in pursuit of peace

Written

“When you think about what you want to be, what do you lean toward? A man or a woman?”

I’m two hours into an evaluation with a gender therapist, and my heart has been hammering inside of my chest the entire time. If all goes well, I’ll be approved to pursue gender-affirming care. But this new question is one that I’ve spent my life struggling to answer.

“I want to be …” I lose my words. I clear my throat. I decide. “Nothing.”

It’s quiet. My hands shake.

“Let’s reframe that,” he says finally. “I want to be … ‘Something Else.’”

Woman.

I roll the word around my mouth like a stale, unbitten gumball. I linger on it until it dissolves, and I’m left with a chalky, acidic aftertaste coating my mouth. The word is sour, sharp, and unshakable. Even then, I couldn’t tell you what it means.

I was eight when my shape started to shift from straight lines to soft curves, and discomfort began festering inside of me. My discomfort mutated into disgust with each second I spent in an increasingly foreign body. I was eight when a man leaned out of his truck to whistle at me for the first time, and I learned my body exists for the world to look at, and they will look at it and think what they’ll think of it regardless of how I feel about it. I was eight when my body became my enemy.

I oscillated between hatred for my body and detachment from it for years. Girls envied my curves, and boys praised me for them; all the while, I said nothing about the countless nights I spent praying to gods I didn’t believe in in hopes that someone, somewhere had the power to rid me of this curse. I told my mother I felt that way, and she said one day I would love every curve I had because they were marks of my womanhood. I didn’t tell her that I dreamt of a world where I had no body at all, or that I felt a wave of nausea every time someone reminded me that I was a girl who would one day become a woman. I punished my body for sentencing me to this womanhood that I had never asked to be a part of. I punished myself by accepting this as the only way things could ever be.

I didn’t hate womanhood or femininity. I revered them in other women, and that reverence only furthered my disconnect with these concepts existing within myself. I admired my older sister’s gradual steps into femininity, yet felt a selfish twinge of frustration as she grew to love and respect her body — a body just like my own — while mine had only ever been a battlefield. I watched women on TV become mothers and wives, but any attempts to imagine myself in their place only resulted in white noise. I stood in fitting rooms with my boyish friends as we tried on prom dresses together, and when our mothers cooed over our transformations into women, there were stars dancing in their eyes while there was only panic in mine.

At one point, I threw myself into performing womanhood in a doomed effort to fit into the world the way I thought I had to. I wore dresses and blouses that highlighted the curves I hated. I put on soft, sweet eye paint, and I kissed my boyfriends with my fire engine lipstick. I conformed to everything I was supposed to be, and in doing so, I became a spectator in my own life. My hatred for my body twisted into hatred for myself and for a life filled with rules I was forced to abide by.

In a desperate bid to find some way out of the neverending hole of self-hatred I was marinating in, I bought a chest binder. I saw myself without the part of my body that had plagued me with discomfort for so long, and for the first time in my life, I caught a glimpse of an end to the war I had declared on myself from the moment that womanhood had first been pushed onto me.

I explored masculinity. There was joy in aligning myself with manhood through dressing up in masculine clothing, expressing the natural mannerisms womanhood had demanded I repress, and ordering coffee with different masculine names just for the thrill of hearing them called out in a crowded cafe. When I further masculinized myself by getting a cropped haircut, I felt conflicted. There was simultaneous overwhelming euphoria from seeing myself in my reflection for what felt like the first time, and frustration because I knew that masculinity was not all that I was.

What is masculinity? How can you define femininity, womanhood, or manhood in ways that capture the nuances of how different people experience them? Defining these concepts by biological sex is reductive, and these definitions often exclude intersex populations and people assigned a biological sex who don’t conform to the definition of that sex in one or more ways.

Defining them by traditional ideas of these concepts erases the different ways people experience them. Even definitions rooted in queer theory are vague and consequently can’t capture every experience. It’s a Sisyphean effort.

My foray into the ends of the binary solidified that whatever I was, it was Other. I use nonbinary — specifically agender, or genderless — to describe myself. However, I quickly learned that, like womanhood and manhood, being genderless comes with its own set of expectations. The legitimacy of nonbinary identities is frequently called into question. If you were born into the kind of body I was born into, you need to keep your hair cropped, your clothes oversized, and your body thin to avoid as many curves as you can. If you are not pursuing medical transition, you are lying about your identity, and yet if you are pursuing it, you are still thought to be lying about your identity. Does my physical appearance need to clearly convey the intricacies of my relationships to masculinity and femininity for me to have the right to say that I exist outside the gender binary? Can specific styling choices and body shapes only convey either masculinity or femininity? I can continue to wish that more people would ask themselves these questions instead of invalidating nonbinary identities. But in the end, I am the only person who can make peace with myself. Part of establishing that peace has been pursuing gender-affirming care.

I initially thought that wasn’t a possibility for me because I didn’t have a binary identity. What does gender-affirming care look like when you feel you have no gender to affirm? I started to contemplate it after I came out to my supportive family and friends, and through playing with my gender expression, found myself connecting with the gender nonconforming experience in a way that I never had with womanhood or manhood. The thought that I could create a body I was fully comfortable with was like finding an oasis after a lifetime of wandering a wasteland.

I am tired of war. Living has always been my birthright, yet I had never felt alive before I was approved to get the care for my body that I used to desperately pray for, before I had the language to describe all the Otherness swirling inside of me, and before I was surrounded by love and support for all that I am. I know now that instead of reducing myself to Nothing, I can just be Something Else. It’s not my job to deconstruct womanhood and manhood or to broadcast my identity in an easily digestible way so that I am allowed to claim it. It’s my job to live.

Queerness is often about survival. While Torres is alluding to a space free from discrimination and violence, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, queer survival is being threatened even more. As much as we want to create a “safe space,” there is no true safe space as long as people are dying and becoming disabled from COVID-19. COVID-19 is being swept under the rug by our government despite clear evidence that repeat infections can leave lasting damage in almost every organ in the body.7 Currently, there is also a resurgence of anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-Black, antiimmigrant, and anti-free speech rhetoric and legislation. When queer people are denied the chance to exist, we must find a way to live. By critically examining our past, we can shed light on the present.

Mass disabling events are already written into queer history. Take the HIV/AIDS epidemic that emerged in the 1980s in the continental United States and wreaked havoc. The Reagan administration sat on its hands for years, claiming that HIV/AIDS was just a gay disease8 and a punishment from God.9 This federal disregard and inaction displays a lack of true concern about the queer community, particularly queer disabled communities of color. According to HIV.gov,10 disproportionately stigmatized populations, such as gay and bisexual men, sex workers, BIPOC, and trans people, continue to be the most impacted by HIV, leading to health disparities.11

According to the National Institute of Health (NIH),12 health disparities often stem from health inequities, which are “systematic differences in the health of groups and communities occupying unequal positions in society that are avoidable and unjust.” The LGBTQIA+ community in particular experiences health disparities driven by social determinants of health, which include employment, socioeconomic status, access to quality healthcare, social and community context, and education. Within healthcare, queer people face provider and insurance-based discrimination, and there are bills passing right now to deny queer healthcare and reverse healthcare legislation.13 Therefore, it is crucial for queer BIPOC to understand how our intersectional identities result in heightened vulnerability to pandemics.

Just as HIV/AIDS is a lifetime illness, the COVID-19 pandemic is also a mass disabling event. In a recent media briefing by the head of the World Health Organization,14 Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “An estimated one in ten infections results in post-COVID-19 condition, suggesting that hundreds of millions of people will need longer-term care.” Every time you get infected with COVID-19, you compound your risk of developing long-term health problems, such as extensive organ damage15 and damage to the immune system like with HIV.16 Unfortunately, many people resist the idea that they are disabled after suffering from long COVID; this resistance is rooted in deep stigmatization of disabled people and what “disability” means in the context of our society and healthcare system. On top of that, queer disabled people are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. The latest U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse survey17 reports that 35.5% of transgender adults, 21.4% of bisexual adults, and 20.9% of gay or lesbian adults are experiencing long COVID symptoms compared to 11.6% of cisgender men, 18.7% of cisgender women, and 14.8% of straight adults. Additionally, 24.7% of adults with disability versus 13.8% without disability report long COVID symptoms.

The lack of accessible healthcare coupled with these troubling statistics results in queer disabled people being made to seem disposable. Queers, disabled people, BIPOC, and intersections of those identities have always been the target of eugenics. After World War I, fascist forces in Italy and Germany used the fallout of the H1N1 influenza pandemic (Spanish flu) to garner public support.18 In the United States, Black people and Jews were blamed for the Spanish flu. Fascism in America has been on the rise for a long time, and COVID-19 has spurred racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, ableist, and homophobic rhetoric and legislature. How do we decide who deserves sympathy? At what point is there a cut-off for who gets to exist, who gets to live?

Such cut-offs are ableist; anyone can become disabled at any given moment. The U.S. government is performing mass “cleansings” and “silencings” — by overturning Roe v. Wade, by reversing trans healthcare, by choosing to drop mask mandates and ending the public health emergency despite the science. In the context of COVID-19, including disability justice within our evolving fight for queer and Black liberation becomes more important than ever.

“But I’m anti-fascist!” Yet — choosing not to act, choosing to ignore the most vulnerable members of our community in the face of all these burgeoning threats, is exactly what allows fascism to exist. In this way, fascism and capitalism go hand in hand; capitalism, which demands a fee from every living being, is incompatible with queerness and intersectional identity. Everyone wants to act like they hate capitalism but forget that capitalism requires ableism.

You cannot be ableist and anticapitalist at the same time; when you engage in ableist practices, you are perpetuating capitalism, thereby perpetuating oppression of all people that don’t fit the white-cishetwealthy-male archetype. Ability is a factor of intersectionality that is often overlooked by mainstream sociopolitical commentary. While liberation is usually focused on racial or queer identity separately, we must not forget that fighting systemic oppression will not be successful unless we fight for everyone who is structurally oppressed, including disabled people.

Our government has failed us over and over. It has always been clear that we cannot live under these conditions, but it is becoming abundantly clear now with the way we have abandoned each other during this pandemic. Capitalist individualism thrives when queer people isolate themselves; when it gets us alone, it rips us apart and swallows us whole. So how do we find joy amidst all of the suffering?

We choose to live. We choose to use our privilege to advocate for others and demonstrate that we care. Truly, all of queer history past and present is proof of what I’d like to call “the queer indomitable spirit.” Despite generations of systemic violence against queer people and historically minoritized people, we are still here. We can never truly be erased or silenced. Our hope, our joy, our fierce love for life and for each other — this is what makes us so incredibly human. The choice is quite simple: we must harness our queer indomitable spirits to create a better world.

“Simple,” however, does not mean “easy.” History has shown us that when we choose to love and care for all people, we see real change. Unfortunately, the revolution will not always be exciting; high quality masking, demanding cleaner air, demanding affirming healthcare, demanding better of our campus, demanding better of our governments and elected officials, and demanding the right to exist are not very “glamorous” revolutionary aesthetics. But the goal isn’t to make something look effortless or exciting — the goal is to live.

Queerness will never be accepted under 30 capitalism, under fascism. But it is not too late; the pandemic is an opportunity for our healthcare system and society in the United States to change. Collective outrage over our government’s failures has been growing, especially in Gen Z. We must not hesitate to evolve our standpoints and practices: the pandemic is an opportunity to create lasting change amidst the turmoil. Choosing to prioritize the most vulnerable members of our community by protecting each other in any way we can is the path to change, to thriving.

Why must this be a radical goal? Is it really so radical to want to live? I dream of a world where we do not abandon sick, immunocompromised, and disabled people for our own convenience. Our indomitable spirit, our compassion and resilience in the face of adversity is what we must harness. We must work collectively in order to change oppressive behaviors and policies, fiercely choosing to love and care for each other in a society trying to tear us down. We must choose to live and to help others live as well.

References

1 Jamee Pineda, “A Decolonizing Approach to the Erotic and Medicine,” in Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments, ed. Lucie Fielding (New York: Routledge, 2021), 163.

2 Lucie Fielding, “Coming Into Passionate Relationship” in Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments, ed. Lucie Fielding (New York: Routledge, 2021), 91.

3 “2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health,” The Trevor Project, https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey2022/#trends.

4 Karine J. Igartua, Kathryn Gill, & Richard Montoro. “Internalized Homophobia: A Factor in Depression, Anxiety, and Suicide in the Gay and Lesbian Population,” Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health 22, no. 2, (2003); 15-30, doi: 10.7870/cjcmh-2003-0011.

5 William J. Hall. “Psychosocial Risk and Protective Factors for Depression Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer Youth: A Systematic Review,” Journal of Homosexuality 65, no. 3, (2017); 263-316, doi: 10.1080/00918369.2017.1317467.

6 Allis Weir, “What is the second adolescense experienced by some LGBTQ+ people?” Honeycombers, June 2, 2022. https:// thehoneycombers.com/hong-kong/lgbtq-second-adolescence/.

7 Shaziya Allarakha, “Which Organ System Is Most Often Affected by COVID-19? ” last modified Dec 22, 2021. https:// www.medicinenet.com/which_organ_system_is_most_affected_by_ covid-19/article.htm.

8 Tim Fitzsimmons, “LGBTQ History Month: The early days of America’s AIDS crisis,” NBC News, Oct. 15, 2018. https:// www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/lgbtq-history-month-earlydays-america- s-aids-crisis-n919701.

9 Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

10 “HIV Statistics Impact on Racial and Ethnic Minorities,” last modified Jan. 20, 2023. https://www.hiv.gov/hivbasics/overview/data-and-trends/impact-on-racial-andethnic-minorities/.

11 Marguerita Lightfoot et al. “Addressing Health Disparities in HIV: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 88, no. S1, (2021); S1-S5. doi: 10.1097/qai.0000000000002804.

12 “The State of Health Disparities in the United States” in Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity (Washington DC: National Academics Press, 2017). https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK425844/.

13 “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures,” American Civil Liberties Union, https:// www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights.

14 World Health Organization (WHO). “LIVE: Media briefing on global health issues with Dr Tedros, ” April 26, 2023, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLXhIdFu8vk.

15 Benjamin Bowe, Yan Xie, & Ziyad Al-Aly. “Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection,” Nature Medicine 28, no. 11, (2022): 2398–2405. doi: 10.1038/s41591-022-02051-3.

16 “SARS-CoV-2 infection weakens immune-cell response to vaccination,” National Institutes of Health, https://www. nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/sars-cov-2-infectionweakens-immune-cell-response-vaccination.

17 “Long COVID Household Pulse Survey,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/ pulse/long-covid.htm.

18 Gregori Galofré-Vilà et al. “The 1918 Influenze Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism: A Cross-City Quantitative and Historical Text Qualitative Analysis,” American Journal of Public Health 112 (2022): 242-247. doi: 10.2105/ajph.2021.306574.