Crossposted from my blog
…and there’s a sickening crunch as a brick pulverizes my skull. I’ve long since fallen silent; I don’t make any noise. As I lie the street, I am kicked a few more times until my attacker – or my attackers, I’m not even sure anymore – decides to run. I wonder I’m ever going to see any of my loved ones again. Still, I don’t move. I don’t think I can. I listen to the rasping sound of my own breath forcing its way through a crushed throat and then I die.
The newspaper uses the wrong gender when reporting my murder, because I am a trans woman. Because I am a trans woman, a jury declares that my murder was merely a crime of passion. The transgender community pounces upon my death and the murder trial and my name (names?) are tossed around for a while by activists and their enemies until they either forget about me or yet another one our sisters is murdered.
This is my fear, my, to take a phrase from Susan Faludi, terror dream.
I’ve had this terror dream every day for a month now, and not only at night. If I allow myself to daydream, or if I even dare to allow my thoughts to wander, I experience my own death. I wish I could say that I was used to them, or that they felt any less real, or that I had any idea how to stop them.
I do know one thing. Besides being my fears made manifest my terror dreams are something far more dangerous. They’re my fantasies. I yearn for the day that I am brutally murdered. More than anything else, I want it – life, or perhaps more realistically, the pain which seems so inextricably linked to life – to end. I’m not suicidal. I know this because I have been suicidal to the point of attempting it once, and what I feel now is not what I feel then. No – I am not suicidal. I want my life to end because I am tired, because I am angry, because I am miserable and I feel like I no longer have the will to keep enduring. But I am a rebel and instead I opt to go
One foot forward, one foot forward, one foot forward. I’m feeling my way through a pitch black rail tunnel and my feet are blistered and bloody but I keep on stepping.
As trans people, we battle each day for our strength, for our purpose, for our resolve. We are neither given nor taught the tools of our power. We are taught a power that will never be ours. We know this and yet we continue to reach for it because we don’t know anything else. Or at least we think that we don’t know anything else. But we do. Each and every one of us knows strength. I think of how many hours of my life have been dedicated to simply being able to say four words. I am a woman.
That is my strength. That, in spite of everything, I can tell the truth about myself. Do you feel the power behind those words? I feel the power. I am a woman! It feels good. Like I can take on the entire world. Triumphantly I move
One foot forward, one foot forward, one foot forward. The fatigue threatens to overwhelm me. I want to lie down on the tracks but I keep on stepping.
Sometimes I see myself as a victim. A victim of a cosmic joke, an accident. A victim of patriarchy, of bifurcated gender ideologies. A victim of the medical establishment, a victim of society. But there’s no power in that. I have no use for victimhood. So I am not a victim. I am a survivor. I am a survivor because my pain and suffering are not over, nor will they ever be over, and yet I continue to stand up proud and tall. I stand up proud and tall of who I am, of what I am, IN ITS ENTIRITY. I am a woman! And I am strong! My strength is not the strength of the cis man. My strength is not the strength of the cis woman. But that doesn’t matter, because my strength is powerful. And like all strength borne through hardship, it is beautiful. So I put
One foot forward, one foot forward, one foot forward. I have a migraine and I want nothing more than to collapse against the wall but that is not a choice and so I keep stepping.
I am heart-broken. People sometimes get the wrong idea, that I am a misanthrope, that I hate men, or that I hate cis people, or even that I hate people in general. That’s not true. I love humanity – truly, deeply, and unapologetically. But loving someone or something means that you have to care about it, and there is so much hurt in the world, so much hurt experienced by fellow human beings and I want to take it all away but I cannot because I am just one poor young trans woman without a real career, buried under student loans for an education I couldn’t afford to finish, just one human with my own pain, my own triggers, my own need for help. And so I am heart-broken because on paper, all I have is my paltry donations, my insignificant volunteerism, and my meaningless and unheard words and voice.
But then I remember that that’s all I am on paper. I am so much more than that. And then I remember that I’m not alone. People like me, we are everywhere. Maybe our priorities differ; they usually do. But people around the world are fighting and more continue to stand up and join the fight and that knowledge gives me the resolve to continue
One foot forward, one foot forward, one foot forward. My hands and feet and head are tingling from oxygen deprivation because I am having a severe panic attack but I have come too far to stop now so I keep on stepping.
We fight for a better world. We fight for our hopes and dreams and aspirations, because before anything else we KNOW that this world is capable of being so much more than it is. Frederick Douglass said that power concedes nothing without a demand and because that is true I will make demands. I will make demands and be loud because not only do I have demands, I have demands that NEED to be heard because lives are on the line. Not only our lives and the lives of human being living today, but the lives of all those who follow – our battles will not be over when we die but when the forces holding us down die. We hold our heads up and march
One foot forward, one foot forward, one foot forward. I feel violated and abused, silenced and ignored, omitted and suppressed but I know who I am – somebody that will keep on stepping.
What do I do about my terror dream? There are no simple solutions I suppose. If I can’t get rid of it I will find some way to make it empower me, just as I have found ways to make so many other things empower me. Because that’s what I’m doing every time I move one foot forward. No doubt I will fail many times. The marginalized person’s journey of empowerment is never finished, not as long as we exist within a world that oppresses. There is no set path and the only way forward is through trial and error. I expect failures because I am young, and I lack both wisdom and maturity. As I age, as I gain perspective, as my consciousness continues to expand, as my experience with my successes and my failures cements, I think I will get better at it. But even then there’s no user’s guide. And that’s also what putting one foot forward is about. It’s about the increments, it’s about the learning and the experience and the cumulative. Empowerment is a process, not a state. We can’t save the world, let alone ourselves in one grand action. It’s slow. It’s painful. It involves us examining parts of us that are hurtful to look at. But we can do it. All of us. Because even if we don’t know it, even if we don’t know where to look, we are strong and we are powerful. So I call each and every one of you – find your strength and I’ll do the same and together we can rock the world.
editor's note: what is cis?
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about "cis" - this isn't vocabulary that was invented by radical gender theorists. It's used in other, completely different contexts, e.g., cis-jordanian literally means "on this side of the Jordan River." In chemistry, cis- or trans- refers to whether the carbon chains are on the same side or opposite sides of a carbon-carbon double bond (hence "trans fats"). Gender theorists simply took an existing term and applied it appropriately in a new context.
I understand that.
However, can we please make this the last that's said about "cis", I posted that link because I want to preclude any discussion about it here.
I posted this at my blog but I'll say it here too:
There's certainly no need to be that apologetic from trying to help out. I put the link in the original post in order to give people a resource if they were wondering what cis meant. I just want discussion on this post to be about this post and any questions about the meaning or nature of cis can/should be posted at the page that I linked to.
So yeah, anybody wondering about cis can read or ask about it here: http://smashthecisarchy.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/trans-101-what-is-cis/
Yeah, I've been trying to look that up for a while.
That's quite clever.
This is an amazing and incredibly powerful post; I was almost in tears halfway through. I'd like to be more articulate, but at the moment I'm just stuck at wow.
Please please please - to the OP or the moderators -
this post should be *prefaced* by a Trigger Warning.
Fair enough. I can't change it myself, but I sent an email to the moderators asking if they could add one.
Thank you.
This is the comment that I have just posted on your blog (I'd thought I repeat it here!)
Thank you for this.
As a cis woman who has just learnt the term, I sincerely respect your clarity of prose regarding your experience. It has been enlightening, and I will be visiting your blog more frequently.
While I acknowledge that you are not at all responsible for my education about trans issues, I really do appreciate your contributions to it!
I wish you all the best.
Just beautiful and inspiring. Thank you for your bravery, for sharing your heart-felt experience, for making me reflect on the pain and courage of others, and my purpose and place in the world.
Thank you for sharing your experiences and perspective. Your writing is eloquent and inspiring.
This was the most beautiful thing I've ever read on this site.