#plenoptic07

The OpLita Squad, @oneshallstand @elitaxne @plenoptic07 and yours truly finally all together 😭

This has been the best weekend of my life, but honest, sitting on the floor with these three in the hotel lobby was the highlight of it all.

here's a hot take, qunari don't structure gender the way humans do so from a human-centric perspective they're ALL non binary

Machiavelli would grade those heckin papers. He would grade the heck out of them. 1) Education is EVERYTHING, 2) the opportunity to tell people they're wrong, 3) if they're right then you can add them to your list of people who are worthy of becoming your nemesis in the future

my grandmother is a fairly healthy 75 year old woman who has never questioned her place in life or the skin that she wears folded with time and experience

so when I told her I was a transgender man at 17 years old she didn't understand

she told me, "it's a phase" she told me, "you're such a beautiful girl, why would you want to ruin that?" she told me, "try living in your skin for just a little while longer"

she told me, "if you jump through my hoops, I'll believe you"

much, much later, as I was passed around like an Olympic baton of hating myself to psychiatrist to therapist to mental wards to hospitals who did their best to stitch the pieces of me back together

she asked me, "why do you want to die? why aren't you happy?"

and when getting out of bed and peeling back my covers was synonymous with peeling off my outer skin and becoming a walking, breathing, talking raw nerve and most days I didn't get out of bed out of sheer self preservation

she asked me, "why can't you just function like a normal human being for once?" she asked me, "have you taken your meds today?"

she told me, "stop being so lazy"

and back then, I did not have the words to tell her "Grandma, I'm not being lazy, I'm a chair. it's true I'm a chair that might have once long, long ago, in a time practically no one remembers stood up straight and supported the weight of those who needed to rest themselves against me

but time has whittled pieces of me away and now I tilt now I wobble now I stand barely able to hold up my own weight let alone the weight of anyone else's expectations

and wobbly chairs like me, well, we're an anomaly

and unlike those perfectly "normal" chairs we have only three options

either we whittle the bits and pieces of ourselves off and away to comfort those who would use us and become less anomalous less freakish, less malformed and become more like those normal chairs who don't question why they exist or why should they have to carry other people when they can barely carry themselves

who are just normal chairs for people like my grandmother to sit on

we get shoved with the other chairs who are "like us" you know, the shorter bunch the bunch with less staying power less polish while the bar stools treat us like we're aliens because, well we may be made of the same design, the same wood, the very same cosmic stardust but obviously not all chairs are created equal

that's just politically correct nonsense to believe anything otherwise

our second option is to have constant support until we die or are, ultimately, scrapped for the useful bits of our souls perhaps, maybe shove our wobbly leg on a book or a conveniently placed ledge that if we were ever, ever ever to move away from, we would pitch our usefulness into the floor and topple over and be left for dead

which brings us to our third option

we die

we die for the comfort of others and are cannibalized for valuables to be consumed valuables that most of you would not touch when we were breathing

the best example of this phenomenon was Van Gogh like, "yeah, he was mentally ill as fuck but my god, have you seen his art?"

this wobbly chair man, was just like me, missing an ear and being swung through the ultimate highs and deadly lows of his weaponized brain ignored because he couldn't carry any other weight other than those of his thoughts and his paint brushes

so they shoved him with the other useless chairs while he starved barely able to afford to buy the supplies to paint the masterpieces that we now sell for millions of dollars

and when he eventually died no, when he eventually killed himself no one blinked before lifting his corpse out of the streets and hanging it in museums for the normal chairs to stare at with misty eyes

because it turns out that's the business of most chairs they don't tell you that the weight you are meant to be carrying is the weight of those whose cultures we have raped and pillaged and the human beings who we now  call illegal until they can provide with commerce those whose homes we have destroyed because colonization is just the gentleman's word for genocide (*suicide)

these normal chairs cry words at us anomalous chairs words like, "faggot" words like, "tranny" words like, "black man" words like, "white genocide" words that in their mouths have lost all meaning because, let's face it, white people wouldn't know a genocide if it was literally killing people in front of them

they would just cry more words at us like "all lives matter"

because they- they have never been wobbly chairs

they have never had electric wires pressed against their temples, burning the skin of their scalp as their body convulses so hard that they have bruises banding the places the doctor's have tied them down and electrocuted them straight for the sin of loving someone who has the same genitalia as they do

these chairs have never been told that the hands at the end of their wrists hands that hold other hands or pencils or doors

or normal human things because they are normal human hands

they have never been told that those hands are weapons, and that the sin of having those hands, with that dark of a skin tone and daring to walk with your head up eyes not pointed at the ground like a good black man

that the punishment for that is death choking on their own blood in the streets

these 'normal' chairs like you, grandma, don't understand they don't try to understand because why would anyone choose to suffer the life of being anomalous?

why would anyone choose to be a broken chair?

we don't, the most of us

i know I did not choose to wake up in a life that I do not even want or appreciate in skin that is always either always too tight or not tight enough with genitalia that is both mine and most definitely not fucking mine growing up to be called

lazy faggot dyke

less

than a normal chair

I would never, ever choose to see   someone just like me beaten to death bloody and screaming in the streets of New York of California of North Carolina of Prague of London of Brazil-

literally every where and every channel I turn to

when I was 26, I came to you again after living in this awful, awful skin that has never once fit

after dressing up, 'like an adult' in dresses that made me feel more like dying than any razor ever could

after dating man, after man, after man who I went to bed with like most people write their wills

with trepidation regret and resignation

I said, 'Grandma, I waited nearly ten years' I said, 'Grandma, I jumped through your hoops' I said, 'Grandma, I am still a man.'

And grandma, you were silent.

Grandma, you didn't say a word

you rushed through our conversation to tell me you were buying me more makeup of a better quality to paint my traitorous mouth closed and did not acknowledge that I had ever spoken

I tried again, months later, to say, 'Grandma, I have got to get out of this town it is killing me and I am afraid to live life as I am

because it may just carry a death sentence

and I have finally, finally realized I want to live

maybe just long enough that I can finally meet myself'

and you were silent.

You spoke with my sister about her child who came out as trans at nearly 15 years old this year- the same time I realized I was not the girl the world told me I was- and you made the decision that I wasn't allowed to see them anymore because I was a 'bad influence'

When I asked you when I would be able to see them again,

Grandma, you were silent

because you, Grandma are a normal chair a normal chair who is tired of waiting for me to cut off pieces of myself to fit your dreams of who I would grow up to be and you have decided to limit my contact with the rest of the "normal" chairs in our  family so they don't end up with my sickness the sickness of daring not to carry your dreams on my back and instead, carrying my own

you're waiting, just like everyone else on this god forsaken planet, for this sickness to eventually kill me so you can cannibalize my corpse for my poetry and my drawings because consumerism is always more important than saving a life

right?

and when you have looted my soul and shoved it up in museums for others to stare at with misty eyes thinking to themselves, "thank god this is a thing of the past a relic that exists more in fiction and art galleries than in real life"

another me is being beaten to death in an alley one street down

so Grandma, I have just one question to ask you,

just one

do you remember when I was eleven years old and you told me it didn't matter what I wanted to be I could be whatever I wanted, just so long as I was happy and you would support me if I ever wobbled?