I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

Models of justice that centre punishment do not prevent abuse but only react to it, and they don't offer a pathway toward healing for either perpetrators or survivors. Nor do they acknowledge the dual reality that a great many perpetrators are themselves survivors.

When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is our of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.

Safety is, I believe, an inherently classed, raced, and gendered experience that frequently runs the risk of being used for regressive ends—ironically, for restricting the freedoms of the vulnerable, those who are never really safe. Often, we see the call for safety actually reinforce the power of oppressive institutions, like the police and the prison system, in our lives. When we choose safety over liberation, our movements fail.

When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier.

We need to ask ourselves: How does labelling depression a physical ailment absolve us as a society of culpability for suicide? How does immediately jumping into a medicalized dialogue around individual mental health allow us to avoid discussing the fact that we have created social environments that make us suicidal? Suicide is always a tragedy, but it is also often a message, a message that points to injustice and suffering in the world that has everything to do with the way we treat each other. When we look at anyone’s suicide and say, “That happened because of a mental illness. This person died of illness,” we are also saying that person did not die of abuse, of neglect, of isolation, of horrifying individual circumstances, of social oppression, of the fact that just living in this place and this time is very often an incredibly difficult thing.

This is why the concept of chosen family is woven so deeply into the fabric of queer community culture: where the bonds of blood have failed us time and again, we hope that our friends, lovers, and mentors will fill the void. We dream of relationships that stand against the test of time and gay drama, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Shut out of the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the nuclear family for most of history, queers have traditionally turned to more daring and creative notions of kinship and sharing the future.

That in a loving place, I am able to hear a friend disagree with me and know that they still care for me. That I can receive their advice and know that I don't have to follow it. That there is enough trust between us. I don't want to be validated. I want to be loved.

Heteronormative society is pathogenic to queers and queer community because it hates us, it is violent to us, and it makes our stories invisible. Heteronormative society traumatizes us by demonizing our sexual expression—and so, we come to hate our sexual expression, our sexual identities, our sexual selves. We pass this hatred from one generation of queers to another in the form of unsafe and non-consensual sex practices, in slut-shaming and sex negativity and sexual aggression. Society sexually traumatizes us, so we sexually traumatize one another.

Transition is a fundamental right that all trans people, of all ages, should have access to. But I believe that transition, ideally, should be offered to us as one option of many for bodily autonomy and self-expression. It should not be something that we have to do to make ourselves more acceptable to others, or to hide our transness from the world.

I was not choosing between being trans and being Chinese. What I chose was the strength of my family’s values—loyalty, lineage, the fulfilment of duty, gratitude to one’s elders—and the magic of queerness: transformation, change, adaptation, and resiliency.

In the past, when I have said that I wanted to die, what I meant was that I wanted someone to offer me a way to have a different life.

When we lose faith in the things that matter, it is easy to turn to anger. Anger helps us survive when survival seems impossible.

It's hard to walk with ghosts on your shoulders, but when you learn to listen to what they're saying, you realize that they're telling the story of who you are.

I do not have much faith in justice, but I have no choice but to believe in it. The other option is nihilism--total lack of faith in humanity--which I reject. We must reject nihilism because that way lies fascism. We must reject despair and embrace healing, slow and imperfect though it may be, and turn instead to love--love strong enough to live without faith. I am trying to embrace my own healing. I am trying to love my own painful, wounded life. As adrienne maree brown suggests, I am trying to embrace growth and constant transformation, like a flower growing in poisonous radiation. I am trying to let love emerge from my traumatized body.

Oppression is rarely, if ever, overthrown through peaceful demonstration alone. Economic and social pressure, as well as direct action and violent protest are all essential parts of revolutionary movements.

When you’re a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is out of your control (since the problem is not that you’re unloved and deprived; it’s that you’re Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.