I was relatively fortunate. For me, it came with a bible. Not spittle-flecked and red-faced, but calm and beaming with certainty. With an angelic smile, my auntie told me, “AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuals. You can only get it from anal sex, you see.”
Another relative, the pater of a related familias who saw me being a curious nine-year-old and thought to himself, “Let’s take this little brat down a peg,” offered just last year to buy me a book on how to impregnate women and thus fulfill my obligation to God, the family and the nation. He delivered this information slightly slurred as, when away from the other Baptists, even a godly man can have one too many adult beverages.
There were weddings built around hour-long sermons on the place of women, replete with singalongs from popular children’s films—the kind that end with princesses getting married. There was pray-the-gay-away bible study, where a preacher man in a moss-green Maoist gown promised a 16-year-old divine judgement against America for the sin of tolerating homosexuals. Covered in oil. Speaking in tongues. These and gentle chuckles and shakes of the head constructed a Christian Nationalist prison in my mind.
Shelby Criswell
Even now, l feel compelled that these people said these thingsl with the best of intentions. After all, they just wanted to save anyone they could. To spread the good news that if one simply abandoned their will and agreed to rigid, gender-essentialist role-playing for life, one could receive eternal salvation. I was and am the traitor in my own mind; the personification of ingratitude; the breaker of a chain stretching back in time and across oceans to a plucky German progenitor fleeing the Kaiser with gold on his mind. They gave me everything and asked only perfect obedience and godly procreation in return.
All manner of sins could have been forgiven, you see, If I had only come home. As I said, I was relatively fortunate. I wasn’t burned or beaten. I wasn’t sent to a “boarding school” in Provo, Utah, to be beaten and sexually assaulted into adulthood like my brother before me. No, I moved from Texas, where my size was middling, to Santa Fe, where my early puberty made my body difficult to physically bash. But every day, in ways great and small, I heard the same message comedian Jerrod Carmichael heard and discusses in his HBO comedy special Don’t Be Gay: Just don’t be gay. This is the party’s most essential command. Beat the weak. Oppress the unfortunate. Destroy yourself with drugs and bitter entitlement. But for the literal love of God, don’t be gay.
I carry this struggle inside me to this day, even as an attorney. Every day that I walk into court in my lady’s business attire with my augmented bust and HRT-replenished hairline, I also carry the Christian Nationalist inquisitor within me. And I won’t speak for you, queer reader, but maybe you do, too. Maybe you had a jihad put inside you. Maybe the frustrated hopes of generations are yours to carry because “you were given everything,” someone says, and all you were asked in return was to be anything and everything but who you really are.
Surveying the world around my trans sisters and brothers, enbies, and every letter and color of our rainbow, I see my childhood nightmares come to life. Members of Congress with far better things to do are hounding the first trans woman representative for using the bathroom. The contributions of every community that isn’t white, straight, and able-bodied are being purged as surely, and perhaps even more efficiently, than at a bootlicker’s bonfire. So what do we have?
The meme goes, “’Joy is resistance,’ says white lady who does no other acts of resistance.”
Maybe for the cis and the straight joy has no political dimension. Maybe I’m just another privileged white lady seeking to pat herself on the back, but I think queer joy and queer community are political acts. Our pride is resistance even when it isn’t a riot, even when fair weather corporate friends abandon Pride sponsorships on a dime. What I know is that the transcendent truth and beauty of my transness was no easy feat to manifest, but it guided me through and out of the fascistic swamps the society in which we grew conspired to put inside us. Behind every harness and pair of slutty jean shorts, I do see spiritual struggle, as well as political resistance. Will this year’s drag brunch tear the fascists down? Not right away, but that’s not what it’s for. As any reader of epic poetry can tell you, feasting is earned by struggle and essential to its continuation. So we must unionize, build and maintain spaces where we can be physically and spiritually safe, raise money for the dolls to get the care they need and to relocate our endangered siblings to safer states. We must stand in solidarity with oppressed people wherever we can. But we should also shove our beautiful truth, and our found families right in the unthinkable faces of the people that made us join the struggle just so we might simply be.
