Overcoming Spiritual Terrorism

Thursday, November 20 is Transgender Rememberance Day. We remember our dead, our injured, and all of us who are harmed everyday. Yet TRD is a special day, symbolizing our lingering grief and our raging perservance. A church-full of us gathered on a bitterly cold night to remember as one community member declared: we are not fighting for marriage, we are fighting for the right to walk down the street.

We all need love to survive.

A memorable moment during the ceremony was the pouring of libations. A pastor asked us to call out our lost loved ones' names as she poured the water--inviting their spirits to join us--for three, long, mournful minutes. She poured, and poured, and poured, and poured, against a ringing backdrop of tearful voices and a sea of steady candlelights.

Spiritual violence underlies the physical brutality in which these lives were destroyed. To be oppressed is to have your soul suffocated with your own heart. Your psychic being sinks through you into the universe's nothingness. And it hurts.

I recently finished Stone Butch Blues, a heralded gender novel by trans-activist, Leslie Feinberg. Feinberg's message is more than transgender equality. It calls for gender liberation; asking us to let go of our hang-ups about how we dress, what we like, what we do, and how we love.

I suspect that Stone Butch Blues is so widely accepted by the academic community because its themes are universal. It is less of a political story, rather, it is a novel about geniune human struggle against spiritual terrorism--a world that makes us fear everything around us and moreover, a world that provides us very good reason to persistently fear, like holding an inverted insanity. You see the world clearly but every person-and-thing which surrounds you intends for your systemic destruction. All paranoia is real, as real as it feels, though, when your world is this way: paranoia does not need to exist. Imagine this! An incredibly painful way of life, if one at all.

The novel tells a story of a person who begins life as an unwanted child and remains misunderstood throughout her early life. A high-school aged person who is violently gang raped by football stars, punished for attempting to confide in her Black friend, relentlessly teased about the rape by her classmates, and is eventually forced to drop out. A young adult who has little choice but to run away from home, abandon her life, begin blue-collar work, and discover the shadowy lesbian-bar scene. A haunted person who routinely endures physical and emotional humiliation and abuse at the hands of co-workers and policemen (taking pleasure in rape-for-ransom). A desperate person who physiologically transforms into a man to escape a tormented life as a "stonebutch" woman. A worn person who eventually finds solace in moments of stability, love, and collective hope. It's likely the story of many people (though, not Feinberg's own) and the story of many more who have fought to live for life's sake.

There is a very Buddhist-like passage appearing in the novel at a chapter's end. The primary character, Jess, is on a bus listening to a mother tell a story to her child. The story is about a woman who is on her way to see a wizard to learn her life's purpose. Along the way she encounters a dragon who wishes to harm her. She outsmarts the dragon enabling her to escape into the forest. She eventually finds the wizard and anxiously asks "what is my purpose?" To which the wizard responds, "to slay a dragon."

If we listen closely we can hear spiritual violence around us. We need not be paralyzed by our own fear. Instead we should simply listen closer--listen harder--to learn how to heal. We know how to cure the pain we cause. Then we must act accordingly.