. I have a ring on my finger from the person I love most in all the world, and we have made a warm safe home where I sleep every night.
But I still eat every scrap in front of me and wipe the dish, even if I’m feeling sick, because part of me can’t look away from the shaky precipice of my life as a queer trans woman of color who’s making it. I’m the monster of the story, lurking at the margin, and it can all be taken away in a heartbeat: that’s what I learned. That it might be safer to be someone’s dog, and at least get the scrapings from the table, but I’d better beg. The ground is unsteady under my feet, and the job, the pantry, the door that locks, I can get pulled off it just as fast as I can be locked up for soliciting for walking down the street for groceries. My mismatched ID is only a sign of how quickly anyone can figure out that I’m a nonperson, a mismatched thing on the edges, the kind of thing that takes scraps or blood to survive. And no matter how steady things get, no matter what I build, I learned that lesson well and it’s just as hard to shake as any lesson about how you can’t eat dignity, about conditional love. Do you see? I’m still gorging on every abandoned plate I pass, just in case the next paycheck doesn’t come. I’m still begging for leftovers of closeness I can stitch into my monster heart. And somewhere, way past that fresh gorgeous produce and piping-hot pie in my kitchen, I still retain the terror that, like Lamia, all that I am will be seen through, and the real people will tear unacceptable me from the feast and my love, that even the woman who knows me all the way to the bottom will somehow someday discover the discarded skin of her selkie bride, and I will lose everything on my way back to the sea.
When I went off the map and up into the ionosphere, I stopped trusting anything good was real, was any more lasting than my breath, and a litany of loss taught me too well to heal right. When I went from scholar to scavenger, the precariousness of my position was a reasonable lesson to learn, but I’m not there any more, not still cobbling together a life from the bits I could sneak off everyone else’s plates.
My mistress with a monster is in love, and I am still learning to trust that she knows what she’s getting into with a fierce conviction and devotion I never thought possible, still learning that leaning on her, the first real family I ever had, is less shaky than I first supposed. When I didn’t know I could be taken care of, she insisted on reaching for my needs. When I was shivering sick she spoon-fed me medicine. At half my size she stood up for me against the whole world without hesitation, and loving her is the truest thing I could possibly know. We have done the work to be family—solid ground—for each other. So why is part of me still waiting for the other reality to drop? Why am I so unable to let go of the hunger, so ready to allow a starving status quo to dictate my life when I am filled daily with love and strength and hope? Where is the trust in a world that can change? In the possibility of feasts, so long as I let them spread out before me, and in a future that is more than a threat? What day will be the day I stop waiting to lose this miracle?
I am planning a wedding, planning motherhood, even as I hold tight to someone who finally told me that I don’t have to accept the leftovers, that I can ask for a brimful cup and watch it sometimes arrive, that I can be not just sated, but satisfied if I let go of believing I don’t deserve it. And at the end of the day, I still fight to remember that it’s not that she’s real and I’m in tenuous human guise, but that she’s cis and I’m trans and that love can be realer than any of those divides, that we can be back-to-back against a whole world full of loss and deprivation and feed each other every day and in the home we are for each other, there is nobody who can stop us now. I’ve come in from the cold and there’s soup waiting.
It is no mistake that when I learned I couldn’t have love, I learned that I couldn’t have a warm meal, either. It is no mistake that in our home, I cook as often as possible.

I’ve been up here in the cold upper air for a long time, with the ghosts and the strays. Needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until I had a mouth enough for a meal again. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss. But sometimes one of us can look down and see a soft place, a warm kitchen. And then, all alight in that hopeful embrace, we are shooting stars, rushing home, consumed.

like a hungry runaway*

This morning my partner sent me down the street to pick up some things for breakfast, because neither of us was thinking about what would happen on the way.

I rounded the corner past the church, its bells pealing for Mass, kids running about, and promptly stumbled into a gauntlet of a solid dozen cafes and restaurants and lunch carts all packed kitchen to door, all their signs cheerfully chalked to announce their specials for Mothers' Day Brunch. It seemed like every storefront had something to say on the matter, or was closed so they could be home to say something else more personal.

I've been trying to avoid noticing today, to skip past all the greeting cards and helpful internet reminders and e-mail from Planned Parenthood telling me via cute video about how much I should appreciate my mother, the best in the world. Last night's crying jag made it clear that this was not a workable strategy. This is not a fun day for me. This is not about picturesque brunch.

When you're barren and motherless, Mothers' Day is a calendar mark to dread.

I will never carry a baby under my heart and above my hips. And the person who carried me, we don't talk any more. There's too much hurt. There's too much poison. Here we are at the day where I'm supposed to idealize that, where I used to call every year and pretend things were other than what they were. This time, it's different. This time I'm not pretending. The rest of my family probably had a lovely spread on the table this morning, but I wasn't there. I may never be again.

I've been trying to hide from this day as best I could, but, as when I was a child, there's nowhere to hide, is there? There's nowhere I can go that the people who made me aren't with me, in the end, nowhere that who they are and what they did isn't encoded in my bones and carved into my corneas. I already knew when I was little that even hidden in a closet or up a tree, nowhere was safe for long, if nothing else because I was there, and I brought it all with me. When it's in you, when it is you, when it's where you come from, you bring it everywhere, stinking in your hair like rancid cigarette smoke, like a red-eyed thing hanging behind your neck and reading everything over your shoulder. I don't know who I am without it. There has never been a version of me without it.

Last year in March I climbed a mountain alone, and sat at the peak trying to put away the whole human world for a while so I could see further, but I brought it with me. My veins and shoes and food wrappers and eardrums were all human, and all came into that place. When I tried to strip away everything and get to the bottom of myself, near the bottom was a terrible, paralyzing fear, infecting all my decisions. That fear spoke in a voice I recognized all too well. Sometimes it wore a face that I recognized, too. Always there. I couldn't get away from where I came from. I brought it with me.

You can't run from where you start. You can't hide from it. You can stop picking up the phone, change your address, change your name, but you'll find it chalked onto the sandwich boards of every cafe in your neighborhood, find it in your inbox as a reward for your volunteer service, and you will find yourself looking over your shoulder every minute, afraid to see in person the people who are always there anyway, but no longer made of smoke and mirrors and hurt but flesh and blood and audible voice, ready to dismantle every shrine you've built in yourself.

I am trying to come to terms with this day. Trying to find a way to make it positive for myself instead of a stab-wound. I think, well, I will never carry a child inside, but I may be a mother someday. I think, well, what about metaphors, about cultivation and vegetable gardens and art, about making new things and nurturing them? I think about the wonderful mothers in my life, who aren't my mothers but who surely count. I think about all the people who helped mother me even if we never shared blood, all the people who gave me somewhere to run to, who showed me a different way to be. I think about elders in my community worth honoring. I think about spiritual mothers, universal mothers even, trying to reach further out into something sacred and more wholesome.
I think of someone dear to me who reminded me that, as Audre Lorde said, we have to learn to mother ourselves. But it's hard to know the best way to mother yourself when your only model is so full of hurt, and is so full of hurt because her only model in turn hurt her. Learning to mother yourself in a new way, when you don't know what the safe and healthy way to do it even looks like, is a tall order.

Mothers' Day is no picnic when you're barren and you're motherless. But I'm not really either of these things. I am fertile, though I cannot give birth, as soil in which to grow things. And I have a mother. If I didn't, this would be a very different kind of hurt, but I do have a mother, one who shaped me, one who is integral to who I am and have become, who is never not looking over my shoulder whether I like it or not. The key is not in the fiction of being motherless. It's in learning to deal with the mother I have, or had, and what she is, now, in me. It's in healing the mother in me so I can mother myself, and so someday when there are children in my care I can do right by them. I don't know how to do these things, but maybe Mothers' Day is a good place to start. My Independence Day, or Dependence Day, or something, something about saying right here and now that even when you ran away, even when you changed your name and address and phone number, you cannot hide from what is written in your ribcage and seeping to fill your muddy footprints, sketched on your palms and wrapped around your throat. If you cannot hide, you have to figure out something better to do.

For all of us learning to mother ourselves, if not a happy Mothers' Day, a hopeful one, one where we give ourselves more chances. A day to remember the good days, the moments of respite. A day to learn to grow something new in ourselves, and start to be brave enough to loose its seeds on the wind. A day to support the mothers around us who are, as our own did, doing the best they can. A day to believe that they, and we, can do it differently.

Where we come from is always in us, and we take it everywhere. Maybe we can learn something from it better than what it wanted to teach us. Maybe someday we can go home.


*props to my friends Coyote Joe and Miss Grace, who you should know better

listening party!

This Saturday the 11th, there will be a listening party for the release of the SPEAK! Radical Woman of Color Media Collective's spoken-word CD. The CD, a compilation of poetry, prose, story and song, is packed with the work of people you know, including Blackamazon, Brownfemipower, Cripchick, La Mamita Mala, Sylvia, me, and many more. We made this project with love and held hands and hard work, and we're proud to present it as a fundraiser to help get some radical mamis of color to the Allied Media Conference and support them in their activism.
At the listening party, you'll have a chance to come together and hear the album, discuss it, and take it home with you. We've put together a whole curriculum, written together, to help facilitate, and both I and Adele Nieves, producer and contributor, will be present to help get things shaking.



Excited yet? I know I am. Here's the details:
The It Is Better To SPEAK! listening party will be held Saturday, the 11th, at 7 to 9 pm at In Other Words Women's Books and Resources, 8 B NE Killingsworth St., Portland, OR, 97211. All are welcome. Bring a friend and spread the word! I'll see you there.

The press release for the album is below:
*******
*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:*
*March 9, 2009*
*SPEAK! WOMEN OF COLOR MEDIA COLLECTIVE** RELEASING SELF-TITLED DEBUT
CD*
*UNITED STATES **– March 9, 2009*– SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective, a netroots coalition of women of color bloggers and media-makers, is debuting March 7, 2009 with a performance art CD, accompanied by a collaborative zine and classroom curriculum for educators. Compiled and arranged by Liquid Words Productions, the spoken word CD weaves together the stories, poetry, music, and writings of women of color from across the United States. The 20 tracks, ranging from the explosive “Why Do You Speak?” to the reverent “For Those of Us,” grant a unique perspective into the minds of single mothers, arrested queer and trans activists, excited children, borderland dwellers, and exploring dreamers, among many others. “We want other women of color to know they are not alone in their experiences,” said writer and educator Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of the contributors to the CD. “We want them to know that this CD will give sound, voice and space to the often silenced struggles and dreams of women of color.” The Speak! collective received grant assistance from the Allied Media Conference coordinators to release a zine complementing the works featured on the CD, as well as a teaching curriculum for educators to incorporate its tracks into the classroom environment. “*Speak!* is a testament of struggle, hope, and love,” said blogger Lisa Factora-Borchers of A Woman’s Ecdysis. ”Many of the contributors are in the Radical Women of Color blogosphere and will be familiar names… I can guarantee you will have the same reaction as to when I heard them speak, I was mesmerized.” To promote the initiative, the Speak! collective is coordinating listening parties in communities across America, creating short YouTube promotions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7tsdaYmvhE) illustrating the CD creation process, and collaborating with organizers and activists online and offline. The CD is available for online ordering at http://speakmedia.wordpress.com on a sliding scale beginning at $12.

All inquiries for review copies should be directed to us at speakcd@gmail.com. Proceeds of this album will go toward funding for mothers and/or financially restricted activists attending the 11th Annual *Allied Media Conference* in Detroit, MI from July 16-19.
*******

fair

So I want you to imagine something. It's going to be pretty awful, and it's probably going to be a trigger for some people. If that's a risk you don't feel up for, take care of yourself and stop now.


The first thing you need to understand is that masculinity, maleness, is inculcated and enforced with violence. It's either actual violence, or the threat of violence, or the implied threat of violence. Constantly. It's how men and boys are taught to train each other into maleness. This is true even at a very, very young age; go to a kindergarten playground, and you will see little boys shaping each others' masculinity, according to the rules they're taught by older boys and by grown men, with violence. It starts very early.

Take a little girl and throw her into that group of boys. Leave her with them and only the instruction, "Do whatever you want with her. Shape her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence." Just sit with that for a minute. The image of handing a little girl who doesn't understand the world yet to a group of boys who are given carte blanche to use violence to shape her into whatever they think is appropriate.

It's a horrifying image. It's hideous and disturbing and wrong and it makes my flesh crawl thinking about it. And that's the way we, as a society, ought to react; if something like this scenario went public, there would be newspaper headlines.

It happens every day. Every hour. But while decent people automatically find this scenario a yawning, shocking evil when the little girl we envision is cissexual, this is considered the normal and proper way to treat a little girl who's trans. I knew I was a girl that early; I was kicked out of preschool for refusing to admit that I was a boy. And then they handed that little girl to the boys for the next fifteen years and said, "Do what you want with her. We will look the other way or cheer you on as you turn her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence. It's only proper if she screams."

This is a horrifying story. This is the kind of story that, when you really look at it, represents the kind of abuse that the average person would respond to with, "Lock that sick bastard away and throw away the key." If it's a cissexual little girl. If she's trans, it's things running as they ought to be. There is no censure. There is applause.

This is one of the revealed, naked faces of oppression: if it were done to the privileged person, it would be considered abuse. If it's done to the marginalized person, it's the status quo. But it's not only that. It's not only about oppression; it's about how and why we internalize oppression.

This is a horrifying story. It's the kind of story that threatens to break your mind if it's your story. And you have to protect yourself somehow. You have to hold yourself together. You have to make it make sense. Because a world where that can be done to a little child who never did anything to anyone, who's not even old enough to understand why she's being hurt this way even by her parents until nowhere is ever safe, that's not an okay world. That's not a world I think a lot of us, including me, are strong enough to hold as true. So we defend ourselves by believing what it tells us.

I let the world tell me lies. I let myself believe that I was so bad and wrong and monstrous that I deserved what I got, that I even let someone rape me just because I was so desperately craving to be touched at all, because even abuse was more closeness than I felt I deserved. I let myself absorb the idea that I was completely delusional, and that all my knowledge about myself was false twitchings of a sick mind, because the alternative to that painful lie, the lie that I was a monster living in a fantasy world who was inherently freakish and unlovable? The alternative was worse. The alternative was that I didn't deserve it, I wasn't disgusting and unworthy of love, that I was a child put in an abusive situation and forced to stay there for no good reason. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true, as a child. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a teenager who couldn't sleep, who worked out on a punching bag every day after school until her hands bled, who spent every day thinking of newer, cleaner exits from living. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a college student who was fetishized and mocked and treated as a contaminated, essentially pornographic animate sex toy unworthy of any kind of closeness that didn't have the tinge of "dirty" and "perverted" seeping into it, who couldn't hug people or say "I love you" without fear that it would be considered creepy.

I wasn't strong enough to accept the truth of how strong I was. Acknowledging and owning my vast strength meant acknowledging that I was holding up something very heavy all the time, that I had been through hardship and not just normal life, the natural order of things. What I wasn't strong enough to accept was that I was a good kid, a strong kid, a brave kid, because that meant admitting that I was going through something that required virtue, strength, and courage, something that would make an inspiring TV movie about human resilience if it were happening to a person considered real by her society. Accepting that I was okay, that I was even beautiful, meant admitting that what I went through at school and at home, rather than being normal and good, was a horrorshow.

So I bought the lie instead. I let them convince me for a large swath of my adolescence that I was, really, a boy. The idea disgusted and horrified me, but not as much as the truth, that I was right, that I was trustworthy to myself, that it wasn't my fault. It was better to live in a world where I was a boy--or even a boy who wanted to be a woman someday--and had lived a normal life, than a world where I was a girl who was systematically stripped of her sense of self, subjective reality, and personhood, subjected to near-constant violence or its threat, and treated as a contaminated, dirty thing. The lie--even the lie of "boy who wants to be a girl" or "woman in a man's body," as though my body was someone else's--as skin-crawlingly painful as it was, was nowhere near as painful as the truth of being a girl trying to find her way to womanhood and living through this on the way.

This is how we internalize the lies. This is how we accept the yoke of oppression. By living in a world where the truth that we are beautiful and worthy and lovable is even more painful to accept than the lie that we are none of these things, because all sense of fairness or order vanishes when you look the truth in the eye. If we are beautiful, we are in a world that does not care about our beauty, and even grinds it in the mud. If we are strong, we are living in a world so heavy that it saps our strength until we are tired all the time. If we are ourselves, we are living in a world that systematically strips away our selfhood like roast chicken scraped from the bone.

Until we are strong enough to look this in the eye and fight it, to stand up and fight and make the part of the world we stand on more okay no matter how hard it is or what it takes--until we are so very strong that we remember we are strong, and beautiful, and true, worthy of no end of love, no matter what--it's just too much to bear. So we accept false stories instead, about how we're dirty and ugly and weak and unlovable. We have to. I had to.

I am writing this down because I know that in an hour, or a day, or a week, I will be listening to the lies again for a while. How else do you live? How do you go on in the world without accepting that the injustice is just, or not your problem, just a little, just for now? How can you walk in a world where the truth is true instead of breaking down and crying? So we internalize the lies for a while in order to let things make enough sense to get through the day. Gravity pulls comfortingly down. The alternative, the raw, vulnerable, pulsing truth can only be taken in doses, even if they're bigger doses every day. It's so hard to just let it be real. How can you let it be real? How can you really pull off the lid and look down into that darkness and let the truth--that you live in a world where you're not considered fully real, fully human, and that if you were considered real, what was done to you would be considered unacceptable, retch-inducing, but you're not and it isn't?

You have to tell yourself the stories. Just for now. Just until you're strong enough to bear the weight of the truth and see with clear eyes, if you ever get that strong. Just until you are so full of overwhelming bravery and power that you can finally insist that you are lovable and loved, that you deserve it in every cell of you, that beauty shines through you as a conflagration of glory. When you stand there, blazing in your awful wonder, you can move the whole world. You just have to get through the pain of knowing that you are true, that you know, that you are everything you will ever need to be.

It hurts to say this and it hurts to hear: you are lovable. So am I. The chasm between that truth and the world we allow ourselves to live in every day is deep and dark, but it is still the truth and always will be.

You are everything you ever hoped you would be, and I love you. When you are strong enough, please, shine.

no regrets no looking back and no goodbyes

I get so homesick.

I'm a country girl. We know this. And I ache sometimes for the hot breeze and tobacco-colored rimrock cliffs, sitting on my dusty car's hood looking up at a sky bigger than anything, somewhere on a potholed back road out at the edge of the big pines. For soaking in the river and baking on a boulder till dry, scrambling over the jumbled basalt with skinned elbows and a big pocketknife in sturdy jeans. For walking up logging roads and past split-rail ranch fences, sometimes with an eye to where I might park with a girl once the moon came up. I knew every flower by name, could tell you which bird just by its silhouette.

Back home, past the rusted-out stacks of the empty mill, you can see the Milky Way oozing glitter across the arch of everything. The train tracks go forever and so does the horizon, except where stretching calderas come up, a great cradling hand, to hold the boundaries of the knowable.

There's a soda fountain that makes its own chocolates and milkshakes, down there, and you can smell their caramel corn all the way down the street at the little restaurant we all went with our prom dates. Both of the old florists continued to not hire me every summer.

I don't get to go back. Maybe ever. I'm gone from there. I kicked the dust from my boots, packed everything in a station wagon, and ran. As far as most anyone knows, I might be dead.
And I might be, if I did go back. You never know. I did famously at cutting and running, and sometimes that cuts back.

The river cuts through everything there, and everything leads down to it. You just look for the green. We used to jump off a bridge in the summer , where two X's had been scratched into the rail to tell you where was deep enough, and crawl back up through the rocks and shady wild mint patches for another go. You just shucked your shoes and jeans and went, though I was always a big chicken about it.

Quaking aspen and knobby juniper tell you where you are, out there. We don't get those where I live now.

I say awful things about my hometown, bitter, narrow-eyed. Fair enough. It hurt me, bad. But some days, it's just to get away from loving it, from feeling rootless with my feet on all this cement, grasping at bluegrass music and "ain't" and typing inside to stay out of the weather.

I used to dangle my feet over a clifftop, rolled-up jacket for a pillow, and make sketches of every growing thing. I knew what time of year the dragonflies would have their highspeed aerial junctioned relations. Sitting up on my parents' roof in the snow, I'd watch the first melt sigh and plop off the branches. I'd shoo the deer from the summer garden, see if the coyote'd come by, and head down the road to town, singing.

They hurt me, and I ran, and I can never go back. But I can't honestly say there's nothing for me there.

I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There's a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There's opera. There's my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There's the woman I'm marrying.

But I've never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It's been years since I've pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.

Maybe I'm just not a teenager any more, and don't notice these things. Maybe, in a world that seems a little grimmer and more complicated, I've just let my sense of wonder slip, let the sky get a little less big. But maybe I'm just homesick for a home that didn't want me, an old lover that'll never take me back.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous. I've made a new home and a new life, with plenty of joy in it. The riotous wealth of subcultures and body-mods, the sidewalks that don't roll up at seven, the new places to go that don't run out, the people, all matter. I get giddy at the press and smells and close-in messy human wonderfulness at Pike Place Market, grin affectionately at the ornate Victorian houses Southeast Portland has long since rented out for duplexes to college kids and station-wagon dykes raising kids. I can rent Bollywood movies, for Gods' sakes. There's colors here I never knew existed, before. Besides, nobody pretends that my hometown is still what it used to be, anyway.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous, and I have the scars to prove it. Life goes on, often into something richer, fuller, more honest, more whole. But a leopard can't change her spots sometimes, and for everything that's changed, some things never do, and I can't shake the feeling, some days, that I'm in exile.



(This post had a soundtrack, on the train when I wrote it. It's Kim Richey's "A Place Called Home," for the record.)

we are ready now

Brownfemipower, once again, speaks truth.

The Allied Media Conference is life-changing. I know because I was lucky enough to go last summer. I was able to go, in part, thanks to the generous help of a couple of you out there who thought it was important enough to help me out. The dividends of that kindness have echoed through my entire life like a shockwave of affirmation, strength, hope, and new community. I left Detroit last June with a new way of looking at the world, a new courage to engage, and new hope for the greatness and potential of letting radical love be at the center of everything.

I never got around to posting about AMC last year because I couldn't find the words. I couldn't describe what it was like to walk into a dynamic community of people who all had been willing to sacrifice in order to come together and hope--without the constraint of always, always having to go back to square one, without the exhaustion, for just a little while, of an oppressive world--who had brought their dearest families, their secret joys, their history-battered strengths in order to dedicate themselves to evolving a new way to go forward. I saw five generations holding hands and supporting each other, across differences, due to deep and mutual respect. I saw children light up with possibility and bravery and laughter. I saw teenagers, arm in arm, teaching everyone in the room what it means to learn. I saw elders in a place of honor, leading the way toward change. And rolling around Detroit, watching as a city forced to its knees by the betrayal of industry continues to provide incredible examples of growth and innovation and faith in the power of community to the rest of the world, I saw a new kind of community that I'd never had before. It was about making not what we're paid to make, not what we're told to make, but what we need, for each other.

At AMC I made connections I had never dreamed I could have--not just as an aspiring writer and media-maker (though I found those and then some) or as a radical activist (we got amazing work done and started projects that blow me away every day) but as a queer woman of color, a sister, a partner, moving through the world and trying to figure out where I fit in it. I went from quietly saying "I'm a woman of color" with my head hung awkwardly to standing up proud and saying "I'm a woman of color" in a clear voice full of certainty. It was the best reminder I could imagine of the idea that that identity is fundamentally about claiming yourself as part of a greater whole, of defining your own identity by your choice of solidarity with others. It's not a "my name is"--it's an "I belong to." It's not a "here's what I'm called"--it's a "here's who my family is." It says you've chosen to prioritize your connection to community, the shared struggle across different iterations of oppression, and the irresistible truth that together we are far more than any one of us.

The Allied Media Conference gave me new tools as a media activist, but it also reminded me where I belong, and to whom I am connected. The people I stood with, sat around a kitchen table with, traded stories and skills and dreams with, re-taught me not just how to do the work, but who I am. They gave me more to stand for, more to love, and more to value within myself. I could integrate all those identities--trans, queer, rural, brown, religious--and nobody tried to force me to take myself apart and just be parts of me. I came away more aware of myself and my context than ever before, ready to keep growing.

On the plane to Michigan, my bag lost, my flight delayed and rescheduled, sandwiched between a dental hygenist and a yuppie who wouldn't turn off his fancy phone, I told people I was on my way to a professional conference of media-makers, and that was true.
On the plane home to Oregon, weeping openly with the joy of discovery and the pangs of distance from a new world of wonders, I told people I'd been in Detroit visiting family, and that was true, too.

I'm ready for more of that. Are you?

same as the old boss

I'm sorry, you were making a point about online feminists reproducing historical patterns of marginalization and privilege?

I couldn't hear you over the deafening roar of "I'll tell you what you're going to be called, and you're going to sit down and like it."

Lesson, kids: when someone you have privilege over says, "Excuse me, but I would appreciate if you didn't use that word to describe me, it makes me really uncomfortable," what is the proper response?
A: "I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm going to keep doing it."
B: "Some of my best friends are (insert somebody here), and they told me it was okay."
C: "I'm reclaiming that language for you, as a show of alliance. It shows I'm comfortable with your kind."
D: "You're wrong about the context of that word. It's not offensive and I didn't mean it to be."
E: "I guess I'll try to consider not saying it in front of you people in the future."
F: "Why are you so oversensitive?"
G: "Oh, okay, I didn't realize that. Sorry, I'll knock it off, because I respect your ability to know what is and is not hurtful to you."

Because only one of those is going to get me saying, "Oh, cool, I'm glad you understand, thanks. Shall we move on?" And the others? That's your greater inclusion? Let me tell you where to stick it.

(And all blogs are businesses? What about all the people who never attempt to profit from blogging, not because they can't, but because their aim isn't their own individual career success, but to build widely-accessible community connection? You know, like most of the women of color you reference?)

Seriously, as a smalltime woman of color blogger I really, really wanted to like this post and the ensuing conversation. And you just let me know that as a trans woman of color, it's okay to "colonize" me.

going around in (Venn-diagram) circles

I keep saying I'm going to write about this, and I keep not doing so.

So here's a question I've been asking myself:

Why is it that I feel much safer in women-of-color spaces that are mostly cissexual and straight than I do in queer-and-trans spaces that are mostly white?  Why is it that I've gotten so much more understanding from one than another?

I've been trying to suss this one out, because it confuses the hell out of me, and I've come at it from multiple angles.  Is it just a coincidence of which circles I run in?  Is is because the (white) queer spaces I've run in are far more clueless about white privilege and than the (straight) women-of-color spaces are about straight-and-cissexual privilege?  Why is that?  Is it because oppression-by-race is somehow a better beginning education in privilege than oppression-by-gender-or-orientation?  I'm really not sure.

I've considered, too, that even a lot of the queer spaces I've run in are cissexual-dominated, so, to wit:  I'm a trans dyke of color.  Maybe it's a matter of cissexual (white) queer spaces and cissexual (straight) WoC spaces, really, dealing with me as two kinds of Other and fitting them together in different ways.  So why is it?

I'd really like to have a discussion about these issues, because it's counter to a lot of what I was told as a baby activist--for instance, that communities of color have more of a problem with queer issues than white communities do.  In my experience, that hasn't been true.  Is it an economic-class thing, where some groups are just forced to live near the disadvantaged trans members of their group and thus have more familiarity through shared disadvantage?  Is it a cultural-imperialism thing, where those of us with roots in more trans-and-queer-inclusive cultures are at an advantage compared to those whose ancestral cultures were not so understanding?  Is it just an American thing?  

I just can't figure out what it is, and it's not only an interesting question to me, it's a matter of safety.  I've left a whole lot of primarily-white queer and even exclusively-trans spaces because they were not safe spaces for me as a woman of color or because there was simply a poor understanding of intersectional privilege and related ideas.  Too much "Is Gay The New Black?" and not enough Gloria Anzaldua.  Too many deeply transphobic LGb(t?) spaces, even ones labeled "trans-inclusive" that only really mean female-assigned genderqueer and transmasculine folks, you know?  And I've found warm shelter over and over in women-of-color spaces that were by-and-large straight and other than me exclusively cissexual, with people who surprised me by considering it their own job to do their homework, understand my situation, and make me welcome--to really acknowledge the patterns of intersectional oppression.  Why is that?  Do I just run in the wrong trans and queer circles?  Have I just been lucky in my POC circles?  I honestly don't know.

What are your experiences with these dynamics?  Are they vastly different from mine?  Why do you think things are the way you've experienced them?  I think there's something valuable to be picked out of these discrepancies, if we chip at them for a bit.