Cathedral Building

Signal boost - one of my awesome daughters has asked me to pass this around for votes, AND it’s a hands-on STEM curriculum that my edufolks might well want to take at anyway. 

I’ve bolded the most important points for those of the tl;dr camp.

I have been very cagey about my actual identity on this blog for a number of reasons. For one, I am very open about my opinions and experiences in a way that could be frowned upon if I was identified by an employer. For another, and while this was not as much of a problem with employers once I relocated but still could very much be a problem with clients with certain views (which I had, and who voiced them frequently, and which I nodded and refocused from because there was work to do and that was not it), I am very open here about being nonbinary and queer.

Last month I got engaged. The love of my life (well, he knows he’s one of the loves of my life, I do have a cat, you know how that goes) is trans and queer and lives in a different state. He doesn’t live in as accepting an area as we both thought. And, after the election results, the situation has gone from “uncomfortable but sufferable until leaving happens” to “increasingly concerning and unsafe”.

So, it changed the timeline of moving a little bit.

Because of my disability I’ve been out of work. And he works as a server which, if you’ve ever been or known someone in food service you probably know, means he has enough to get by but not much to save, no matter how hard he works. It means that, on our own, though we want to have him here before the inauguration, it could take six more months. And we’re worried about what might happen in between.

We set up a gofundme in hopes of getting enough together for his first/last, shipping or baggage charges for whatever he can take with him, and a one-way ticket. Again, usually I wouldn’t put this sort of thing on here if it wasn’t education-related, but I want to be sure as many people as I can reach personally see this because I love him and want to know he’s safe.

PLEASE don’t post this on Facebook - people who know him offline have already been harassing him about views expressed on Facebook, and it’s just safer to keep it off there unless it’s in a private message or something. But if you can contribute or even reblog here, or share away from Facebook with others you think would like to help, I would very much appreciate it.

We as a community may be unbreakable. But no individual is invulnerable. And this is a lot. 

This is a lot and that’s okay. It’s even okay for it to be too much. I don’t say that in a turn off the tv way, because it may not feel like we can. These are our family, our community, our people. My mother told me tearfully that she can’t stop thinking about how it could have been me or any one of my friends at that club. It’s a feeling that in as much shock as in empathy can leave a person feeling stuck on the tracks watching the train come.

I son’t know about you, but I can’t stop reading about what happened, and about the people who died, and I am heartbroken and overwhelmed and still can’t seem to stop. I just read love stories posthumously. Love stories between couples, between parents and children, between people and humanity, between artists and their art. I can’t stop. It doesn’t seem right to stop, and yet I know that continuing to do it isn’t helping either, and yet I can’t stop.

I feel powerless. I feel like there’s some bigger thing I should be able to do. I’ve spent so much energy and thought and time trying to make myself visible in the “real world”, trying to make my existence helpful to others, to let them know it’s okay to be themselves on their own terms in their own time, that if the world as they have it now rejects them that there are people who will help them build a world and a family that accepts them. I’ve tried to be visible to people to show them that they can love anyone, even people they many not realize they could connect with on a human level, that they should accept and love others regardless of so many other things.

It feels like it isn’t enough. People think I’m feeling as broken as I am right now because of a single event, but this event is just another culmination of so many. 

I know that the world is changing. I do. I know that there may be a tomorrow that is better than today. I know that today may have been better than many yesterdays. I know that we need to keep fighting, that what we do has meaning, that we have to be resilient to show those who need to see it because they do not know it yet for themselves that we can thrive, that we do deserve to thrive.

But right now, in the wake of this, I feel like a liar for trying to teach that the world can be an accepting place. Not just in the wake of the act itself, but in so much of the discourse that comes with it. And yes, the positive voices may outnumber the others, but please, please think about what that feels like, to know that in a room full of people shouting it’s only a corner of the room that wants to kill you. Even though there has been positive response, please, remember that it doesn’t make the rest go away.

Maybe the best thing that you can do right now, for your students and for your loved ones and for people you’ve never even met, is give them permission to feel scared, Give them permission to be scared, to feel overwhelmed, to feel hopeless. Don’t try to sway them to seeing the brighter side - acknowledge that they may see far more struggles than you even know, from violence to even the microaggressions that may permeate our lives in a way you may have never noticed.  And let them know that you are there for them, that they are not here alone, that you will fight for them.

Let them know that if they need to feel afraid, you will be there to feel angry on their behalf.

This is a post about identity, activism, energy, and work.

Now, when I say different, I’m not talking apples and oranges. I mean more like..being a fruit, but working on issues that effect...I don’t know...sharks. Maybe some issues effect both, like water pollution or climate change, but things like soil quality isn’t going to mean a thing to a shark, and things like overfishing aren’t necessarily going to do much to an apple tree.

I’m a trans* person. I say person because I don’t feel like I fit in either binary gender category, though I have days I may present as or even loosely affiliate with either (passing aside). I accept either binary pronoun, but don’t personally use they. If I could stamp an NB or an Other on my paperwork I would - though not necessarily other labels that would associate me with a “third” gender. I don’t feel like I belong in any, and I’m okay8888888888888888888888888 with that. Am I eschewing all labels? No, I just haven’t found one that feels like it fits “just right” yet, and I know for sure that the two that we build things around are definitely not right for me.

And I say that in ways that give me certain freedoms. I can wear clothes from any section of the store. I don’t have any hangups about whether something makes me appear more masculine or feminine in terms of activities or interests (something that I had to build up to, thank you internalized misogyny and consistently being told or shown that associating with something feminine would automatically categorize me as female whether I identified that way or not). I think women are strong and amazing for putting up with what they do and have the experience to understand just what that is, and at the same time I have the privilege, when I pass, of being free of some of those things - and the responsibility to raise my voice for women in a different way than I may have before, which quite frankly, feels like an honor that is also disgustingly representative of the problem of misogyny itself.

Then there’s the game of deciding whether I can use a public restroom without making someone uncomfortable or putting myself in danger. The fact that despite leaning more toward the transmasculine side in many ways when I’m forced one way or the other I don’t “belong” in men’s spaces, but also know I don’t belong or feel comfortable (for my sake but also for theirs) in women’s spaces either. Feeling like I have to “pick one” in order to function in certain environments, like when working with kids or in spaces (or whole states) where being nonbinary is unsafe.

And yet I don’t work within my community. I’m not an LGBTQ advocate by profession, or now that I’m dealing with significantly reduced energy thanks to a mild TBI, even necessarily in my off-time. I no longer work in an environment where I can be an educator about LGBTQ issues and a safe space for LGBTQ youth even though that may not be my primary function. I work with kids and families, and most of my work both personal and professional focuses on things as they effect low-income families or children in the mental health or foster care systems. How they play into abuse dynamics and how to prevent child abuse in general. They’re places where, say, trans* issues can certainly intersect, but right now in my very narrow and particular part of the world at large (specifically sexual abuse), the most I can do is educate as it comes up and connects to that narrow and particular part on a case-by-case basis and be affirming and validating and not bat an eye when someone mentions without it otherwise connecting to the situation at hand that a child is LGBTQ. I can educate on social media when I have the energy to do anything outside of work. I can call people out on things compassionately and without hesitation when I see these things even beginning to surface.

Sometimes, for those reasons, I feel like some kind of traitor to my cause. I see friends and other members of the community focusing more extensively, more publicly, more vocally, on trans* issues. I see them running classes or becoming literal spokespeople or pioneering programs and I think, “Am I letting my community down?” 

When I was in better health, when I had more energy, when I could tell people “I’m really sorry, I’m too busy right now to fit in another thing” and not “I’m sorry, I’m just exhausted, I already had to cancel everything else too, I promise it’s not just you,” maybe I did more of both. When it wasn’t appropriate to focus on at work (because look, if it doesn’t play into the issues of a family you’re working with because of a host of other very pressing issues, someone’s off-handed political comment is not something to go back to just then) I could do things outside of work, like writing a column or educating educators more proactively. When it wasn’t something that came up spontaneously but there was room to address it I could bring it up myself as casual or careful way as necessary. When it was something that came up and needed to be addressed but couldn’t be head-on, I could be positive and subversive and relentless. 

So, I guess this is also a post about ability and disability, too - a topic I’m still getting used to after a year and a half of major life changes that mean this has to come up a lot.

What do you do then? What can you do other than being visible and confident, and vocal as things come across your field of vision? When you don’t have the energy to spare from basic function to go looking for ways to speak out, because there are no shortages of reasons? What responsibility do we have to our community, to ourselves?

My first responsibility has always been to kids. That’s where my passion lies. And do I have a special responsibility to kids who are also LGBTQ? You damn right I do. But can I narrow my focus to kids within my community, so that I can dedicate more energy to my own community?

I can’t. There’s so much work to do everywhere, for everyone. It means sometimes getting overwhelmed on multiple fronts - your own, the populations you work with, the populations tangential to them, the places where they all intersect.